She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 18

The Dowager Marchioness came in the spring, and there was a great deal of ceremony about it, because there was a ceremonial stir that the old woman would have despised, but the household insisted, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Eleanor did not meet her at the door. She was not so naive as that, and she understood that the old woman had come, not to see her, but to see her grandsons, and that to intrude upon that meeting would have been a presumption of the very sort that the old woman had spent her life detesting. So she waited, in the sitting room, as the carriage came up the drive, and the boys were sent, solemn and delighted, to greet their grandmother, whom they had not seen since before their mother died, and whom they had only the haziest of memories of.

It was William, with the gravitas that befell the eldest, who led the others. Eleanor watched through the window as the old woman descended from the carriage, and she saw, in the way of a woman who had been watching children for a year, that William’s formal bow was just this side of too formal, and that Henry, who had been coached, had forgotten every word of it, and that Edmund was about to say something catastrophic.

And she saw Tom. Tom, who had not been coached, and who had been standing a little apart, watching, as he watched everything, and who stepped forward, when the old woman turned, and who took her hand in his own small one, and who said, in his quiet voice, and with no one’s prompting, “I remember you. You visited when I was small, and you gave me a biscuit, and I think about it sometimes.”

The old woman stood very still. And then she said, in a voice that shook, “You remember that.”

“I remember the biscuit,” Tom said. “I do not remember you. But I would like to.”

And the old woman — the formidable, exact, impossible woman — bowed her head, and her shoulders shook, and she knelt, with a grimace at her knees that she would have sworn to no one, and she drew Tom into her arms, and she held him, and she wept.

Eleanor turned from the window, because it was a private thing, and she did not wish to witness the grief of a woman who had been grieving, in one way or another, for four years.

Later that afternoon, the old woman came to the sitting room. She was a tall, thin woman, with a nose of considerable authority, and eyes that were not unkind but that were certainly exacting, and she looked at Eleanor for a long moment, and then she said, in a voice that was dry and not at all apologetic, “I did not come to thank you. I came to see my grandsons, and I have seen them, and they are happy, and I am grateful for it, though gratitude is a thing I am not in the habit of expressing.”

“I know,” Eleanor said. “And it is not expected.”

“Nevertheless,” the old woman said, and she stopped, and she looked at Eleanor, and there was a struggle, and then she said, with great effort, “I was wrong about you. I was wrong to resent you before I knew you. I have spent a great many years being certain of things I had no business being certain of, and I do not intend to spend the rest of them that way.”

“Thank you,” Eleanor said.

“Do not thank me,” the old woman said, with some sharpness. “It is not a kindness. It is an acknowledgement of the truth. And I am better at acknowledging the truth now than I was, and it is harder, and I do not like it.”

She sat down, and she looked at Eleanor, and then she said, in a voice that was not quite so sharp, “Tell me about my grandsons. Not the things I can see, which are that they are tall and have grown. Tell me the things you know about them.”

Eleanor sat down opposite her, and she told her. She told her about William, who was at once too serious and too brave, and who had not yet learned to be anything other than a boy who had been asked to be a man before he was ready. She told her about Henry, who thought deeply and said little, and who had a kindness that he hid, because it made him feel foolish. She told her about Edmund, who was a whirlwind and had a heart as large as his appetite.

And she told her about Tom, who was the quiet watcher, and who was, Eleanor thought, in some way, the one most like the old woman herself.

The old woman listened, and did not interrupt, and when Eleanor was done, she was quiet a long moment.

“I took no notice of them,” she said, at last. “When my daughter was alive, I took no notice of them, because I was busy being important, and there is no one so blind as a person who is busy being important. And when my daughter died, I told myself that I could not bear to look at them, and so I did not, and I told myself it was grief.”

She looked at Eleanor, and there was no sharpness now, only a kind of tired honesty. “It was not grief. It was cowardice. And you, who had no reason to, did the thing I was too much of a coward to do. You looked at them. You saw them. And they adore you.”

“They adore each other,” Eleanor said. “And they adore their father. I am only part of it.”

“It is a large part,” the old woman said, “and I am glad of it, and I am sorry that I was too much of a coward to be glad of it sooner.”