The pen did not stop moving. "Do you agree with that?" she asked.
"I think it would be easier."
"For whom?" He didn't answer.
She wrote a figure at the bottom of the column and underlined it and set the pen down. "Very well," she said, "I'll come to London. I won't ask you to present me."
He felt relief. And then immediately underneath it, something cold that he could not name. "Isabel, I hope you know that I—"
"Good night, Adrien," she said.
And now we return to St. James's palace and 400 candles and a woman standing alone by the windows with a card in her hand. The presentations had been running 20 minutes. The chamberlain worked down his list. The great families went forward two by two into the light at the end of the gallery, and the murmur of the room rose and fell like tide.
Cassandra Vain was in excellent spirits. She had watched Adrienne walk forward alone. She had watched the Chamberlain's pen cross out her line. She thought, and you must allow her this, it was not an unreasonable thought, that she was watching the end of a marriage. 3 years of interest paid off. A wife quietly retired to Lincolnshire with a house and an allowance and in 18 months a Duchess of Harfield who knew how to enter a room. She was so certain of it that she said so not loudly. She leaned toward the daager behind her fan and said in the fond, amused, carrying voice of a woman who has never once in her life been overheard by anyone who mattered. "Poor creature. He couldn't even bring himself to say her name. One doesn't present a steward's daughter to a king. One presents the drainage bill."
Two things happened at once. The daager laughed and the room went quiet. It was not because of Cassandra. That was the terrible accident of it. The room went quiet because up at the dais the gray-haired man in the plain black coat had reached the king's chair and bent and said something in the royal ear and the king had lifted his hand and the chamberlain had stopped midname.
400 people fell silent at the precise moment Lady Cassandra Vain finished her sentence. Her voice went down that gallery like a dropped glass. The king turned his head. He was not a young man and not a well one, but he had the Hanoverian trick of stillness, and he used it now. He looked down the gallery, past the chamberlain, past the Duke of Harfield, standing alone at the foot of the dais with his hat in his hand, and he said in a voice pitched to carry, "Before we go further, I am told that Gray of Harfield is in this room." Nobody moved. "Gray," the king said again, "I. Gray of Harfield, in Lincolnshire."
Mr. Josiah Ren stepped forward, cleared his throat, and said the words that ended the evening. "Your Majesty, the author of the Fen report, is her grace, the Duchess of Harrowfield."
Imagine the sound 400 people make when they turn their heads at once. It is not a gasp. It is a soft, enormous rustle, like a field of wheat when the wind changes. Isabelle Fenwick stepped away from the window. She walked up the gallery in her plain gray silk and her mother's small pearls. She did not hurry. She did not look at her husband as she passed him. The crowd opened in front of her the way water opens in front of a hull.
"Gray of Harowfield," said the chamberlain, and his pen was nowhere, and his list was useless. And he said it anyway. "Her grace, the Duchess of Harrowfield."
She sank into the deepest curtsy of her life.
"Rise," said the king. "Rise, madam! Good God!" she rose. "Three winters ago," said the king, "This kingdom was hungry, and clever men in this city told me nothing could be done. Then Ren put a paper in my hand about 6,000 acres of Lincolnshire fen that came in dry in the worst harvest in living memory. Catch drains and a wind engine of a pattern invented by a land agent in Norfolk." He leaned forward. "I have had that pattern put in at Windsor. It goes in on the crown lands at Deeping this spring. 11 parishes will eat this winter because of a paper signed I. Gray. I have wanted for three years to shake that man's hand," said the king, "and I find he is not a man at all."
Someone began to applaud, and then the whole gallery did, and it went on some time, and Isabelle stood in the middle of it with her hands folded and her eyes absolutely dry. When it died, the king finished it.
"I am told you are married, madam, to a duke, no less." He looked mildly about him. "Which of these gentlemen is your husband? Present him to me."
And there it was, the whole gallery turned slowly to the Duke of Harowfield, standing 8 ft away, with his hat crushed in his hand, and no color whatever in his face. Isabelle looked at her husband a long moment. Then she turned back to the king and said quite gently without a trace of triumph. "I'm afraid I can't, your majesty. I haven't been introduced this evening."
The king of England looked at her. Then he looked at Adrienne Fenwick. Then he laughed, one short, disbelieving bark of a laugh, and the gallery, taking its permission, laughed with him. 400 people, some behind their hands, most not. And that was how the ninth Duke of Harfield learned the price of a sentence.
She left before supper. She did not storm out. She thanked the chamberlain, spoke a quarter of an hour with Mr. Ren about the fall of ground at Deeping, and accepted an invitation to attend the board on the 14th. Then she asked for the Harowfield carriage, and rode to a house in Half Moon Street she had taken in her own name 6 weeks before, and which nobody in her husband's family knew existed.
Adrienne found the address 3 days later. He came at 8:00 and was told her Grace was not at home. He came at noon. He came at 6:00. At 6:00 she saw him. He stood in her hired drawing room and did not sit down.
"I've come to apologize."