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

Chapter 13

She went up at eleven, when Diana was downstairs in the linen room, counting napkins.

She knew the schoolroom, because Cosima Marbrey knew every room in her own house, and she knew exactly where the books lived: the shelf over the desk, the middle row, the three shabby volumes that had come out of a dead scholar’s trunk seven years ago — and she took them all, and brought them down to the back parlor, and laid them on the table, one by one, and opened them.

The two larger ones were only books. Notes, in a dead man’s hand, in the margins of the Georgics; a broken spine; the smell of old paper. Nothing else.

The smallest one — the little volume of Ovid, soft as a wallet from years of use — was different. The endpapers were stuck together at the spine, and when Cosima slid the blade of a paper-knife along the join, the cover came apart in her hand like an envelope, and something folded very small fell out onto the table.

A single sheet. Dry, yellowed at the folds, in an unliving, clerkish hand.

…the said sum of one hundred and eighty pounds per annum, to be paid to the said Diana Cranidge, her heirs and assigns, out of the trust established by the indenture of…

Cosima stopped reading.

She stood there, in her own back parlor, holding the piece of paper her sister’s husband’s clerk had made for a dying man’s daughter, and she understood — the way one understands the shape of a room when the lamp is finally lit — exactly where she had been standing all these years, and how near the edge of the floor it was, and how thin.

The copy was a copy. But it was the clause. It was the clause, and it was in the girl’s own hand, kept for seven years in a children’s book, in her aunt’s house, under her aunt’s roof, like a coal carried in a pocket.

She looked at it a long time.

Then she went to the fire in the schoolroom grate, which was banked and low and patient, and she dropped the paper onto the coals and watched it burn, and it burned quickly, the way a thin sheet burns: one bright curl of orange along the wild edge of the writing, and then a fold of black, and then nothing at all.

Diana came up twenty minutes later to find her aunt standing at the fireplace with the three books in her hands, and the room full of the smell of burned paper.

It was that smell that did it. Not the books. Not her aunt’s face. The smell — the specific, thin, acrid smell of a page going out — and Diana knew, before a single word was spoken, exactly what had happened, and exactly how long she had been standing there, and exactly what she had lost.

Cosima said calmly, “You will not need these where you are going. I am keeping them, as your guardian, for safekeeping.”

Diana did not answer.

She looked at the grate; and she looked at her aunt; and there was, on her face, for the first time in seven years, something that Cosima Marbrey had never once managed to put there, in the whole long patient history of the pinches and the little coldnesses and the ledgers and the walls: she looked at her aunt and did not pretend, for even one second, that it did not hurt.

That was all.

She went out of the room, and up to her own, and closed the door, and sat down on the bed; and there, alone, in the small back bedroom she had been given at seventeen, Diana Cranidge cried for the first time since her father’s funeral — not much; not long; not a sound that anyone in that house ever heard, but real tears, and real grief, for the single sheet of paper her father’s clerk had copied in the last week of his life and pressed into the hand of a seventeen-year-old girl in mourning, with the words: Keep this by you, miss. Papers go missing in houses like the one you are going to.

It had gone missing. It had done exactly what he told her it would do. And there was no one — no one at all, in the whole of the world — to see her cry about it.

But she was wrong about that, and she would not find out for three days.

Because downstairs, at the front door, at that very hour of that same afternoon, a footman in the Ravensgate livery was standing on the step, waiting, hat in hand; and the butler had told him, as instructed, that Lady Marbrey was not at home to callers; and the footman had gone away.

And the Duke of Ravensgate, in his carriage at the corner of the square, heard the message, and looked out of the window at the tall narrow house, and said one sentence to himself in the dark of the carriage, and then said a second sentence aloud.

The first sentence was: Something has happened.

The second was an instruction to the coachman: “Grosvenor Square.”