Chapter 10
“The glass is falling fast,” Thomas Leigh said, looking at the barometer in the entrance hall. “We’ll have weather by nightfall.”
Declan looked at the instrument. It had the committed quality of a thing that has made up its mind. “The north pasture drainage…”
“Done this morning. First light.” Thomas looked at him in the way he had developed across fifteen years of shared stewardship: the acknowledgment that the assessment had already been made by the person he was communicating it to.
“The east field is the concern. We’ll lose the lower corner if it comes in hard from the north. ”
“It will come in hard from the north,” Declan said.
“Yes.”
They stood together for a moment, two men looking at the barometer, enacting that particular companionship of practical people confronted with an uncooperative situation; one they could do nothing about, yet felt compelled to acknowledge in full.
“I’ll ride out at four,” Declan said.
Thomas nodded. He had already known this. He took his hat from the stand and left, because Thomas Leigh communicated what needed to be communicated and then went and did the things that needed doing.
Declan looked at the barometer for a moment longer. Outside the entrance hall window, the sky to the north was doing something conclusive with its light, the particular yellowish dimming that came before serious weather on the moors. The landscape was contracting beneath the sky.
He went to find his coat.
The storm arrived at half past six with the organized thoroughness of something that had been planning the visit for some time.
It came across the moors in a long, sweeping advance; he could see it from the study window on his return, a curtain of rain moving from north to south with the deliberate pace of an army that knows it has already won.
The wind preceded it by twenty minutes, testing the windows, pressing at the glass, finding the gaps in the old frames, and pressing at them.
By half past seven, the sound of the storm had filled the house, the way certain sounds do, present in every room, underneath everything.
The moors had disappeared entirely behind the rain.
A tile from the eastern parapet came loose and crashed onto the terrace: concrete, specific, the sound of something breaking that belonged to the estate.
Lavenham Hall had become, for the duration, an island.
Rose came to the door of his study at eight.
She knocked. This was new. In two years, she had never knocked on his study door. He registered this when she appeared in the doorway: small, pale, and controlled in the way she was controlled when she was frightened.
She had a book under her arm and was wearing her dressing gown.
“Miss Browne is in the library,” she said. “I thought…” She looked at the window, which demonstrated its character by vibrating in its frame. “I thought I would find something to read here.”
He looked at her. He said, with the practicality of someone who has decided that the matter at hand does not require any additional architecture: “The library has better books.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Shall I walk down with you?”
She considered this with the seriousness she brought to all questions that required something of her. “If you like,” she said, which was for Rose, yes, in the particular register she used for things she wanted but did not want to be seen wanting.
He got up and took his candle. He walked with her down the corridor and the stairs to the library, where the fire was burning well, and Cynthia was in her chair with a book.
She looked up when they came in with the particular quality of unsurprised that was her default expression for things she had expected without quite knowing she was expecting them.
Rose found what she was looking for, or appeared to, and settled in the smaller chair near the fire, the one that had become, across the past several evenings, a third point of the arrangement
He took up a book and, over the course of the next hour, read no more than four pages; an effort entirely in keeping with the rest of the evening.
His attention strayed easily: to the fire, to the sound of the storm, to the soft turning of Rose’s pages, and to that particular quality the room assumed at this hour, which he could not name, but which had lately drawn him there.
Rose fell asleep in the smaller chair at nine, because she had decided the present was safe.
He looked at her and then at Cynthia, who was already looking at Rose, her expression doing the thing it did when it was on Rose: a warmth so uncomplicated and so total that it had briefly reorganised his understanding of what a person’s face could do.
He should carry Rose to bed or ask Mrs. Poole to carry her. He should do something practical about a child asleep in a library chair at nine o’clock in a storm.
He did not do any of these things. He sat in his chair, looked at the fire while the storm pressed at the windows, and the evening continued.
At ten, Cynthia woke Rose enough to be redirected to bed.
She managed this with the efficient, tender practicality she brought to all of Rose’s transitions: one hand on her shoulder, a murmured word, a steering toward the door, and Rose went without full consciousness, the way she went when sleep had already claimed the essential parts.
He heard Cynthia’s voice, low and steady and the shuffle of small feet, on the stairs.
He sat in the library and looked at the fire.
He was aware that he was waiting, which was not a thing he generally did.
Waiting implied uncertainty about whether something or someone would occur, and he had organized his life with considerable care, avoiding uncertainty.
The library at this hour was not one of those conditions.
It had become something else, something with a different quality of uncertainty, something he had stopped trying to resolve.
Cynthia came back at ten past ten.
She came to her chair and sat, looked at the fire, and said: “She’s asleep. She was most of the way there already.”
“She was frightened,” he said.
“She was but didn’t want to say so.”
“No,” he said. “She wouldn’t.”
The storm was, if anything, louder now, a full, uninterrupted roar, the wind coming in hard gusts that shook the house, subsided and built again, the rain horizontal against the glass.
He had been at Edmund’s grave this afternoon, before he rode to the east field.
He went often, more often than anyone knew.
He did not know precisely what he went for.
Not comfort, because there was none. He went, perhaps, because going was the only available way of showing that he was still there, but directed at someone who was not.
He had stood at the grave in the yellow pre-storm light with the wind beginning already and he had thought: It has been two years. I should have come sooner to you and maybe…. He thought this at the grave every time.
“Declan.”
He looked up.
She was looking at him directly, without apology. She had something to say and had decided the time was now.
He had not, until this moment, realized she had used his name. They were always addressing each other as Your Grace and Miss Browne, properly and correctly. She had now used his name, though without appearing to notice.
He was not going to address this. He was going to let it stand.
