Chapter Fifteen
“Miss Goodall is not at home.”
The housekeeper said it for the third time in three days, and the third time had a quality to it that the first and second had not.
It had a firmness, a finality, the voice of a woman who had been instructed to refuse admittance and who was no longer pretending that the refusal was temporary.
Mrs. Glass stood in the doorway of the Goodall townhouse with her hands folded at her waist and her face arranged in the particular expression of a servant who was performing a duty she did not enjoy and who would have preferred, if given the choice, to be doing almost anything else.
The Duke of Ravenhurst’s man retreated from the step with the duke’s card still in his hand, the card that joined the two other cards that had been presented on Monday and Tuesday and that had been returned, untouched, on the silver tray in the front hall where cards from unwelcome visitors went to wait for collection that never arrived.
Imogen watched from the upstairs window.
She stood behind the curtain in her old dressing gown, the one she had not changed out of since Saturday night, and she watched the man retreat.
She knew the card would be on the hall tray, but she did not go downstairs to collect it, because collecting it would have meant reading it and she had no strength to do that.
Two letters arrived that week. She returned both unopened.
The returning was a physical act that cost her more than she had expected.
The letters were addressed in his hand, the angular hand, and the sight of her name in his writing, Miss Imogen Goodall, written on heavy cream paper with the Ravenhurst seal on the back, produced a reaction in her body that she could not control.
***
The Mayfair Tattler began its work by Wednesday.
A column on page four, worded carefully enough to avoid libel and clearly enough to leave no doubt, mentioned a certain duke, a certain lady and a conservatory and an evening that had concluded with the lady departing in the duke’s own carriage.
The column was read at every breakfast table in Mayfair by Thursday morning, and the reading produced conversation, which brought visits.
The visits were not to the Goodall townhouse but to the Goodall neighbors and acquaintances and anyone who might have information about the quiet baronet’s daughter who had been seen dancing with the Duke of Ravenhurst.
***
Aunt Margery wept once, briefly, in the kitchen on Thursday afternoon, standing at the table with the Tattler open in front of her and a cup of tea going cold beside it.
Imogen heard the weeping from the stairs and came down and found her aunt with her face in her handkerchief and her shoulders shaking.
She looked up and said, in a voice that trembled, that Cassie’s season was ruined, that no respectable family would receive a girl whose sister had been named in the Tattler, that everything they had worked for since Cassie turned eighteen was gone.
And then she stopped weeping, because there was no time.
After all, weeping required the luxury of believing that weeping would help, and Aunt Margery had lost that luxury sometime between the second card being refused and the Tattler column appearing on the breakfast table.
Imogen made the decision that evening. They would leave London and close the townhouse. She would take Cassie and Aunt Margery to her late uncle Geoffrey’s small estate in Hertfordshire, and wait there until the season was over and the gossip had found something else to feed on.
She told Cassie on Friday morning. Cassie, who had been listening to her sister cry in the night and who had read the Tattler and had understood, with the sharp instinct of an eighteen-year-old who was watching her first season collapse around her, that the reason she was being offered was not the full story but accepted the news without argument.
She packed her trunk, her bandboxes and her dancing slippers, which she placed in the trunk last, carefully, as if the care of the placing might preserve the season they represented, and she did not ask Imogen to explain.
They left London on Saturday morning, one week after the Carlisle ball.
The townhouse was closed behind them, the shutters drawn, Mrs. Glass left to manage the dust sheets and the cards that would continue to arrive on the tray.
Aunt Margery did not ask questions in the carriage.
She held Imogen’s hand instead, and the hand-holding was sufficient, warm, and the warmth was the only thing Imogen had felt since Saturday night.
Because everything else was cold, and would be for a very long time.
***
The Goodall estate in Hertfordshire was small.
A manor house of honey-colored stone with twelve rooms, a leaking roof over the east wing and a garden that had been tended by a single gardener for thirty years and that showed the particular beauty of a place that was loved more than it was maintained.
Uncle Geoffrey’s library was still intact, the books on the shelves where he had left them, the empty spaces where the pawned volumes had stood, the gaps like missing teeth in a familiar smile.
Imogen stood in the library on the first morning and looked at the gaps and thought about Crébillon, the cottage, the rain and the man she had told about the gaps while sitting in front of a smoking fire in her shift.
The first week was the worst. She walked the orchards twice a day, morning and afternoon, following the same path her uncle had walked, the old apple trees arching overhead, the fruit still small and green on the branches, the grass beneath her feet worn into a track by thirty years of a man’s daily constitution.
The path led through the oldest part of the orchard, where the trees were gnarled and heavy and had been planted by someone who believed in patience, and the planting was an act of faith.
Imogen was trying very hard not to think about faith, because thinking about it led to thinking about trust and that was one thing she was not ready to think about.
She did not read. For the first time in her life, Imogen Goodall did not read.
The books sat on the shelves in Uncle Geoffrey’s library, and she could not look at them because that would bring memories of her discussions with Ash, which seemed genuine.
That shared honesty had felt like a foundation. But the foundation was a lie.
Cassie tried to draw her out. She brought her wildflowers from the meadow, left them in a cup on her bedside table, small purple flowers that Imogen did not know the name of and that she looked at every morning.
Cassie also suggested walks, then picnics, then card games, then simply sitting together in the drawing room, and Imogen accepted the sitting but not the conversation, and the acceptance without conversation worried Cassie more than refusal would have, because silence from Imogen was not peace.
It was the sound of a woman holding something in her body that she could not put down, could not describe and could not share with an eighteen-year-old sister whose season had just been destroyed.
