Chapter Eighteen
Mar. 1st, 2020 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
linneacarlsMaria had not moved from her seat, had scarcely breathed all through this recitation. Only when Chatham stirred, an awkward and painful motion, and asked for water, did she rise to pour a glass from the pitcher near the door.
Chatham tilted her head back to drink. The loose collar of the borrowed shift left her throat exposed, a long curve in the low light, with no knotted cravat to hide it. Maria fought a sudden urge to avert her eyes, and wondered at it. She would not have blushed so, sitting beside the man she had thought she married.
Returning the empty glass to its place gave her the excuse she needed to hide her face. When she settled back on the bed, Chatham was regarding her with an air of watchful reserve. “You might have told me,” said Maria.
Chatham’s laugh was harsh and thin, putting Maria in mind of an oversteeped tea that had been watered down to save it. “Well yes, I see that now.”
There was so much she might have said or asked. Perhaps it was the coward’s way out, but Maria seized upon the practicalities. “But who else have you told—any of those at the London house?”
“None of them. Ellis has arranged it so there is very little risk.”
“The Hugginses know,” Maria said with quick conviction.
“Mrs. Huggins has still not forgiven me for being sick in her kitchen at the age of six, having finished one of three Christmas pies and making steady inroads on the next. Her son once scaled an elm tree in the pouring rain because I had climbed up to the highest branch and could not work out how to get down again. They know very well who I am and are happy to remind me of the fact. Huggins’ wife—” She shrugged. “I haven’t asked if he’s told her; I expressly forbade him to do so but I can’t imagine he paid it any mind. Ellis could probably say for certain. Ellis knows everything. I suggest you apply to him if you require details.”
“Yes,” said Maria wryly. “I’ve just had his version of the Riot Act! And I expect there will be more to follow. Then not the tenants, nor the neighbors—?”
“No, and no—we keep it very close. That was easier than I had expected, but most of my father’s generation has died, or gave up their lands as a too-expensive bargain and moved out of the country.”
“Lacey?”
“Good God, no. I doubt he would survive the revelation. But this will go much faster if you ask me who does know.” Her eyes swept closed. Their lids were paper-thin, crossed with fine lines; they lifted again and Maria was caught in that clear gaze. “Ellis. The Hugginses, mère et fils. A lady of unimpeachable discretion whom I met shortly after my return from the continent. One of my brother’s surviving fellow-officers, now a resident of Bombay, who worked it out on the battlefield and from whom it could not be kept, but he gave his oath on David’s deathbed and I am assured of his silence. Myself, of course—and now you. It is a select society, and I had not intended to induct you quite so dramatically, or so soon.”
“It could not have been kept a secret very long.”
Chatham raised an eyebrow. “Why, did you have some suspicion?” Maria could not say that she had. “It would have been much longer, if I had been at all wiser—separate residences if I wished to be particularly careful, but I could have done more to stop your meddling in my affairs. At the very least I should not have taken you to the estate so soon. In London there is hardly anyone who remembers me well, or remembers David, from before, and you were a great deal safer there. Ellis had a great deal to say about that decision.”
“But why did you take me?”
“For the reasons I gave you at the time. And as with all my decisions, an impulse of the moment.” She gave a weary imitation of her mocking smile. “And because your company had proved so diverting until then, I was loathe to forego it. I must say, it has yet to disappoint.”
Why did you marry me? Maria had really wanted to ask—but there again was that sudden self-consciousness. She repeated instead, “You might have told me. Why did you not? I have as much at stake now in keeping your secret as you, or nearly so.”
“I have been on the point of it, and more than once, since we left town. But nearly every thought you had of the future was of your sister, of her security, of rendering our marriage acceptable and eliminating any danger to your family! To present you with another complication, and from so unexpected a quarter—I quite trembled at the thought. There is a single-mindedness about you, my dear, that forbids one to threaten the best interests of those to whom you are attached.”
“And did it never occur to you that you were one of them?”
It had not, in so many words; this was apparent as soon as Maria had said it. Chatham stared at her a moment and then turned her face away, so Maria must regard her in profile. Her mouth was pinched with pain and exhaustion.
“You mustn’t be afraid of me,” said Maria. She meant it to reassure, and struggled to keep the plea from her voice. “I am not about to call you a—a pitiful curiosity, you said. If I could marry for my family’s security, do you not think I could admire what you’ve done for your brother, and those who depended on him?”
