Chapter 23
“Mama, I am going to His Grace.”
Lady Carrow set the cup down so carefully that no sound came from the saucer. She had been holding it without drinking for some minutes already, and the careful setting down was the movement of someone who had waited all week for the sentence and found herself unprepared for it after all.
“This morning, my dear.”
“This morning. Now. Within the hour, before I have time to talk myself out of it. I have been talking myself out of it since Tuesday and I shall not do it for a fifth morning.”
Sir Marcus lowered the newspaper. He did not lower it all the way. He lowered it to a level from which he could see his daughter over the upper edge, and at which the newspaper would not have to commit itself to any single position.
“You will go alone,” Sir Marcus said.
“I shall take Sarah. Lady Linwood would lend me her carriage. I shall not ask her. It is six houses down the street, Papa. To call a carriage for it would be to pretend the walk is greater than it is, and the walk is the whole point. I have spent four years not walking it.”
“My dear.”
“You will not stop me, will you,” she said.
“I shall not stop you. I had not, at any point since the duke’s note, supposed I would stop you. You are not asking me. You are telling me. I am grateful you have told me, but the telling is a courtesy, and I shall return the courtesy by hearing it as one.”
“Papa.”
“You will go to him. You will say the thing you have rehearsed at the dressing table for five mornings. You will say it badly the first time because you have rehearsed it. The second time, when he asks you to say it again, you will say it as you mean it. He will listen. He is a man who has spent eight weeks learning to listen to the woman in front of him, and he will not, this morning, have forgotten how. I do not promise you a happy hour. I promise you an honest one, which is the better promise.”
Lady Carrow was crying very quietly into her napkin, which was the manner of weeping she had taught herself in the four years of Cole’s absence and had never since unlearned. Sir Marcus put his hand briefly on her arm and went back to the newspaper.
“Sarah is ready,” Melody said.
“She has been ready since seven, my dear. She told me half an hour ago that she had pressed your blue pelisse and brushed your grey bonnet and put aside the better pair of grey gloves. She said it as a woman says a thing when she knows perfectly well what the items were for. I did not ask her to elaborate.”
“Mama.”
“You will be back by twelve,” her mother said.
“I shall be back when I am back. I cannot promise an hour. I shall send Sarah ahead with word if I am to be very late.”
“Go, my dear. Go before the kitchen sends up another rack of toast and your father feels obliged to eat it.”
Melody rose without finishing the cup she had not started.
She did not, in the few steps from the breakfast table to the door, allow her chin to come down by any visible degree.
The discipline cost her more than she had supposed it would cost. Her mother’s quiet weeping followed her along the hall and was the last sound from the breakfast room before Smithson, who had been told that the lady was going out, opened the front door for her without remark.
The morning was cold and grey and very dry.
The pavement of Brook Street was empty of the carriage traffic that would come in by eleven, and a single delivery boy with a basket was working down the area steps on the opposite pavement, and Sarah, in her plain dark cloak, fell in six paces behind as the door of the Linwood house closed.
Greenstone House was six doors down on the same side.
Melody had passed the door a dozen times in the past three weeks.
She had passed it on her way to the Park drive.
She had passed it on the way to and from the Ridges’ ball.
The brass plate on the area railings she had looked at exactly once, in the late afternoon of the day she came up to town, and not looked at since.
She walked towards it now with her hands inside her muff and her thumb pressed not into a glove seam but into the warm leather of the muff lining, because she had stopped at the foot of the stairs in her bedroom and changed her mind about the gloves and put her hands into something her thumb could not bleed.
The Greenstone House door was painted Brunswick green, with a brass knocker in the form of a stag’s head. Sarah came up beside her on the step.
“Miss.”
“I shall do the knocking, Sarah. You will go in with me and wait in the hall.”
“Yes, miss.”
She knocked twice with the stag’s-head brass, and the door opened almost at once.
