Chapter 9
“You have taken my chair,” he said.
Cynthia looked up from the book in her lap, then at the chair and then at him, standing in the library doorway with a candle, uncertain whether he’d meant to speak the words aloud.
“There are more chairs in this room,” she said.
“That one is near the fire.”
“Indeed. That is why I chose it.”
He dismissed the other chairs with a glance and sat down, not beside her, but in the chair across from hers. She watched this maneuver with quiet satisfaction, not moving. A moment passed in which both of these positions were communicated without further language.
Then he crossed the room and sat in the chair on the other side of the hearth, the lower-backed, less angled one, and he set his candle on the side table and opened his book.
They kept reading, but after approximately ten minutes, he enquired, without looking up: “What are you reading?”
“A history of the Roman roads of Britain. It is almost aggressively thorough.”
“You have been reading that for three weeks,” he replied, turning a page.
“I know.” She also turned a page. “It is a very long road system.”
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh, barely a movement of air, really, but she noted it.
It became a pattern, like everything else in this house: without being named, without being agreed upon, arriving gradually through the accumulation of evenings until one night she realized that they were both sitting without reading. They were merely talking.
She could not, afterwards, identify precisely when the books had stopped being necessary.
He talked about the estate first. The words came more easily when he discussed drainage, tenancy and the particular agricultural challenges of the Yorkshire uplands.
She had, across eight weeks of Lavenham Hall, developed a genuine interest in these subjects, partly because they were explained well and partly because the estate was, in some sense, the external form of him, the thing he had been shaped by.
She asked questions, and he did not hesitate to answer them. The questions grew more specific, and somewhere in the middle of a discussion about the yield variance, she realized they had been talking for an hour and a half, and she had not once reached for the Roman roads.
One of those evenings, he talked about his father.
A single observation, almost accidental, slipping in at the end of something about estate management: My father was not a man who thought much about the land he had.
He thought about what it looked like from the outside, which is not the same thing.
He said it flatly, as a fact. Then he moved on. But she caught what was underneath and held it.
She kept everything he said.
On the fourth evening, he talked about Edmund.
It began with something small, a book she had found in the library shelves, more comprehensive than the schoolroom’s battered copy, which she had set aside, intending to show Rose.
He saw it on the side table and said, “Edmund gave me that. He was forever finding books he thought I didn’t have.”
“He sounds like someone who paid attention to what people needed.”
“He did,” he said. “He was considerably better at that than I was. Better than I am.”
She waited.
“He was the easier one,” he said, not quite to her but to the fire and the general proposition of the evening.
“People liked Edmund immediately. I was aware of this from childhood. It did not particularly trouble me; I was older, I had other things to attend to, the title was mine when it came, and Edmund could afford to be charming where I could not. It seemed a reasonable arrangement.” He paused for a while.
“I did not fully appreciate what it would mean to lose him. I had taken it for granted that he would simply always be there, being charming, finding books, and writing letters I never replied to quickly enough.”
“That is what we do with the people we are certain of,” Cynthia said.
He looked at her. “Indeed. I think that is exactly it.”
And then they are gone, and the certainty turns out to have been the most expensive thing you owned, she thought.
“How did he come to marry Lucinda?” she asked, for she wished to know, and to comprehend the shape of it.
“A whirlwind courtship, three months from introduction to wedding. I was surprised because Edmund was not impulsive in general. But he was…” He stopped.
She watched him decide how much to say. “He was taken with her. She was very beautiful. And she was very attentive to him in those first months. Devoted, one would have said.”
One would have said. She noted the construction.
“You didn’t like her,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He was someone who did not say things he wasn’t certain of, who preferred silence to imprecision. She had come to find this quality rather restful. A person who only said what they meant was a person whose words you could trust completely.
“I could not articulate it,” he said. “I tried. I told myself it was snobbery; she was not from a notable family, but that was not a serious objection, and I knew it. I told myself it was the speed of the courtship. That was closer, but still not…” He set his hand on the arm of the chair and looked at it.
“She was very good at presenting exactly what was wanted. Whatever the room required, she provided it. But with Lucinda, there was an efficiency to it. A calculation that ran slightly faster than the emotion it was meant to be expressing.” He paused.
“I told Edmund I thought he was rushing. He told me I was a cold man who wouldn’t recognize warmth if it knocked me down in the street. ”
She pressed her lips together. “Was he wrong?”
“About the calling me cold? Probably not, at the time.” He looked at the fire. “About not recognizing warmth, I have revised my view somewhat recently.”
She looked at the fire too. The room was quiet around them, and she decided not to comment on his last words.
“His health,” she said, after a moment. “When did it change?”
“Within the first years of the marriage.” He had thought about this many times. The timeline never changed. “He had been entirely well before. He wrote to me that autumn that he had been feeling poorly. By spring, it was worse, and by summer Lucinda had engaged Mr. Crane.”
“And he did not improve under Crane’s treatment.”
“He declined under it. The diagnosis was consumption.” He said it flatly, the voice he used when a thing was too large to carry any additional emotional weight. “Edmund did not recover.”
She was quiet. She turned the information over in her mind without rushing it, laying the pieces alongside the pieces she already had.
Edmund was healthy before the marriage. Edmund was ill within the year, and was declining steadily under the treatment of a physician his wife had selected and managed.