No reply. The ready, even reckless flow of confidence had dried up, and no wonder; it must have required a punishing effort, and Chatham was not at her best.
“I will not keep you much longer,” Maria said, when it became obvious she must be the one to move the conversation. “I promised Ellis I would tell you to rest, and there will be time enough to talk tomorrow. But I will not leave you agonizing over the nature of that conversation. You should know I am glad not to have this secret between us. We will do so much better now!”
“Very likely—but I should never have guessed it. Are you not angry?”
“Well, yes, certainly; if I had known from the start, many things would have been easier. And you must not think yourself forgiven for today’s display! If I thought anything I could say would be fitter punishment than that surgeon’s visit I should certainly say it, but as it is—“
Chatham was shaking her head, half laughing in disbelief. “That is not what I meant. Have you not considered your position? You’ve married a woman!”
“So have you,” Maria replied. At once she felt rather foolish for having said it, but there it was. “If you have no objections, you need not invent them on my behalf. I never wanted a husband; now I find I have none! It is no great tragedy, though I quite see if it is discovered it may be, so I beg you will exercise more prudence. You must have some about you, to have managed all this time.”
“So I thought, until you came knocking on my door.” All harshness had gone out of that laugh; now she settled back against her pillow in a languid attitude only a little spoiled by the stiffness of her arm, an attitude Maria recognized and was very glad to see. “Very well; you will wait until I am somewhat recovered to scold me as I deserve, and I will attempt to resurrect my good sense.”
“That is not precisely the bargain I meant to propose, but it will do for tonight. And then I hope—“ Maria’s voice grew thick of a sudden, and to her own surprise, for she had thought she was keeping admirable control of her reactions. “I hope this means we will not keep one another at such a distance. We have been good allies—but I think you have more need of a friend. And I know I want one quite desperately.”
For a moment, nothing; then Chatham’s uninjured hand rose from the coverlet, and reached across the space between them. Maria would have shaken it, but it was the left, and at an awkward angle. Instead she only took it in her own, firmly, and felt the answering pressure. Chatham cleared her throat. “There is little that I miss, from my life before. But I think—within the strict bounds of prudence—I should like to hear my Christian name.”
Maria's heart gave an odd, quivering leap. “Diana, then. But only when we can be quite sure we are alone.” She squeezed the hand between hers lightly and rose. “I am sure Ellis is waiting outside, with one eye upon the clock, blaming me for keeping you awake. I will send him in to you. Good night.”
He was indeed waiting outside, and made no attempt to disguise the fact that he had been doing so all along. She considered ordering him where he clearly intended to go, knowing this would send a certain message; but that was not how she wanted to arrange this relationship. Instead she stepped back from the door, offering deference more than permission. And to her pleasure, he responded not by darting past her, but with a bow.
“Thank you, my lady. Is all well?”
“I hope so—and indeed I think it is. But you may be a better judge of that.”
A nod of acknowledgment. Then he indicated the next door along the hall. “That room is ours as well, if you prefer to wait in privacy.”
Oh Lord, for half an hour to herself! They had clearly put Chatham in the better of those two rooms—the one in which she found herself had only one bed, and was moreover very drafty—but there was no-one there to see when she sank down at the small table and put her head in her hands, and no-one to hear the odd strangled moan she smothered in one palm. She would have liked to weep; she would have liked to scream; she found she could not achieve the one, and certainly could not countenance the other, where she would be overheard. She could not even name all the feelings that crowded her breast, demanding some violent expression. Shock first and foremost, of course, though she had been pushing past that for so long that it seemed dull and remote. (Her father had lost two fingers and gained a lieutenancy at the battle of St. Vincent; he told her once that he noted the bloody stumps after one of the first broadsides, forgot them entirely, and only remembered in the battle’s aftermath when he reached for a line and saw it slip through the place where his fingers ought to have been.) Anger, beyond what she had admitted? Certainly she ought to be angry—ought to feel herself ill used, and to fear the risk of her situation. And so she did, on an intellectual level, but with no conviction of feeling. Grief was present, the echo of Chatham’s own, and grief for Chatham as well: what a lonely existence, even before she took this extraordinary step. But what Maria felt most strongly, though it flew in the face of all reason, was relief.
