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

Chapter 21

The wedding was at Michaelmas, quietly, at the church at Southcross, with the village and the tenants and the household and two carriages full of London; and it was not, Diana thought afterward, a wedding with any particular event in it, which was the highest praise she could give it. The interesting things happened before and after.

Before, at dawn, in the morning room at Southcross, the Duke of Ravensgate had gone down alone because he could not sleep with the day’s thoughts, and had found, in the corner by the window, where there had been nothing at all the night before, and where the servants had been remarkably close-mouthed for a week: a pianoforte.

He had written letters for six weeks — to Bath, and to a music-seller, and to a man he had never met, whose address in Wiltshire had taken three weeks to find — and the instrument had arrived by sea and wain, and been set there in the dark while she slept, and the last thing in the world that Diana Cranidge owned from the house of her childhood was standing in a morning room in Kent with the sun coming across its lid.

She came down in her grey traveling dress and stopped in the doorway and stood there with her hand on the doorframe and did not speak for a long time, and said, finally, the only possible thing, which was: “It is not the same one.”

“No,” said the Duke. “Yours went to a house near Truro, and the family there would not sell it. They had painted it blue. I could not buy it at any price I was willing to pay, because they had eleven children and the eldest plays it. But this one came out of the same workshop in the same year, and I am told by men who know that the maker’s hand runs through all of them, and I thought — Miss Cranidge, I thought that if I could not give you back the actual instrument, then you would have to have a beginning.”

Diana walked over and opened the lid and sat down, and put her hands on the keys — the quick, clever, steady hands, reddened across the knuckles, hard at the fingertips — and played the first thing they had been made to play, which was a piece her mother had taught her when she was five, and had not been played in seventeen years, and the notes went out of the open window and across the terrace and down to the walled garden where the roses did well at Southcross, much better than they ever had at Mount Street.

And every servant in the house stopped where they were, in the middle of their morning, and stood still and listened, because that is what people do.

After.

Southcross was a long time in the mending. The roof was put right the following spring, at appalling expense, by workmen who came from Maidstone and were paid on time, which the tenants noticed; the rent roll was corrected in four places by a duchess with a pencil and a plain taste for not being lied to; the walled garden was replanted, and the stables kept three horses. And slowly, in the way of these things, the house on the low hill in Kent stopped looking like a place that had given up and began to look like a place where somebody lived.

The Marbrey girls: Priscilla, who had once been the beauty of Almack’s, went in the autumn to stay with a schoolfriend in Devon and did not come back to London, and in the second year, quietly, and by her own choice, married a country clergyman with a good living, a kind nature, and a habit of talking about his sermons at breakfast, which she found restful. She came to Southcross once a year after that, always uninvited and always welcome, and she never once said anything to Diana about the book.

Jemima, who had been taught the fourth book of the Aeneid in a schoolroom in Mount Street by a girl who was not paid for it, was sent — at her aunt’s expense and arrangement — to a school in Bath where a girl might study anything she liked; and she stayed there as a teacher of languages for nine years, and became, in time, the sort of small, sharp, happy, unmarried woman that England produces about once a generation, and there were, in the end, four languages she could read at sight. She visited Southcross twice a year, always in Latin, at least in the mornings.

Alice — who had once been invisible, and who had taught herself in the end that a person’s life could be located in a book and walked to — did not marry. She had spent twenty-two years being no one in a house, and she chose independence in the end, and it suited her entirely: she lived with Diana for half of every year, in a house where nobody watched her, and read her way through every shelf in Southcross, and became the person Diana called, to her husband, when she was tired of being a duchess: Alice, I am not officious. I am tired. I am not — Lord, I am tired. And she would sit at the end of the room and read, and it was never once a contradiction. It was, of the two of them, the only entirely happy arrangement in that whole family, because it required nothing of anyone.

Cosima Marbrey went to live in a smaller house in Cheltenham, alone with one maid, and lived — as one does — on less, and grew old, and in her later years she would sometimes sit in the sun on the front and speak to the other widows about a niece she had brought up like a daughter, in the kind fashion of every woman who rewrites her own book once there is no one left to argue with the manuscript. And Diana, who heard about these conversations through Alice, who heard them through the aunt of the parish clerk’s wife, would sit and look at her own hands, and remember.

She did not forgive, exactly.

She sent every quarter rather.

That was all. The word she had been able to think, at last, in the end, was the one about a fire made in a grate; and there were a couple of things to be forgiven or not forgiven, and in the end she found the whole trouble came to less than she had supposed, and that she was the same person she had always been. The money was not nothing, and it was not everything; the point had not been the money. She had known that for seven years, from a window at the top of a tall narrow house, watching a season shine on a stair she was not allowed to descend by the front.

The point had been to be named, which is what the Master did.

The scratch of the pen. One hundred and eighty pounds a year for life, to the said Diana Cranidge.

Her own name, in her own hand.

She woke most mornings at Southcross before the household, in a room that was at the top of the house if one counted two turns of a stair and a turn along a corridor, and she did the accounts before breakfast over a plain table and a plain ledger in a small even hand — and the hand was hers and the house was hers and there was no kitchen-cupboard room for the pinches any more, because the pinches were seven years done and the woman who gave them had not once touched her in four years; and when she was done, and the household up, the day began in earnest, and the men at the estate office came in, and the bailiff and the tenants; and somewhere in the house, from the open door of the morning room, there was consistently, from a quarter to eleven each morning, music: the sound of a woman, alone at a keyboard, who was not pouring tea.

The End.