Chapter 20
“You have proof now. Surely that settles it.”
The Dowager said it from her usual chair without looking at him as he came in.
She had been waiting for him. The lamps had been lit early against the November dark, and the day’s correspondence was stacked unread on the small table at her elbow because the only piece of correspondence she meant to discuss this evening was the one in his coat.
“It does not, madam,” he said.
“You have given her the letters.”
“I have given her the case. She may have given the letters to the fire by now. It would be inside her rights.”
“She will read them,” the Dowager said.
“She may. If she reads them, she may understand. She may understand and still be wounded.”
“That is sophistry,” she returned.
“It is the consequence of having done a thing badly for four years and asked forgiveness on the strength of having intended otherwise. I have been the man who wrote the letters. I have not been the man who delivered them. The first has earned me very little. The second is the office I should have filled.”
“You cannot spend a matrimony apologising.”
“I can begin by not demanding gratitude for letters she never received.”
She set her cup down. The cup made the small clean sound a cup makes when a woman has placed it with care because she has just been told a sentence she did not wish to hear.
“You will not press her,” the Dowager said.
“No.”
“That is foolish,” she said.
“It is what I owe her.”
“What you owe her is your name,” the Dowager said.
“My name was the thing that was withheld from her, madam. I am not going to offer it as compensation. I am going to leave her room to take it or refuse it without my standing at her shoulder asking her to feel obliged.”
“Then she will refuse it. A woman in that house, with the mother she has and a father who has not been able to afford a tailor since the Toulouse expedition, will not refuse a duke when she is not pressed. She will refuse him precisely when she is given the room. You have given her the room. She will use it.”
“She may.”
“You are very calm about a future you have just thrown into the river.”
“I have not thrown it into the river, madam. I have stopped sitting on it. There is a difference. I should rather she refuse me freely than accept me from the weight of a leather case set on her drawing room table by a man who has not yet earned the right to set anything on her table at all.”
She did not answer at once. She had a way of being silent that was its own argument, and Cole had grown used to it across the eight weeks of his return, and had learned that the best answer to it was the silence directly opposite. He took the chair across from her and waited.
“You will go to the Ridges’ ball,” she said.
“I shall.”
“You will dance with Cassandra,” she went on.
“I shall not promise it.”
“Cole.”
“You may use my name twice this evening, madam. We agreed on the rule this morning. I have not yet heard the second.”
She let it pass, which was the discipline of a woman who had bigger work to do this evening than win a small point about a name.
“The room will read what it sees. It will read your dancing with Cassandra as a settlement, and it will read your not dancing with her as a declaration. There is no neutral floor at that ball for you. You will be making a sentence with your feet whether you mean to or not.”
“Then I shall make the sentence I mean to make. I shall not be managed into the wrong one because the alternative is awkward.”
“You will embarrass me.”
“I shall be sorry for that. I shall not change the dance card to spare you the discomfort.”
“Cole.”
“That is three, madam.”
She closed her mouth on the rebuke she had not yet finished assembling.
She had not, in her three and sixty years, found a graceful way to lose a small argument, but the eight weeks of his return had taught her that he did not soften when she pressed his name.
The lesson had cost her something, and the cost had been visible at breakfast for three mornings, and Cole was sorry for it without being prepared to refund it.
“Go to your supper, madam. I shall not keep you.”
“I am not hungry.”
“Then go to your fire. I should like the room.”
She rose without speaking, and did not bid him goodnight, which had become her habit when she meant to display displeasure, and which he had once minded and no longer did.
The door closed behind her with the small precise sound it had been making across all the evenings of her displeasure that autumn.
The clock on the mantel struck the half.
He went to the desk by the window and sat down to write the note he had been composing in his head all the way from Brook Street.
He wrote two drafts and burnt them.
The first had said too much. It had begun I do not wish you to feel, which was a sentence about her feelings written by the man whose business her feelings had this afternoon been. It was burnt at the third line.
The second had said too little. It had begun Miss Carrow, which he had used five times to her face today and which had begun, in the cool of the evening, to sound like a man holding her at the proper distance because the distance protected him. It was burnt at the second line.
The third draft he kept.
I shall not ask you to answer a promise you were left to mourn alone.
I shall not call until you send for me. If you do not send for me, I shall understand the silence to be your answer, and the answer to be the one a woman in your position is entitled to give.
The letters are yours, and so is the room you read them in, and so is the time you take to read them. C.A.
He read it three times. The signature was the difficult line.
He had signed his April ’14 letter Cole, and she had not read it, and she would not know what the C.A.
meant unless she set this note beside the April letter.
The two together would tell her that he had reverted on purpose to the formality of one who had once signed with the smaller initial and now offered her the larger only when she had asked for it.
She had been reading him since the summer she was two and twenty, and reading him then had not been the easier of the two skills, and she had picked it up faster than he had picked up reading her.
He sealed the note and rang for Beale.
“Brook Street, Beale. Smithson at the door, as before. He is to put it into her hand, not into her mother’s. Wait for no answer. If she sends one tomorrow, bring it directly.”
“Tonight, Your Grace.”
“Tonight.”
Beale went out with the note. Cole sat at the desk a minute longer. The note was gone now, and was a thing he could no longer mend. He took his hat and went out himself.