Relief, that this was in the open. Relief, that there need not be such a sense of reserve, of talking and moving at cross-purposes—for they had been, had they not? The damnable incident with the David’s name, of course, but not only that. Ellis’ disapproval, Mrs. Huggins’ wariness and determined lack of warmth, Chatham’s own unpredictable fluctuations between candor and constraint—these no longer seemed the uphill battle they might have only that morning, one she was determined to win, but that might exhaust her in the attempt.
Most of all, for the husband she had not wanted, she had exchanged a co-conspirator; a sister of her own sex; even a confidant. Chatham’s—Diana’s—accusation of shocking duplicity made her smile and sigh, for if Maria had lied when she said she wanted a distant marriage, with no involvement more than necessary in one another’s lives, she had lied as much to herself. She was not made for cool detachment.
She was reflecting on this, her thoughts breaking slowly apart to drift on the surface of a mind stunned into tranquility, when Ellis knocked at the door. “She is asleep,” he said in weary satisfaction, not troubling with a greeting or even a ‘my lady’. “I’ve brought supper from downstairs. They’ll serve you themselves, and something a deal more elegant, if that’s what you want—”
“No.”
He nodded, setting the tray down at the table beside her, and lifted the bottle in his hand. It was the port she had started. “They sent this, too—said you’d paid for it and all.” A quick tightening of the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth; it surprised and reassured her, to see him finding the humor in their situation. “Should I fetch you a glass as well?”
“Why not fetch two?”
There, she had surprised him as well! She took no little pride in this, especially when he followed it by an outright smile.
Considered objectively it was probably the strangest meal she had ever taken: the Viscountess of Chatham and the Viscount’s valet, sharing a plate of cold meats and jellies and making steady inroads on a bottle of port. After the day’s reverses and revelations, it did not seem awkward at all.
“I’m ordered to tell you everything you want to know,” he said, early on. “Which is making very free of my time and conversation, if you have as many questions as I expect.”
“I have many, but that is why I’ve plied you with the port. I hope they will pair better with it than does this ham. Is it any good? I mean the port, not the ham. I have cured meats before, but have no notion at all of wine.”
“So his lordship tells me,” said Ellis, unbending far enough to grin at her. “It goes down happier than your questions are like to. I’d pair those with a stiff gin myself if I didn’t think your ladyship might object.”
“Lady Chatham’s father liked a glass of seaman’s grog better than anything else, and she might have fewer objections than you think. But I won’t shock the proprietor with demands for rum. Where should we begin?”
They began with domestic management, as the most familiar terrain for both: the difficulties of arranging a household so the intimate details of its master’s life were protected (easier, when so few of the servants lived in, and when the only maid that did knew it was the valet’s task to tend the fires in his lordship’s rooms first thing in the morning, and more than her job was worth to light them herself); the trick of Chatham’s clothing. Maria had not intended to pry too much into those specifics, but Ellis proved astonishingly knowledgeable on the subject of stays. He had sourced them from a number of places until Chatham had settled on the sort she found most comfortable and Ellis found most discreet under a waistcoat, which he had discovered (he said, with the quiet relish of a man who knew his abilities deserved an appreciative audience) by inquiring among the seamstresses who served certain of the more outré acts at Vauxhall Gardens.
From there the conversation wandered, to his account of years since the masquerade began (though neither he nor Maria touched at all on David Astley’s death), their travels on the Continent and the catalogue of relationships, events, and experiences Chatham was expected to be familiar with, and which Diana and Ellis had built between them. Ellis’ confidence in the Hugginses, though he had been as much a stranger to the country estate as Maria herself when Chatham returned to England. “They’re as jealous of the secret as I am. More so, I expect; I daresay I’d find a new position if it all came out, perhaps not so respectable, but there are gentleman who’d laugh and take me on as a lark. But what would happen to their home and place—”
“Do you think it would be as bad as all that?” Maria asked. “I’ve heard of that elderly cousin who stands to inherit, but if he is so elderly he cannot inherit for long, and may not have the opportunity to criss-cross the land with so very many canals, and carve up so many farms and fields, as Chatham feared ten years ago.”
“Well now, who’s to say? Huggins goes scarlet at the first suggestion of it, but he’s an old-fashioned sort, with his own ideas of how the land ought to be used, and what a landlord is to his tenants. Me, I’m city born and bred, and you can’t expect me to feel the same. I don’t say one landlord’s good as another. I’ve met the old gentleman and shouldn’t honor him by that name, if not for his lordship’s sake. I wouldn’t care to serve him. But he’s a canny sort and he may have the right of it, when he says farming in the old style is a failing prospect.”
