After the Duke of Calendula has gone, the Duchess of Linden sinks into the sofa with a silk handkerchief crushed in her hand, and cannot hold the sobbing down. The thin shawl over her shaking shoulders takes the tears as they fall.
Sunlight comes through the gap in the heavy curtains in a thin thread. The air in the room is silent and damp with weeping, and what is left of the incense drifts up from the burner and comes apart.
[That boy…… how did he become so stupid……] (Duchess of Linden)
Her voice is scraped raw, like an instrument coming to pieces.
The elder son had the details from the butler the moment he came home, and he kneels quietly beside her.
[Mother……] (his elder brother)
He means to say something to comfort her, and nothing comes out properly. He cannot understand what his brother has done either.
[It is over…… This engagement was the only thing that could restore any authority to this family, and now even His Grace has given up on him.] (D)
The tears come over and she goes down where she sits. Beside her, her elder son holds his head in his hands over things he can hardly credit his brother with saying.
[Not content with treating his betrothed as nothing, he tells her father to his face that he never wanted the engagement…… Has he lost his mind? He was never that sort of man——] (B)
The Leonardo he knew was nothing of the kind. If anything he was able; his bearing as a gentleman was faultless. How he has fallen this far — to the bottom of the class as a man and as a person both — is beyond working out.
[Mother. In that case, let us strike Leonardo from the family at once, adopt one of our relatives, and put him in as the betrothed instead.] (B)
Better to adopt someone else quickly and make him Chloe’s new betrothed than to go on expecting anything of a brother who has done this much. That is what he proposes. His mother shakes her head weakly.
[……There is nothing in it for them. Not at that price. And would you want to be engaged to a blood relative of a man who has done all this?] (D)
He cannot nod to that. There is nothing to be gained by House Calendula in keeping a tie to House Linden at such a cost. A decent son from any other house would serve them far better.
‘How on earth did it come to this?’
When the engagement was made there was nothing to worry about, no cause for concern. He had actually trusted his brother to treasure the girl. That Leonardo would treat his betrothed as nothing was not something he had ever thought to imagine.
[Had I known he was this sort of man, I would never have let the engagement happen……] (B)
He says it half under his breath. His mother wipes her eyes and answers.
[……It must be that I raised him badly. I did not intend to spoil him, and I spoilt him. Otherwise there is no way he would have grown into a child so senseless and so childish……] (D)
[No! That is not so. You taught my brother and me both, strictly, what a nobleman’s obligations are and what pride means——] (B)
She never favoured one son over the other, never indulged either of them for nothing, and she was strict about what the nobility owes. And Leonardo was everything a nobleman’s son should be. Well-mannered. Clever. And now he behaves as though he set his intelligence down somewhere and forgot where. He was never a man who said and did stupid things.
‘Something must have changed him. There is no other explanation. And…… I have felt this before, somewhere.’
Someone he had thought perfectly ordinary, turning overnight into an animal that no longer understood speech. He has lived through that once. He goes back through his memory after it, hard.
[Now that I think of it…… Father.] (B)
[What? What is it?] (D)
She looks up at what he has said. The silence goes on a moment, and then it arrives, and he catches his breath.
[This situation…… it closely resembles the time Father was seduced by the concubine and turned into a man of unbelievable stupidity. It may be that someone unspeakable is at Leonardo’s side, putting ideas into him.] (B)
[What did you say——!?] (D)
Her voice comes up loud with the shock of it.
＊
Leonardo’s father, the Duke of Linden, was an ordinary man with nothing much to recommend him and no fault worth the name — the sort found anywhere. A passing grade; nobody thought him unfit to inherit the house. He married the Duchess, was blessed with two children, and lived quietly.
The greatest mistake of his life was his devotion to the concubine. Everything he said and did, which until then had been sensible enough, turned into the kind of thing that makes a whole room frown.
He poured the family’s wealth into the second prince’s faction exactly as she wished it poured, and to keep her attention he pushed bad rumours about the rival first prince out into society. House Linden’s good name went into the dirt in no time at all, and the first prince, on becoming crown prince, marked them out as enemies.
Anyone could have seen the ending from where it started. It was bound to end there. Nobody had backed the second prince because they judged him fit to be king; a group of men taken in by one woman’s charm is a fragile thing, and its collapse was a question of time.
A quiet, unremarkable man who disliked conflict was reduced by a single woman to something below a stupid animal — senseless, unable to tell which people must not be made enemies — and he took the family name and his own household to the edge with him. For a while the Duke of Linden was a byword for a fool. Ruin stood directly in front of them, and it was then that his wife set about getting the family’s honour back.
She took the authority away from the husband who had caused it. She raised money and rebuilt a treasury that had been emptied. To recover the honour that was lost, she made an engagement between her son and a house with real standing — House Calendula.
Desperate work kept them from falling. Even so, every time the Duchess thinks back on what it cost her and on what her husband did, it turns her stomach over.
He had a wife, and he lost his head over another woman — the King’s wife, of all the women alive — and drove a house that had no business falling almost the whole way down. She has not forgotten one degree of that humiliation, or the anger that came near to boiling her brain. Her hatred of the concubine, who turned an ordinary husband into an active menace, is in perfectly good health to this day.
And if her son has been turned the same way, by someone’s influence, as his father was——
The Duchess feels the rage come up through her whole body, seething.
[Then…… you are saying there is someone who has seduced Leonardo?] (D)
[……I cannot say for certain. But it is possible. If he takes after Father and is easily led, it would explain how he fell this far.] (B)
Her hand closes quietly around the handkerchief, and the cloth crumples with a small sound.
[Surely not…… He has Lady Chloe as his betrothed, and he has lost his head over another woman……?] (D)
What comes back to her is her husband as he was then — the undignified sight of him mooning at the concubine. If some slut of the same kind, who drags men down into nothing, has got near her son——
The thought alone brings murder up in her.
[No. It may in fact be a man. There is every possibility that some young nobleman with an eye on the position of Lady Chloe’s husband set out to ruin Leonardo, and steered him into behaving senselessly enough to be given up on.] (B)
By this point the two of them have settled it between them: someone is working on Leonardo.
It is nothing but conjecture. But the instinct is sound. That person does exist.
[If we separate him from whoever it is, Leonardo may go back to what he was.] (B)
[Yes…… And if he does, we may yet escape having the engagement broken……] (D)
What is in both their heads is the same: remove whoever has been putting these ideas into Leonardo, and restore him. It is a plan with very little chance in it. But people who have been driven into a corner will take hold of a method with no reality to it at all, because there is nothing else to take hold of.
[Then let us speak to him——] (B)
[Wait. If we question him directly, he may well put us off.] (D)
However hard she pressed her husband, back then, he did nothing but put her off, and by the time she understood it was too late. She recalls it with the taste it leaves and stops her son.
[If we are to question anyone, it is the attendant. Have Leonardo’s attendant brought here.] (D)
An attendant who goes everywhere with him will know who his brother keeps company with. And if he tries to put them off, an attendant can be made to talk, by force if it comes to that.
The Duchess’s tears stop. Something settled comes into her eyes, and she gives the butler his order in a clear, steady voice.
