Chapter 17
“Miss Carrow. How charming to see you in London. I confess, I had not known you came.”
Lady Eversley said it with a small surprised smile, though she had known very well that Melody had come.
She had known the morning Lady Linwood had written to the Dowager that the Carrows were taking the house, and she had spent the intervening days adjusting her own arrangements to make sure no one in town remained ignorant of the news for longer than a meal.
“I arrived on Tuesday, Lady Eversley. It is good of you to remember me.”
“You are unforgettable, my dear. The country sets the eye for one’s own friends.”
They went in to dinner.
The Dowager’s London dining room was longer than the one at the Abbey and twice as cold, full of the kind of silver no servant in any house of Melody’s acquaintance had ever been asked to polish.
She had been put three places from Cole on his left, in the seat a duke gives the guest he is glad to see and not the woman he means to honour.
Cassandra was on Cole’s right in white again, lovely as a swan, and the message of the seating had been written in a hand the room could read at a glance.
Melody sat down with her chin level and her thumb pressed against the seam of her glove under the table. She counted the candles on the centre branch. She had reached eleven before her neighbour spoke.
“You find London very different from the country, I daresay.”
It was Mrs Drinkwater, the wife of one of Cole’s old schoolmates, a brown careful woman who had been told to make Melody welcome and was already, in her first sentence, putting her in a smaller country than the one she had come from.
“I find it larger, Mrs Drinkwater. The roads are wider and the wits are sharper, and the rooms have more silver, but the conversation is much the same.”
“Oh, surely not.”
“Surely yes. Everywhere I have ever dined, people ask the same three things of a new guest. Whether the journey was very tiring, whether she finds the present company a great change from what she is used to, and whether she has any particular opinion about the weather. I have had all three before the soup. London is admirably efficient.”
Mrs Drinkwater laughed, uncertainly, and then more, because the man across from her was smiling, and decided to be amused.
Cassandra had been listening from across the table, and she leaned forward now into the lull.
“Miss Carrow has such a country way of putting things. It is so refreshing. Do you not agree, Lady Linwood, that a rustic turn of phrase has a most settling effect? It naturally puts one in mind of one’s grandmamma.”
“It does in your case, Lady Cassandra,” Lady Linwood said comfortably. “Your grandmother was Norfolk. Mine was a French émigrée with a temper. I have never yet been discomposed by any provincialism, and I do not intend to begin tonight.”
That earned her a small ripple. Lady Linwood was a Brook Street fixture, two and sixty and unbothered by anyone, and Melody had liked her since Tuesday afternoon. The ripple cost her something, because the ripple had been a public alliance.
“Miss Carrow,” said the Dowager from the head of the table, “you must tell us how you find the season. The little season can feel quite overwhelming if one is not used to its scale.”
“I find it manageable, Your Grace. I have managed worse.”
“What worse, my dear?” the Dowager asked.
“A long autumn in the country with very little to do and a great many people taking an interest. I assure you, Your Grace, after a quarter of the things one is given to manage in a country lane, the noise of a London street is a relief.”
“How brave of you to make light of it.”
“It is not brave to make light of small things. It is brave to make light of large ones. The small ones are practice.”
Cole spoke at last. He had not interfered, and she had been almost grateful for that, because to be defended too readily would have been to confirm that she had needed defending. He spoke now in his own voice, the level one.
“Miss Carrow has the best head for figures I have met. I told my mother so last week. We had a parish account that no one in the county could mend, and she undid it in under a minute, standing up, with most of the parish wives as onlookers. I have hoped all evening she would tell Lord Linwood about the matter of the Hatcher allowance. He has been worrying his own steward to distraction over the same kind of arrangement.”
The compliment was beautifully done. He paid her no flattery.
He set her use down on the table instead, where anyone who wished to talk to her about it might pick it up, and Lord Linwood, who had been carving away in the resigned manner of a husband who expected nothing interesting of his wife’s table, looked up at once.
“A parish account, Miss Carrow? In what year?”
“This autumn, sir. It was a question of the relief fund. The clerk could not read his own sevens and had entered the Michaelmas quarter twice.”
“Ah.”