“Then why lend yourself to this?” Maria asked, curiously; he was now so easy in her company that his accent had begun to slide northward, and she thought it safe to ask. “If that was Chatham’s motive—I mean to speak of both of them, how does one keep it straight?—if that was where it started, why did you agree in the first place, and why care so much now?”
“Ah, well,” he said, with a rather distant smile into his port, “that’s also for his lordship’s sake.” And she noticed he did not say which of them he meant.
Feeling she had strayed from their comfortable path, Maria relinquished control of the conversation. Ellis turned it back to practical matters. At some point between his enumeration of the footman Terence’s shortcomings and virtues, and his reminiscences of Chatham’s introduction to the London clubs, a pack of cards appeared, and shortly thereafter Maria found herself being trounced neatly at piquet.
She had learnt her lesson from that first encounter with port, and paced herself accordingly, but there was still a more-than-comfortable glow hanging about her when at last she set down her glass. “That,” she declared, “is enough for one evening. I hope it is the first, if not of many, then—”
“I will stop you there, before I find myself committed to a regular card-party above stairs. It wouldn’t do.”
“I meant the first of our consultations, which you will agree can only be to his lordship’s advantage. And if they happen to deplete the contents of his lordship’s cellar, I am told those are in your keeping.” He saluted her. She was gratified to see his hand was less steady than hers, but that said far more of her prudence than his tolerance, as she had not attempted to match him glass for glass. She rose. “Do you think Chatham will be more hi-that is. Will she be more herself tomorrow?”
“I do; as wounds go it is a trifling one, alarming though the blood may have looked. I gave her the surgeon’s draught, so she ought to sleep soundly. Though she told me when she took it that we must rouse her to leave early, if we are to be in London in good time for your dinner. She was insistent on that.”
“My dinner,” said Maria, blankly; she had forgot it entirely. The dinner party she was to hold the next day, over which Mrs. Wilson must even now be worrying in the hostess’ absence. The dinner party she’d conceived as the next sally in her campaign upon a scandalized London. She recognized that she ought, but could not even begin, to give a damn for the dinner party, which seemed at the moment to have no bearing upon reality. Yet she was not so far gone as to think this opinion would necessarily last until the following evening. “Yes, of course, I must leave as soon as practical tomorrow morning—and if she is not well enough we will think of something.”
“I am certain you will.”
“Now,” said Maria, casting her eye over the contents of the room—a valise and two smaller cases, none of which she recognized. “Would you have my things brought here? I will only need the traveling case.”
“Not in here,” he said, with a firm shake of his head. “I can’t spend the night in your maid’s room; that second bed is yours. I have already left your case inside.”
She had forgot this, too. The night before Ellis had slept on a trundle bed in Chatham’s room, as a matter of course, and it had not occurred to Maria that other arrangements would be needed. She had shared with Matthews; now she would share with Diana. Only—
“If that does not suit,” said Ellis rather kindly, while she failed to gather her wits, “I will go and have them make up a third room.”
Maria roused herself from that absurd stupor. “No, of course not. Naturally I will take the second bed. And if my case is there, that is all I need. Thank you for that, Ellis, and for an enlightening evening.”
She held out her hand to him; he took it, not for the businesslike shake she intended, but to bring it swiftly to his lips. “My lady, thank you.”
The second time she entered that room, there was nothing but her candle to light it. She waited a moment to see if the figure under the coverlet would stir, but the surgeon’s draft had done its work. Chatham moved not at all, even when Maria began with more noise than she had intended to prepare for her own bed. Tired and still a little fuzzy with drink, she did not allow herself to think very deeply about anything that had gone before or anything that must happen on the morrow; but when she had her dressing gown about her she went to the middle of the room and raised her candle over the sleeper’s pillow.
Diana lay on her side, deep in sleep, her uninjured hand curled under her head. Maria’s eyes traced the curve of her wide mouth, slack as it never was during the day; the faint shadow that fell under the lift of her cheekbone and the darker one cast by the high arch of her nose. She let out a very quiet sigh that moved the muscles of her throat. The wash of feeling that came over Maria—of fierce protectiveness, of affectionate exasperation, even of tenderness—took her off guard, and she stood there until the painful tightness in her chest had released its hold. Then she blew out the candle and slipped into the second bed, and lay awake for some time staring at the dark ceiling; drifting off at last to the sound of soft, regular breathing.
