Chapter 11 #2
“Graves made it clear.” He moved from the window to the hearth with contained energy.
“A Chancery proceeding. My reputation as it stands. A bachelor household, a child who by all external accounts was not thriving before the current governess arrived, a previous run of three governesses in as many months.” He looked at her.
“And now the governess herself, apparently.”
She met this steadily. “I heard that part too.”
“In Chancer…” He stopped. He pressed his fingers to his jaw and looked at the fireplace with an expression she had not seen on him before.
The fear was not for himself. “If a court decided in her favour. If they placed Rose in Lucinda’s custody...
” He said it as though the words required force to produce.
“She is frightened of her own mother. She does not speak of it, but she is frightened, and she has been frightened since the day Lucinda arrived.” He looked at Cynthia. “Do you know why?”
She held his gaze.
She had been here before, at the edge of it, with not quite enough. She had the letters upstairs, the timeline in her head, the doctor in Thornwick she had not yet visited, and the shape of something terrible growing daily more distinct. She had Rose’s words during her nightmares.
She had enough, she thought, to say something. Not everything, but enough.
“Rose is frightened of Lucinda because Lucinda frightens her,” she said carefully.
“Not by anything overt, nothing she could name in a courtroom, nothing a solicitor could cross-examine her on. But Rose pays very close attention, and what she pays attention to in Lucinda is something that does not match what Lucinda presents.”
He looked at her. “What does she present?”
“Grief. A bereaved mother. A woman who has been kept from her child by a heartless man.” She kept her voice even. “And what Rose sees, what I have seen, in the two times Lucinda has come here, is something that performs grief without being troubled by it.”
He was very still. “Go on.”
“I have been reading Edmund’s letters,” she said.
“The ones in the storage cupboard on the third floor. Mrs. Poole asked me to sort them.” She met his eyes.
“I should have told you sooner, but I wanted to be more certain first. However, we are running out of time for the kind of certainty I was hoping for.”
“What do the letters say?”
She told him. Not everything, not yet, but the letters to Gerald.
The timeline: unwell within the first year, declining under Crane’s treatment, distrusting the treatment without distrusting it enough to stop.
The particular phrase: I shall trust her judgment.
The quality of a man who has begun to be frightened but cannot yet afford to be certain.
He listened in the absolute, still way he listened to things that mattered. He neither interrupted nor moved.
When she finished, he said, “Crane’s treatment.”
“It made him worse,” she said. “He says so himself. He says that the weeks before Crane arrived, he had been unwell. Under Crane’s treatment, he declined steadily.”
He looked at the fire. She watched him work with it, the information, the implication, the thing it pointed toward that neither of them had said yet. She watched him arrive at the edge of it and stop.
“Say it,” he said.
“I don’t have proof, not yet. But I am going to obtain it. There is a physician in Thornwick, Mr. Hartley, who attended Edmund before Lucinda dismissed him in favour of Crane. I intend to speak with him.”
“When?”
“This week.” She paused. “I want you to know what I am doing and why. I will not go to you with half a case. I will not put this weight in your hands without something solid to hold it with. But I needed you to understand…” She stopped and tried to find the right words.
“The petition is not only a custody dispute. If Lucinda gains guardianship of Rose, she gains control of the trust Edmund left Rose. Edmund’s personal fortune, separate from the dukedom, is held in Rose’s name until she comes of age, but Rose is frightened of her mother.
And I believe she has reason to be frightened that goes beyond a difficult relationship. ”
He looked at her with an expression that was absorbing what she had said, calculating what it meant, and underneath the calculation something that was not calm and not fury but was that of a man understanding something: the ground he thought solid had been hollow for two years.
Then he said, very quietly, “What you are describing: the timeline, Crane’s treatments making him worse rather than better, Edmund’s letters…
” He stopped. “If one were to look at all of it together, one might begin to ask certain questions. About the nature of the illness. About why a man in good health should become systematically unwell within the first years of marriage. About whether…” He stopped.
He pressed his hand flat against the chair arm. “I cannot…”
“I don’t know either,” she said. “Not yet. I will know more after Hartley.”
The silence between them had the weight of something neither of them was going to say aloud, not yet, not tonight, not without something more solid to hold it with.
He looked at the fire for a long time. Then he said, “What do we do? About the petition? About Chancery?”
She noted the plural but did not remark on it.
“We do not give them anything they can use,” she said.
“We ensure Rose is visibly well, which she is, and which matters in a court’s assessment of a child’s welfare.
We ensure the household is seen as stable.
” She paused. “And we obtain the proof. Before Graves files with Chancery. Before Lucinda has the chance to construct her case while ours is still circumstantial.”
“If you go to Hartley and he has nothing?”
“Then I will find another way,” she said. “But I do not think it will be needed. I think he has been carrying something alone for two years because he did not know who to bring it to. And I think, if I ask him the right questions, he will bring it to us.”
He looked at her. “Why would he speak to you?”
“Because I will ask him about Rose,” she said.
“Not about Edmund. I will ask him as Rose’s governess, concerned for a child in my care, asking about her history and her welfare.
People speak more freely when they believe the question is about a child.
” She met his eyes. “And because I think he has been wanting to speak for a long time and has simply been waiting for someone to ask with enough care to be worth the cost.”
He held her gaze. She looked back at him steadily and realized that this was what it meant to trust someone. Not the easy trust of comfortable acquaintance but the harder kind, the extension of something real into territory that could not be perfectly mapped in advance.
“All right,” he said. “I should have gone sooner,” he added, and she understood he did not mean to Hartley.
“Yes,” she said, because she was not going to lie to him. “But you are here now.”
He looked at her, and something moved through his expression.
“I’ll go to Thornwick on Thursday,” she said. “I’ll take Rose to the haberdashery, she has expressed an interest in embroidery thread that I have been meaning to address. It will not appear unusual.”
“Take the gig,” he said. “Not the cart. Thomas Leigh will arrange it.”
“Thank you.”
She stood, crossed to the door and had her hand on it when he said, “Cynthia.”
She turned.
He was looking at her from across the room, his hands at his sides, the fire burning behind him. “Be careful,” he said. “Hartley may have spoken to others. Lucinda has long arms in this county.”
She held his gaze. “I know. I will be careful.”
She went to the schoolroom and sat beside Rose, who had finished the watercolour in her absence and was looking at it with the critical, assessing eye of an artist who has done something adequately and suspects adequately was not the right goal.
The fourteen purples of the heather argued with each other on the paper in exactly the way real heather argued, which Cynthia found, looking at it, rather beautiful.
“It’s not quite right,” Rose said.
“It is closer than you think,” Cynthia replied.
Rose looked at it for another moment. Then she set it aside because she would return to this later, when she was ready. “What shall we do this afternoon.”
“I thought we might read,” Cynthia said.
Rose settled into her chair with the fairy story, which she had been keeping at her bedside and brought to the schoolroom each morning with the quiet permanence of something she had decided belonged near her.
Cynthia sat beside her and listened to her read aloud while she was thinking about Thornwick, Hartley and the petition sitting in Graves’s briefcase.
She thought about all the shapes a household could take, all the shapes this one had taken across the past weeks, and the particular shape it was taking now.
She sat in the schoolroom and listened to Rose read about moonlight, rivers and stones that held, and she thought: I will not let her take this, whatever it costs.