Chapter 11
“She has brought a solicitor,” Mrs. Poole said, reporting a natural disaster with professional composure, matter-of-fact, and unsurprised. “They arrived at nine. I have put them in the drawing room.”
Declan looked up from the letter he had been reading.
Not Lucinda’s letter, the one from three days ago, which he had read once and placed in the drawer he reserved for communications he intended to deal with and would prefer not to, but another matter.
He looked at Mrs. Poole’s face, which was communicating considerably more than its surface suggested.
“How many with her?” he said.
“The solicitor and a clerk. The solicitor is Mr. Graves. He carries himself like a man who is skilled and has accepted what the work requires of him.”
Declan closed the letter he had been reading.
He set it on the desk with care, controlling his hands because his mind was elsewhere.
He thought about Lucinda’s letter: formal, polished, the language correct in every particular while being constructed, sentence by sentence, to be as threatening as possible within the constraints of legal courtesy. She had always been good at that.
“Tell them I will be with them shortly,” he said.
Mrs. Poole left. He sat at his desk for a moment and did what he always did when he needed to face something he would rather not: he put everything he felt about it in the place where he kept such things, and he put on the duke’s mask.
Cynthia was in the schoolroom when she heard the carriage on the drive.
She was at the table with Rose, working through a set of watercolour exercises that Rose had approached with the competitive focus she brought to all things she was determined to do correctly: her small jaw set, and her brush held with a precision that suggested she felt watercolour was a discipline that deserved respect.
The morning had been good, clear and cold, the moors doing something interesting with the light, and Rose had woken without a nightmare for the fourth consecutive night.
Then the carriage came on the drive, and Rose’s brush stopped moving.
She did not look up. She was too controlled for that. She sat with her brush hovering a quarter inch above the paper and her shoulders doing the thing they did, the incremental drawing-in, the making-oneself-smaller.
“Shall we try the sky?” Cynthia said, as though carriages arrived every morning and were entirely unremarkable. “The challenge with sky is the gradation, darker at the top, lighter toward the horizon. We’ll need to work quickly before it dries.”
Rose looked at her paper and put her brush to it. Her hand was steady; it always was. She had that quality of self-governance that Cynthia both admired and found quietly heartbreaking. It was the composure of survival, and she had learned it long ago.
“The carriage,” Rose said, to her paper.
“Yes,” Cynthia said.
“Is it her?”
She considered the available responses but discarded all of them, because Rose was eight years old, had been through a lot and deserved only the truth.
“I think so,” she said. “But you are here, and I am here, and whatever is happening downstairs is not happening in this room.”
Rose looked at the sky she was painting. She made three careful brushstrokes. “Will she try to take me?”
“Not today,” Cynthia said, and she said it with enough steadiness that it was a thing you could hold onto. “Your uncle will not allow it.”
Rose made another brushstroke. Her sky was, technically, quite good, and the gradation was better than Cynthia’s had been on the first attempt. She worked in silence. Then she said, very quietly, to the watercolour, “He won’t let her take me, will he?”
“No,” Cynthia said. “He will not.”
Rose dipped her brush and painted the horizon pale.
Cynthia went downstairs at half past ten.
She had not planned to. She had intended to remain in the schoolroom, to keep Rose occupied and undisturbed.
The sensible approach. The professional one.
But she needed more ultramarine from the supply cabinet in the first-floor passage, which was true, and which was also not entirely the reason why she went.
She heard the voices before she reached the stairwell, not words at first, only the shapes of them, the particular cadences of people saying careful, constructed things in a formal register. Then she was on the landing; the drawing room door was not quite shut, and she could hear clearly.
“I am not seeking to remove Miss Rosalind from an adequate arrangement,” Lucinda was saying.
The voice of her was musical, measured, so carefully calibrated to the frequency of injured reasonableness that it was almost impressive.
“I am simply asking that her mother be permitted a formal and regular role in her upbringing. Surely that is not an unreasonable position.”