Chatham tilted her head back to drink. The loose collar of the borrowed shift left her throat exposed, a long curve in the low light, with no knotted cravat to hide it. Maria fought a sudden urge to avert her eyes, and wondered at it. She would not have blushed so, sitting beside the man she had thought she married.
Returning the empty glass to its place gave her the excuse she needed to hide her face. When she settled back on the bed, Chatham was regarding her with an air of watchful reserve. “You might have told me,” said Maria.
Chatham’s laugh was harsh and thin, putting Maria in mind of an oversteeped tea that had been watered down to save it. “Well yes, I see that now.”
There was so much she might have said or asked. Perhaps it was the coward’s way out, but Maria seized upon the practicalities. “But who else have you told—any of those at the London house?”
“None of them. Ellis has arranged it so there is very little risk.”
“The Hugginses know,” Maria said with quick conviction.
“Mrs. Huggins has still not forgiven me for being sick in her kitchen at the age of six, having finished one of three Christmas pies and making steady inroads on the next. Her son once scaled an elm tree in the pouring rain because I had climbed up to the highest branch and could not work out how to get down again. They know very well who I am and are happy to remind me of the fact. Huggins’ wife—” She shrugged. “I haven’t asked if he’s told her; I expressly forbade him to do so but I can’t imagine he paid it any mind. Ellis could probably say for certain. Ellis knows everything. I suggest you apply to him if you require details.”
“Yes,” said Maria wryly. “I’ve just had his version of the Riot Act! And I expect there will be more to follow. Then not the tenants, nor the neighbors—?”
“No, and no—we keep it very close. That was easier than I had expected, but most of my father’s generation has died, or gave up their lands as a too-expensive bargain and moved out of the country.”
“Lacey?”
“Good God, no. I doubt he would survive the revelation. But this will go much faster if you ask me who does know.” Her eyes swept closed. Their lids were paper-thin, crossed with fine lines; they lifted again and Maria was caught in that clear gaze. “Ellis. The Hugginses, mère et fils. A lady of unimpeachable discretion whom I met shortly after my return from the continent. One of my brother’s surviving fellow-officers, now a resident of Bombay, who worked it out on the battlefield and from whom it could not be kept, but he gave his oath on David’s deathbed and I am assured of his silence. Myself, of course—and now you. It is a select society, and I had not intended to induct you quite so dramatically, or so soon.”
“It could not have been kept a secret very long.”
Chatham raised an eyebrow. “Why, did you have some suspicion?” Maria could not say that she had. “It would have been much longer, if I had been at all wiser—separate residences if I wished to be particularly careful, but I could have done more to stop your meddling in my affairs. At the very least I should not have taken you to the estate so soon. In London there is hardly anyone who remembers me well, or remembers David, from before, and you were a great deal safer there. Ellis had a great deal to say about that decision.”
“But why did you take me?”
“For the reasons I gave you at the time. And as with all my decisions, an impulse of the moment.” She gave a weary imitation of her mocking smile. “And because your company had proved so diverting until then, I was loathe to forego it. I must say, it has yet to disappoint.”
Why did you marry me? Maria had really wanted to ask—but there again was that sudden self-consciousness. She repeated instead, “You might have told me. Why did you not? I have as much at stake now in keeping your secret as you, or nearly so.”
“I have been on the point of it, and more than once, since we left town. But nearly every thought you had of the future was of your sister, of her security, of rendering our marriage acceptable and eliminating any danger to your family! To present you with another complication, and from so unexpected a quarter—I quite trembled at the thought. There is a single-mindedness about you, my dear, that forbids one to threaten the best interests of those to whom you are attached.”
“And did it never occur to you that you were one of them?”
It had not, in so many words; this was apparent as soon as Maria had said it. Chatham stared at her a moment and then turned her face away, so Maria must regard her in profile. Her mouth was pinched with pain and exhaustion.
“You mustn’t be afraid of me,” said Maria. She meant it to reassure, and struggled to keep the plea from her voice. “I am not about to call you a—a pitiful curiosity, you said. If I could marry for my family’s security, do you not think I could admire what you’ve done for your brother, and those who depended on him?”
No reply. The ready, even reckless flow of confidence had dried up, and no wonder; it must have required a punishing effort, and Chatham was not at her best.
