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

Chapter 19

She died in her sleep that night, in the small hours, with the fire banked up and the window open, because she had always liked the cold. The maid said afterward that she had wanted the window open, and that there had been, in the room, when she came in at seven, the faintest smell of lavender water and orange peel, which she had found comforting, and which the doctors would have called the smell of the medicines, and which all the servants in the house called the smell of the old duchess, and continued to call so for a long time after.

The funeral was at the end of the week, as was proper, and the whole of Mayfair came to it — some of them out of respect, most of them out of the ordinary correct diligence of London at the death of a peeress; and Cosima Marbrey did not come, because she had taken to her bed the day the news reached Mount Street, and Priscilla and Alice came instead; Priscilla in full mourning for her father’s cousin’s family, correct and pale; Alice in black and standing very still, and when the two cousins saw each other across the church, neither of them spoke, but Alice did one small thing, which was to close her hand lightly on the back of the pew in front of her, in a gesture that Diana and Diana alone understood, because it was exactly what she had done under the table when either of them was frightened.

At the end of the funeral, on the steps, with the carriages drawing up, a man spoke to Diana.

He was elderly, stooped, in an old-fashioned coat; and he had that particular quality that scholars and only scholars have, of looking at a room full of people the way a man looks at a long field he does not intend to cross. He said, “You are Georgiana’s daughter.”

“Mama,” said Diana. “Yes.”

“I was your father’s friend,” said the man. “We were at Cambridge together, and we wrote to each other for thirty years, and I have with me, in the wagon at my inn, three crates from his library. I bought them at the sale — I bought everything I could carry, and there was nothing to speak of, so these are all of it. I did not know where the daughter was, all these years, or I would have come sooner. I am told this morning that you are the daughter. Is there somewhere to send them?”

Diana Cranidge stood on the steps of the church where the Ravensgate family had buried its dead for two hundred years, and looked at an old man in an old-fashioned coat, and tried to say thank you, and found that she could not, and put her hands over her face for a moment, in front of all of the fashion and the peerage of London, and nobody minded, because that is a thing people understand at funerals even when they cannot explain why.

The crates came to Grosvenor Square that evening: three wooden boxes of books, in total disorder and dust, in the way of a scholar’s library that has been packed by strangers. And in the last crate, under the loose pages and the bound journals, there was something large, wrapped in an old blanket; and it was wrapped in the dry, careful, double-pinned way a librarian wraps an object he is paid to be very careful with.

Diana unwrapped it in the drawing room, on the floor, in her black dress, with the Duke watching from the door and the servants hovering with lights.

It was a wooden box, with three brass keys, made by Thomas Tuck of Bath, whose name was driven into the panel in tiny letters; and inside that box, on two layers of ancient cloth, was a small, dry, folded document — the copy, made by an unknown clerk at an unknown hour, of a paragraph of certainty; and Diana looked at the box, and at the paper on her knees, and she said, out loud, with a laugh that had about a half of a sob in it, “My father kept the receipt.”

And on the floor of the drawing room, with a duke and a footman and a maid all looking down at her, Diana Cranidge sat with the last paper in the world that could not be taken from her own hands, and heard herself say, for the first time, in a voice that sounded nothing like her own: “Your grace, my mother’s house had a law of its own.”