Grace Made Visible

(Fiona)

The good cups were out, because Fiona always had the good cups out; one did not economise on the people one loved, and one did not, in any case, let the second-best service be seen by Sidonie, who would say nothing whatever and notice everything. The afternoon had arranged itself beautifully. The light came in long and gold across the good rugs; the cakes had turned out; the girls — she still called them the girls, though the youngest of them was thirty-six — were settling into the chairs they always took, in the order they always took them, the way water finds its level in a vessel it has known for thirty years.

It was the hour they always met, the gentle hour: late enough that the morning’s business was done, early enough that the evening’s had not begun, the slack tide of the afternoon when the houses ran themselves and a lady’s time was, briefly, her own. Out across the city, below the level of any actual thought, the household people would be at the school gates by now, gathering up the children — Marra fetching Fiona’s three, and everyone’s someone fetching everyone else’s — walking them home through the long light so that their mothers might have precisely this: the cups, the cakes, the company, the hour. Fiona did not think of it. There was no reason to think of it. It was simply how the afternoon was made, the way a stage is made ready by people one does not see, so that the thing in the light can happen.

Five of them today, with Fiona six — they were never all there at once; that was rather the point of a thing with no name, no register, and no rule about who came. Honor had sent her regrets, which Fiona privately thought just as well: Honor in full caution could flatten an afternoon like this, and this was an afternoon that wanted to soar. So it was the lighter set. Amma in the good chair by the window, where she always wept if anyone wept; Bryony already upright and bright-eyed, plainly carrying news she had decided was important; Carys spread across the better part of a sofa with the first cake already gone; Sidonie arranged rather than seated, the way only the royally-adjacent can arrange themselves; and Perdita in the corner with her tea going cold, watching them all the way she did — which, with Perdita, meant nothing yet. She always came to it late, and from underneath.

They did the King first, because one always did the King first; it was a kind of grace said before the meal. Sidonie had it freshest, as Sidonie had everything freshest — the back was worse, much worse, he could barely sit his own council; and the new healer, the southern man they had all been so high on at midwinter, had been sent away in disgrace. Something about a poultice; something about a promise made and not kept. Sidonie was vague in the delicious way that meant she knew exactly and would not stoop to the particulars. So now they were all casting about again — was there anyone? — and the names went round: the bone-setter the Duke swore by, the old woman in the hills the stories were about, the foreigner, always the foreigner, there was always supposed to be a foreigner who could mend a king’s back. Amma said wasn’t it sad, an old man in such pain, and meant it; and Bryony said the realm could hardly be run from a sick-bed, and meant that; and both were true, and neither helped, and the names went round once more.

From the King it was the shortest of steps to the prince, as it always was — the failing centre and the unready edge, the two ends of every conversation’s worry. And here Sidonie had a thing that made even Carys set her cake down. The prince had a new one. A new — companion; Sidonie gave the word a quarter-second of air that did the work a coarser woman would have spent a whole sentence on. And this one, she let it land, was a slave.

The small struck note of indrawn breath went round the circle. A slave. Not a freed girl, not some merchant’s pretty daughter reaching above herself, not even an actress — a slave, squired openly, taken about, seated at things, as though there were no difference at all. Carys laughed her low laugh and said you had to hand it to the boy for consistency; he’d worked clean through the ranks and out the bottom. Bryony said it was a scandal and a waste. Amma said the poor child — meaning the slave — and was looked at, and subsided. And the general feeling settled over the room like a shared shawl: that it was past time. Past time he gave up this endless squiring up and down the whole length of the world and took an appropriate one. A suitable girl. A proper match. Some well-brought-up daughter—

—though not, Fiona noticed, anyone moving to offer her own. The appropriate girl was always, very firmly, someone else’s. One wished the prince a sensible marriage the way one wished fine weather on a wedding that was not one’s own: warmly, and from a safe distance, and with no intention on earth of lending one’s own roof to the experiment.

And then — because an afternoon has its courses, and one does not serve the richest dish first — Carys produced the thing she had plainly been sitting on since she arrived; she had been very nearly trembling with it under the cake. Lady Roskelly. And her own husband’s commander — Tarn, the cavalry man — the two of them, together, together together, caught more or less by more or less everyone at the one thing nobody is ever to be caught at.