The Terms of Surrender: Black Crepe And Sharpened Knives

The soil struck the lid of the coffin with a sound like a fist hitting wood, thud after muffled thud, and the sound carried across the Delacroix family plot with a hollow finality. Iolanthe stood three rows back, her black crepe gown catching the late October wind, and watched the small gathering of mourners bow their heads or study their shoes. The churchyard lay grey and damp beneath a sky the color of tarnished pewter. Somewhere beyond the yew hedge, a rook lifted its voice in a single, complaining note.

Cassian stood nearest the grave, his shoulders rigid inside a coat that fit too well, as though it had been made for someone who had possessed more appetite than he did. He did not weep. He held his hat against his thigh with fingers gone pale at the knuckles, and the set of his jaw suggested that he was performing arithmetic in his head rather than grief. Iolanthe could respect that. She had performed the same calculations at her own father's service, weighing the cost of the lilies against the cost of the wine for the reception, and finding, to her shame, that the figures had steadied her more than any prayer.

The dead man in the box had been a stranger to her. Cornelius Delacroix, the late Earl, had lived and died in this crumbling pocket of Sussex without ever laying eyes upon the woman his nephew had chosen to marry. That fact ought to have insulated her. It did not. The weight of the earth, and the smell of it, wet and mineral and ancient, pressed against her sternum as surely as any hand.

She had worn mourning because it was expected of a new wife in her first season of attendance upon a family she had joined by contract rather than affection. The bombazine was stiff at the wrists. The veil, drawn forward over her face at the church and now pinned back beneath the brim of her bonnet, kept tugging free in the breeze. She resisted the urge to pluck at it. To fuss with one's toilette at a funeral was the sort of thing Evangeline Delacroix did, smoothing the skirts of her gown and dabbing at her cheeks with a handkerchief trimmed in violets.

Evangeline stood between Iolanthe and her brother Julian, her chin lifted at an angle that seemed almost theatrical. The cousin had chosen to weep prettily rather than deeply, her shoulders hitching at irregular intervals, and each time she dabbed at her eyes she glanced sideways to see who might be observing. Now she pressed her gloved fingers to her mouth and turned toward Iolanthe with a look of fragile appeal.

"You are too composed," Evangeline whispered, her breath catching. "I cannot bear how still you are."

"I have had practice," Iolanthe said, and kept her voice low enough to pass for sympathy.

Evangeline blinked, as though the answer had been delivered in a language she had not expected. She turned away, mollified or wounded, and Iolanthe could not tell which. It was difficult, she was discovering, to wound Evangeline Delacroix in any lasting way, because the girl received each slight and softened it almost immediately into something she could fold into the shape of a daydream.

Julian, by contrast, showed nothing at all. He lounged against a low headstone at the edge of the gathering, one hand thrust carelessly into the pocket of his mourning trousers, and watched the proceedings with the bored detachment of a young man counting the minutes until the horses were brought round. His cravat was tied with an elegance that bordered on the insolent. His boots, polished to a black mirror, caught the thin grey light. He caught Iolanthe observing him and offered a smile so slight, so practiced, that it might have been meant for her or for nobody at all.

The vicar concluded his office. A final prayer, a final scattering of soil, and then the mourners began to drift apart in ones and twos, drifting toward the lychgate where the carriages waited. The gravel of the path crunched beneath their feet, a small and domestic sound that made the larger silence afterward seem vaster.

Mrs. Havers, the housekeeper at Delacroix Park, stood near the gate with her hands folded into her apron and her mouth folded into a knot. She had walked the half mile from the house in sturdy boots and a bonnet that had seen better decades, and she had stood through the entire service with the rigid patience of a woman who considered attendance a professional duty rather than a personal loss. Her eyes, however, had moved constantly, watching Cassian, watching Iolanthe, watching Evangeline, and now watching the slow procession of guests.

Iolanthe caught Mrs. Havers' gaze and held it for a measured moment. There was no warmth in the exchange, but there was recognition, the brief acknowledgment of two women who had learned to read a room before entering it. Mrs. Havers inclined her head by the width of a finger and turned back toward the lane.

The wind freshened, bringing with it the smell of wet bracken and the distant smoke of a chimney at some unseen farm. Iolanthe drew her shawl closer about her shoulders and moved, at her own pace, to join the line of mourners descending the slope.