“I will not keep you much longer,” Maria said, when it became obvious she must be the one to move the conversation. “I promised Ellis I would tell you to rest, and there will be time enough to talk tomorrow. But I will not leave you agonizing over the nature of that conversation. You should know I am glad not to have this secret between us. We will do so much better now!”
“Very likely—but I should never have guessed it. Are you not angry?”
“Well, yes, certainly; if I had known from the start, many things would have been easier. And you must not think yourself forgiven for today’s display! If I thought anything I could say would be fitter punishment than that surgeon’s visit I should certainly say it, but as it is—“
Chatham was shaking her head, half laughing in disbelief. “That is not what I meant. Have you not considered your position? You’ve married a woman!”
“So have you,” Maria replied. At once she felt rather foolish for having said it, but there it was. “If you have no objections, you need not invent them on my behalf. I never wanted a husband; now I find I have none! It is no great tragedy, though I quite see if it is discovered it may be, so I beg you will exercise more prudence. You must have some about you, to have managed all this time.”
“So I thought, until you came knocking on my door.” All harshness had gone out of that laugh; now she settled back against her pillow in a languid attitude only a little spoiled by the stiffness of her arm, an attitude Maria recognized and was very glad to see. “Very well; you will wait until I am somewhat recovered to scold me as I deserve, and I will attempt to resurrect my good sense.”
“That is not precisely the bargain I meant to propose, but it will do for tonight. And then I hope—“ Maria’s voice grew thick of a sudden, and to her own surprise, for she had thought she was keeping admirable control of her reactions. “I hope this means we will not keep one another at such a distance. We have been good allies—but I think you have more need of a friend. And I know I want one quite desperately.”
For a moment, nothing; then Chatham’s uninjured hand rose from the coverlet, and reached across the space between them. Maria would have shaken it, but it was the left, and at an awkward angle. Instead she only took it in her own, firmly, and felt the answering pressure. Chatham cleared her throat. “There is little that I miss, from my life before. But I think—within the strict bounds of prudence—I should like to hear my Christian name.”
Maria's heart gave an odd, quivering leap. “Diana, then. But only when we can be quite sure we are alone.” She squeezed the hand between hers lightly and rose. “I am sure Ellis is waiting outside, with one eye upon the clock, blaming me for keeping you awake. I will send him in to you. Good night.”
He was indeed waiting outside, and made no attempt to disguise the fact that he had been doing so all along. She considered ordering him where he clearly intended to go, knowing this would send a certain message; but that was not how she wanted to arrange this relationship. Instead she stepped back from the door, offering deference more than permission. And to her pleasure, he responded not by darting past her, but with a bow.
“Thank you, my lady. Is all well?”
“I hope so—and indeed I think it is. But you may be a better judge of that.”
A nod of acknowledgment. Then he indicated the next door along the hall. “That room is ours as well, if you prefer to wait in privacy.”
Oh Lord, for half an hour to herself! They had clearly put Chatham in the better of those two rooms—the one in which she found herself had only one bed, and was moreover very drafty—but there was no-one there to see when she sank down at the small table and put her head in her hands, and no-one to hear the odd strangled moan she smothered in one palm. She would have liked to weep; she would have liked to scream; she found she could not achieve the one, and certainly could not countenance the other, where she would be overheard. She could not even name all the feelings that crowded her breast, demanding some violent expression. Shock first and foremost, of course, though she had been pushing past that for so long that it seemed dull and remote. (Her father had lost two fingers and gained a lieutenancy at the battle of St. Vincent; he told her once that he noted the bloody stumps after one of the first broadsides, forgot them entirely, and only remembered in the battle’s aftermath when he reached for a line and saw it slip through the place where his fingers ought to have been.) Anger, beyond what she had admitted? Certainly she ought to be angry—ought to feel herself ill used, and to fear the risk of her situation. And so she did, on an intellectual level, but with no conviction of feeling. Grief was present, the echo of Chatham’s own, and grief for Chatham as well: what a lonely existence, even before she took this extraordinary step. But what Maria felt most strongly, though it flew in the face of all reason, was relief.
Relief, that this was in the open. Relief, that there need not be such a sense of reserve, of talking and moving at cross-purposes—for they had been, had they not? The damnable incident with the David’s name, of course, but not only that. Ellis’ disapproval, Mrs. Huggins’ wariness and determined lack of warmth, Chatham’s own unpredictable fluctuations between candor and constraint—these no longer seemed the uphill battle they might have only that morning, one she was determined to win, but that might exhaust her in the attempt.
