There was a very long silence in the estate room at Renfield. Six in the morning is not early, Your Grace, Tabitha Ren said unevenly. That is a lie, Ambrose replied. Is that a yes? It is a yes, she said, and burst into tears and was extremely angry about it. They were cut, of course.
Not everywhere and not for long, but they were cut. The worst of it came at the county assembly at Michaelmas, 3 weeks before the wedding, when Ambrose brought her into a ballroom full of people who had spent the summer saying the word governess to one another in a particular tone, and the hum went out of the room like air out of a bellows. Lady Breakwell was equal to the occasion. Lady Breakwell had a great deal of presence and forty years of practice. And she looked at Tabitha Ren's plain white gown and her one string of pearls, and she said sweetly, loudly, in the exact hush, Miss Ren, how very brave of you.
Tell me, is it true you're in service? Ambrose felt Tabitha's hand tighten on his arm. He drew breath to destroy the woman, and Tabitha Ren said, Yes, just that, perfectly clear, perfectly calm, into a silent room. I was a governess for six years, she went on at £22 a year, and a clerk to a land agent for four. I saved £311 and I bought a bankrupt farm with a hole in the roof and I have made it pay every year for nine years.
She smiled at Lady Breakwell with what Ambrose could only describe as genuine pleasure. Your husband's steward buys his lime from me, ma'am. He has done for three years. I dare say he has not mentioned it. Men so seldom do.
Somebody somewhere near the card room door laughed out loud. And I am not brave, said Tabitha. It requires no courage whatever to tell the truth about oneself in a room where everybody has already decided what one is. The courage was in the first winter when the roof went and there was no one to ask for help and I stood in four inches of water in my own kitchen at two in the morning and did not go back to being a governess. She inclined her head very slightly.
I hope you will forgive the plain speaking. I was not brought up to it, but I have had to learn. And then she turned to Ambrose and said in an entirely different voice, Your Grace, they are striking up. You promised me a waltz, and I have never danced one in my life, and I intend to be very bad at it in front of everybody. He was so much in love with her that he could not speak.
He danced with her. She was very bad at it. He did not care in the smallest degree, and neither visibly did she. By the end of the evening, there were four women waiting to be presented to her, and Lord Breakwell had come across the room in person to ask her opinion about a bull. They were married in October in the little church at Renfield, with the doors open and the smell of applewood smoke coming across the churchyard from the house. Cecily Vane came to the wedding.