“The midsummer was missing entirely. Once the clerk wrote it in plainly, the fund balanced and the family had their coal.”
“What I should give for a clerk who could read his own writing.” Linwood put down the knife.
“I have been at the Hatcher kind of arrangement for a tenant of mine since August. The widow’s allowance is not the difficulty.
The difficulty is the timber for the roof.
We agreed it in May and three carpenters have come and gone, and I cannot get a price that I trust.”
“You may not get a price you trust until you have a clerk who has read the carpenters’ books and can tell you what they paid for the last roof.
Three carpenters have come to you with three prices, and you have only Greenstone wood for them to work with.
There is generally a fourth price if one looks for it. ”
Linwood laughed. “Greenstone, I shall borrow your young lady. I have not been talked to so plainly about a roof in three years.”
The Dowager’s smile did not change.
“I am sure Miss Carrow’s gifts will be very useful to a great many gentlemen this season.”
The cut was beautifully done as well, in the other direction. The word gentlemen had been laid down with such soft accuracy that it sank in two places at once. She kept her face the way she had managed worse faces in country lanes.
“Your Grace is too generous. I had hoped only to be useful to one gentleman, who appears to have been taken care of by his steward.”
Cassandra’s mouth tightened, very slightly. Lady Eversley turned to her other side and began an enquiry about Lady Sefton’s table.
“You are a deal too modest, Miss Carrow,” Lady Linwood said.
“It is one of the few things about you I should like to see corrected by London. The town teaches a girl in a season what the country had not taught me in twenty years, which is that there is no merit in pretending to be less than one is.”
“You overestimate me, Lady Linwood.”
“I do not. I have been at table with you four nights, and I have watched the figures done in your head at the third course, and I am perfectly aware that you can read a butcher’s bill upside down.
I shall be plain. The only person in the room who has not yet understood your usefulness is the one who is going to her chamber tonight to revise the seating cards for next Thursday. ”
The Dowager did not move at her end of the table. The room had gone perfectly still for a half-second, then come back to its courses, and Lady Linwood, who had been the wife of a third son for forty years, ate her venison with the cheerful unconcern of one never yet frightened of a relation.
“You are a wicked woman, Lady Linwood,” Melody said quietly.
“I am at present a slightly wicked woman. I have been improving. Eat your fish, my dear.”
The courses came and went. Melody ate what she could eat and pushed the rest, and the rest happened to be the dish with cardamom in it, which she could not abide. She did not say so. She had not been invited to be invited to dishes.
She turned to find a footman at her elbow.
“His Grace asks whether the lady would prefer fish, Miss.”
She looked down the table. Cole was attending to a sentence of Lord Linwood’s. He had not looked at her once during the cardamom course.
“Thank you. The fish, if you please.”
The footman went away, and a few minutes later the fish came. The Dowager had not seen the exchange, because the footman had carried the message at the angle a footman carries instructions, but Cassandra had seen, and the seeing did not improve her temper.
By the time the women rose to go through, Melody was finished.
She had spent four years training herself to last in rooms, and she had reached the end of what she could last in this one.
She walked with the other women towards the drawing room and turned, at the foot of the stair, into the conservatory at the back of the house, because the conservatory was the only place a woman could go in this house that was neither a drawing room nor an admission.
It was a small green glass room full of citrus trees the Dowager kept against the November cold.
The smell was of damp soil and waxy leaves and the faint sharp astringency of an unripe lemon, and Melody breathed it twice and found the window seat and sat down on the dark stone with her hands in her lap and did not, for some moments, attempt to think.
A footstep sounded behind her on the tiled floor.
“May I come in, or shall I defend the threshold from a distance?”
She did not have to look up to know him.
“Defend it. I am not fit for company.”
“Then I shall fail at my post and come in, because I am not in the army any longer and have lost the trick of obedience.”
He stayed at the doorway for a moment longer, and then he came in, and he did not cross the floor to her but stopped a yard short and stood with his hands clasped behind him, looking at a citrus tree as though it had asked him a question.
“You did well, Miss Carrow.”
“I did not do well,” she said. “I survived. They are not the same thing.”