Chapter 6
“Tell me again,” Rose said. “The part with the river.”
Cynthia turned back a page in the fairy story.
It was about a girl who crossed a river of moonlight to find her way home, and Rose loved it with her characteristic intensity: not with exclamations or questions, but in silence, her dark eyes fixed somewhere beyond the room, her whole attention surrendered to the story.
“‘The river ran silver in the dark,’” Cynthia read, “‘and the girl put her foot to the first stone and felt it hold, and she stepped again, and again, and the moonlight held her weight and did not break.’”
Rose exhaled slowly. Not a sigh of tiredness, only a sigh of satisfaction.
“I like that part,” she said.
“I know you do.”
“Because the stones hold.” She said this as though it completed an argument she’d been having with herself. “You don’t know they’ll hold until you step on them. But they do.”
Cynthia looked at her over the rim of the book. Rose was already drifting into sleep, her gaze soft and faraway; the clover crown from the fell rested on her bedside table, where she had turned it once in her fingers before letting it go.
“Yes,” Cynthia said. “They do.”
She read until Rose’s breathing deepened and the fingers on the coverlet uncurled, and then she closed the book and sat in the quiet for a moment. Lavenham Hall breathed around her in the particular way of late evening, that long, settling exhalation of a house releasing the day.
Rose was better. She was eating more. She had twice initiated conversation with Mrs. Poole without being asked to, and once, extraordinary, she had knocked on the kitchen door and stood in the doorway watching Bess work.
The nightmares were less frequent. The first week had been every night. The second, six times. This week, four.
She went to bed at ten and fell straight into deep sleep. She did not know what time it was when she heard it.
Two in the morning, perhaps or even later. The darkness in the room was the full, settled darkness of deep night. She was pulled up from sleep by the sound before she was fully aware of what the sound was, her body knowing before her mind, already sitting up in bed, already reaching for the candle.
And then the second scream landed, and she was on her feet.
She ran.
Down the corridor, bare feet on cold stone, her candle throwing a swinging, insufficient light against the walls. She knew the way without thinking. Left at the end, three doors, the last one. She had made this journey enough times now to know its geography in her sleep.
She had the door open before the third scream had finished.
Rose was thrashing with a violence that Cynthia had not seen before, not the rigid, trembling distress of earlier nights but something more total, her whole body engaged, her head moving side to side against the pillow, her hands batting at something that was not there in the dream but was very much present to her.
She was making sounds without words, and then the words came in a rush, tumbled and broken:
“Don’t… Stop… The bottle… She has the… No, don’t give him…Stop…”
Cynthia was across the room, and she had Rose in her arms before she had time to think about it.
Rose fought her harder than before, with the urgent, desperate strength of someone trying to prevent something terrible, but Cynthia held on.
She wrapped both arms around her and kept saying: I have you, I have you.
You’re safe, Rose, I have you, and the struggling gradually began to change.
“Come back,” Cynthia said quietly. “You’re at Lavenham. It’s night. I’m here. Come back.”
Rose’s breathing was ragged, tearing. She was still somewhere in the dream, her hands gripping Cynthia’s arms with a strength that would leave marks.
“She was… She was going to…The bottle…” The words came out between gasps, barely coherent. “She kept putting… I told him…I told him not to… Papa…”
“I know,” Cynthia said, though she didn’t, not fully, not yet. “I know, I am here. It’s all right.”
“It is not all right,” Rose said, with a sudden and desperate clarity that struck Cynthia like a bell being rung. “It is not all right.”
“No,” Cynthia said, changing course without hesitation. “No, it isn’t. You’re right. But you’re safe. Right here. Right now. I have you.”
Something in Rose cracked open then. She wept with the same totality that she’d been fighting moments before, the same whole-body commitment, her face pressed into Cynthia’s shoulder and her small fists clutched in the fabric of Cynthia’s nightgown.
Cynthia held her, rocked her and said nothing for a while, because there was nothing to say that was more useful than holding and rocking.
She was going to… The bottle… Don’t give him…
She thought about what Rose had said. She filed it precisely where she filed all of it, the accumulating weight of small pieces that were beginning, slowly and without haste, to arrange themselves into a shape she could not yet quite see clearly.
She did not push the thought further. Not now, in the dark, with Rose sobbing against her shoulder.
Later. She would think about it later.
Right now, there was only this room, this child and the candle burning low on the table.
The Duke was in the corridor.
She found him when she finally eased Rose back against the pillow, not asleep, not fully, but exhausted past the point of fighting, her eyes half-open and glazed, her breathing slowed.
The tears had stopped, and exhaustion had taken over.
Cynthia tucked the blanket, touched her cheek and said: I’m just outside the door.
She stepped into the corridor and nearly walked into him.
He was standing at the doorframe, not in front of the door, but beside it, pressed back against the wall as though he had intended to be here and had simultaneously intended not to be found.
He had a candle in one hand that had burned very low, telling her he had been standing here for some time.
He was in his shirtsleeves. His hair was disordered in a way she had never seen it, the careful, controlled surface of him disrupted, the habitual armor slightly off, as though he had come here too quickly for it to assemble properly around him.
