The corridor was cooler and smelled of beeswax and cut yew. She walked without hurrying. Her slippers made almost no sound upon the marble. The long mirror at the turn of the passage gave her a quick glimpse of a tall woman in dove gray silk with a face so composed it might have been a portrait, and she did not recognize the woman.
At the foot of the great staircase she met Mrs. Pell, the housekeeper, who carried a small ring of keys at her waist that chimed very softly. Mrs. Pell looked once at her face, once at the empty glass in her hand, and said only, My lady, and inclined her head.
Maren said she would like a fire in the blue sitting room, a pot of strong tea, and her writing case. Mrs. Pell said, My lady, in a different register, the register of a woman who has been waiting eight years to be useful in precisely this way, and went. Maren climbed the stairs slowly because she did not yet trust her knees.
At the landing she paused beneath the portrait of the third duke and thought with a small private flicker that he would have understood her better than any of the living men downstairs. The blue sitting room had been hers since the second year of her marriage, when she had asked very mildly for a room of her own that did not adjoin his, and he had granted it with mild surprise. The fire was being laid as she entered. The maid, Annis, did not look up from the grate, but her shoulders had a particular stiffness.
The stiffness of someone who has already heard what had happened at the table. News travels in such houses faster than the people who carry it. Maren sat in the low chair she had reupholstered herself in secret one winter when she had been very lonely. She did not sit gracefully.
She sat the way a woman sits when she has at last reached a chair she can trust. She looked at the empty glass on the small table. The engraved W on its bowl. His initial, his house, his mark upon a thing meant to touch her mouth.
She had been drinking from his initial for eight years. The thought was not bitter. It was the thought of a woman who has just noticed, in good light, the pattern on a wallpaper she has lived with so long she had ceased to see it. Annis finished with the fire and went.
Maren was alone with the crackle of new flame and the distant vibration of the dining room three floors below, where her husband was even now attempting to recover the evening. She did not pity him. She did not yet hate him. She was between feelings, in that thin clear country where the old country has been left and the new has not yet declared its borders.
Mrs. Pell came with the tea. She came alone, which was itself a message. She set the tray down with the particular soundlessness of a woman who has spent forty years setting trays down in rooms where someone was weeping or refusing to weep.
She poured the milk in the proportion Maren preferred and handed the cup across. Only then did she say, very quietly, that the writing case was on the desk and that the lamp had been trimmed. Maren looked at her. She looked at the lined, patient face that had been the first face she had seen in this house eight years ago, when she arrived as a bride of nineteen with her mother’s pearls and her terror neatly tucked beneath her smile.
She said, Mrs. Pell. And her voice did the small unforgivable thing of catching, just once, on the second syllable. Mrs.
Pell reached out and laid her dry, warm, key-scented hand briefly upon Maren’s wrist. My lady, I have known since the spring, and I am sorry it was tonight. The fire popped. Maren held the teacup very still.
Mrs. Pell had known. Seven months. Her husband had been constant to someone whose name she now knew because he had said it over the chrysanthemums.
She thought of the long damp March when she had been ill with a low fever and he had been so attentive, sitting by her bed in the evenings with a book he did not read. She had been touched. She had thought they were finding a quieter affection. She set the teacup down.
She did not wish to weep. She wished to write. She crossed to the desk. The writing case was open, the inkwell uncapped, the pen laid neatly upon the blotter.
Mrs. Pell missed nothing. She drew a sheet of cream paper toward her, the small gray monogram at the head, her own initials, the M and the A entwined, the initials of the girl she had been before there had been a W to drink from. She dipped the pen.
She did not know to whom she was writing. Words were rising with a pressure she had not felt in years. She wrote the date. She wrote the hour beneath the date.
She set the pen down, walked once around the room, stopped at the window and parted the curtain a finger’s width. She looked out at the dark park, at the line of bare elms, at the cold indifferent moon three days past full and declining. She said aloud, very softly, Well. Only that.
The word steadied her. She returned to the desk. She wrote to her father. Three lines: he was not to make a scene, she required by morning the use of his small house in town on Marjorie Street, and she would explain everything when she saw him.
She signed it with her own name. She did not write Wendover. She wrote Merryn Ashcombe. She sealed the letter and rang the bell.
An older footman called Hibbert came. When he saw her face, he did not require to be told the letter was urgent. She gave it to him, told him to take it himself on horseback and wait for an answer. He went.