***
White’s was thinly held at that hour. The dining room had emptied earlier than was usual for a Wednesday, and the bow window held only Pringle and a man Cole did not know, who rose and excused himself to a small game in the back room as Cole came in.
Pringle did not rise, which was its own kindness in a man who could read a face across a room and chose not to dress it up.
“Greenstone. Sit.”
“I shall stand a minute.”
“You shall sit. You have a face on you that I cannot read across a room, which is its own information. I am not asking you about the face. I am asking you to put it where I can pretend not to be looking at it.”
Cole sat without further argument. The glass that arrived in front of him he held without drinking.
“You have heard,” Cole said.
“All of London has heard. The Row was thick with it by five. I have had three notes this evening, two of them from women who do not write me notes in the ordinary course of business. There is a public version, in which Miss Carrow gave Lady Cassandra a country phrase about the breeding of duchesses, and there is a private version, in which the Duke of Greenstone arrived on horseback and made it known that the conversation was at an end. The public version is improving in the telling. The private version is doing better than the public one.”
“I shall not give you a third version, Pringle,” Cole said.
“I had not asked for one. I am telling you what is in the air. There is a thing in the air, also, about a ball.”
“Lady Eversley has issued.”
“Lady Eversley has issued, and has issued for Friday week, which is far more time than the season generally affords for the assembly of an ambush of this size. She is not building a ball, Greenstone. She is building a court. She is calling the entire interest she has been calling on for ten years, and she is calling it to one room on the evening on which she expects you to do something foolish.”
“What is the foolish thing she expects?” Cole asked.
“There are two versions. In the first, you go and dance with Cassandra, and the announcement is made the next morning by a man at this club who has been paid in advance to be among the first to repeat it. In the second, you do not go at all, and Lady Eversley spends the evening explaining your absence in such a way that the absence reads as the announcement of a different intention. Either version is useful to her. There is no third.”
“There is the third, in which I go, and I do not dance with Cassandra, and I do not announce anything either.”
“That is the version,” Pringle said, “in which she calls you a coward by the end of the week.”
“She may call me what she pleases.”
“She will not call you a coward to your face. She will call you a coward to the room, and the room will carry it home, and a duke who cannot answer the room is a duke whose interest in the Lords goes very thin very quickly. I am not telling you to dance with Cassandra. I am telling you that you have been put on a board and the squares have been chosen for you.”
“Then I shall walk between the squares,” Cole said.
“That is not a move, Greenstone.”
“It is the move I have. Pringle, you are a useful man and I have been glad of you twice this autumn. I am not going to be managed into a use of Miss Carrow that I have spent eight weeks teaching myself not to make. She is not a shield to be raised against Cassandra Ridge. She is not a prize to be held up at a ball. She is not proof that the Duke of Greenstone has chosen well. She is a woman who has spent four years being talked of in rooms she was not in, and I am not going to add another room to the list.”
“You will go to the ball,” Pringle said.
“I shall. I shall not, however, go in a costume that requires me to use her as a shield. If Lady Eversley wishes to spend a thousand pounds on a court, she may spend it. I have not commissioned the court. I am not obliged to perform in it.”
“You will dance with someone.”
“I shall dance with Lady Linwood. She is two and sixty and has a knee. We shall have a fine time. The room will understand at once that I have come to spite it, and the spite will be its own message, which will land better than any of the messages you have offered me this evening.”
Pringle laughed, briefly and not unkindly, and drank.
“You are a strange duke, Greenstone.”
“I had not aspired to be one,” Cole said. “I find the position has its own discipline.”
“I shall inform Drinkwater that you intend to suffer the insult tamely, even before the eyes of the entire assembly.”
“You may tell him whatever amuses you. He owes me a sentence still, on Miss Carrow’s behalf, and until he has written it I shall not stand him a drink.”
“He owes a great many sentences and writes very few of them. It is the chief recommendation of the man.”
They stayed at the table half an hour longer.
The glass Cole did not drink. The talk went to horses, which was the ground a club always returned to when the immediate subject had become inconvenient, and Pringle was kind enough not to press him further, and Cole was grateful for it without saying so.
He walked back to Greenstone House by way of Bond Street.
The night was cold and dry and the lamps were lit.
He passed the corner where he had passed it on the afternoon Melody had stepped down at the Linwoods’ door, and he did not stop there this evening, because he had been told once already that a man could not stand on every corner of a city looking for the woman he meant to give the room to.
The note would have been delivered by now. Whether the case had been opened, and whether the letters in it had been read, he could not know until the morning. He had done the thing he could do, in the order he could do it, and the rest was hers.
The Ridges’ ball was Friday week. He would go, and he would not dance with Cassandra Ridge, and he would not stand at Melody’s elbow as though her elbow were a position he had any right to occupy.
Lady Linwood was the woman he meant to ask first. One glass of indifferent champagne would do for the duties of the evening. The room could read what it pleased.
He let himself in at the Greenstone House door. The hall was lit, and Beale had not yet returned. A line of light showed under the Dowager’s drawing room door, and Cole did not knock as he went past it to the stair.
He went up to his rooms. The note he had written and burnt twice and kept the third time was the only sentence he had said well all evening, and he was not certain even of that, because the writing had been easier than the standing.
In the morning he would know whether she had read it, by whether she sent for him.
He did not, at present, believe she would.