Chapter IV — The Duchess of Rutland

Rutland House, Belgrave Square — October 1879

There are moments in a man's life when the world, having spent many years telling him what he ought to want, finally leaves him alone with the unpleasant discovery that he must decide for himself. For Charles Montclare, Duke of Rutland, that moment arrived on an evening in October when London was hidden beneath a cold rain and the lamps of Belgrave Square burned dimly through the mist. His engagement to Catherine Walters had become the subject of conversation in drawing rooms from Mayfair to Kensington, and the newspapers, with that peculiar mixture of discretion and enthusiasm which belongs to respectable journalism, had managed to say almost everything without appearing to say anything at all. Some called it romantic. Others called it unfortunate. A few, who possessed neither sufficient courage to be honest nor sufficient imagination to be silent, called it amusing. Charles had ceased to care.

He sat alone in the library of Rutland House with the fire burning before him and a letter from his mother upon the table. She had written from London with the restrained severity of a woman who believed that emotional scenes were vulgar but disapproval could be communicated perfectly well upon four pages of expensive stationery. She had reminded him of his responsibilities, the history of the family, the expectations of society and the necessity of thinking beyond personal inclination. She had not once mentioned whether he loved Catherine. That omission, more than anything else, had clarified the matter.

For most of his life Charles had been taught that duty was something which came from behind him. It belonged to his father, his grandfather and the long procession of men whose portraits filled the galleries of Belvoir. Duty meant preserving the land, maintaining the house, paying the servants, protecting the tenants, attending Parliament when necessary, appearing at the proper functions and marrying a woman whose presence would make the family more respectable rather than less. It had never occurred to him that duty might sometimes require the courage to disappoint the dead.

He rose and walked towards the window, where outside, the rain fell steadily upon Belgrave Square.

He thought of Catherine, and of the first time he had seen her upon the stage, when the theatre had seemed suddenly too small to contain her. He had admired her beauty first, as men had admired it for years, but beauty had not been what kept him awake at night. It was the life in her. She possessed something which no portrait could preserve and no sculptor could capture. She laughed when society expected silence. She spoke when it would have been safer to agree. She disliked arrangements made for her by people who believed themselves wiser than she was. She had looked at his title and seen the man beneath it, which was perhaps the most dangerous thing anyone had ever done to him. And he had responded by trying to give her everything: the house, the gardens, the position, and the name. He had mistaken generosity for love. The realisation was humiliating, but it was also liberating.

The following afternoon he went to see her.

Catherine was staying in a modest house in Bloomsbury belonging to an old theatrical acquaintance. It was not a beautiful house, and Charles had never before noticed how little beauty had to do with comfort. The drawing room contained mismatched chairs, several faded prints and a piano which had clearly survived at least one owner who had been unable to play it. There were flowers in a cracked vase upon the mantel and books piled upon almost every available surface. Charles found the room strangely cheerful.

Catherine entered wearing a simple dark dress. For several seconds neither spoke.

Then she smiled.

“You look troubled.”

“I have been thinking.”

“That is usually dangerous.”

“I have discovered that.”

She sat opposite him while Charles remained standing.

“I have been asking you to become part of my world.”

Catherine watched him carefully.

“I know.”

“I thought I was offering you freedom from the difficulties of your life.”

“You were.”

“I was wrong.”

She said nothing.

Charles looked towards the window.

“I thought that if you lived at Belvoir, if you had the position you deserved, if you were my wife, everything which has made your life difficult would disappear.”

“And what would replace it?”

He looked at her.

“My expectations.”

She smiled sadly.

“Yes.”

The admission seemed to cost him more than any declaration of love could have done.

“I cannot promise that my family will accept you immediately. I cannot promise that society will behave kindly. I cannot promise that being Duchess of Rutland will make you happy.”

“I know.”

“I cannot even promise that I shall always understand you.”

At that she looked at him with something approaching tenderness.

“No,” she said. “You cannot.”

Charles crossed the room and stopped before her.

“But I can promise that I will not ask you to become someone else.”

Catherine looked down at her hands. It was not the sort of promise women were usually given in marriage. Women of her position, and women of her lack of position, were generally offered something more practical: security, respectability, comfort, protection, advancement. They were told what their lives would contain, but they were seldom asked what they wished to retain.

She looked up.

“And if I remain myself?”

“Then you will remain yourself.”