Cassian fell into step beside her without invitation or greeting. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, his stride shortened to match hers, and for several paces neither of them spoke. The crunch of gravel underfoot marked the silence like a metronome.

"You will be introduced to Lord Pemberton at the house," he said at last, his voice low and unhurried, carrying the rasp of a man who had smoked too many cigarettes in rooms too poorly ventilated. "He is my uncle by marriage. He has opinions."

"All Englishmen of a certain age have opinions," Iolanthe replied. "It is their chief employment."

Cassian's mouth moved by a fraction. It was not, quite, a smile. "He will be seated nearest the fire in the drawing room. My aunt will be beside him. You will be expected to make conversation with both of them without giving offense, and to do so without the assistance of either your husband or your host, since your husband will be occupied with the steward and your host will be occupied with his grief."

"And with his heir," Iolanthe said. "Whom he appears to have forgotten."

Cassian glanced at her then, a quick, measuring look. "Julian," he said, "is not easily forgotten. He ensures it."

They had reached the lychgate by then. The carriages waited in a row along the lane, the horses stamping and shifting, their breath rising in pale plumes that the wind tore apart almost before they formed. A groom stood at the head of the first carriage, his cap in his hand, his face carefully empty.

Cassian offered his hand. Iolanthe looked at the hand, at the glove, at the faint smudge of soil at the cuff where he had lifted dirt from the grave and not quite brushed it away. She placed her own gloved fingers within his and let him hand her up into the carriage. The step was high. Her skirt caught. He did not comment, and she did not thank him, and the carriage door closed upon them with the solid sound of a decision being sealed.

Inside, the upholstery smelled of camphor and old velvet. A foot warmer had been placed beneath the seat, and the heat of it rose through the soles of her boots. She arranged her skirts, smoothed her gloves, and fixed her gaze upon the window.

Cassian sat opposite her. He had removed his hat and turned it slowly between his hands, a gesture she suspected he was not aware of making. The brim was edged with a band of crepe, and his fingers traced the edge of it, round and round, as though he were polishing something that could not be polished clean.

"He was not," Cassian said, "a kind man."

"I did not suppose he was," Iolanthe replied. "The kind do not generally inspire such expensive funerals."

For a long moment the only sound was the turning of the wheels upon the lane, and the muffled complaint of the springs, and the small cough of the horse between the shafts. Then Cassian made a sound that was not quite a laugh, a single exhalation through the nose, and set the hat upon the seat beside him.

"My sister," he said, and paused. "She will hate you."

"Your cousin," Iolanthe corrected. "I have been corrected in this twice already."

"Evangeline," he amended, with the patience of a man conceding a point he did not consider material, "will hate you. She has decided that you are the obstacle between herself and a future she has been imagining since she was twelve years old. She will not be reasoned out of it. You will find her pleasant, and then you will find her impossible, and then you will find her pleasant again, and the cycle will repeat until one of you is removed from the vicinity of the other."

"How comforting," Iolanthe said.

"It is not meant to comfort. It is meant to inform." He leaned forward, resting his elbows upon his knees, and looked at her with an attention she had not yet learned to interpret. "You are, I think, a woman who prefers to be informed."

"I am a woman who prefers not to be surprised."

"There is a difference."

"There is. And the second is considerably more attainable than the first."

The carriage turned from the lane into a broader avenue, and the house appeared between the bare limbs of the elms. Delacroix Park had been built in the previous century by a man with more ambition than taste, and the façade of it showed the strain: the stonework darkened by weather, the windows dulled by dust, the portico leaning a degree off true as though the building were considering its options. Smoke rose from three of the seven chimneys. The others were cold.

Cassian watched the house approach with the expression of a man returning to a place he had hoped, at some earlier hour, never to see again. His fingers had resumed their slow tracing of the hat brim.

"My uncle's opinions," he said, without looking at her, "include a number concerning the disposition of the title and the estates, which he intends to share with me in private, and a number concerning my choice of wife, which he intends to share with you at dinner."

"How obliging of him to divide the subjects."

"How typical of him."

The carriage drew up before the portico. The groom stepped forward and let down the step. Iolanthe gathered her skirts, and before she could reach for the handle, Cassian opened the door from within and stood upon the gravel to hand her down. The wind met her at once, sharp and clean, carrying the scent of the kitchen garden beyond the south wall and the faint, distant sound of someone, somewhere in the house, playing a piano that had not been tuned in some years.