The footman who opened the door was very young and very tall and had been trained by somebody to ask no question of any caller who looked above stairs, and he stepped back at once without asking her name. Melody walked past him into the hall before he had finished bowing.
“Miss Carrow, to see His Grace.”
“His Grace is not at home, miss,” the footman said.
“He is at home.”
“His Grace has not announced himself at home, miss.”
“He will to me. You will tell him that Miss Carrow is in the morning room. If you cannot tell him, you will tell his man, who I believe is called Beale, and Beale will tell him. I shall wait fifteen minutes. After fifteen minutes I shall go up the stair myself, and you will be very glad you have not detained me by then.”
He went, white-faced and at a careful pace. Melody turned to the morning room door, which stood half-open, and went in.
The Dowager was already on her feet.
She had been seated by the window with the household correspondence on her lap, and the rising had not been at Melody’s announcement because Melody had not yet been announced.
The rising had not been at a carriage at the door, because there had been no carriage.
It had been at the sight of a woman on the step, by way of the long window that gave on the street, and a quarter of a minute, perhaps less, had been enough for her to prepare a face.
The face was perfect, of the kind a Dowager wore when she was about to do work she had not anticipated needing to do.
“Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
“You have come.”
“I have.”
“Without a card,” the Dowager said.
“Without a card. The hour required brevity over form.”
“You will sit.”
“I would rather not, Your Grace,” she said.
“You will sit, Miss Carrow. I have a number of things to say to you, and I shall not say them at a person who is at the disadvantage of standing. Sit, if you please. It is not a trap.”
“It is a chair, Your Grace, in your morning room, in your house, with you on your feet. If it is not a trap, it is the closest thing to one a chair in this room has been used for in the past three months. I shall stand. You are kind to offer it. The kindness is sufficient.”
The Dowager set the correspondence on the table beside her chair with the smallest sound a stack of paper made.
She was very straight and very composed.
Her hair was already done for the day in the controlled grey she had been wearing it in for the past ten years, and her morning gown was the dark plum of a woman in nominal half-mourning for a son two years departed.
The face she wore was not the face of the woman who had said You will not have my apology, Cole in a morning room before breakfast a fortnight ago.
It was a face the Dowager had not, in Melody’s acquaintance, worn before.
“You must consider whether you can bear the life.”
“I have already borne the consequences of the life without its protection, Your Grace. I have stood at windows in country lanes for four years being pitied by women whom you would not, on the whole, allow in this room. I have been the jest of three confectioner’s mornings in a single autumn.
I have been told, sweetly, that altered expectations build character.
I have come up to town in a borrowed bedroom on a street I had not seen at thirteen, and I have stood in your dining room with your daughter-elect on your son’s right hand and answered the questions your friends were paid to ask me.
The life is not what I am wondering whether I can bear.
I have borne the worse half of it without any of the title’s protection, and I have come out the other side.
The half with the protection in it, Your Grace, would be a considerable improvement. ”
“Affection is not enough for a duchess.”
“Neither is breeding, Your Grace, as many drawing rooms prove daily. I have been in two of them this autumn alone.”
The Dowager did not move at the cut. She looked at Melody as a woman looks at an animal she has misjudged for some time and is now reconsidering, and there was nothing warm in the look, but there was, for the first time, the small clean attention of a woman who had begun to see who was in front of her.
“My son’s duty is larger than his heart.”
“I have come to speak to his heart, Your Grace, and not to negotiate with his duty. If you mean to negotiate with his duty, you will need to do it on a different morning, and with a different woman, and in any case without me in the room. I shall not, this morning, conduct that negotiation on his behalf, and I shall not give you the opportunity to conduct it on mine.”
“You think yourself equal to him,” the Dowager said.
“I think myself the woman he has chosen, which is not in the same sentence. The first is a claim. The second is a fact. I am not making the claim. I am stating the fact.”
“He has not chosen you,” the Dowager said flatly.