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

Chapter 7

Cosima was at the drawing-room window when he left the garden, and she saw only the end of him: a tall dark coat retreating along the street, a man walking away from a house he had not, that afternoon, called at through the front door.

She thought it strange. She asked Priscilla — needlework in her room all morning — whether the Duke had been in the garden. Priscilla said she did not know. And then something moved in Cosima’s mind, slow and cold, the way a key turns, and she sent for Diana at once, and did not call her dear.

Diana came, and stood, and said in her plain voice that she had walked the spaniel in the garden as arranged, and had seen no one.

It was not, strictly, a lie. It was, strictly, the truth with its clothes changed. Cosima looked at her for a long minute. She had not, in seven years, ever found this girl out in a lie; and she had learned, over those same seven years, something about her that ought to have worried her more than it did: that Diana did not lie, but sometimes said very little, and that when Diana said very little, the wall was up, and there was no door in it.

She could not tell. That was the thing she could not bear — she, Cosima Marbrey, who could tell everything about every room she had ever ruled, could not tell whether the girl in the brown gown was lying to her face.

She said at last, coldly, that Diana was to keep out of the garden until further notice.

Diana said softly that she would, and curtsied, and went upstairs, and taught Jemima her Latin at noon exactly as if the morning had been a morning like any other.

But her hands, on the page, were not quite steady, and Jemima — who was not, despite everything her family believed about her, a fool — saw it, and said nothing, and filed it away for a week when it would matter very much.

For eight days after that, nothing at all appeared to happen.

The Duke did not call in Mount Street. He was seen twice at Almack’s, both times in the company of his mother, and both times he stood by a wall and made polite conversation and did not dance. Cosima, at Almack’s, presented Priscilla to him in a small, deliberate manner, with the particular smile of a woman laying a card on a table. He bowed, said good evening — and did not ask Priscilla to dance. He turned to speak with an older gentleman of the reforming set, and did not turn back.

Cosima went home in a very dry temper, and took it out, as always, on the household. The cook was scolded about the soup. Alice was scolded about nothing at all, which was worse. And Diana was set, that week, to recopy three years of Priscilla’s music into a new bound book, because Priscilla had decided her old one was shabby, and the season required everything to be new.

But what Cosima could not see — sitting in her house, waiting, sure of her world — was what the Duke was doing during the days.

He was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in a small quiet office on the first floor, that smelled of ink and coal smoke and wet umbrellas, with a gentleman named Mr. Padet.

Mr. Padet was a spare, pale man of fifty-five, with a face arranged around a mouth that closed like a wax seal. He had served the Ravensgate family for twenty-eight years, and he had never in his life smiled at a lie. He listened gravely while the Duke told him what had been told to him in a garden. He asked, when the Duke had finished, whether he might send a boy round to the trust office in Chancery Lane for a copy of the settlement.

The Duke said he might. The boy went. The boy came back.

By the second day, Mr. Padet had it all in his small office: a certified copy of the entire marriage settlement of the late Mrs. Cranidge; and, from the trust office’s own ledgers, a schedule of the annuity payments made every quarter for seven years to the estate of the ward — every payment drawn by Lady Marbrey, as trustee in fact if not in law, and not one of them ever receipted by the ward, or by anyone claiming to be the ward, or by anyone at all.

Mr. Padet looked at the schedule for a long time. It was the kind of quiet that comes over a man who has spent his life reading documents the way other men read weather.

Then he said, in his dry voice, that it was a very tidy piece of fraud — tidy, and patient, and small enough to hide, which were the three qualities that let such things run for years, and he said he should be able to unwind it. He would prepare a summons in Chancery, in the ordinary form, and place it before a Master, who would require Lady Marbrey to produce the original settlement and answer for the payments. He said the ward, if she wished, should attend. And he said he did not, in any case, propose to move one step without her word.

“You will have her word this week,” said the Duke.

Mr. Padet set down the schedule and looked at him.

“I hope so, your grace,” he said dryly. “And let me say one thing to you, since you pay me to say things. Do not put yourself — or her — in the position of a young woman making a decision she cannot make. Go carefully. A girl in that house has more to fear than her aunt. It is not her aunt’s hand that does the true damage in the end. It is what is done in her name while she stands still. Whatever is done in this suit, it must be done in hers.”

The Duke was quiet a moment. Then he said, “You are right.”

He rose, and took his hat, and said, “I will bring her to you myself.”

And he went out into the Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the clerks and the lawyers were hurrying past with their bundles tied in red tape, and neither of them — not the duke, not the lawyer — said what both of them had understood in the small office, which was that somewhere in the tall house in Mount Street, a woman who had been waiting seven years was about to become, whether she wished it or not, the most dangerous person in her aunt’s life.