Aunt Margery made camomile tea every day, but Imogen did not drink it.
The tea sat on the table beside her chair, growing cold, joining the previous day’s cold tea, a small collection of abandoned cups that Aunt Margery cleared away without comment each evening and replaced each morning with fresh ones.
Bethany followed two days later.
She arrived in her own carriage with a small trunk and a face that carried the particular expression of a woman who had made a decision during the carriage ride and was not going to be talked out of it.
She did not ring the bell. She let herself in through the kitchen door, which was unlocked because country kitchens were always unlocked and because Aunt Margery had given up on security along with everything else.
She walked into the Goodall morning room without announcement, without ceremony, without the social preamble that six seasons of London had trained her to deploy.
Imogen was sitting in the morning room chair by the window, the chair she had been sitting in for three days, the chair that was beginning to develop a permanent impression of her body.
She looked up when Bethany came in, her gaze flat.
The flatness was new because Imogen Goodall had been many things, but never dull.
It scared Bethany more than tears ever could.
Imogen saw it in her face: the sharp intake of breath when she saw the shadows under her eyes, the unwashed hair, and the dressing gown she had worn for four days.
Bethany set her trunk and removed her traveling cloak.
“I am here for the duration,” Bethany said.
“I will not interfere. I will not say anything you do not want to hear. I will drink your aunt’s camomile tea, walk your uncle’s orchards and sit in your uncle’s drawing room, and if you want to talk I will listen, but if you do not want to talk I will be quiet.
Either is acceptable, and neither requires discussion. ”
She unpacked her trunk in the guest bedroom.
She drank the camomile tea, all of it, every cup Aunt Margery produced, because drinking it was an act of solidarity with Aunt Margery’s need to be useful, and Bethany understood usefulness and honored it.
She walked the orchards with Imogen in the afternoon, matching her pace, and her silence, not filling the quiet with words because she understood, better than anyone, that some silences needed to exist and that filling them was a form of trespass.
The third evening. The four of them were at the dining table; the candles low, the food plain, the conversation sparse.
Cassie was telling a story about a hedgehog she had found in the garden, and Aunt Margery was pretending to listen.
Bethany was cutting her bread into precise squares, which was something she did when she was thinking about saying something she did not want to say, and Imogen was watching her, because she had been watching Bethany cut bread into squares for thirteen years, and the squares always meant the same thing: a sentence being assembled behind the teeth, a truth being prepared for delivery.
Bethany set down her knife.
“I told you, Imogen.” Her voice was quiet, level, carrying the particular weight of a woman who had been holding a sentence behind her teeth for days and was now releasing it because holding it any longer would have been dishonest and dishonesty was a thing Bethany Mercer could not sustain.
“I told you on the gravel sweep at Ravenhurst Park. I told you the day after Marchmont. I told you in your morning room after the conservatory. He has done exactly what I said he would do.”
The table went silent. Cassie stopped talking about the hedgehog and Aunt Margery’s cup paused halfway to her mouth.
Imogen set her fork down.
“I needed to be told by him, Bethany. Not by you.” Her voice was steady and low and carried no anger, because the anger had burned through in the first three days and what was left underneath was something colder and more precise.
“You telling me was never going to stop me. I have been told all my life by women who knew better. My aunt told me. Mrs. Glass told me. Every woman who has ever watched a younger woman walk toward a man she should not walk toward has told me, and I have heard each one of them, but I walked anyway. I needed to be told by him, not by anybody else.”
She paused. The candle nearest her plate flickered in a draft from the window, and the flickering made the shadows in the room shift, and that was the only movement, because no one at the table was moving.
“He was the only one who could have told me, and he chose not to. He chose to wait. He chose to keep the wager between us while he came to my house and whispered words to me that I believed, and I believed them because they sounded true. They may have been true, but the truth of them does not help, because the wager was also true, and he chose the wager’s silence over his own honesty, and that choice is the thing I cannot forgive. ”
She picked up her fork, set it down again and looked at the tablecloth.
Bethany’s face changed. The steadiness cracked, and beneath it, Imogen saw something she had not seen on Bethany’s face in six seasons of friendship, something that looked, in the candlelight, remarkably like shame.
Bethany had been right. She had been right about the duke, about the mark and right about the broken hearts, but being right had not prepared her for this, for the specific shape of the damage.
“I am sorry,” Bethany said. The apology arrived before her napkin reached the table, quick, raw and genuine. “I am sorry I said it. I am sorry I was right. I would rather have been wrong about him than right about this.”
There was silence for the rest of the meal.
The cold supper went mostly uneaten, and Aunt Margery excused herself with a small sound that might have been a cough and might have been a sob.
Cassie followed, pressing Imogen’s shoulder once as she passed, a brief firm touch that said everything Cassie had not said aloud for a week.
Bethany stayed. They shared the bed, the narrow guest bed in the room next to Imogen’s, lying side by side as they had when they were twelve, when the world was smaller, and the dangers in it were imaginary.
The bed was too narrow for two grown women, but neither of them cared, because the narrowness meant their shoulders touched, and the touching was the point.
Imogen cried once, quietly, in the dark.
Not the hot furious tears of the Carlisle parlor.
Quieter tears, slower, the tears that arrived after the fury had burned out and the grief had settled in underneath it.
It was the grief of a woman who had given herself to a man she loved and who had learned, less than thirty hours later, that the giving had been built on a foundation she had not been allowed to see.
She told her friend everything, and Bethany listened without commenting. She simply lay beside her in the dark and listened to her cry and was there, present, silent and steady, because steadiness was what Bethany offered and it was what Imogen needed.