Page 74 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Then a curious thing began to happen, and it took her a few minutes to understand it.

The looks were not all the kind she had braced for. A dowager two boxes along, a great gaunt monument of a woman Ellen had never met, caught her eye and gave her the smallest, most deliberate nod, the nod one gives a person one has decided to be seen approving of. A few minutes later a couple she did not know bowed to the box as they passed below. And then Lady Carrow came along the tier, the wife of the man Theodore was working with in the House, and stopped at the box door, and was admitted, and settled herself in the empty chair beside Augusta with the air of a friend who had the whole night and meant to spend all of it just there.

“My dear Duchess.” She said it loudly, a good deal more loudly than the distance between them required, and took both of Ellen’s hands in a grip that was pure performance and perfectly deliberate. “I have been trying to reach this box a quarter of an hour and been quite defeated by the crush. How well you look. How perfectly well. I said to Carrow only this morning, I will not have it, I said, the things people will repeat without the smallest notion whether there is a word of truth in them, and out of a printed sheet of all places, a thing got up by some grubbing creature for ha’pennies. One does not credit a ha’penny. I told him I should call on you tonight in front of the entire grand tier if I were obliged to climb over three boxes to manage it, and here I am, and here is the entire grand tier, and I do hope they are all attending closely.”

“You are very kind, Lady Carrow,” Ellen said, and meant a quite different thing by it than the words, and saw that Lady Carrow knew exactly what she meant.

“I am not in the least kind. I am extremely particular about the persons I am seen with, which is a different thing entirely and a great deal more useful to you this evening.” She patted Ellen’s hand once more, for the benefit of the watchers, and rose. “You must both dine with us on Thursday. I shall not be refused.” And she swept back out along the tier with her chin up, having spent five whole minutes saying nothing whatever at the top of her voice, every syllable of it a flag planted in plain sight of two hundred people on the side of the Duchess of Rosanne.

When she had gone, Ellen understood what she had been watching.

“Augusta,” she said quietly, behind her fan. “These people are being kind to me on purpose.”

“These people are doing as they have been told, which from that particular set of people looks remarkably like kindness and answers just as well.” Augusta did not trouble to lower her own voice much. “I have spent a fortnight at a great many card tables, child. I have mentioned, to the right women in the right order, that the poor new Duchess has been most shamefully maligned by some mercenary printer’s scribbler, and that everyone knows whose spite is behind it, and that a woman of real quality will of course be seen to stand by her. They do not know they are being marshalled. They believe they thought of it themselves. That is the whole art of it.”

“And the other half. The ones who are not being kind.”

“Watch where they are not being kind, and to whom.”

So Ellen watched, and saw it, and the seeing of it was the first wholly satisfying thing the evening had given her. The cool looks, the turned shoulders, the small theater of disapproval that she had feared would be aimed at her own box, were being aimed instead, two tiers up and across, at a box she had not yet let herself look at directly. A box with a silver-haired man in it. People were not cutting the Duchess of Rosanne tonight. They were beginning, in the small preliminary way these things began, to cut the Earl of Greaves, and they were doing it where he could not fail to feel it, and Ellen understood that Augusta’s fortnight and Theodore’s quiet work in the House had between them turned the tide a degree, and that a degree, in this water, was a great deal.

She let herself look at the earl’s box then, once, for exactly as long as courtesy allowed and not a moment longer, and found him already looking at her.

It was the first beat of it, the thing that would finish in the corridor at the interval. Across the breadth of the lit theater he looked at her, and she looked back, and she did not shy away as he was searching her face for, and did not give him the defiance that would have told him he had drawn blood. She gave him the bored, faintly puzzled half-smile of a woman who cannot quite place a face, and then she returned her attention to the stage, and left him holding a look that had found nothing to take hold of.

It was while the first act was ending that she saw her brother.

She had been letting her glass drift along the cheaper boxes and the upper tiers, the way one does, and it stopped without her deciding it on a figure standing at the rail of the gallery, far up, in the part of the house where people went who could afford the opera once a season and chose to spend the afford on the music rather than the being seen. Henry was thinner than she remembered, in a coat she did not know, which meant a coat from before the worst of it, kept and brushed. He was not looking at the stage. He was observing her box, she understood he had been doing so for some time. When at last she raised her glass and their eyes met across the crowded theater, he knew it immediately, by that strange, unspoken instinct which connects two souls.

He did not wave. He did not make any sign that a person below might mark and gossip over. He inclined his head to her, once, gravely, the bow a man gives a lady he respects and has no claim upon, and then he turned and looked at the stage and did not look at her box again, and left her in possession of the evening without asking the smallest thing of it.

She had written him a letter telling him he might one day be written to as a person and not a creditor. She understood, watching him keep his careful distance up there in the cheap gallery, that he had read it, and understood it, and was showing her, in the only language available across a crowded theater, that he meant to try. A sudden tightening arose in her throat, which she compelled herself instantly to master.

“Your brother is in the gallery,” Theodore said, very quietly, beside her. He had followed her glass. “I had my man keep him in view, and I will tell you the whole of what that means later, when you are ready to be angry at me about it, which you have every right to be. For tonight I will only tell you that he came alone, and sober, and bought the cheapest seat in the house to hear Mozart, which is not the act of the man who sat in your morning room.”

“You are managing me again. You say this only to soften my disposition toward you.”

“I am telling you a true thing because you are looking at it and have a right to know what I know about it.” He paused. “There is a difference, and I am learning it very slowly, and you will have to tell me when I get it wrong, because I cannot always feel the line from my side.”

It was, she thought, the most honest sentence he had given her since the dining room, and she did not answer it, but she did not move her arm away from where it had come, by accident, to rest against his.

At the interval she rose, and told Augusta she wanted air, and went out into the corridor alone, which was not wise, and which she did on purpose, because she had spent the whole first act feeling the earl’s box at her back and had decided she would rather meet the thing on her feet in a passage than wait for it to come to her in her chair.

He was there before she had gone twenty paces, as she had known he would be. Greaves did not hurry. He came along the crush of the corridor with a glass of something in his hand and the same withheld bow he had given her at the Cresswell ball, and he stopped in front of her with the easy confidence of a man who had read a pamphlet about her that morning and believed he knew the shape of her now.

“Your Grace. You are brave to come.”

“Am I?” She let the two words sit, pleasant and empty.

“There has been such unkind talk. A folly, a moonlight walk, a young officer. I confess I never credited a word of it.” His eyes moved over her face, hunting. “I am glad to see it has not crushed you. A lesser woman would have stayed at home.”

“How thoughtful of you to be glad.” She did not give him the tremor. She did not give him the color rising, or the eyes going bright, or any of the small coins he had come to collect. She gave him a serene and faintly tired courtesy.

He tried a different road, the first having yielded him nothing. “Talk is a difficult thing to stop, once it has begun to run. A printed sheet is bought up easily enough, I am told, but the memory of having read it is not bought up at all. These things have a way of coming back. At a christening, a wedding, years from now, when one had thought them safely buried. It must be a hard prospect, for a young woman, to know she will carry such a thing the whole of her life.”

“You speak as though you had given the matter a great deal of thought, my lord.”

“Only the natural sympathy of a neighbor.”