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

Chapter 11

The next three days were the strangest of Diana’s life, because nothing happened at all.

She taught Jemima her Latin in the mornings. She kept the accounts. She took the dog out, now, in the small back mews, since the garden was forbidden. She did not see the Duke. The house was quiet; Cosima was occupied with the season; and the only sign of what was coming was a small, cold, polite attention in Priscilla’s eyes whenever Diana entered a room — the gaze of a woman watching a clock.

And, twice, in the hall, Diana saw Alice catch her eye and look quickly away. That was the whole of their communication, and it was enough. Alice looked, and Diana went, the next morning, when the house was empty of errands, to the little mews behind the house, where a plain woman in a plain bonnet spent half an hour of every afternoon by the stable wall with a novel — half an hour where nobody was watching either of them, because nobody, in the whole history of that house, had ever watched Alice.

Alice put a small folded paper into her hand and whispered, “Thursday. The library. He says not a word to anyone.”

And that was that. That was the whole of the revolution.

It was not much. It was, Diana thought, walking the dog home, everything: a folded paper, a bonnet, a wall, a Thursday; the entire machinery of a life, turned on one small, foolish, enormous hinge.

She read the paper in the coal-house, of all places, with the door ajar for light. Thursday, eleven. Come with a genuine errand — a book to be exchanged at the subscription library; a parcel. The carriage will wait on the south side of the square, plain, no crest. Burn this.

She burned it in the kitchen stove, and went up, and taught Latin to a girl who had no idea — none at all — that she was living, that week, inside the only piece of luck her family had ever produced.

Thursday came.

Diana knew, by then, that it was the last Thursday of her old life, whichever way the coin fell, and she spent it doing the thing she had done every day of seven years: she got the work done. She rose at six. She did the accounts. She took the dressmaker’s parcel to the shop with the printed list of Priscilla’s alterations, and stepped, in the process, out of the house in Mount Street with a brown-paper parcel under her arm and no one’s leave asked, because the parcel was a duty, and duties went.

The carriage was on the south side of the square, plain as a husband’s front parlor, with a man in livery without a stripe; and the door opened before she was halfway across.

She did not get in.

She stood on the pavement in the grey morning, with the parcel in her arms, and looked at the open door, and thought of seven years, and of a pinch that was a small red bruise under a brown sleeve, and of a schoolbook with a folded paper in its cover, and of a wall where the roses did not do well, and she got in.

They drove to Lincoln’s Inn Fields without speaking, because the driver had been told to take the long way and the streets were full and there was nothing that could be said in a hired carriage that would not be said better in a room. The Duke sat opposite her in his plain dark coat; and looked out the window; and said, once, without turning his head, “You may still turn back. Nothing has been done yet that cannot be undone.”

“I know,” said Diana. “I have a parcel to exchange at the library, your grace, and if we hurry I shall be home before my aunt misses me. That is all the turning back there is.”

And he turned his head then and looked at her, and the look had something in it she could not read, and which was, in fact, the look of a man watching a woman count the cost and pay it out of her own pocket, coin by coin, without ever once asking him to pay a farthing of it.

The office of Mr. Padet was on the first floor, and smelled of ink and cold ash. Mr. Padet stood up; and looked at her — a small, pale, dry-eyed man with a mouth like a wax seal; and Diana looked back at him with exactly the calm he was looking at her with, and he liked her, and showed no sign of it, which was the highest compliment of which he was capable.

“Sit down, Miss Cranidge,” he said. “I have talked to your grace here. Now I will tell you what I can do, and what it will cost, and what it will not.”

He was honest down to the last penny. The settlement gave her one hundred and eighty a year for life. Cosima had drawn seven years of it, and one quarter more. The money was gone — spent, most of it, on coal and on the season and on clothes for daughters who would never know where the money came from. The law could make Cosima produce the original document, account for the payments, and repay what could be found; it could not conjure money that had been spent.

He said that he would file a summons in Chancery in the ward’s name and at the ward’s direction, that Lady Marbrey would be compelled to appear or to answer, and that when the original document was produced, the trust would amend its records and pay the annuity to Diana and to no one else, for the rest of her life.

He said it would be ugly. He said her aunt would fight. He said she might lose everything she had, which was: a bed in a house that was not hers.

And then he said the thing he had said to the Duke a few days before, and he said it to her, which was the point of the entire morning:

“Miss Cranidge, I must ask you one thing, and I must ask it plainly, because it is the hinge of the whole matter. What is done here will be done in your name. Are you able to bear it? Not the hearing. The year. The talk. The people who will use this against you.”

Diana looked at the desk. She thought about all the years she had spent saying little rather than lying. She thought about a small sheet of paper, folded inside a schoolbook.

“I have borne seven years of worse in silence, sir,” she said. “I can bear a year of it out loud.”

Mr. Padet looked at her for a long moment. Then he drew a sheet of paper toward himself, dipped the pen, and said, “Then be so good as to sign here, where it says the ward.”

And Diana Cranidge leaned forward, in a small office that smelled of ink and cold ash, and signed her own name — for the first time in her life, before a witness, on a paper with her own interests written on it; and her hand did not shake at all, because it was the hand that could pour tea for two hundred callers without spilling a drop.