The clock on the mantel chimed the half hour. Maren sat back in her chair and put her hands flat upon the desk, looked at the wedding ring, at the small thread of light the lamp threw along the gold. She turned the ring on her finger. She did not yet remove it.
There was a difference between leaving a room and leaving a marriage. She had done the first. The second was a longer walk and required better shoes. The door opened without a knock.
She did not need to look up. She had been waiting for him to find his way to this room. He came in heavily, shut the door behind him with the particular care of a man who has been drinking and is concentrating very hard on not appearing to have been drinking. She said, without looking at him, that he was expected back at his guests.
He said her name the way he had used to say it in the first year, when he had still been trying to learn the shape of her. The sound was so unexpectedly familiar that she closed her eyes for one treacherous instant. She turned her chair enough to look at him sideways, the way one looks at a painting one is deciding whether to keep. He had the high color still, his cravat a little loosened.
His eyes were not the eyes of a man who had triumphed at his own table. They were the eyes of a man who had heard, only after the door had closed behind her, the sound of what he had said. He began three different sentences. It was the wine.
It was the warmth of the company. A slip, a foolish slip. She watched him work through the available defenses. She did not help him.
She had spent eight years helping him through sentences, smoothing his small public stumbles, finishing his thought aloud with such grace he came to believe it had been his own. She had laid down the work, and the work, set down, looked from a small distance very like servitude. He came closer, stopped at the edge of the desk. He looked at the letter she had not yet put away, at the cream paper with her own initials, at the wax still soft on the seal.
His face did a small private thing that was the closest he came in his life to fear. He said, Who have you written to? She said, My father. He said, Maren.
She said, I have asked him for the use of grandmother’s house. I shall go in the morning. I shall take Annis. You may tell your guests whatever you wish.
I find I have no preference. He stared at her. He said, You are overreacting. She did not answer.
She let the silence hold. He had never been able to fill a silence she had decided to keep. He passed his hand across his face. He sat uninvited on the small chair by the desk, a chair her mother had given her, which creaked faintly under him.
After a while he said, in a voice quite unlike the voice that had toasted the chrysanthemums, that he had not meant to say the name. She believed him. That was the worst of it. He had not meant to say it.
He had meant only to be magnanimous, expansive, the kind of man whose affections were large enough to encompass more than one woman. He had been happy. That was the thing she had not allowed herself to know. He had been happy in a way he had not been with her for a very long time.
She said very quietly, I know you did not mean to say it. He looked up. There was hope in his face. She said, That is why I am going.
She did not sleep that night. After he had gone, she rose and went to her dressing room, stood before the long glass in the dove-gray silk, undid the clasp of the diamond band at her throat, laid it in its velvet case, closed the case, set it upon the dressing table. She did not put it on again. Annis came at the sound of the case closing.
She had been waiting in the passage perhaps the entire hour. They undressed together in silence. Annis said, My lady, am I to pack? Yes.
Everything? The small trunk only. The blue dress, the brown, the gray wool, my books, my mother’s pearls, the writing case, the little clock by the bed. Nothing else.
Annis curtsied and went. Maren heard her opening the cedar drawers with the careful efficiency of a girl who had been preparing for this departure longer than she had admitted. Maren sat on the edge of the bed, very wide and very cold. She let her mind go, at last, to the name.
She let herself think it with a curious gentleness. She thought of the woman with the low laugh, the quick eyes, the habit of resting her hand briefly upon the duke’s sleeve. She had noted it at the time and set it aside because a wife who notes such gestures and acts upon them becomes the thing she did not wish to be. She thought of that woman now without outrage.
She thought with something nearer to pity because she understood that the woman had also been waiting eight years for someone to say her name in a toast, and that the duke had given her that and would not be able to give her more. He could not be constant in the singular. Toward morning the fire had almost gone out. Maren rose and went to the window, parted the curtain.
The dark park had given itself over to the hour before dawn when the world is at its most honest. The bare elms stood along the drive like patient witnesses. The moon had gone. The sky was the thin gray of unpolished pewter.
Somewhere in the homewood a single early bird tried out a phrase and stopped, embarrassed by the silence, and tried again. She watched until the bird succeeded. She watched until the phrase, on its third attempt, held. Then she let the curtain fall and rang very softly for tea.