She set her foot upon the ground. Her boot sank slightly into the gravel. The wind pressed the crepe of her skirts against her legs, and she smoothed them with one hand.

"Lord Pemberton," she said, without looking at him. "Is he the sort of man who expects to be agreed with, or the sort who expects to be argued with?"

"He expects to be the cleverest man in the room," Cassian replied. "If you permit him to believe that he is, you will find him tolerable. If you disabuse him, you will find him vicious."

"Then I shall be very stupid," Iolanthe said, "and very quickly."

Cassian looked at her then, and for the first time since the churchyard, something shifted behind his eyes. It was not warmth, precisely. It was recognition.

"Welcome home," he said, and turned toward the door.

Iolanthe did not move for a heartbeat. The wind tugged at her veil. The rook, somewhere beyond the yew hedge, offered its single, complaining note again, and was not answered.

She followed him into the house.

The hall of Delacroix Place smelled of beeswax and woodsmoke and something older, a mustiness that had crept into the plaster while the house sat half-emptied of its people. A long table ran down the centre, its surface dark with generations of polish, and upon it stood a single bowl of late roses, their petals already browning at the edges. Above the mantel, a portrait of a woman in a lace cap regarded the new arrivals with an expression of mild, painted disapproval.

Iolanthe took it all in with a glance that lingered on nothing. She had learned, in her years of moving from one respectable household to another, to inventory a room in a single sweep: the condition of the silver, the height of the ceilings, the way the servants held their shoulders. Here, the ceiling was high enough to echo. The silver on the sideboard was kept bright. The butler who had admitted them stood with the particular rigid grace of a man who had been trained by someone exacting and had not been allowed to forget it.

Cassian handed his hat and gloves to the man without looking at him. "We shall have tea in the drawing room in half an hour, if you please. And send word to Mrs. Havers that I wish to see her."

"Yes, my lord."

"And the carriage will not be needed again tonight. Inform the stables."

"Yes, my lord."

The butler withdrew. Iolanthe noted the absence of the man's name, and the precision of the orders, and the way Cassian delivered them as though he had been giving them his whole life. She suspected he had been rehearsing them in the carriage, and she filed the suspicion away without comment.

"Through here," Cassian said, and opened a door to the left of the hall.

The drawing room was long and underfurnished. A pianoforte stood near the tall windows, its keys yellowed, the ivory of one of the sharps chipped. Two armchairs faced the hearth, where a small fire had been laid against the evening chill. A third chair, lower and older, had been pulled up beside them, and it was into this that Iolanthe sat, smoothing her crepe skirts beneath her with the automatic care of a woman who had learned that the condition of one's hem was often remarked upon before the condition of one's character.

Cassian did not sit. He crossed to the fireplace and stood with one hand on the mantel, looking down at the flames as though he were considering whether to trust them with a confession. The light from the fire caught the edge of his jaw, the line of his collar, and turned the silver in his cuff links to a dull, accusatory glow.

"You will be asked questions," he said. "Beginning tomorrow morning and continuing, I suspect, until Lord and Lady Pemberton have exhausted whatever appetite for gossip they carried with them from town. You and I must give them the same answer."

Iolanthe folded her hands in her lap. "I had assumed as much."

"Assumption is not preparation." He did not look at her. "May I tell you what I have prepared, or would you prefer to improvise?"

"I would prefer," she said, "to know precisely what I am agreeing to lie about."

The word landed softly between them, and Cassian's mouth moved, almost imperceptibly, at one corner. It was not quite a smile. It was the recognition of someone who had also, at some point, been obliged to call a falsehood by its proper name.

"Very well," he said. "Sit forward, if you can bear it. I am going to be tiresome."

He turned from the fire at last and took the chair opposite her, crossing one long leg over the other with the kind of deliberate ease that suggested he had once been taught that a man's posture was the first sentence he spoke in any room. He regarded her, and she regarded him, and the fire popped between them like a small, unhelpful witness.

"We met in Italy," he began. "In Positano, on the Amalfi coast, in the late summer of eighteen seventy-one. I was travelling alone, recovering from a bout of something the physicians there were pleased to call a fever. I had taken a room at a small hotel above the sea, where I spent my mornings attempting to read and my afternoons failing to do so. You were there with a party of companions. An aunt, I believe, or a friend of your family's. A respectable female relative."

