Chapter 4
“She is here,” Mrs. Poole said, her voice sharp with a kind of grim forecast, as though the weather itself had arrived and it was ominous.
Cynthia looked up from the globe she had been attempting to repair with a small piece of wire and a great deal of optimism.
Rose was beside her, watching the operation with the scepticism she brought to most of Cynthia’s practical undertakings, which was, Cynthia had come to feel, a healthy scientific instinct in a child of eight.
“Who is here?” Cynthia asked.
Mrs. Poole’s expression communicated a great deal without her face doing very much at all. She was, Cynthia had observed, a woman of considerable vocabulary in the language of compressed lips and fractional eyebrow movement.
“Lady Heathe,” she said. “The late Lord Edmund’s widow.”
Rose, who had been considering the globe with scientific detachment, went very still.
It was the stillness that told Cynthia everything she needed to know.
Not the ordinary stillness of a child pausing what she is doing, but something deeper and more total, the stillness of an animal that has heard a sound and is waiting to determine, with great precision, how dangerous it is.
The globe wire hung from Cynthia’s fingers and Rose’s hands, which had been resting on the edge of the table, retracted fractionally into her lap.
“I see,” Cynthia said. She set the wire down on the table carefully. “Thank you, Mrs. Poole.”
Mrs. Poole looked at Rose and then at Cynthia. The look said: Watch her.
Cynthia looked at Rose after Mrs. Poole had left.
“Rose,” she said, gently. “Shall we go on with the globe, or would you rather read for a bit?”
“Is she going to come up here?” Rose asked, but her voice was entirely flat. Not the flatness of indifference, but the flatness of controlled fear, which in a child of eight is a more troubling thing by several degrees.
“I don’t know,” Cynthia said, which was the truth. “But I am here, whatever happens.”
Rose did not say anything to this. She picked up the globe wire and turned it over in her fingers, not looking at it.
Whatever this woman is, the child has been afraid of her for a very long time; deeply and not without reason.
The carriage had arrived at half past eleven, which was its own statement of intent.
Cynthia heard it from the schoolroom window: the sound of wheels on the gravel drive, the voices below, and then the particular quality of silence that falls over a household when something has entered that was not expected and is not, on reflection, entirely pleased to receive.
She had stayed with Rose and had continued with the globe, the wire and the general business of the morning.
She learned the details gradually, from Mrs. Poole’s return an hour later, shorter this time, three-word communications at the door, and from the quality of sound that came through the floor from the drawing room below.
Lucinda Heathe swept into Lavenham Hall the way very beautiful and very deliberate women sweep into rooms they have decided to own: with grief arranged on her face like a garnish, and with mourning silks that had been chosen by someone who understood that mourning silks could be entirely becoming if one approached the question with the right attitude.
She wept, Mrs. Poole reported, in the manner of someone well-practiced in the art of it.
She asked for her daughter. She told three members of the household staff that she had been separated from her child by a heartless man.
She delivered the last part within audible range of the entrance hall, which was not, Cynthia suspected, an accident.
And downstairs, in the drawing room, the Duke of Lavenham met her.
Cynthia was not present at the meeting. She was in the schoolroom with Rose, drawing wildflowers and maintaining a composure she had to work harder than usual to sustain.
When Rose finally agreed to let her fetch the better ink from the room across the passage on the floor below, Cynthia set off; as she approached, she heard voices drifting through the drawing-room door, which had been left slightly ajar.
She was not listening. She was simply in the vicinity; the door was not fully closed, and voices carry.
“My own daughter.” Lucinda Heathe’s voice was lovely. Low, musical and thick with injury. She had found that grief had become her, and she wore it still, past all reason. “Two years, Declan. Two years I have been kept from my own child, and you stand there…”
“Edmund’s will named me her guardian.” His voice was stripped of everything. Flat, uninflected. He had removed every ornament because an ornament was a tool they could use. “The terms are not ambiguous.”
“Edmund was not himself at the end. We both know this. He was, he was not thinking clearly, he was frightened, and he asked things of people that were perhaps not entirely…”
“He was perfectly clear.” A pause. “He was, in fact, the clearest he had been about anything in months.”