“You were at the graveyard,” she said. “Today. Before the storm.”
He looked at the fire. “Did you see me from the window?”
“No. You came in from the north side, and your coat was wet before the rain started. There is only one thing on the north side that would take you out in the weather before it arrived.” She paused. “I am not prying. I noticed. There is a difference.”
With you, there is always a difference. He thought but said nothing.
“Do you go often?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looked at the fire for a long moment. He thought about all the available answers, the deflections, the adequate approximations, the shorter and less costly versions, and found, sitting in this particular room on this particular evening, that he did not want to deploy any of them.
“Because I did not go often enough when he was alive,” he said.
She was quiet.
“He wrote to me in the last months,” he continued.
“He asked me to visit. Several times, in his letters, consistently, come when you can, come soon. I told myself it was Edmund being Edmund. He was always warm about his feelings. I told myself he was well enough, that he was being dramatic, that there were things that required my attention and I would go when the session ended.”
Cynthia said nothing. She was very still.
“There was a vote in March,” he said. “A bill I had worked on for two years, agricultural reform. I told myself Edmund would understand because he always understood. The bill passed. I was in the chamber when it passed, and I thought that I could go to my brother the next day.”
He stopped. The storm outside was at a peak, the wind sustained, high and furious.
“I arrived on a Tuesday,” he said. “His man let me in. I could tell from the man’s face what I was arriving at, but you do not accept what a man’s face is telling you when you are not yet ready to accept it.
I went upstairs. He was…” His jaw was tight.
“He was bedridden. I did not recognize him at first. He had been a well man in October, and it was March, and he was a different man.”
He looked at the fire.
“He gripped my hand with very little strength, and he said: Take Rose, keep her safe, not Lucinda, never Lucinda, promise me. He said it twice. I told him yes, of course, I promised, and I told him he was going to be all right, which was a lie, and we both knew it. He died that evening. He never regained consciousness after that conversation.”
The fire burned. Outside, the storm had not abated. Inside the room it was very quiet.
“I dismissed his words about Lucinda,” Declan said.
“I told myself, delirium. A dying man’s fear, exaggerated by illness and pain into something that sounded like warning but was only the mind at the end of its tether.
I did not investigate. I accepted the physician’s account, which was consumption.
I accepted it because not accepting it meant asking a question that I was not prepared for. ”
He was aware that his hands, on the arms of the chair, were not entirely steady but he stilled them by an act of will.
“I should have come sooner,” he said, and the sentence had the quality of something that has been said in private ten thousand times and is being said aloud for the first time.
“I chose a parliamentary vote over my own brother. That is what I did. And they are right, the people in the village, the ones who say what they say. I simply committed it against someone who never, in his entire life, said a single unkind word about me.”
He stopped because there was nothing more to say after that.
Cynthia looked at him.
She had been listening with the whole of herself, not the polite surface attention of social listening but the total, interior kind. She had everything with full understanding, because she had Edmund’s letters and the timeline.
She sat with all of it for a moment. Then she said:
“You are not cruel.”
He looked at her, but his expression revealed that he did not believe her.
“I am not being kind,” she said. “I am being accurate, which is rather different. You delayed a visit because you had obligations you believed were genuine. You were not present for your brother’s final weeks because you believed he had weeks to spare.
After all, Edmund was permanent, because that is what we do with the people we are certain of.
” She met his eyes steadily. “That is a mistake. It had a real cost, and you will carry it. But a mistake is not cruelty. Cruelty is choosing harm. You chose wrong. There is a difference.”
He said nothing.
“You are a man who has been punishing himself for a choice he cannot undo,” she said.
“Grief is not the same thing as guilt, and guilt is not the same thing as cruelty. The cruelty they see in you in the village, what is it, actually? A man who does not speak unnecessarily. A man who keeps himself apart because proximity to people who love you makes the loss of people who loved you more apparent. A man whose face, when he is not thinking about composure, looks like grief.” She looked at the fire.
“That is not cruelty. That is simply what a very private person looks like when he has not yet found a reason to be less so.”
He was quiet for a long time. The storm was quieter too, or perhaps the room simply felt more still than it had before.
Then he said, very low: “He warned me about her. At the end. He said not Lucinda, never Lucinda. And I dismissed it.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you think…” He stopped. He looked at her with an expression she had not seen before, the look of a man who is about to think something he has been successfully avoiding and knows it.
“You said not yet. Twice. And you have been asking me about Edmund’s timeline, and Crane, and the course of the illness.
” His voice was entirely even. “Miss Browne. What is it that you are not yet certain of?”
She looked at him.
She had known this moment was coming. She had thought she would be more prepared for it, that she would have the certainty first, the solid evidence.
She had not yet obtained the certainty. She had the letters and Hartley’s name; she had been gathering herself to go to the village, to find him, to ask carefully what it was he had noticed about Edmund’s illness.
“I am not yet certain of anything,” she said. “But I think Edmund’s warning was not delirium.”
They looked at each other. She watched him receive what she had said and saw the change in his expression.
“Tell me what you have,” he said.
“Not enough,” she said. “Not yet. But I will have more. I promise you I will have more before I bring it to you fully.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then: “How long?”
“Not long. A week, perhaps. Less if I can manage it.”
He nodded and looked at the fire. She watched him place the weight of what she had handed him into the same location he placed all the things he could not yet do anything with.
“Cynthia,” he said.
She looked at him. He was still looking at the fire. He had used her name for the first time, without appearing to notice, which meant he had been thinking it.
“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me.”
“Thank you,” she said, “for telling me first.”
They looked at each other once more, and they both realized that something had changed between them. Something that neither of them was yet ready to admit.