Uncrowned Queen

Chapter 16

I discovered, in the fortnight following the Ashworth submission, that Damian had opinions about correspondence.

Not merely the content — that, I might have accepted with some equanimity, given that content fell broadly within an adviser's legitimate purview. He had opinions about the phrasing.

The precise arrangement of clauses. The calibration of warmth appropriate to Lord Cavenham versus the calibration appropriate to Lord Fenwick, which were, he had apparently concluded, materially different warmths requiring separate and considered treatment.

I discovered this on a Thursday morning when I found that three letters I had composed the previous evening had been amended.

Not rewritten. Amended — with the light, decisive hand of a man who considers revision a courtesy rather than a transgression. The letters were, upon close examination, rather better than when I had left them.

I sat with this for a moment. Not because I required time to form an opinion — the opinion formed immediately and without effort — but because the quality of it surprised me. Not anger, precisely. Something more complicated.

The letters were better. He was right that they were better. And I resented, with a clarity that I found rather bracing, that the most irritating thing about the entire situation was that his judgement was demonstrably sound, because it removed the simplest available objection and left me with only the principle.

The principle, I decided, would have to be sufficient.

He was at his desk when I brought the letters to him and set them down between us.

"You have amended my correspondence," I said.

He set down his pen. "I have improved your correspondence."

He said it with the composure of a man who has been expecting this conversation for three days and has therefore had time to prepare his position. I found this, on reflection, rather more aggravating than if he had been caught off guard.

"You improved it without being asked."

"Whether improvement constitutes amendment," he said, with the patient tone of a man presenting a philosophical distinction he considers genuinely relevant, "depends rather on whether the outcome was beneficial."

"Whether improvement constitutes amendment," I returned, "depends rather on whether anyone solicited your opinion in the first place."

He considered this — genuinely considered it, without the fractional delay that indicates a man assembling a rebuttal rather than listening to an argument. I had noticed this quality in him early and found it, depending on the morning, either admirable or extremely aggravating. This was not, it must be said, an admirable morning.

"A valid distinction," he said.

"I thought so."

"The letters were, however—" He paused, apparently reconsidering the sentence he had been about to produce. "Reasonably well-constructed."

"They were mine," I said. "The quality is beside the point. The point is that they were my letters, and the decision to revise them was not yours to make — however sound your judgement in the making of it."

Another pause. Not uncomfortable — our pauses had ceased to be uncomfortable around the third week, a development I had noted and filed. "I should have asked," he said.

"Yes," I said. "You should have."

He accepted this without qualification, returned to his desk, and I returned to mine. We continued the morning in the manner of two people who have reached a small, clear understanding and are proceeding on its basis. I was, I noted with moderate suspicion, becoming rather accustomed to that particular quality of proceeding.

I began, from that week forward, making decisions without informing him first.

Small ones initially. Then progressively larger, each executed with the deliberateness of a woman establishing a principle and intending it to be clearly understood. They went well — every one of them, without exception, which was satisfying and faintly infuriating in equal measure.

Satisfying because they were mine and they succeeded. Infuriating because their success produced a visible recalibration in the council that was, if examined closely, rather insulting. They had expected, apparently, that without Damian's hand in the arrangements, the outcomes would suffer.

They had not prepared adequately for the alternative, and I found this quietly gratifying in a way I would not have described aloud — because describing it aloud would have required acknowledging how thoroughly their low expectations had been operating inside my own head without my having noticed.

Which was, upon examination, considerably more troubling than the council's opinion of me. One expects the council to underestimate. One does not particularly enjoy discovering that one has been assisting them in doing so.

Damian said nothing about any of it. He offered two observations I had not considered, did not suggest the absence of his prior involvement had been a problem, and when I glanced at him on the second afternoon to see whether he was going to say something, he simply looked up from his document and said: "The Calder letter requires attention before Thursday." He was, I was finding, rather effective at not saying things.

The winter reception arrived three days later with the efficient inevitability of social obligations that do not consult one's preferences.

Lord Elliston had located me at the east window — which had apparently become, in the court's collective understanding, the location at which the queen was available for agricultural enquiry — and was presenting his views on drainage yields with the enthusiasm of a man whose favourite subject has finally received the audience it deserves.

"The challenge," he was saying, "is the western approach. The gradient, you understand—"

"Entirely," I said.

"—presents rather a different set of conditions than the eastern fields. Remarkable differential, actually. Quite remarkable."

"One imagines so," I said, and became aware, at precisely that moment, of Damian across the room.

He was in conversation with Lady Harwick and her companion. Lady Harwick was saying something. Her companion laughed. And then Damian laughed — low, brief, entirely unguarded, the laugh of a man who has forgotten for a moment that there is any audience beyond the immediate conversation.

I had heard him produce polite laughter on perhaps a dozen occasions. This was not that variety.

This was the other one — the one that meant something had actually struck him as funny — and the difference was, I catalogued it with the peripheral thoroughness of a woman trying not to look directly at a thing, rather more significant to me than I had previously acknowledged or was currently in any position to address.

He turned his head and caught my eye across the room.

Two seconds, perhaps three. Long enough for him to register that I had been looking, and for me to register that he had registered it, and for both of us to arrive at the same small and moderately inconvenient conclusion.

Something shifted in his expression — not visibly, but present, the infinitesimal adjustment of a man who has received information he intends to file and return to presently.

Then he returned to Lady Harwick.

I returned to Lord Elliston. "The gradient," I said. "Quite."

Lord Elliston appeared gratified. I heard none of whatever followed, which was becoming, I reflected, a reliable pattern where Lord Elliston was concerned.

The category of things I was not addressing had grown rather unwieldy — the correspondence, the decisions, the laugh, the two seconds across a crowded room, and whatever those two seconds had contained.

It was, in aggregate, the sort of inventory that would eventually demand examination rather than continued deferral, and would choose its own moment for doing so, entirely without reference to my schedule or my preferences in the matter.

I took a sip of something and watched Lord Elliston locate his next conversational quarry with the relief of a man who has discharged a social obligation and may now stand at ease.

He had, I would give him, very good posture.