"An aunt," Iolanthe said. "That will do."

"You were kind to me," Cassian said, "when I was at my most tedious. You read aloud to me on the terrace when the heat made the pages tremble in my hands. You corrected my terrible Italian without laughing, or at any rate without laughing where I could hear you. We took long walks along the cliff road in the cooler hours, and you pretended not to notice that I was not yet strong enough to keep your pace."

Iolanthe said nothing. She watched his face as he spoke, and she watched the way his hands lay still upon his knee, the fingers neither spread nor clasped. The story, she noted, was careful. It cast him as the invalid, her as the nurse. It allowed her a virtue that required no further explanation. It gave them a setting that was romantic without being indecent, and a separation long enough to have explained the absence of any prior announcement.

"In October," he continued, "I was called back to England. The inheritance had not yet quite fallen, but its shadow had, and I understood that I must come home. We parted at the harbour, with promises to write, and we did write, for some months. The letters became fewer. You were called away to your brother's situation. I was absorbed in the business of the estate. But we did not forget each other."

"And then?" Iolanthe said. "How does the story end, so that it may begin in a drawing room in Hampshire with black crepe and no warning?"

Cassian's gaze did not waver. "You came to me. When you learned that your brother was to be transported, and that there was nothing more you could do for him, you wrote to me. You asked if the offer I had once made you, in a moment of what I shall call sentiment, still stood. I replied that it did. You travelled down by the afternoon train. We were married the following morning by special licence, because we did not wish to wait, and because, given the circumstances of your family, a quiet ceremony seemed kinder to you than a public one."

He paused. The fire settled in the grate, sending up a thin tongue of flame that licked at the back of a log and then subsided.

"Does it satisfy you?" he asked.

Iolanthe considered. The story was tidy. It explained her presence, his apparent haste, the absence of family on her side. It accounted for the crepe. It made her, in the eyes of any inquirer, a woman who had acted from affection and from a reasonable desire to escape the shame of her brother's situation. It made him a man who had behaved honourably by a woman he had loved for some time. It cast neither of them as a fortune hunter, which was fortunate, since one of them most certainly was.

"It is plausible," she said. "It is almost romantic. I begin to suspect you have told it before."

"I have not had the occasion."

"Then I shall compliment you on your invention."

"It is not an invention." For the first time, something in his voice roughened, almost imperceptibly, like the edge of a coin drawn across a thumbnail. "It is a scaffolding. Every part of it may be replaced by a part of the truth, if you prefer. I was ill. I was abroad. I was recalled. You were kind to me once, in a manner of speaking, and I was grateful. The rest is arrangement."

Iolanthe inclined her head. "I have no objection to arrangement. I have lived by it since I was seventeen. I merely wished to know the shape of the thing I am to defend."

"You will not need to defend it. You will only need to repeat it, and to look as though repetition has become tedious to you." He paused. "You are very good at looking tedious, I think. You have the face for it."

"I shall take that as a compliment."

"It was meant as one."

The door opened. The butler entered with a tray, upon which stood a teapot of blue and white porcelain, two cups, a small jug of milk, and a plate of bread and butter cut into precise fingers. He set the tray upon a low table between the chairs, asked whether there was anything else, was assured that there was not, and withdrew with the particular silent grace of a man who had determined that the fewer words he exchanged with the new Countess, the fewer questions he would be required to answer later.

Cassian poured. He handed her a cup, and his hand was steady. She took it, and she felt the warmth of the porcelain through her gloves, and she drank, and the tea was hot and faintly bitter, as tea always was in houses where the kettle had been boiled too long ago.

"If Lord Pemberton asks whether we corresponded," Cassian said, "you may say that we did, and that you burned the letters when you learned of your brother's arrest, because you did not wish them to be read by anyone who might find them. This is a small cruelty to the truth, but it will prevent him from asking to see them."

"I did not know you were a man who thought in terms of small cruelties."

"I am a man who has had to think in terms of them for some years." He set down his cup. "You will find, Iolanthe, that the world is very kind to men who lie well, and very unkind to women who are caught doing so. It is therefore necessary that you lie better than I do, and that I be seen to rely upon you for the truth. Do you understand?"

"I understand that you wish me to be the face of the arrangement."

