Uncrowned Queen

Chapter 18

Victoria arrived at half past two in the manner of a woman who had spent the carriage ride preparing for two possible versions of this meeting — confrontation and negotiation — and had equipped herself thoroughly for both.

She had not, I noted with some professional appreciation, prepared for a third.

I received her in the blue sitting room. Not the state apartments, which would have signalled formality. Not my private study, which would have suggested intimacy. The blue sitting room occupied a pleasant middle ground — comfortable enough to imply welcome, formal enough to imply that the welcome had its conditions.

I had arranged for excellent tea. And biscuits. The biscuits were, in their own quiet way, rather an important component of the strategy.

"Victoria," I said warmly, as she settled into the chair across from me. "How kind of you to come."

"Your Highness sent a summons," she said, which was accurate and only marginally pointed.

"A request," I said pleasantly. "I should never presume to summon a duchess. Tea?"

She accepted. Victoria had accepted tea in every social situation I had ever observed her in, regardless of the circumstances — I had known this since we were girls, and had been relying on it since approximately the moment I decided what this afternoon would look like.

She was beautifully dressed. Victoria had always understood the particular language of being beautifully dressed — the way a well-chosen gown communicated intention as clearly as a spoken sentence, with rather more deniability. Today's communicated: I am here as an equal and I am prepared to negotiate from that position.

This told me she had concluded, correctly, that the power arrangement between us was not what it had been.

This conclusion was approximately eight months overdue. I was not, however, in any great hurry to point that out. Some satisfactions are considerably improved by the patience required to reach them.

She looked well. One had to acknowledge this. Whatever else Victoria Lancaster had done and continued to do, she looked remarkably well whilst doing it.

She had always possessed the particular quality of appearing precisely as she intended to appear, which was a talent I had once admired without understanding its operational dimensions, and now understood completely, and would perhaps have continued to admire had it not been, on several important occasions, deployed against me.

"The season has been rather demanding," I said, pouring. "I trust you and Edward are settled at Beaumont."

"Quite settled." Her hands rested composedly in her lap. She was watching me with the quality she had always had — patient, attentive, cataloguing. I had once mistaken this for genuine interest. I now understood it for what it was: the habit of a woman who treats every social exchange as a source of intelligence. "The east wing has been entirely refurbished. Edward is very pleased."

"How gratifying for him," I said. "And the child? The physician's visits have been satisfactory?"

A pause. Fractional. Invisible to anyone not specifically watching for it. I was specifically watching for it.

"Entirely," she said.

"Excellent." I set down the teapot with the unhurried ease of a woman who has nowhere more pressing to be for the remainder of the afternoon. "The crown has a standing interest, as I am certain you know, in the welfare of children born to noble houses. Various administrative matters — records, documentation — have been receiving rather thorough attention of late. One does wish to ensure everything is properly in order."

Victoria's eyes moved to the papers on the desk.

There were three documents. I had positioned them with some care — close enough to be visible, angled sufficiently to be readable in outline, not so prominently displayed as to constitute a declaration. An invitation to notice, rather than a demand to address.

She noticed.

She returned her gaze to me with the composure of a woman trained since birth to receive difficult information in drawing rooms without permitting her face to comment on it. "The crown's administrative interests are always of the highest importance," she said.

"Indeed they are." I offered the biscuits.

She declined.

Victoria, I should note, had never in her life declined a biscuit. Not in twenty-two years of my direct acquaintance, and not, I suspected, in the years preceding my acquaintance either. Victoria and biscuits had an understanding.

The fact that she declined them now told me rather a great deal about her present interior conditions.

"One is simply pleased," I said, returning the plate to the table with serene unconcern, "that record-keeping is comprehensive. Accuracy matters so enormously in these things. Historical accuracy, particularly."

"Of course," she said.

We continued in this pleasant manner for a further quarter-hour. I enquired about the season and she answered beautifully. She enquired, with the careful indirection of a woman who has identified a topic she wishes to approach obliquely, about the Ashworth submission, and I mentioned it with the tranquil brevity of a woman who finds it mildly interesting rather than existentially significant.

She enquired about the palace gardens. I enquired about the comparative merits of south-facing nursery rooms.

She answered that question with the particular quality of a woman being asked about a subject she would prefer not to discuss in her present company, which was, in its way, rather informative.

Victoria was magnificent throughout. She did not flinch. She did not reach for the subject. She did not attempt to address, dismiss, or pre-empt anything I had not said. She simply sat in her beautiful dress with her composed hands and her cataloguing eyes, conducting what appeared to be an entirely agreeable social call.

She was, I considered, rather good. She had always been rather good.

The difficulty, for Victoria, was that I had been rather good too, for rather longer, in rather more adverse circumstances, and was no longer the woman she had been good at.

She rose to take her leave with the excellent manners of a woman concluding a pleasant social call.

At the door, she paused.

"You are not going to address those today," she said, glancing once at the desk with the specific quality of a woman who has spent forty minutes carefully not looking at something and has decided to acknowledge the effort.

"Not today," I said pleasantly.

She held my gaze for a moment — two women who had shared a household and a childhood and rather a great deal of history that could not be neatly summarised at a doorway — and then she left.

The door closed.

I sat for a moment in the particular quiet of a room from which something has just departed. Not triumph. Something quieter — the specific satisfaction of a first move that has landed precisely where one intended.

Several minutes later, the door opened.

Damian entered in the manner of a man who had been in the corridor for no specified reason and had concluded that sufficient time had now elapsed. He looked at me. I looked at him.

"She has gone," I said. "You may come in."

He was making, I observed, a visible effort to refrain from saying something.

"You were right about the approach," I said. This is not a sentence I produce easily, or frequently, and it is therefore rather more effective on the rare occasions it appears.

He received it with complete equanimity and without any of the additional commentary that had been available to him. "She took the biscuit question quite seriously," I said.

"Did she decline?"

"She did. For the first time in twenty-two years of my acquaintance."

He absorbed this. "Then it went rather well."

"Rather better than well," I said. "She left without the confrontation she came armed for, which is considerably more unsettling for her than losing one would have been. Uncertainty is a remarkably effective instrument. I intend to keep her in it for some time yet."

"I shall make a note," he said drily.

"I thought so," I said, and returned to the correspondence, and did not look at the very slight quality of amusement that had settled at the corner of his mouth, because one cannot address everything in a single afternoon, and I had already addressed rather a considerable amount today.