They were both looking at each other.
His face was past the vocabulary. His jaw was set in controlled anger, but beneath the anger was something rawer and worse: a helplessness so total that she thought he probably had not let anyone see it in a very long time.
He had heard Rose’s screaming, the particular words of the nightmare, the crying, and the voice saying I have you, but had not gone in.
She understood, in that moment, the full shape of it.
He had loved his brother, but he had not gone to him in time.
He had looked at this child every day for two years and seen, in her face, the particular compound proof of everything he blamed himself for, and she had looked back and seen, in his, the person her father was not.
Each time he had stood in the corridor, put his hand on the doorframe and heard her crying, he had not gone in.
Because going in made it real. Going in meant she would look at him and grieve, and he would see the grief, and the whole terrible calculus of it would add up to the same sum it always did.
Cynthia stood in the corridor, looked at this man and thought: He is punishing himself by not going to her. And he thinks it is a way of protecting her. Both things are true, and both things are wrong.
She said, quietly and without raising her voice, which was sometimes the only way to say a true thing without it sounding like an attack.
“She needs you, Your Grace.”
He looked at her.
“Not your distance,” she said. “Not your rules or your management of the household. You. She needs you.”
He did not speak. The candle between them threw his shadow large and unsteady across the wall.
“She had a nightmare about her father,” Cynthia said. “She has them regularly and cries for him. And you stand in this corridor every time. She wakes and reaches for whoever is there, for anything that is warm and present and will stay, and you are not in the room.”
His jaw moved. He looked away from her, down the corridor, the rigid profile of him in the dim light.
“She looks at me,” he said, “and she sees…”
“She sees her uncle,” Cynthia said. “She sees the person who remained. Yes, you look like him. Indeed, that is painful for her. It is also, Your Grace, the thing that makes you irreplaceable to her. There is no one else in this world who carries what you carry of him. But only if you are in the room.”
The silence stretched.
“She said…” He stopped. Started again, in a different register, lower and less controlled. “She said, in the nightmare. She said the bottle and don’t give him.” He turned to look at Cynthia. His eyes were very direct. “What does that mean?”
She met his gaze. She had been waiting for the right moment to say what she was gathering, the particular accumulation of small things that had been building.
She did not have enough certainty, though.
She was not sure she would ever have enough evidence, on her own, without more than she currently possessed.
But his face was asking her for the truth, and she had never been able to look at a person asking for the truth and give them something less.
“I don’t know,” she said, carefully and honestly. “Not yet. But I think it is worth knowing.”
He looked at her for a long moment. She watched him take that in and file it in the place where he kept things he was not ready to open but would not throw away.
“Is she asleep?” he asked.
“Almost.”
He turned and looked at the closed door. She watched his hand, the one that wasn’t holding the candle, move to his side, flex once, and then he reached out and put it on the doorframe. He looked at the door, but then his hand fell. He turned away and walked back down the corridor.
She watched him go as she stood in the corridor alone, and she realized that he had heard everything.
Whether he could act on it, whether the weight of two years of self-imposed exile from that room was something he could lift in a single night at two in the morning, she did not know.
She thought, probably not. She thought it was the incremental kind of change, the kind that happened one evening at a time, one story at a time, one guttering candle in a corridor at a time.
He had wanted to go in. That was the thing she had seen.
He had been standing in that corridor not because he did not want to go in, but because wanting to and being able to were, for him, still two entirely separate matters, separated by two years of guilt that had calcified into something structural.
One at a time, she thought. One evening at a time.
She went back into Rose’s room and sat on the edge of the bed and listened to her breathe until she was certain that sleep had settled past the place where nightmares live.
Then she lay down on top of the covers in the way she had on the first night, because the room was cold and Rose’s hand had found hers in the dark and was holding it, and there was no good reason to leave.
***
He sat at his desk in the gray hours before dawn and did not pour the whisky.
This was notable in the same way that other small deformations of habit had been notable recently: the necklace, the brass latches, the fact that he had been to the graveyard twice this week instead of once.
She needs you, she had said. In the corridor, in her nightgown, with a child’s tears still on her shoulder, her hair loose and her eyes absolutely steady.
Not your distance. Not your rules. As though it were obvious.
As though two years of carefully constructed distance were simply a misunderstanding that could be cleared up with a sentence.
He wanted to find this absurd because he could not manage it, but he thought about the woman who left things on the hall tables and looked at him in the corridors. She spoke the truth when it was needed, and she did not soften it.
She is making it matter, said the inconvenient part of him.
He let it say so, this time, without trying to quiet it.
It was nearly dawn. The heath outside had gone from black to gray to the particular pale gold of a morning that intends to be decent.
He should sleep. He had estate accounts in the morning, a letter from his solicitor in London that he had been avoiding and a conversation with Thomas Leigh about the east field drainage which had been deferred twice.
He did not sleep.
He sat at his desk and thought about the corridor he would walk away from again tomorrow night if it came to that, and the night after that.
And then, at some point, he thought: Mayhap the night after that, I might not walk away.