He was writing about treatments that left him feeling worse, and about a wife who insisted on trusting the expert.
She thought of a poison, slow, cumulative, disguised as weakness and consumption. Then when Mr. Crane was brought in, Mr. Hartley was dismissed. And Rose’s nightmare echoed in her mind: The bottle, don’t give him.
She had more than she had a week ago. But she did not have proof.
And bringing this to Declan without proof, bringing it to a man who had spent two years carrying guilt for a brother who had, in fact, been murdered by his own wife, would be to hand him the worst possible news and nothing to do with it.
She needed to be certain first.
“You have gone quiet,” he said.
She looked at him. “I was thinking.”
“About what?”
“About the timeline. Edmund’s health and the time it changed.” She met his careful gaze.
“Is there something you want to say?”
“Not yet,” she said. “I want to be certain of something before I say it.”
He looked at her for a moment longer, and she saw him decide to accept her answer the way he had accepted uncertainty from her before, placing it in the same internal location, the folder of things he would return to when she told him it was time.
“All right,” he said.
The simplicity of it, the extension of trust implicit in those two words, landed somewhere in her chest and stayed there.
She looked at the fire. “Tell me about growing up here. Before.”
He was quiet for a moment, and she thought perhaps she had overstepped.
“Edmund used to slide down the banister of the main staircase. From the second floor to the ground floor. Every morning for approximately three years, my father threatened consequences. But every morning Edmund did it anyway because the calculus of risk and reward worked differently in his head than in most people’s. ”
“Did you ever do it?”
He looked at her. “I was the elder son.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“Twice. Both times before I was eight. And if you say anything to Thomas Leigh, I will deny it entirely.”
She laughed, the laugh arrived before she had assessed whether it was appropriate, which was something that happened more in this library, with him, than anywhere else in her life.
He looked at her when she laughed, and she saw something in his face that she was not going to examine directly tonight.
He talked about Edmund on the banister, and then about a summer when they had been twelve and ten respectively and had undertaken an extensive survey of the estate heath with a map Edmund had drawn himself.
They had been lost for four hours and found, eventually, by Thomas Leigh’s predecessor, a man named Sutton, who had the patience to find lost things and people on the moor and never once mentioned it to their father.
She listened with her chin resting on her hand, the fire warm on her face and thought: Here it is. This is what is underneath. Not the cruelty they talk about in the village. Not the cold authority of the study on the first day. This.
“You miss him very much,” she said.
He stopped and looked at the fire for a long moment. “Yes,” he said. Simply, finally, without the usual layering of qualification.
She nodded. She did not tell him she was sorry, because condolences had the peculiar effect of making the person expressing them feel better and the person receiving them feel that the grief was expected to be performed for an audience.
She simply sat with him, which was what most people actually needed and almost no one thought to provide.
After a while he said, “Your uncle?”
“Mm.”
“Tell me about him.”
She looked at him, slightly surprised. He met the surprise with the evenness he brought to most things.
“He was a clergyman in a small village in Hertfordshire,” she said.
“He had a very good library and a very bad garden, because he could never bring himself to discipline the plants sufficiently. He was not an especially conventional clergyman; he thought about the wrong things and not enough about the right ones, according to the bishop. They disagreed on whether Greek was a necessary part of a young girl’s education.
My uncle thought anything worth teaching was worth teaching well, and Greek was the language in which a considerable portion of human thought had first been expressed. The bishop left quite soon after.”
He made the almost-laugh again. She heard it and thought: I could listen to that sound indefinitely and never get tired of it. She set the thought aside.
“He died last year in November,” she said. “It was not unexpected, but the aftermath of it was.” She looked at her hands in her lap. “I had thought I was prepared for it, but I was not prepared for it at all, which I suppose is how those things generally work.”
“What were you unprepared for?”
She thought about it honestly. “The smallness of it. I had expected to be sad, and I was sad. But I had not expected the specific smallness of being entirely alone. Of having no one to whom my small daily things were of any interest.” She paused.
“To have things happen to you, small things, the sort that would only matter to one person, and to have that one person gone.”
He was looking at her. She could feel the specific quality of his attention, which she had been aware of since the first day.
“Yes,” he said. “I know that precisely.”
They looked at each other, and then he said, quietly, with the carefulness of someone setting something down rather than delivering it, “You have no one, and yet you are the least lonely person in this house.”
She held the sentence in her mind for a moment. She turned it over. She thought about what it meant, about what he had been observing across these weeks of corridors, libraries and evenings in this room.
She did not know what to say to it, and this was not a frequent experience for her.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said.
“I know. I did not say it to require an answer.”
Suddenly the clock on the mantel showed half past eleven.
She stood and smoothed her skirt, and he instantly stood, as well.
“Good night, Your Grace,” she said.
“Good night, Miss Browne.”
She took her candle from the side table and crossed to the door.
At the threshold, she stopped and registered the room behind her: the two chairs before the fire, both occupied for more than an hour but empty now, the warmth of it, the particular quality of a space that has been used for something more than reading.
She went upstairs and lay in the dark of her small room and thought about the Duke’s words, about Edmund’s letters, the timeline, and what she still needed to find out.
She held warmth and dread together in the dark, and thought: I need to move faster.
Before whatever this is becomes something I cannot protect.
She did not sleep for a long time. But when she did, it was something deeper, less troubled, and very faintly warm.