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

Chapter 4

The second call came three days later, under a small polite pretext: the Duke had promised his mother he would inquire again after Lady Marbrey’s health, which had been described at the first call — not, in fact, by Lady Marbrey — as a little indifferent.

Cosima was in the drawing room within the quarter hour, in a new cap. Priscilla was there within the half hour, in a new gown. Jemima was in the corner. Alice was on the sofa. And Diana was upstairs, in the schoolroom, teaching the housekeeper’s youngest child the same lesson she had given Jemima two days before — because that was the arrangement of Tuesdays and Thursdays, and had been for four years, and Cosima had judged the arrangement safe.

After all, the Duke had come to see her daughters. Why would a duke think to ask after a niece?

She had underestimated him in the ordinary way that people who have never met a serious man underestimate serious men.

The Duke had come, in fact, to look at the household. He would not have said so. He would not, if pressed, have permitted himself to know it. He told himself he had come to be thorough — to see whether the chairs were arranged as they had been, whether the tea was again poured by a girl in brown, whether the daughters were again seated like a shelf of goods. He was thorough the way he was thorough about the estate accounts at Southcross: because somewhere underneath the surface of things there was always a number that did not match, and his whole life had taught him that the number is where the truth lives.

This time, Priscilla poured.

She poured beautifully. She talked beautifully. She spoke of a lecture on antiquities she had lately attended, and of a small watercolor of a Roman ruin she had lately painted, and she did not once, in twenty minutes, ask him a single question of her own. A man who wanted a beautiful ornament could have been happy. Ellis Ravensgate had spent five years watching the roof of his inheritance let in the Kentish rain, and he wanted something else.

His eye went to the mantelpiece. Behind the china dog, half hidden, the small volume sat exactly where it had sat before.

“Are you a reader of Latin, Miss Marbrey?” he said.

Priscilla was far too well trained to falter. She said sweetly that she read a little. Very little. She could not, of course, read Virgil at sight — nobody could. Ellis said mildly that one of his sisters had learned it very well from their mother when they were children, and that he had always thought Latin not a language reserved to men.

Priscilla smiled and said she quite agreed. But there had been no opportunity in her own girlhood, she added lightly. Her governesses had been more concerned with accomplishments. It was such a pity.

Cosima nodded gently. The Duke said nothing, and glanced at Alice, whose cheeks had gone pink and who was studying her hands as though they belonged to someone else.

“And your other sister,” he said casually. “The youngest. Does she read Latin?”

Cosima laughed. It was the small laugh she used when she meant to close a subject, like a door being shut very gently in a caller’s face. Jemima, she said, was a hopeless dawdler over any book at all. She had tried, once, to have the girl taught. It had proved quite hopeless. She said this loudly enough that Jemima heard every word, and Jemima looked at the carpet, and the carpet, as always, said nothing.

Ellis turned to her directly, in the mildest voice in the world.

“Miss Jemima. What is your favorite Latin author?”

There was a silence.

Jemima’s ears grew hot. She looked a quick sideways glance at her mother’s face, and then at the door — and it was as if, in that half second, the whole of her nineteen years passed in review: the schoolroom mornings, the finger moving under the words, the secret she had kept so carefully because it was the only thing she had ever had that was entirely hers. Somewhere upstairs, Diana was teaching the housekeeper’s child. Diana could not save her. Priscilla could not save her. Nobody could save her. And a duke — an actual duke, in an actual chair, in her mother’s actual drawing room — had asked her, Jemima Marbrey, what she liked to read.

“Virgil,” she said, very quietly. “Your grace.”

Cosima’s face did not change. It had been trained by long practice, and the training held.

“Ah,” said Ellis. “Which book?”

“Sir —” She caught herself, her ears burning. “Your grace. The fourth.”

“The fourth of the Aeneid. That is a difficult one.”

She looked at her lap and said nothing. He turned back to her mother with an expression of polite, mild surprise.

“Madam, I stand corrected. Your daughter is more accomplished than you allow.”

Cosima recovered the way she recovered everything: quickly, and with a laugh. Jemima, she said warmly, had done a little Latin indeed, with the last governess. She had almost forgotten. The last governess had been very fond of the ancient languages. Poor woman, she added lightly. She had died last autumn.

The Duke, who had four sisters and had, over the years, known several governesses well enough to know the exact sound of a lie dressed as an obituary, did not press it. He nodded gravely and let the moment pass. But he had seen the calculation the girl made — the sideways glance at her mother, the ears gone hot — and he had noted, silently, that somewhere in that house there had to be a Latin book read carefully, and someone patient who had guided the reading of it. It was not Priscilla. It was not the mother.

He waited.

They spoke then of the season, and Priscilla was warm again, and light, and clever. Cosima steered the talk around two corners of good family news. The Duke drank his tea and rose in due course, and on his way to the door he let his eyes pass, once, briefly, over the small household ledger lying open on the sofa table.

He did not touch it. He only looked.

The hand in it was very fine — small, even, disciplined. It was not the hand of any of the three daughters he had spent the hour with. It looked like the hand of someone who had kept a house’s accounts for a long time: the hand, he thought, of a woman who had learned to count because nobody had ever counted for her.

He made his bows and went.

In the carriage back to Grosvenor Square, he was quiet again, and his mother let him be, and London went by the windows — the knockers, the footmen, the slow gold evening.

At last he spoke. “Only the middle one,” he said.

His mother inclined her head.

“And the fourth.”

“The fourth?”

“There is a fourth young woman in that house, mother. She teaches Jemima her Latin. She keeps the accounts.”

The Dowager Duchess was silent for the length of three streets. Then she said, “Ah. So it is she.”

He did not answer. He looked out at the passing lamps, and his face — which people called cold — was, very quietly, the face of a man who had spent five years being asked to buy things in shops where nothing was real, and who had just, by accident, seen something that was.