By eight o’clock the household had organized itself around her departure with the unspoken precision of a regiment drilled for an emergency it had hoped would not come. The small trunk stood at the foot of the bed, strapped. The writing case lay on top of it, locked. Hibbert had returned in the small hours with her father’s reply.
The house was hers. He would not come down himself because she had asked him not to make a scene. He would call upon her in town when she was settled. He was, as ever, hers.
She folded the letter and put it in the writing case. She drank her tea. She ate a single slice of toast that tasted of nothing. At half past eight she went down by the back stairs.
They were narrow and uncarpeted, smelled faintly of soap, and let her out into the small flagged passage by the still room where Mrs. Pell was waiting with her cloak. Mrs. Pell put the cloak about her shoulders.
Mrs. Pell fastened the clasp at her throat. Mrs. Pell said, Miss Merryn, you take care of yourself now.
In the tone of a woman who had nursed her through a fever and was nursing her again through a different kind of fever. Maren almost broke, but the breaking was to be kept for the carriage. The carriage was waiting at the side door. The horses steamed gently into the cold air.
Annis was already inside, her face very pale, her hands folded with rigid neatness. Maren stepped up. She turned on the step and looked back only once at the long gray face of the house, at the row of windows along the upper floor, at the one window that was hers, where Annis had left the curtain drawn so the room behind it might be, for a little while longer, a room one might still come back to. She did not see the Duke at any window.
She did not expect to. She got into the carriage, drew the door shut herself. Pierce clicked his tongue, the horses leaned into the traces, the wheels turned on the gravel with the long crunching sigh that great houses make when they let someone go. The drive unwound itself in the pale early light between the rows of patient elms.
She did not look back again. The house on Marjorie Street was smaller than she remembered and dustier than her grandmother would have permitted, and Maren loved it instantly. Three rooms upstairs and three down, a narrow garden behind, a copper kettle, a long scrub table that bore faintly the ghost of an ink stain her grandmother had made one afternoon in 1822. Annis took one look at the kitchen and burst into tears of professional outrage, then rolled up her sleeves.
Maren went upstairs alone. She went into the small front bedroom with the low bed and the faded blue cover, a window that looked down upon the street. She opened the shutters with both hands, and the cold pale London light came in and laid itself across the floorboards. She stood in it for a long moment with her eyes closed.
She had not since the age of seventeen stood in a room in which no one expected anything of her. By midday Annis had a fire in the kitchen and bread from the corner and tea from the canister her grandmother had left, eight years stale, which they drank anyway because the ceremony required tea. By afternoon a boy came from her father’s house with a hamper and a note that said only eat. By evening Mrs.
Pell had sent on the books from the blue sitting room, the little clock by the bed, the low chair she had reupholstered in secret, the one piece of furniture in the Duke’s house that was unambiguously hers. Maren set the chair by the small hearth. She set the clock upon the mantel. She set the books upon the shelf.
She sat in the chair. The clock ticked. The fire crackled. Annis in the kitchen sang very softly to herself, a tune from the village she came from.
Maren realized she had never heard Annis sing before. Annis had been a girl who did not sing. She thought, well. There would be letters to write, settlements to negotiate, lawyers with long words.
There would be a society that would for some weeks take pleasure in her name and then in something else. There would be a man who had been her husband who would at some point ask to call. There would be a woman with a low laugh whose name she would never say aloud. But that was all to come.
That evening there was only the chair, the clock, the small fire, the singing in the kitchen, and the cold pale London light fading at the window into the soft blue of a robin’s egg, the exact blue of the room she had left. She drew the chair closer to the fire. She put her feet upon the fender. She closed her eyes.
And there, in a house that asked nothing of her, in a chair she had made with her own hands, with no one watching and no toast pending and no eight seconds to count, the thing she had been holding since the chrysanthemums broke. It broke quietly. She wept the way a long closed window weeps when it is opened in the rain, with a small steady running that the room absorbs without comment. Annis went on singing.
The clock went on ticking. The fire went on doing its patient work. After a while she opened her eyes and dried her face with the back of her hand and reached for her teacup. The tea was cold.
She drank it anyway, because cold tea drunk by a woman in her own chair in her own house was a different drink entirely. She set the cup down. She smiled. It was not the contained, proportioned smile she had given the table the night before.
It was small and crooked and entirely her own. There was in it the first faint warmth of something she had not felt in eight years and could not yet quite name. She would name it later. She was in no hurry.
She had the rest of her life in which to name things, and no one to ask her to be quick about it.