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

Chapter 5

In the schoolroom the next morning, Jemima Marbrey committed the crime of telling the truth in her own house.

She told it only to Diana, which was the safe place, and she told it with her forehead on the desk and her arms over her head, in the manner of a girl who expects the ceiling to fall. She had said Virgil. In front of a duke. She had said the fourth book. Her mother had told a story about a dead governess, and Jemima did not know whether to laugh or be sick, and she was certain — certain — that she would be locked in her room for a month.

Diana, standing at the window with the Latin primer in her hand, was quiet a moment. Then she said the thing she had been teaching that girl for four years without ever saying it plainly: “You told the truth, and the sky has not fallen. Notice that. It is worth noticing.”

Jemima lifted her head and noticed that the sky had not fallen. It was, for her, an entirely new thought, and it sat in her like a swallowed stone: truth does not always end you.

Downstairs, the house went on being the house. Cosima was occupied with the season’s chief problem, which was Priscilla: six seasons, and no offer, and the Duke of Ravensgate newly in play. Diana was occupied with the ledgers — the quarterly accounts, the butcher, the chandler, the dressmaker’s bill for Priscilla’s new gown, the coal — and with the fact that Cook had not been paid in three months and had begun, in her manner, to leave the kitchen in the quiet way of a woman practicing the word no.

And Alice was occupied with being invisible, which she did very well, and which had one advantage nobody had ever bothered to count: invisible people see everything. Alice had seen the Duke look at the mantelpiece. Alice had seen him look at the ledger on the sofa table. Alice had seen — three days before, at the first call — him watch Diana’s shoulder at the moment of a movement nobody else in the world had caught. Alice had spent twenty-two years learning to read rooms the way other people read books, because a room was the only book her mother ever let her finish.

Alice said nothing to anyone. Alice was not brave yet. Brave was still three weeks away for her, and it would arrive as a letter, and she would have to decide whether to open the door when it knocked.

The third and fourth calls came over the following fortnight. He came with his mother and he came alone. He asked, once, whether he might see the small back garden, which Cosima had mentioned in an off moment was newly planted with roses — and Cosima, scenting triumph like a hound scenting water, sent Priscilla out with him.

Priscilla walked the paths and told him the name of every plant, and did not know one of them; she had learned the names off the plan the day before, and she recited them the way she recited everything: perfectly, and without any of it being true. He listened gravely. And then, in a mild voice, he asked whether the roses were Diana’s work.

Priscilla’s step did not check. She said, with a small light laugh, that Diana — dear thing — had helped a little, yes, everyone helped a little in the garden. She was very fond of Diana.

“I have not, I think, been introduced to Miss Cranidge,” said the Duke.

Priscilla said sweetly that of course he had. He had met Diana at the tea three weeks ago. Diana had been pouring. She was such a dear thing, but very shy, and preferred not to be introduced formally to visitors. She was, poor soul, a little afraid of company. It was, Priscilla said, the awkwardness of her situation. They all felt so for her.

“I see,” said the Duke.

He said it in a voice his mother would have recognized — the voice he used in the Lords when a speaker had said a plain untruth in a fine sentence, and it was not yet time to say so.

He did not press it, and did not, on that third visit, insist on seeing Diana. He said his goodbyes to Cosima and to the daughters and left. But that night, from Grosvenor Square, he wrote a small note in his own hand, and had it delivered at eight in the morning by a footman he trusted, to the house in Mount Street.

The outer note was addressed to Miss Cranidge, care of Lady Marbrey, and it said, courteously, that his grace the Duke of Ravensgate hoped to have the pleasure of being introduced to Miss Cranidge at his next call, if her aunt could be persuaded to make the introduction.

Inside the outer paper, folded separately, was a smaller note, and the outer note said nothing of it, and the footman had been instructed, in one short sentence, on exactly whose hand it was to be given into.

Cosima read the outer note over Diana’s shoulder in the hall and smiled her small hostess’s smile. Diana would have to be introduced, then. There was nothing to be done for it. She was, of course, to say very little, and to say nothing whatever about the house, or her position in it, or the arrangement of the afternoons.

Diana curtsied and carried the notes up to the schoolroom, and there, at the plain deal table, with the door shut, she unfolded the inner paper.

The handwriting was smaller than the outer — cramped, deliberate, as if the writer had been careful not to let any servant who happened to warm the paper by the fire read it as easily as his usual hand.

If you can walk in the garden tomorrow at ten, I will be there. Come with the spaniel and a book. Say nothing of this to anyone. — R.

She read it three times.

Then she sat very still, at the table where she had taught a girl the fourth book of the Aeneid, and understood, quickly and coldly, that a duke of England had just handed her a choice she had not asked for — and that it had been folded inside a courtesy so perfect that she could not even claim it had been forced on her.