"I wish you to be its author." He met her eyes, and for the first time she saw, beneath the studied ease, something that was not fatigue but something adjacent to it: a kind of bleak, careful attention. "When Pemberton asks me, I shall refer him to you. When his wife asks you, you will tell her the same thing you have told me. It will be consistent. It will be dull. By the end of the evening, no one will wish to speak of it again."

"And if they do?"

"Then we shall have failed, and we shall try again tomorrow." He reached for a finger of bread and butter, examined it, and set it down again without tasting it. "I do not intend to fail."

The fire had burned low. Somewhere in the house, a clock struck the half-hour, and the sound came to them muffled, as though the rooms between had thickened the air. Iolanthe set her cup upon the table and folded her hands again, and the crepe of her sleeves whispered against itself.

"Tell me about Positano," she said.

Cassian looked at her.

"If I am to describe it convincingly to Lady Pemberton, who I suspect has never been further from London than Bath, I shall need to know how the light falls on the water in the morning, and what the church bells sound like at six, and whether the fishermen sing when they come in. I shall need to know what I ate for breakfast, and whether the tiles on the terrace were warm underfoot in October, and whether the swallows were still there, or already gone."

Cassian was silent for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair, and something in the line of his shoulders eased by a degree, as though she had, without intending to, given him permission to set down a weight.

"The light comes in from the east," he said, "over the headland, and it turns the sea the colour of a beaten tin cup. The church bells are cracked, and they sound it. The fishermen do not sing, but they argue, very loudly, in a dialect that no one from Rome understands. I ate bread and bitter coffee for breakfast, and the figs, when they were in season, which they were not by October. The tiles were warm until the sun moved off them, and then they were cool. They were already gone."

"The swallows?"

"Gone."

She nodded. She would remember it. She would say it to Lady Pemberton with exactly the cadence he had used, and the woman would sigh, and say how romantic it sounded, and the matter would be closed.

"And the woman you were kind to," Iolanthe said. "What did she look like, in your version of the story?"

Cassian regarded her. The firelight caught the silver at his temples and turned it, for an instant, to a kind of tarnished gold.

"She looked like a person who had been asked to be kind," he said, "and had consented to do so, and had not yet been thanked for it."

Iolanthe held his gaze. The clock in the hall struck the hour, and the sound moved through the house like a stone dropped into still water.

"Then she sounds very like me," she said.

"She does," said Cassian. "That is why I thought of her."

The fire settled. The tea grew cold. And in the silence that followed, the house of Delacroix Place, which had waited so long for someone to come home to it, listened, and did not yet decide what to make of the woman who had.

The morning came up grey and close, the kind of English weather that smelled of wet wool and old stone. Fog lay against the windows of Delacroix Place like a length of damp muslin, and the servants moved through the lower rooms with lamps still burning at nine o'clock. Mrs. Havers, who had not slept, presided over the breakfast room with the rigid cheerfulness of a woman holding herself together with starch and habit. The kippers lay on their dish like small, accusing fish. The butter had not come.

In the hall, black crepe had been wound about the newel posts with a thoroughness that suggested either great respect or the suspicion that the late Earl might, at any moment, object to the proceedings. A pair of mourning coaches waited in the drive, their horses breathing plumes of steam into the cold air. The older one stamped, the iron of its shoe ringing sharp against the cobbles.

Cassian came down the stairs in black. The coat had been his father's, or his uncle's, and it did not quite fit across the shoulders; the tailor who had altered it had not, perhaps, understood the new Earl, or had understood him too well and had not tried. Iolanthe, behind him by half a pace, wore the dress she had worn to church the day she had refused the first Earl, and which Mrs. Havers, with a tact that bordered on the miraculous, had caused to be aired and pressed without being asked. The jet beads at her throat clicked faintly as she descended.

In the vestibule of the parish church, the fog had followed them like a dog. It pooled about the font and made the candles gutter. The Delacroix pew, front and to the right, had been opened; the Pemberton pew, across the aisle, had not. Lady Pemberton was not yet arrived. Lord Pemberton stood near the door in his own black, with the air of a man who would rather be anywhere else and had decided to be philosophical about it.

Cassian's brother was there.

He stood by the of his grandfather, in the north aisle, with a woman Iolanthe did not know on one arm and an expression on his face that was not quite grief. He had the Delacroix look: the dark hair, the fine, wasted bones, the mouth that suggested a capacity for charm that had never quite been applied to anything useful. He had come up from Town, it seemed, for the funeral of a father he had quarrelled with for a decade. The prodigal, in mourning, at last.