Most of all, for the husband she had not wanted, she had exchanged a co-conspirator; a sister of her own sex; even a confidant. Chatham’s—Diana’s—accusation of shocking duplicity made her smile and sigh, for if Maria had lied when she said she wanted a distant marriage, with no involvement more than necessary in one another’s lives, she had lied as much to herself. She was not made for cool detachment.
She was reflecting on this, her thoughts breaking slowly apart to drift on the surface of a mind stunned into tranquility, when Ellis knocked at the door. “She is asleep,” he said in weary satisfaction, not troubling with a greeting or even a ‘my lady’. “I’ve brought supper from downstairs. They’ll serve you themselves, and something a deal more elegant, if that’s what you want—”
“No.”
He nodded, setting the tray down at the table beside her, and lifted the bottle in his hand. It was the port she had started. “They sent this, too—said you’d paid for it and all.” A quick tightening of the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth; it surprised and reassured her, to see him finding the humor in their situation. “Should I fetch you a glass as well?”
“Why not fetch two?”
There, she had surprised him as well! She took no little pride in this, especially when he followed it by an outright smile.
Considered objectively it was probably the strangest meal she had ever taken: the Viscountess of Chatham and the Viscount’s valet, sharing a plate of cold meats and jellies and making steady inroads on a bottle of port. After the day’s reverses and revelations, it did not seem awkward at all.
“I’m ordered to tell you everything you want to know,” he said, early on. “Which is making very free of my time and conversation, if you have as many questions as I expect.”
“I have many, but that is why I’ve plied you with the port. I hope they will pair better with it than does this ham. Is it any good? I mean the port, not the ham. I have cured meats before, but have no notion at all of wine.”
“So his lordship tells me,” said Ellis, unbending far enough to grin at her. “It goes down happier than your questions are like to. I’d pair those with a stiff gin myself if I didn’t think your ladyship might object.”
“Lady Chatham’s father liked a glass of seaman’s grog better than anything else, and she might have fewer objections than you think. But I won’t shock the proprietor with demands for rum. Where should we begin?”
They began with domestic management, as the most familiar terrain for both: the difficulties of arranging a household so the intimate details of its master’s life were protected (easier, when so few of the servants lived in, and when the only maid that did knew it was the valet’s task to tend the fires in his lordship’s rooms first thing in the morning, and more than her job was worth to light them herself); the trick of Chatham’s clothing. Maria had not intended to pry too much into those specifics, but Ellis proved astonishingly knowledgeable on the subject of stays. He had sourced them from a number of places until Chatham had settled on the sort she found most comfortable and Ellis found most discreet under a waistcoat, which he had discovered (he said, with the quiet relish of a man who knew his abilities deserved an appreciative audience) by inquiring among the seamstresses who served certain of the more outré acts at Vauxhall Gardens.
From there the conversation wandered, to his account of years since the masquerade began (though neither he nor Maria touched at all on David Astley’s death), their travels on the Continent and the catalogue of relationships, events, and experiences Chatham was expected to be familiar with, and which Diana and Ellis had built between them. Ellis’ confidence in the Hugginses, though he had been as much a stranger to the country estate as Maria herself when Chatham returned to England. “They’re as jealous of the secret as I am. More so, I expect; I daresay I’d find a new position if it all came out, perhaps not so respectable, but there are gentleman who’d laugh and take me on as a lark. But what would happen to their home and place—”
“Do you think it would be as bad as all that?” Maria asked. “I’ve heard of that elderly cousin who stands to inherit, but if he is so elderly he cannot inherit for long, and may not have the opportunity to criss-cross the land with so very many canals, and carve up so many farms and fields, as Chatham feared ten years ago.”
“Well now, who’s to say? Huggins goes scarlet at the first suggestion of it, but he’s an old-fashioned sort, with his own ideas of how the land ought to be used, and what a landlord is to his tenants. Me, I’m city born and bred, and you can’t expect me to feel the same. I don’t say one landlord’s good as another. I’ve met the old gentleman and shouldn’t honor him by that name, if not for his lordship’s sake. I wouldn’t care to serve him. But he’s a canny sort and he may have the right of it, when he says farming in the old style is a failing prospect.”
