"Adrien, may I say a thing you won't like?"
"You always do."
"I'm anxious about October." She turned her glass slowly. "Ashkam will be there and Rutland and the whole court. And Isabelle." A soft apologetic look across the table. "Isabelle has never been presented. It isn't her fault, but they will ask who she was, and someone will say her father was a land agent, and by Thursday it will be all over London that Haroffield married his steward's girl to pay the interest."
Silence. "Nobody would say that," Adrienne said.
"Darling," Cassandra said gently, "they have been saying it for three years."
And there the hook set cleanly in the softest part of him, not hatred of his wife, shame at himself. She had found the wound, pressed it with one finger, and called it concern.
The daager laid down her knife. "She is right, Adrien. You will be received. Isabelle will be looked at. There is a difference and it will be a cruel difference and it will be cruel to her most of all."
Isabel sat very still at the foot of the table and let them arrange her. Then she said quietly, "I should like to go."
Three faces turned startled, not by the request, but by the fact that she had spoken.
"I have a reason."
"What reason?" said Adrien.
She looked at him a long moment. Later he would spend a great deal of time on that look, hunting through it for the door he had failed to walk through. "If you ask me properly," she said, "I'll tell you."
He did not ask. He said, "We'll discuss it another time." And rang for the port. And the moment went into the ground like water into sand.
Two things happened in September that nobody in that house noticed. The first was that a second card arrived from St. James's, smaller, plainer, sealed in green wax, addressed to Mrs. I. Gray of Harrowfield. Cassandra collected the post that morning, turned it over, saw a tradesman's name, and set it aside with the bills for the steward. Isabelle found it that evening in the basket by the estate room door. She read it standing up twice. Then she folded it into her purse, sat down at her father's desk, and wrote three letters. The first was to Mr. Josiah Ren in London. The second was to her solicitors in Lincoln regarding the Wayburn House and the disposition of certain funds. The third, she wrote slowly, sealed, and did not send. It was addressed to her husband, and it would sit in a drawer for a very long time.
The second was that Adrien rode out to Barrow Corner alone one morning, watched the wind engine turn over 6,000 acres of good black earth, and asked the drainage man how it came to be built.
"Her grace had it up, sir. Her own money. Her father's pattern."
"Her own money." Adrienne repeated.
"Aye, sir," the man wiped his hands. "Beg pardon, but I'd not have thought a lady could set a fall like that. She stood in the cut with us, the whole of one November."
He rode home the long way. That evening, he came to her sitting room, the small one over the stable arch, which she had taken because nobody else wanted it, and stood in the doorway. "Isabelle." She looked up from the accounts. He had come to say something. If he had said it, this would be a different story with a smaller ending. But she sat under a lamp with mud on her half boots and a pen in her hand, looking so entirely unlike everything he had been raised to want and so entirely like everything he actually needed that the shame came up in him like a tide and he could not speak through it.
"The carriage is ordered for the 11th," he said, "for London."
"I know."
"My mother thinks... that is... it has been suggested that at the banquet itself it might be simpler if you were not presented. To spare you."