“The will is the relevant document,” Declan’s voice was stripped, with nothing ornamental, down to the structural elements. “It is explicit.”
“It was written by a gentleman in the final stages of a serious illness,” said a third voice, the solicitor’s, Mr. Graves, smooth and precise. “I think we might all agree that the circumstances in which it was produced invite some consideration.”
“The circumstances in which it was produced were my brother’s final hours,” Declan said, with a flatness that conveyed, with immaculate economy, that he found the construction offensive. “His wishes were clear.”
“Your brother was, by all accounts, not well,” Graves said. “A man in extremis may express wishes that, upon reflection, and in the cold light of legal scrutiny, do not represent his considered intent.”
“His considered intent was precisely what he expressed.”
Cynthia heard the shift of movement, someone standing, perhaps, or crossing toward the window.
Then Lucinda spoke. “I have statements.” Quiet, almost gentle, the way certain announcements were made was more devastating than their delivery.
“From members of your former household staff. Attesting to the character of this establishment. The atmosphere.” Another pause, weighted, and the weight placed precisely.
“The isolation the child endures. The coldness.”
“You have purchased statements,” Declan said.
“We have gathered testimony,” Graves said. “There is a distinction.”
“There is not.”
Cynthia pressed her back against the passage wall and thought: He is holding. He is holding, and it is costing him considerably.
“Additionally,” Graves continued, and she heard in his voice the particular quality of a man producing his intended weapon, the one he had been carrying into the room from the start, “there is the matter of the current domestic arrangement. A young, unmarried woman of no family connections residing in the household of an unmarried duke.” A pause calibrated to let the implication settle.
“I am certain no impropriety is intended. But the court’s perception of the child’s environment will necessarily encompass the… ”
“That is enough,” Declan said, and the flatness had changed, gone to something colder and sharper.
“Your Grace, I am merely raising what the court will raise.”
“The governess is employed by this household for Rose’s own good. If you raise her in a court of law, I will have my solicitor address the matter in terms that will not be comfortable for anyone in this room.”
There was silence. Then Lucinda, very softly, said, “Declan. I am Rose’s mother. I am not your enemy. I want only what is best for her.”
“Then we are in agreement,” he said, “because what is best for her is exactly what she has.”
Cynthia moved away from the passage before the drawing room door opened.
She went back upstairs with the ultramarine and sat down beside Rose and said, “The sky is very good. I think we should try the foreground now.” She opened the ultramarine and said nothing about the drawing room.
Rose looked at her with those dark, watchful eyes. She had always been a child who read rooms and people, with an accuracy that exceeded her years. She read Cynthia now with the attention she gave to things that mattered.
“All right?” she asked.
“All right,” Cynthia said. “Now. Fourteen shades of purple. Where shall we begin?”
***
They left at noon.
She heard the carriage from the schoolroom window, two hours after it had arrived, which told her the conversation had continued past the point she had heard, extended and pressed with the precise courtesy of people wielding politeness as a weapon.
She watched the carriage move down the drive without appearing to watch it, a skill she had been refining for the better part of two months.
Rose watched it too, but she said nothing. Her drawing was technically accomplished, and she was working on the shadows in it with quiet intensity, waiting to see if the ground would hold.
Cynthia left her with Mrs. Poole after lunch and went downstairs.
She found him in the library. He was standing at the window with both hands behind him, and his jaw was set in the way she knew was controlled fury. The window was receiving from him the same quality of attention that the morning sky sometimes received from the moors.
She came in, closed the door behind her and said nothing for a moment, because there were kinds of anger that needed a moment’s acknowledgment before they could be spoken to.
“She had statements,” he said, without turning.
“I heard some of it. I was in the passage. The door was open.”
He turned. There was something in his face beyond the fury: a fear she had not seen in him before, the fear of a man who had just understood what he stood to lose.
“She has bribed members of my former staff to attest to the household’s character.
She has a solicitor who understands precisely how to frame a dying man’s will as the product of delirium. She will take this to Chancery.”
“She said so?”