The silence that followed had a particular quality. Two people who know a great deal more about each other than they are saying, and who are each waiting to see whether the other will say it first.
Then Lucinda said, and her voice had shifted, not much, but enough: “She is my daughter, Declan. Whatever the will says, I intend to see her.”
“You will have one hour,” he said. “In the schoolroom. Supervised.”
Cynthia moved away from the door before she could hear anything more.
She went back to the schoolroom and said nothing to Rose about what she had heard. She sat down, opened the ink and said: “Right. Where were we?”
***
Lucinda Heathe arrived at the schoolroom door forty minutes later.
She was beautiful. There was no honest way around this.
Perhaps twenty-eight, with pale gold hair that had been arranged beneath her bonnet in a way that made the arrangement look effortless, and very bright green eyes.
She was still in the mourning silks, which suited her and carried a handkerchief, folded, in one gloved hand.
She stood in the schoolroom doorway and looked at Rose, and she let her face compose itself into something that Cynthia supposed was meant to read as maternal longing. The eyes went slightly soft, the chin quivered, faintly, and one hand pressed to her heart.
“My darling,” Lucinda said.
Rose, who had been sitting at the table with a piece of paper in front of her and both hands flat on the surface in a way that suggested she was stabilising herself, did not move.
Cynthia stayed in her corner. She was trying to do two things at once: observe Lucinda with the careful, sidelong attention of someone not appearing to observe, and maintain a visible calm for Rose’s benefit.
Lucinda Heathe was performing grief. The first thing Cynthia noted was the handkerchief that was never raised to the eyes, though the voice broke at intervals.
Her gaze, when it moved, was sharp and specific, taking inventory, assessing, cataloguing.
She moved toward Rose gracefully, unhurriedly and showed nothing of actual want.
Cynthia had seen grief and knew what it looked like in a body.
It did not look like this.
Rose had not moved from the table. She was watching her mother with those enormous dark eyes, watchful and still, her face going very slightly inward, closing down. A door drawing gently shut behind the eyes.
Lucinda crossed to her and touched her cheek. Rose did not flinch. She was too controlled for flinching. She simply absorbed the touch with a stillness that was somehow worse.
“Look at you,” Lucinda said softly. “How you’ve grown.”
Rose said nothing.
“Are you well, my love?” A glance, quick and sharp, at Cynthia. “Is she being properly cared for? I have been so very worried. The journey was…” She pressed the handkerchief to her lips. “I have missed you so terribly.”
In this speech, as in the one she had partially heard through the drawing room door, the emotions described were Lucinda’s own.
I have been worried. I have missed you. Not: are you frightened?
Are you eating? Does anything hurt? What do you love?
The vocabulary of maternal grief as deployed here was entirely self-centered.
A performance that required an audience but had no interest in the audience’s reply.
Rose was silent, and Lucinda simply waited, perfectly patient, letting silence stretch without attempting to fill it.
Then Lucinda’s gaze moved to Cynthia. And this time, it held.
Cynthia met it calmly and looked back. She had a policy, developed early in life, of not lowering her eyes first when she had done nothing to be ashamed of.
Lucinda looked at her, not briefly, but deliberately. Calculating. Cataloguing age, face, position in the room. Finding her own conclusion somewhere behind those bright green eyes, and letting nothing of it reach the surface of that beautiful, composed face.
“You are the governess,” Lucinda said pleasantly.
“Miss Browne,” Cynthia said. “Yes.”
“How fortunate,” Lucinda said, and moved her gaze back to Rose.
Two words and a glance. Cynthia stood in her corner and thought: she has just decided something about me. I don’t know what it is. But I don’t think I would like it if I did.
The hour passed.
It passed with Lucinda talking to Rose in a continuous, musical stream that required very little in the way of reply and received very little: she spoke about London, about society, about people whose names meant nothing to an eight-year-old child on the Yorkshire moors.
She asked questions and did not wait for answers.
She spoke about Rose’s future, which she described in terms that were all gilded with Lucinda’s own preferences and none of them inhabited by Rose at all: lessons with proper masters, a Season in due course, a household that was quite unlike this one, she said with a small and carefully weighted smile, a house with life in it.