"I am going to Salisbury," she said, "on Tuesday, if the roads permit. I intend to call upon Mrs. Bennett."
Edmund stared at her.
"I don't approve," Lavinia said. "I want that understood. I think it unwise, and I think it will be hard on her, and on you, and on the child. I have not changed my opinion of the world. But if the world is to be told, it shall be told by me, from my own carriage, in my own voice, in Salisbury Close in broad daylight. They will say a great many things about Miss Bennett. They shall not be able to say that her husband's mother would not receive her." She lifted her chin. "I left one letter unopened. I will not do it twice."
He did not embrace her; they were not a family that embraced. But he crossed the room and took her gloved hand, and held it, and she let him.
X.
He came to St. Ann Street in January, and in February, and in March, and he sat in Mrs. Bennett's small parlour with the smoking chimney and was lectured on the Corn Laws by Kit, who had opinions. He brought Rose twice. On the second visit Rose climbed the cathedral tower as far as the vergers would allow, and won at spillikins, and told Mrs. Bennett in confidence that her Papa now read to her every night, though he did the voices very badly.
Hester did not make it easy for him. She had promised herself she would not. She quarrelled with him about Rose's French, and once, memorably, about whether a duke ought to walk the Close in boots that cost more than the dean's stipend. She showed him her temper and her pride and her wrongness, all of it, as she had warned him she would. He stayed. He did not always agree with her. He did not always behave well. But he stayed, and he came back, and he kept his word when he was out of the room.
The Dowager came once. She sat bolt upright on Mrs. Bennett's best chair for exactly half an hour, and spoke of the weather and the cathedral and the price of coals, and at the end of it took Mrs. Bennett's hand and said, "Your daughter refused two hundred pounds from me, ma'am. I have not yet forgiven her for it. I expect I shall, in time." Then she went out to her carriage with every curtain in the Close twitching, and the Close talked of nothing else for a month, which, Hester realised afterwards, was precisely what she had intended.
In April, Hester walked to the counting-house of Messrs. Gale and Penruddock with twenty pounds in her reticule, the first of the bank's new instalments, and paid it across the counter with her own hand, and Mr. Penruddock wrote received with thanks in the ledger and bowed to her. That evening, when the Duke of Ashcombe asked her a question in her mother's parlour, with Kit banished to the kitchen and her mother pretending to be deaf in the next room, she found she was entirely free to say no to him.
She said yes.
They were married at Salisbury at midsummer, very quietly, by the dean, with the Dowager in the front pew in a gown of dark grey that was, the Close agreed, very nearly lavender.
It was September before they came home to Ashcombe for good, and on the first bright morning Hester climbed the stairs to the nursery out of habit, and found that the room had changed.
The light was the same, laid across the floorboards in a dozen bright panes. The rocking horse was there, and the books, and the long curtains with their birds and briars. But on the wall above the window seat, where the sun could reach it, there now hung a portrait of a laughing dark-haired woman in a crimson and gold shawl, and beneath it, in a frame Rose had chosen herself, a page of pressed rosebuds and a sloping line of ink: For R., from her garden.