His grandmother, watching, purred like a cat over cream, and Winston told himself the daager was being deceived along with everyone else, and did not examine too closely the growing suspicion that he was the one deceived, and that the person deceiving him was himself.
Sidwell, for her part, threw herself into the fraud with a relish he found dangerously endearing. She learned the house. Within a week she knew the names of every servant from the butler to the boy who trapped rats in the grainery, and she used them, and the staff of Fossliffe who had served a grave gray master for 11 years and grown grave and gray themselves began under her to thaw. He heard laughter in the kitchen passages for the first time in memory, he came upon a housemaid singing. He found his own dark steward, Mr. Corrant, explaining the drainage of the lower meadows to Sidwell with an animation Winston had not known the man possessed because she had asked and had actually wished to know and had remembered the answer.
"You are managing my house," he accused her over the chessboard one evening. They had fallen into the habit of chess after dinner, the doaga dozing by the fire, Mr. Glennville and Prudence at cards across the room. It was all very domestic. It was all a performance. It felt like neither.
"I am doing no such thing." She took his bishop without appearing to look at the board. "I am learning it. There is a difference. When I go, you shall have to run it yourself again. And I want it in good order for you. That is all. A house should not be afraid of its master. Yours is, was. It is getting better." She glanced up at him and something flickered behind her eyes at her own words, 'when I go', and was gone. "Your move and do stop scowling at the board as though it has insulted your mother. You are going to lose either way. You may as well lose with grace."
He was going to lose. He lost most evenings. He had discovered that he did not much mind.
There was besides the matter of her father, which Winston had expected to find a burden, and found instead a strange unlooked for gladness. Mr. Glennville was a sharp, dry, well-read old man, wasting slowly in a failing body, and he had, in his years of illness, been talked over and talked down to and pitied by a great many people, and truly spoken with by almost none. Winston took to sitting with him of an evening. He did not know at first why he did it, told himself it was courtesy, was part of the performance, was owed, but the old man played a wicked hand of piquet, and had opinions about the drainage of Marshland and the folly of the last three governments, and he did not care in the least that Winston was a duke, and treated him, in fact, with exactly the tart affectionate rudeness he treated his daughters. And Winston, who had not had a father to speak of since he was seven and 20, found the room where the old man sat had become, without his noticing, the warmest in the house.
"You are not the ogre they paint you," Mr. Glennville observed one night, dealing the cards with his ruined hands. "You're only a man who has been left too much alone with too much to guard. I know the look. I had it myself after my wife died, until Sidwell shamed me out of it. She has a gift for that. Shaming the grief out of a man without his noticing it has gone." He fixed Winston with a bright shrewd eye. "You will mind how you go with her, your grace. Bargain or no bargain. I am ill, not blind."
And he had said no more and won the hand and left Winston sitting up a long while afterward with the cards in his hand and the old man's words going round in him like a bell. And there was Prudence, the sister, blossoming under the dwigger's fierce patronage, from a whispering frightened girl into a young woman with color in her cheeks and suitors already circling. And there was the daaja herself, watching all of it from her chair by the fire with her small, terrible, satisfied smile. And there was the house warming week by week, the fires drawing better, the passages full of the small living sounds of a place that is lived in rather than merely maintained.
Winston moved through it all like a man walking in a country he had thought long since burned, astonished at every turn to find it green. He was going to lose. He lost most evenings. He had discovered that he did not much mind, not the chess and not, he was beginning to fear, anything else.
It was in the third week that the first shadow fell across the pleasant time and it fell, as shadows so often did in that country, in the shape of a very handsome woman in a very fine carriage. Miss Ara vain came to call at Fosscliffe with her mother, and she came ostensibly to offer her felicitations to the happy couple, and she offered them with a smile so sweet and so sharp that Winston felt Sidwell stiffen at his side the moment the girl entered the room.
"Miss Glennville," Aramea said, taking both of Sidwell's hands in a warm clasp that did not reach her eyes. "How I have longed to meet you properly. It was all such a whirl at Harwick, was it not? One hardly saw. You must tell me everything about yourself. I do so want us to be friends. I have known dear Winston since we were quite small. You understand our families are very old friends, and I feel almost a sister's interest in whoever should finally win him." The smile sharpened by a degree. "It has been such a long wait for so many of us. You cannot imagine the disappointment in half the drawing rooms of the county. But then you are so wonderfully unexpected. However did you manage it? One is dying to know your secret."
It was beautifully done. Every word of it was a blade wrapped in silk, the reminder of old intimacy. The hint that Sidwell was an interloper who had somehow cheated better women of their due. The sly little dig at 'manage it', as though there had been some trick, some scheme, some grasping cleverness in a portionless girl's capture of a duke. Winston opened his mouth to freeze the woman where she stood in the flat gray voice that had ended a hundred such conversations before they began. He did not get the chance. Sidwell got there first.
"Do you know?" Sidwell said warmly, returning the clasp of Araminta's hands with every appearance of delight. "I have wondered that myself. I have no secret at all. I promise you I am the last person in England anyone would have picked, and no one is more astonished than I. I think it must simply be that I laughed at him." She turned a fond, mischievous look up at Winston that struck him unprepared, somewhere beneath the ribs. "No one had laughed at him in years, you see. Everyone was so busy being impressed. I dare say the poor man was starved half to death for someone who would tell him when he was being ridiculous. It is not a secret you could copy, Miss Vane. One either finds a man absurd or one does not, and I am afraid I find him terribly absurd and there is an end of it. But how kind of you to want to be friends. We shall be glad of you. Foss is so very quiet. And Winston tells me you have known each other since you were small. You must come often and tell me all the mortifying things he did as a boy. I collect them."