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

Chapter 12

The summons was served on a Tuesday, at breakfast.

It was served by a clerk of the court, in a plain coat, at the front door of the house in Mount Street, at half past nine in the morning; and it was carried in on a salver by the second footman, who had no idea what he was carrying, into the dining room where Cosima Marbrey sat with her three daughters and her coffee.

Cosima read it twice. The first time she simply looked at it, the way one looks at an unexpected bill for a hat one does not remember buying. The second time she went white, and then red, and then very quiet.

In the matter of the marriage settlement of the late Mrs. Cranidge: summons to appear and produce. On the application of Diana Cranidge, spinster, by her solicitor, Mr. Padet, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

She looked up from the paper at her niece.

Diana stood at the sideboard with the coffee pot, as she had stood at the sideboard with the coffee pot every morning for seven years, and she was pouring, and her hand did not shake, and there was no expression on her face at all beyond the plain, grave stillness she wore the way other women wear colors.

Cosima said, in a voice like the edge of a card, “Leave us, girls.”

Priscilla took her sisters out without a word. Alice went last, and at the door she looked back once, just once, and Diana did not look at her, because if she looked, everything would show.

The door closed.

Cosima Marbrey sat with her coffee and the summons, and looked at the girl by the sideboard, and said, “You.”

“Aunt.”

“You have done this.”

“I have asked the court for what is mine.”

“What is yours.” Cosima laughed — the first real laugh Diana had ever heard from her, and it was not a pleasant sound; it was the small, incredulous, rising laugh of a woman watching a plate fall and not being able to catch it. “What is yours. And what of the seven years of bread you have eaten? The roof you have slept under? The gowns? The Latin lessons your father left you, which I paid a master to keep up —”

“You did not pay a master, aunt. I taught myself, and I taught Jemima, and you paid nothing.”

“Do not,” said Cosima, very softly, “do not stand there in your brown dress and be clever at me.”

“I am not clever, aunt. I have never once been clever, I have only been quiet. You told me that myself, seven years ago, and it is the only lesson of yours I have ever found any use for.”

Cosima stood up, walked to the window, and stood with her back to the room, looking at Mount Street; and when she spoke again her voice had changed entirely, and it was the voice of a woman who had made a decision.

“You will go to your room and pack,” she said. “You will go to Yorkshire on Thursday — to my cousin’s, where you will be quiet. You will not speak of this to anyone. You will not write to anyone. And I will answer this piece of impudence in the courts as it deserves.”

Diana set down the coffee pot. “Aunt, I will not go to Yorkshire.”

“You will do as I say, as you have always done it.”

Diana looked at her for a moment — the woman in the morning light, in her cap and her shawl, small and furious, and behind the fury, for the first time in seven years, frightened — and she said the sentence she had been keeping in the lining of her workbag for a week and a half, and had not known she would ever say:

“No, aunt. Not this time. Not in this.”

And she curtsied — the same curtsy she had given to two hundred callers a season, to the wall, to the general company, without expecting anything to come back — and went out of the room, and up the stairs, and closed her door.

Cosima stood at the window for a long minute after the door closed, tapping her fingers on the sill; and then she sat down, and wrote — not to any cousin in Yorkshire, whatever she had said; she wrote, with a steady hand, to a barrister in the Temple, and then to the trust office in Chancery Lane, and then to two other people, in two other parts of the city, whose names she did not write down.

Then she went up to the schoolroom.