“And if your mother dislikes me?”

“She will survive it.”

“And if society laughs?”

“Society has survived worse.”

“And if I refuse to spend every morning arranging flowers in the drawing room?”

“I shall regard it as a personal triumph.”

She laughed. It was the first time that evening that Charles smiled. He took her hand, and this time she did not withdraw it.

They were married in December.

The wedding was not, as some had expected, a disaster, nor was it the triumph which others had feared; it was simply a wedding. There were flowers, carriages, servants, clergy, family jewels and enough solemnity to satisfy even the most determined guardian of tradition. The newspapers reported the event with great interest. Women examined Catherine's dress. Men discussed Charles's decision. Old families pretended not to be curious while being exceedingly curious. A number of people who had once warned Charles against the marriage attended the ceremony and behaved afterwards as though they had personally arranged it. Such is society: it is remarkably forgiving of decisions once it has become impossible to prevent them.

Catherine became the Duchess of Rutland. The title suited her rather better than Charles had expected — not because she changed, but because she did not. She continued to visit the theatre. She continued to read books which offended Charles's mother. She continued to speak honestly at inconvenient moments. She walked in the gardens without a maid when the weather permitted and occasionally disappeared into the maze without informing anyone where she had gone. The household gradually learned that the Duchess preferred breakfast late, disliked unnecessary ceremony and had no intention of becoming ornamental merely because the house contained sufficient rooms in which ornament might be displayed.

There were difficulties, of course there were; no marriage, however fortunate, is exempt from them. Charles sometimes returned from London carrying the habits of his former life with him. He could become distant when troubled, silent when angry and excessively concerned with matters which Catherine considered ridiculous. Catherine could be impatient with conventions which Charles still regarded as necessary. They disagreed about money, servants, guests, politics, the theatre and the proper number of people who ought to be permitted to sit at breakfast.

They also laughed, and this was important.

The marriage did not transform them into perfect versions of themselves; it made them more fully themselves.

In the spring of the following year, Catherine walked through the rose garden at Belvoir and found Charles waiting beside the fountain in the centre of the old maze.

She stopped when she saw him.

“You have found me.”

“I own the maze.”

“That has never helped you before.”

He smiled.

They walked together along the winding path. The hedges were beginning to flower, and beyond them the castle rose against a pale afternoon sky. Catherine looked towards it and then back at Charles.

“Do you still imagine me there?”

“Where?”

“In the house.”

Charles considered the question. Once, he would have answered immediately. He would have described the drawing room, the library, the gardens and the long dining table. He would have imagined her dressed in the colours of Rutland, receiving guests, standing beside him upon the terrace and becoming so completely a part of the house that he could no longer imagine one without the other.

Now he shook his head.

“No.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Never?”

“I imagine you wherever you happen to be.”

She smiled.

“That is a better answer.”

They continued walking. The path turned and the castle disappeared behind the hedges. Charles took her hand.

There had been a time when he had believed beauty was something which could be preserved, believing that houses, estates, paintings, titles, and names existed for the purpose of defeating change, and that if a thing was sufficiently beautiful, sufficiently valuable, and sufficiently carefully protected, it might remain exactly as it was. Yet he had been wrong: nothing remained unchanged — not houses, not families, not titles, and least of all love.

The beauty he had first admired in Catherine had never belonged to him. It had existed independently of him, as the light existed independently of the windows through which it entered the house. His mistake had been to believe that loving something gave him the right to shape it. Catherine had taught him otherwise.

They reached the centre of the maze. The old fountain was running quietly beneath the summer sky.

Catherine looked at him.

“Do you remember what I said here?”

“I remember everything you say.”

“That cannot possibly be true.”

“It is safer to claim that it is.”

She laughed. Then she rested her head lightly against his shoulder.

Beyond the maze, the bells of the castle chapel began to ring. The sound travelled across the gardens, over the terraces and through the open windows of the house where generations of Montclares had lived, married, quarrelled, suffered and died beneath portraits which had recorded their faces far more faithfully than their lives.

Charles looked towards the castle. For the first time, he did not see it as something which demanded to be preserved; he saw it as a place in which people might live, and that was enough.

The Duke and Duchess of Rutland remained in the garden until the evening came. And when they finally returned to the house, Catherine entered first and Charles followed. Neither of them knew what the future would bring, and for once, neither of them required it to be beautiful in advance.