Chapter 13 #2
“Good.” Theodore leaned back. He looked at the ceiling for a moment and then looked back at the boy.
“I should tell you that I have very little experience with this particular situation. Children, as a category, have not featured prominently in my life until recently. I am working largely from first principles.”
Frederick stared at him.
“First principles...” Theodore said. “That means that I am reasoning from what I know to be generally true rather than from specific experience. It is a method employed extensively in mathematics and natural philosophy and apparently also in the management of sick six-year-olds.”
Frederick blinked.
“You do not know what mathematics is yet,” Theodore said and nodded.
“That is fine. You have time.” He glanced at the cloth, which had already been removed and was now sitting on the pillow beside Frederick's head.
He retrieved it and replaced it. “Mathematics is the study of numbers and their relationships. It is extremely useful, and most people find it deeply unpleasant, which I have always thought says more about how it is taught than about the subject itself.”
Frederick looked at the cloth on his forehead.
“Leave it,” Theodore said again.
He helped the boy take a sip of water. As Frederick settled back against the pillows, a silence settled between them.
Theodore realized the silence of the room was far too heavy for a sick child.
He needed to distract him, but his repertoire of stories was limited to estate management and social politics.
He was, he acknowledged privately, significantly better equipped for charming women at dinner parties than entertaining a six-year-old with a fever.
The two skill sets had very little overlap.
Women at dinner parties responded well to wit, to the well-timed observation. He was excellent at all of that.
Frederick, on the other hand, was six and did not know what a dinner party was, and was looking at him from a pile of pillows, waiting for something.
“The estate...” he said. “...runs on a combination of agricultural income, tenant rents, and a moderately successful investment in a shipping concern that I established years ago, and which caused me considerable difficulty in its early years, primarily because I chose the wrong partner. A man named Hartwell, who had excellent references and absolutely no understanding of tide schedules.”
Frederick looked up at the hand holding the cloth on his forehead.
“Tide schedules,” Theodore continued. “Are the times at which the sea goes in and out.
This matters a great deal when you are trying to move cargo from one place to another because if you get it wrong, your ship sits in the harbor for six hours while your cargo spoils and Hartwell writes you a letter explaining that it was nobody's fault when it was very clearly his fault.”
The corner of Frederick's mouth moved.
Theodore noticed, but he kept his expression entirely neutral.
“The matter was eventually resolved,” he continued.
“When I replaced Hartwell with a man named Sims, who had no references whatsoever but an encyclopedic knowledge of tide schedules and an extremely practical attitude toward the movement of goods. Sims is still with me. Hartwell is not.” He adjusted the cloth slightly.
“The lesson, should you require one, is that practical competence is worth considerably more than impressive paperwork. I intend for you to know this before you are ten.”
Frederick was looking at him now with the focused, fever-bright attention of a child who did not understand the words but had decided the speaker was worth listening to.
“The south field has been underperforming for three seasons running,” Theodore continued.
“Mr. Briggs, who is the head gardener and has opinions about everything, believes it is a drainage issue. The estate manager believes it is a soil issue. I believe it is a Briggs and the estate manager issue. Also, that the two of them need to be put in a room together and told they cannot leave until they have agreed on something.” He paused.
“That is also a method. It works on shipping merchants. I have moderate confidence it will work on gardeners.”
Frederick made a sound. It was small. Barely anything. But it was not crying, was not distressed, and it was shaped... if Theodore was not mistaken, like the very beginning of a laugh.
He looked at the boy.
Frederick looked back at him with the slightly glazed, slightly entertained expression.
Theodore sighed. “The north field is doing considerably better.”
Frederick made the sound again, a genuine, albeit weak, giggle that shook his small shoulders.
Theodore paused, his hand hovering over the basin of water. “I was under the impression that crop rotation was the most efficient sedative known to man. I was quite literally trying to bore you into a slumber, Frederick. Why on earth are you laughing?”
