Three Sisters Were Presented for the Duke to Marry — He Chose the Quiet Woman Pouring the Tea
Chapter 20
The morning the settlement’s past payments came before the Master, and the restitution schedule was set in its final form, Diana was the one who stood, and asked the Master’s leave, and spoke.
She asked his forbearance for a matter that was not, strictly, before the court: the matter of the persons who would suffer for what had been done — and here she looked down the row at Priscilla, at Jemima, who had not been asked to come and had come anyway, in silence, and at her aunt, who was not in the room at all, and whose barrister had come alone.
She asked that the recovery not touch the portions of Lady Marbrey’s daughters, and the Master, who had these four years spent his mornings in the same room hearing the arithmetic of the fashionable world, noted it, and asked whether the ward wished it in the order; and she said yes, so that nothing of it should ever again be done quietly in her name and then published as if she had done it herself.
And in the corridor, going out, she met Priscilla.
Priscilla Marbrey — the beauty of six seasons, in black, with her golden hair pinned up in full mourning, and her gloves perfect, and her face wearing nothing at all, for the first time in her life, because there was nobody left in the building whose opinion she could be bothered to have — stood by the window and said, “You did not have to do that, you know. Nobody would have blamed you.”
“No,” said Diana. “But they are your portions. They were never mine to take.”
Priscilla looked at her for a long moment, and the two of them stood there, cousins after all, in a corridor that smelled of coal and paper; and then Priscilla said the one true sentence of her life, in a small voice, and it was: “I told her about the book. I am the one who told her, and I have not slept since, and I am not apologizing. I am telling you, because I want one person in the world to know my worst thing, and there is only one person left I would want it to be.”
Diana looked at her, and did not forgive her then, because forgiveness of that particular thing took a year; and said instead the thing she had learned to say, in a room in Southampton Buildings, to people who had done bad things: “It is told. I have it now. Do not give it to anyone else.”
And Priscilla Marbrey went down the stone stairs, and went out of the door of the Chancery office, and though nobody in London ever knew it, or ever said it, she went home that afternoon and began — very slowly, and not for years, and never once with any fuss — to do something no Marbrey had ever done in the whole history of the family: she began to be kind to her youngest sister.