“Then why lend yourself to this?” Maria asked, curiously; he was now so easy in her company that his accent had begun to slide northward, and she thought it safe to ask. “If that was Chatham’s motive—I mean to speak of both of them, how does one keep it straight?—if that was where it started, why did you agree in the first place, and why care so much now?”
“Ah, well,” he said, with a rather distant smile into his port, “that’s also for his lordship’s sake.” And she noticed he did not say which of them he meant.
Feeling she had strayed from their comfortable path, Maria relinquished control of the conversation. Ellis turned it back to practical matters. At some point between his enumeration of the footman Terence’s shortcomings and virtues, and his reminiscences of Chatham’s introduction to the London clubs, a pack of cards appeared, and shortly thereafter Maria found herself being trounced neatly at piquet.
She had learnt her lesson from that first encounter with port, and paced herself accordingly, but there was still a more-than-comfortable glow hanging about her when at last she set down her glass. “That,” she declared, “is enough for one evening. I hope it is the first, if not of many, then—”
“I will stop you there, before I find myself committed to a regular card-party above stairs. It wouldn’t do.”
“I meant the first of our consultations, which you will agree can only be to his lordship’s advantage. And if they happen to deplete the contents of his lordship’s cellar, I am told those are in your keeping.” He saluted her. She was gratified to see his hand was less steady than hers, but that said far more of her prudence than his tolerance, as she had not attempted to match him glass for glass. She rose. “Do you think Chatham will be more hi-that is. Will she be more herself tomorrow?”
“I do; as wounds go it is a trifling one, alarming though the blood may have looked. I gave her the surgeon’s draught, so she ought to sleep soundly. Though she told me when she took it that we must rouse her to leave early, if we are to be in London in good time for your dinner. She was insistent on that.”
“My dinner,” said Maria, blankly; she had forgot it entirely. The dinner party she was to hold the next day, over which Mrs. Wilson must even now be worrying in the hostess’ absence. The dinner party she’d conceived as the next sally in her campaign upon a scandalized London. She recognized that she ought, but could not even begin, to give a damn for the dinner party, which seemed at the moment to have no bearing upon reality. Yet she was not so far gone as to think this opinion would necessarily last until the following evening. “Yes, of course, I must leave as soon as practical tomorrow morning—and if she is not well enough we will think of something.”
“I am certain you will.”
“Now,” said Maria, casting her eye over the contents of the room—a valise and two smaller cases, none of which she recognized. “Would you have my things brought here? I will only need the traveling case.”
“Not in here,” he said, with a firm shake of his head. “I can’t spend the night in your maid’s room; that second bed is yours. I have already left your case inside.”
She had forgot this, too. The night before Ellis had slept on a trundle bed in Chatham’s room, as a matter of course, and it had not occurred to Maria that other arrangements would be needed. She had shared with Matthews; now she would share with Diana. Only—
“If that does not suit,” said Ellis rather kindly, while she failed to gather her wits, “I will go and have them make up a third room.”
Maria roused herself from that absurd stupor. “No, of course not. Naturally I will take the second bed. And if my case is there, that is all I need. Thank you for that, Ellis, and for an enlightening evening.”
She held out her hand to him; he took it, not for the businesslike shake she intended, but to bring it swiftly to his lips. “My lady, thank you.”
The second time she entered that room, there was nothing but her candle to light it. She waited a moment to see if the figure under the coverlet would stir, but the surgeon’s draft had done its work. Chatham moved not at all, even when Maria began with more noise than she had intended to prepare for her own bed. Tired and still a little fuzzy with drink, she did not allow herself to think very deeply about anything that had gone before or anything that must happen on the morrow; but when she had her dressing gown about her she went to the middle of the room and raised her candle over the sleeper’s pillow.
Diana lay on her side, deep in sleep, her uninjured hand curled under her head. Maria’s eyes traced the curve of her wide mouth, slack as it never was during the day; the faint shadow that fell under the lift of her cheekbone and the darker one cast by the high arch of her nose. She let out a very quiet sigh that moved the muscles of her throat. The wash of feeling that came over Maria—of fierce protectiveness, of affectionate exasperation, even of tenderness—took her off guard, and she stood there until the painful tightness in her chest had released its hold. Then she blew out the candle and slipped into the second bed, and lay awake for some time staring at the dark ceiling; drifting off at last to the sound of soft, regular breathing.
