Three Sisters Were Presented for the Duke to Marry — He Chose the Quiet Woman Pouring the Tea

Chapter 10

Priscilla Marbrey was not cruel.

This is the single most important fact about her, and nobody in the world, including her mother, had ever bothered to learn it. She was frightened, which looks almost exactly like cruelty from the outside, and she had been frightened for so long — six seasons, six whole years of being looked at and not chosen — that the fear had worn a smooth hard surface over her, the way running water wears stone.

She stood at the foot of the stairs that Thursday, holding her needle, and watched her younger sister’s face, and knew.

She had known for days, really. Two weeks ago she had heard her mother’s lady’s maid mention, in the way of a woman talking to a wall, that the Duke of Ravensgate had been seen in the back garden; and Priscilla, needlework in her hands, had sat frozen while a fraction of a thought — not me — had gone through her like a cold knife. She had not said anything to her mother. She had held it. She had held it the way she held everything: smoothing it down, fixing her face, turning her head at exactly the angle that had been admired at Almack’s.

Because here was what nobody understood about Priscilla: she had been raised on hope the way a hothouse plant is raised on heat, and the six seasons had run down through her one by one like candles, and now there was nothing green left in her, only the light and the heat and nothing to grow toward. She had been told, her whole life, that she would be a duchess. She had told herself so, in the dark, in her girlhood, the way other girls told themselves stories. And a duchess of six seasons’ standing with no ring on her finger and no offer on the table learns one thing very well: that the goal has been taken away from her without her ever having been told she was running a race she could lose.

And now, in this house, an actual duke had come — and the servants were talking about the back garden, and her mother was talking about a second call, and Alice, plain quiet Alice with her library books, had been out an hour and ten minutes.

“Where have you been, Alice?”

“At the library.”

“Whom did you speak to?”

Alice looked at her, and in her eyes — Priscilla saw it, and it made the cold thing in her chest move — there was no fear at all. There was something worse: a small, quiet steadiness, like a candle carried in a wind and not going out.

“I read a novel of Miss Edgeworth’s,” said Alice.

It was the first lie of Alice Marbrey’s adult life, and it was said in a level voice, and it had been prepared on the walk home, and it landed in that hall like a coin in a collection box: nobody could prove anything about it, and everybody would remember the sound.

Priscilla looked at her for a long moment, and then smiled, and went up to her room, and closed the door, and sat down before her glass.

There, alone, with nobody to arrange herself for, she looked at her own face for a long time — the golden hair, the white throat, the beauty that all London had named a fact for six whole seasons. And she thought about the sentence she had been swallowing for a fortnight: her instead of me.

The mouse inside the beauty went on eating.

She thought about telling her mother, and she knew at once what her mother would do — her mother would take it, and turn it into a war, and drag the family honor through the Chancery courts, and Priscilla would be ruined as a by-product, the way the daughters always are. She thought of saying nothing, and she knew what that would come to — the season would end, and there would be no offer, and there would be another season, and another; and the beauty, which had been her one asset, would become a joke, which is the only way a beauty ever truly ends.

And then she thought — with the cold, clear, narrow cleverness of a woman who has decided a thing is owed her and has been told by the world, six seasons running, that it is not — of the small book.

The book Diana kept. The small volume, always, in the schoolroom. Priscilla had noticed it years ago, the way she noticed everything about people’s hands: that when the girls were young and lessons were being given, Diana always kept one book apart from the rest, the smallest one, and once, when Priscilla had idly reached for it — she had been thirteen, she remembered, and bored — Diana had taken it back with a look Priscilla had never forgotten, because there had been no fear in the look at all, only a quiet wall going up.

Priscilla, at her glass, remembered that look and understood it now the way one understands a word in a language one never studied.

That evening, at the supper table, where Diana stood to serve as she had stood to serve for seven years, Priscilla watched her cousin’s hands, and then she said, in the light, sweet, conversational tone she had spent six seasons perfecting, “Mama, has Diana ever told you about the little book she keeps in the schoolroom? The tiny one. She never lets it out of her sight.”

The table went quiet.

Cosima Marbrey looked up from her soup, and something in her face moved and settled, the way a key turns a lock it has turned a hundred times, and she said mildly, “No. She has not.”

Diana went on pouring the wine without spilling a drop.

But her hands, under the table afterward, were ice; and that night, when the house was quiet, she went up to the schoolroom and took the small book of Ovid down from the shelf, and put it in the lining of her workbag, and slept with the workbag under the head of her bed.

It bought her three days. Three days was not nothing. It was more time than some women get.