Epilogue
“Your Grace, if one more person tells me I look born to the title, I shall be obliged to behave badly enough to disprove them.”
Cole did not look up from the conversation he was finishing with a small grey man whose name Melody had been introduced to twice in the past hour and could not yet retrieve.
He inclined his head a degree, and his hand went briefly behind him to the small of her back, and the small of her back was the only address he gave her until he had finished the sentence with the small grey man and turned.
“They have been at it long?”
“Three of them since I came through the gallery,” she said. “One of them was your cousin. I do not yet know how to refuse your cousin without appearing rude. I shall have to acquire the skill before next Easter.”
“My cousin Phipps is rude to everyone in the family. You will not be required to acquire the skill on his account, because the skill is unnecessary. He shall be rude first. You will answer politely and excuse yourself to attend to a chair, and the conversation will be over, and he will not notice for a quarter of an hour that you have left him. He has been managed by these tactics in this house for forty years. I have learnt them from my brother. Henry was exceedingly fond of Phipps, provided their acquaintance was strictly limited to Sunday afternoons.”
“You shall not now make me cry at my own wedding breakfast, Your Grace.”
“I had not been about to. I was about to ask if you had eaten. The answer, I think, is no. You shall eat. There is a small chair by the fire in the gallery, and a plate at it for you, which Mrs Holt has been guarding it as a sergeant of foot guards a position. Sit. Eat. Phipps will not pursue you to the gallery. It has the chairs he does not like.”
Mrs Holt was the housekeeper. The plate was on the small chair beside the fire as he had said, and Mrs Holt was indeed at it, and her gravity loosened by exactly one degree as Melody came up, which from Mrs Holt was the equivalent of any other woman’s curtsy.
“You have managed an hour and a quarter, Your Grace.”
“I have, Mrs Holt,” she said. “By the count of one of us.”
“You shall sit, and you shall eat. The duke has said so. The duke says very few things in this house that I am required to enforce. This is one of them.”
“You will not enforce it, Mrs Holt.”
“I shall stand at this chair and look at you, Your Grace. That is the office. The enforcing is not in my line.”
Melody sat, and ate without ceremony. The plate was the food she had had at country breakfasts in her father’s house since she was four, a slice of ham and an egg and a piece of toast that had been buttered without elaboration.
It was the kindest plate she had been served all day.
She had been Duchess of Greenstone for two and a half hours and had not yet been served any of the dishes the duchy was supposed to have.
From the chair she could see the long gallery.
Her mother was at the south end of it under the third window, with Sarah behind her holding a fresh handkerchief because Sarah had been holding fresh handkerchiefs since Lady Carrow had dressed at half past seven and would continue to do so until she was put to bed at ten.
Lady Carrow had been weeping at intervals all morning.
She had wept at the church porch and she had wept at the side door of the Abbey when the carriages had been brought round, and she had wept very briefly at the cutting of the cake.
It was the way a woman wept at a thing she had been waiting for too long to believe in until it had happened, and would now believe in every quarter of an hour for the rest of the afternoon as a kind of insurance.
Sir Marcus stood beside his wife with a glass he was holding without drinking.
It had been in his hand for an hour. His face was the face he had worn through three London dinners and two country evenings and four parish meetings, the face of a man who had decided, well in advance of the morning, that he would not embarrass his daughter on the day of her wedding by being seen to find it more than he could carry.
He was being seen to find it more than he could carry, and he did not mind.
The glass had been set down twice and picked up again, and each setting-down had been at the same expression of his face, which had not been a smile.
At the middle window, with the small careful attention of a woman managing a room that was hers without quite being hers, Lady Linwood was telling a story to a circle of four ladies.
The four ladies were Mrs Drinkwater and two of her sisters-in-law and a woman Melody did not know, and Lady Linwood was telling the story with one hand on Melody’s mother’s other elbow at the necessary intervals to provide Lady Carrow with the steadying she had not asked for and was much in need of.
She had been doing it since the carriages came in.
At the door of the gallery, having stayed an hour and now leaving on the careful timing of a woman who did not wish to be observed leaving, Cassandra was on Lord Beresford’s arm.
Beresford had asked for Cassandra at the ball in November, had pursued the pursuit through Christmas, and had been understood since Twelfth Night to be the man she would, in time, enter into matrimony with.
He was a viscount with thirty thousand a year and a kind face.
He was not a duke. Lady Eversley had taken the loss of the dukedom with the discipline of long practice, a woman who had been making bargains all her life and had not, until November, lost one in such a public room.
In the four months since she had begun to mention Beresford’s coal interests in conversation at a frequency that suggested she had decided to take the coal interests as compensation.
Cassandra, who had attended this morning with her parents in a gown of pale blue, was leaving on Beresford’s arm with the small clean composure of a woman who had not lost everything, and had not, in any case, ever been quite as exposed as the room had needed her to seem.
She inclined her head a quarter of an inch as she passed the door.
The inclination was not at Melody. It was at the threshold of a house she had once expected to be hers.
Melody received the inclination from her chair with the small returning inclination of a woman who had no need, this morning, to settle any further account.
“Your Grace.”
The Dowager had come to the chair without Melody’s noticing she had approached.
She had not weighed in heavily on the morning.
The second pew at the church porch had held her, in the proper grey.
The face she had brought to the wedding of her younger son had not, in two hours and a half, smiled, which had not been a refusal so much as a fact of the face itself.
She stood now at the side of the chair with her hands clasped at the small of her back.
“Madam.”
“You will not stand, please. You have not been allowed to sit since eight.”
“I shall stand, madam, if you would prefer.”
“I would prefer you to sit, and to eat the piece of toast Mrs Holt has been guarding since nine. The toast is the more useful thing for you to attend to. I shall be brief. I had not come over to take up your morning.”
“You may take it up, madam,” he said.
“I have a sentence. I shall say it and go away again, and you may retain the chair and the toast. I shall not detain you a minute beyond the sentence.”
“Yes, madam.”
The Dowager hesitated, in a manner she had not, in Melody’s observation of her, hesitated since the morning of the Park ambush. The hesitation was not a thing Melody allowed herself to interpret.
“You carry the room better than I had expected.”
“I had excellent practice surviving rooms that did not want me, Your Grace.”
“So I am beginning to understand.”
She inclined her head, an inclination of the same quarter-inch she had given Cassandra by accident at the door, and she went away across the gallery to a chair at the far end where she had set down her shawl an hour ago. She did not look back.
Mrs Holt, who had been the only witness, set down the small silver fork she had been holding without needing to and did not speak.
“That was the second time, Mrs Holt, that her grace has surprised me. I shall not, on the present evidence, expect a third.”
“You may expect what you like, Your Grace. I shall continue to hold the fork.”
Melody ate the toast in the silence the Dowager had left behind her, and Mrs Holt did continue to hold the fork.
After the toast, by way of the door at the south end of the gallery and along the corridor that led past the small breakfast parlour, she went down to the library.
It sat at the back of the house, two corridors and a turn from the gallery, the room in Greenstone Abbey that no one but the duke ever, in the ordinary course of the year, entered.
The wedding party would not find her there for a quarter of an hour, which was what she had come for.
The library smelled of beeswax and the cold of an unlit fire.
The high windows showed the south lawn going down to the river.
On the small table by the second window, which had been her own choice of the room when she had spent a week in the house in February setting the rooms to her hand, the inscribed book sat.
Beside it, in the leather case Cole had set on her Pembroke in November, the letters sat.
The two had been in the same room since February. She had not yet, in March or in early April or in the three days before the wedding, taken either of them up. She had wanted to take them up first on this day.
She took up the book.