"Ah," he said, when he saw Cassian. "The new master of the house. I had not expected you to look so well. The Mediterranean must agree with you."

Cassian inclined his head. "Marcus."

"Or perhaps it is the marriage. Congratulations, by the way. I had not sent a card. I am afraid I have been very busy." He glanced at Iolanthe, and his glance lingered. "You are the governess."

"I was," said Iolanthe. "I am now the Countess."

"Ah," he said again. "One of those. A great improvement, no doubt, upon the circumstances."

The woman on his arm laughed, a little, as if at a private joke. Iolanthe did not laugh. She looked at Cassian's brother with the cool, unwinking regard of a woman who had spent years in houses where the mistress was not always treated as the mistress, and who had learned to spot the small, sharp knives that families hid in their pockets.

"You mistake the order of things," she said. "It was not the marriage that improved the circumstances. It was the Countess who improved the marriage."

There was a small silence. The candles guttered. Somewhere in the body of the church, the organ coughed into life, very softly, as if apologising for its presence.

Marcus Delacroix looked at her. He had not expected to be answered, and certainly not by her. The woman on his arm said, "Darling, we ought to sit," in a tone that suggested she had been hoping for several minutes that he would think of it himself.

"In a moment, my dear." He did not look away from Iolanthe. "I had heard you were sharp. I see the reports were not exaggerated."

"They seldom are," said Iolanthe. "In households where the reports are written by the governess, the governess is usually the only one who can read."

Cassian, beside her, made a sound. It was not quite a laugh. It was the sound a man makes when he has been punched unexpectedly in a place that does not hurt, and he is surprised to find that he is not, in fact, angry. He looked at his wife, and the look at him was longer than he intended.

"Marcus," he said, "you will excuse us. We have a duty to perform."

"Your duty," said Marcus, lightly, "has always been so much more pronounced than mine. It was a wonder the old man left it to you at all. I had quite supposed, when the will was read, that he had done it as a kind of penance."

The woman on his arm said, "Marcus, really," in a voice that was beginning to lose its patience.

"In a moment, Louisa."

Iolanthe stepped forward. She did not touch Cassian, but she stood very slightly in front of him, the way a person stands when they mean to be a wall without making a point of it.

"The penance," she said, "is that you came all this way to attend a service for a man you had not spoken to in ten years, and that you are obliged to do it in a pew that is not the principal one. The inheritance is not a punishment. It is a thing that was willed to the man who was here, when the man who was elsewhere was not. If you find that hard to bear, I am sure the pew will give you a great deal of time to think about it."

Marcus looked at her. He had not been answered, in a long time, by anyone who was not paid to answer him. The organ had begun to play in earnest now, something slow and sure, and the verger was beckoning, with his rod, towards the family pew.

"Lady Delacroix," Marcus said, and the form of address was new, and a kind of acknowledgement, "I see we shall have to be careful."

"Yes," said Iolanthe. "You shall."

She turned and walked to the pew, and Cassian followed her, and Mrs. Havers, who had been standing just within the door with a prayer book held very tightly in both hands, let out a breath she had been holding for what appeared to be some minutes.

The service began. The Delacroix pew was very cold. Iolanthe sat with her hands folded, and the jet beads at her throat were still, and Cassian, beside her, did not look at his brother again. He looked, instead, at the stained glass window above the altar, where a Delacroix of some earlier century knelt in armour before an angel who did not look impressed. He thought, briefly, of the woman in Italy who had not yet been thanked. He thought he ought to do something about that, and soon.

The fog, outside, was beginning to lift. The bells of the cracked church began to toll, one at a time, as if unsure of the hour, and then, finding the rhythm, gave themselves up to it. The sound of them moved out over the grey water and the grey fields, and the fishermen, who had not sung, paused in their work, and the women in the cottages set down their brooms, and the village, for a little, stood still.

In the pew, Iolanthe reached, very quietly, for Cassian's hand. He did not look at her. He let her take it, and his fingers, which were cold, closed around hers, and the Countess of Delacroix, who had been a governess, and who had refused an Earl once and accepted another, and who had spoken sharp words in a church to a man who had not expected them, sat very still, and did not let go.

The bells went on. The fog went on lifting. And the house, when they came back to it, waited for them at the gate, with the door already open, and the lamps lit, and the tea, against all expectation, actually hot.