Page 63 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Augusta came every afternoon.

She brought her embroidery frame and sat in the second chair by the window and did not require Ellen to talk, or to eat, or to be anything other than what she was, and she filled the long silences with small idle harmless things, the way a person leaves a low fire burning in a cold room.

“The rooks have been at the new wheat again,” she said, on the second afternoon, to nobody. “Coyne is in a passion about it. He has put up a scarecrow in your father’s old coat, Theodore’s father I mean, a coat the moths had already half eaten, and the rooks sit upon its shoulders to survey the field. I have rarely seen a man so insulted by a bird.”

Ellen said nothing. Augusta drew her thread through and went on.

“My sister kept rooks once, as a girl, in a great wicker cage, and fed them on bread and her own bad temper, and they learned to say two words, neither of which I shall repeat in a respectable bedroom.” She held the frame to the light. “She passed away at nine-and-twenty and I have missed her every day for forty years, which I mention only to say that I am tolerably practiced at sitting in a room with a person who does not wish to speak. You need not perform for me, child. You need not do anything at all. I am only here so that the room is not empty.”

It was the kindest thing anyone had said to her in a week, and Ellen could not answer it, and Augusta did not ask her to, and the afternoon went down into dusk with the two of them and the small steady going of the needle.

On the third afternoon Augusta spoke of her own girlhood, of a Season forty years gone, and a man she had very nearly taken as her husband and was glad now that she had not.

“He was uncommonly handsome, and said the prettiest things, and meant about a third of them, which I have since learned is a high average for a handsome man.” She held the frame to the light. “My father forbade the match, and I sat at a window for the better part of a year over it, and was perfectly certain my life had ended.”

Ellen said, before she had decided to, the first words she had spoken in three days that were not a refusal of food. “Did you hold him close to your heart?”

Augusta did not look up from her work, lest looking up should startle the words back in. “I thought I did, at twenty, which is the age at which one is certain of a great many things that are not so. He wedded into a fortune in the end, and beat it through in six years, by all accounts, and possesses a full girth and resides in Bath together with his bitter disappointment.” A pause ensued, and the needle went steadily on. “I have never once been sorry I lost him. But I was sorry for a year, child, and I sat at a window for a part of it, so understand that I am not speaking to you from any great height. I am speaking from the very same chair, a long way back.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“No reason in the world. I am an old woman and I ramble. Pay me no mind.”

But Ellen had turned her head toward the room, away from the glass, the first time in three days she had done it, and Augusta had seen her do it, and neither of them said a word about it, and the afternoon went down a shade less heavy than the ones before.

So the fourth day passed with the hedge feud and the apothecary and a christening in the parish, Augusta’s voice going on over it all like water over a stone, asking nothing back, and Ellen grateful for the sound of it in some buried place she could not have named.

“The Pargeter girl is to be wedded at Lady Day,” Augusta said on the fifth afternoon, grey and still, threading a fresh length of silk. “To the curate, who has a weak chest and excellent prospects, which her mother assures me is the ideal combination, since the prospects arrive sooner if the chest does its part.” She let that sit. “You are not laughing. A month ago you would have at least troubled to disapprove of me for saying it.”

“I have not much laughter in me this week.”

“No.” The needle went on, even and unhurried. “I have noticed. I am only marking the day you find a little of it again, so that I may take the credit.” She did not look up. “I am patient, child. I have outlasted better sulks than yours, and a Bonaparte besides.”

On the fifth day Augusta’s patience broke.

It did not break loudly. She was too old and too governed for that. She drew her thread to its end, and knotted it, and set the embroidery frame down upon her knee with a deliberateness that was its own kind of announcement, and she folded her hands on top of it and looked at Ellen full in the face, which she had not done in five days of looking sidelong.

“I am going to say a thing now,” she said, “that I have held my tongue on for five afternoons, and you are not going to like it, and I am going to say it regardless, because I am too old to watch a thing go to waste in front of me and hold my peace out of manners.”

“Then do not say it,” Ellen said, to the window.

“I have said nothing for five days. I have sat in that chair and talked of rooks and let you grieve in whatever shape grief chose to take, because that is what one does, for a while.” Augusta’s hands stayed folded on the frame. “But there is a grief that heals and a grief that digs in and builds itself a house and means to stay, and I have watched yours these two days deciding which it intends to be, and I find I cannot sit quiet and watch it decide wrong.”

“You do not know what it is deciding. You do not know what I have done.”

“Then tell me, and I shall hold my tongue gladly. Tell me the black thing you did that has earned you five days of starving in the dark and frightening your servants half out of their wits.” Augusta waited, and the needle was still in her hand, and Ellen said nothing at all. “No. You will not, because there is nothing in it worth the telling.”

“You have sat in this chair for five days punishing yourself for a thing you did not design.” Augusta’s voice was level and clear. “You were lured into the dark by a letter written in a hand you trusted, by a man who was paid in good coin to write it, by another man who has despised your husband for nine years and used you as the cheapest weapon to hand. That is what was done to you. It was a pitfall, my dear, laid by those all too well-practiced in deceit, and you walked into it because you are twenty and lonely and were starving for one kind word, and there is no shame in a hungry creature taking the bait in a snare. The shame, if there is any going, belongs to the men who set it.”

“You cannot know what I am.”

“I know that the only person in this house suffering for that night is you. The lieutenant sleeps sound, I have no doubt. The earl dines well. Your husband goes about cold and grim and untouched, as he always has. And you sit at a window and starve and call it penance.” She drew breath. “I find this, if I may be frank, a waste of a woman who was doing rather well before she let a red coat and a moonlit folly undo her. You raised a withered garden. You faced down Selby and won her. You mended a roof over a family the house had forgotten for a decade. And you have thrown the whole of that into a corner to sit here and prove to everyone, yourself most of all, that a fortnight of kindness can be undone by one bad night.”

“Get out.”

It came out of Ellen low and shaking, and she turned from the window, and the look on her face was not grief. Augusta had been waiting five days for grief and would have known what to do with it. This was the other thing. This was fury, clean and hot and entirely awake, and it was not turned inward where it had been pointed all week. It had found a door at last and come out.

“Get out of my room.” She was on her feet without knowing she had risen. “You sit there every afternoon with your embroidery and your patience and your kindness measured out by the spoonful, and you think because you are kind you have the right to tell me what my own ruin is worth and how long I am permitted to feel it. You are exactly like the rest of them. My brother decided my life for me. My husband decided it. The lieutenant decided it. And now you, in this chair, deciding when I have grieved enough, deciding what was a trap and what was my own foolishness, deciding, deciding, deciding, every last one of you deciding around me as though I were a chair in the room. I am so tired of being decided. My husband sends a maid up to my door three times a day to ask whether I want a book or a higher fire, and never once comes himself, because even his kindness must be handed down through a servant so that he need never stand in a room with me and risk my having a feeling where he can see it. And you sit there with your needle and your forty years of being right. And I am to be grateful to the pair of you for managing me so very gently. Get out. I am finished being managed by people who cherish me.”