Frederick considered this for a moment. “Mr. Briggs and the other man,” he said. “In a room?”
“Yes,” Theodore said.
“Together?” Frederick said.
“Together.”
“They will die.”
Theodore stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“They will die,” Frederick said again. “No food. No water. They argue.” He paused. “Then they die. That is sad.”
Theodore looked at him for a long moment. “I was not planning to lock them in without provisions.”
“But you said they cannot leave,” Frederick said.
“Until they agree,” Theodore said. “I did not specify the conditions of the room. There would be food. And water. And presumably windows.”
Frederick considered this. “How long before they agree?”
“I estimate,” Theodore said. “Three days. Perhaps four. Briggs is stubborn, but the estate manager has a weak constitution and would likely capitulate somewhere around the end of day two when Briggs starts talking about drainage at dinner.”
Frederick thought about this with great concentration. “What if Briggs also has a... weak constitution?”
“Briggs...” Theodore said. “... has been tending these gardens for thirty years in all weather. Briggs has no weak constitution.”
“What if the estate manager cries?”
“Then Briggs will feel terrible about it and agree immediately,” Theodore said. “Briggs strikes me as the kind of man who cannot bear it when people cry. He goes very red and apologizes for things that are not his fault.”
Frederick stared at him.
Then he laughed. Properly this time, the full unguarded laugh, bright and genuine, his whole small face in it.
“Is that funny?” Theodore asked, chuckling.
“I don’t think they will cry. Old people don’t cry.”
Frederick's laugh faded into the comfortable, drowsy quiet of a child who had spent something he had been holding.
His eyes were still bright, but the brightness was softening now, the fever still present but the worst edge of it eased by the cool cloth and, Theodore suspected, by the fact that he had laughed.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned his head on the pillow and looked at Theodore.
“What does Emily do?” Theodore said. “When you cannot sleep.”
Frederick considered this as though it were a point of some significance. “She sings sometimes. But mostly she does this.” He reached up and made a slow, vague stroking motion near his own hair.
Theodore looked at the motion. He looked at Frederick. He looked briefly at the ceiling.
“She strokes you to sleep?” he said.
Frederick nodded.
Theodore sat with this information for a moment. Then he stood from the bed, set the cloth on the bedside table, and took off his coat. Frederick watched him with great interest, saying nothing.
“I am not going to sing,” Theodore said.
Frederick nodded seriously, as though he had already assumed this and was at peace with it.
Theodore shifted back against the headboard. Frederick turned toward him instinctively, and Theodore reached out and placed his hand on the boy's hair.
He moved it. Once. Slowly.
Frederick's eyes drooped immediately.
Theodore looked at his own hand as though it had done something without consulting him. Then he did it again. The same slow movement, the same deliberate pace, and Frederick's breathing changed within seconds, deepened and steadied.
It was strange.
He could say that plainly, at least to himself, strange and entirely outside anything he had done before.
He had spent years being responsible for nobody but himself, answering to nobody but himself.
Now he was sitting in a child's bed in his own house with his hand moving through a child's hair, the weight of a small sleeping body gradually leaning into his side, and he did not know what to call any of it.
But he did not want to move.
That was the thing he had not expected. Not the strangeness of it, but the fact that the strangeness did not bother him. He was doing something he did not know how to do, and it felt, inexplicably and without any warning, like exactly the right place to be.
Frederick's hand found his forearm in his sleep. Small fingers curling around it without any intention behind them, simply finding something solid and holding on.
Theodore looked at the small hand on his arm.
He kept his hand moving.
Everything, he thought, was starting to feel new. The house. The corridors at night. This room. This boy. The particular quality of being needed by someone who didn't ask for much and trusted you anyway.
New, and quieter than he expected, and considerably more than he had bargained for when he rang that bell pull an hour ago.
He looked at Frederick's sleeping face, and he began to shut his eyes too.