Chapter 23
“You have a smudge,” Rose said. “On your chin. Left side.”
Cynthia looked up from the hairbrush she had been using while looking at the wall rather than the glass.
“Thank you, Rose,” she said.
“It’s not ink this time.” Rose sat on the edge of the bed in her dressing gown, watching with observational patience. “I think it is jam.”
“That is less explicable.”
“You had jam at breakfast. Several hours ago.”
“You probably touched your chin while you were thinking about something else,” Rose said. “You do that sometimes. You touch your chin when you’re thinking.”
Cynthia looked at herself in the glass. The smudge was indeed jam, on the left side, and Rose was entirely correct about the habit. She addressed the jam with her handkerchief and looked at the window.
The morning was different.
The curtains in her room had been opened before she woke. Properly, the rings settled with care. She had lain in bed for a moment looking at the window and had thought: that is new.
Then she had gone to breakfast, and there were flowers on the breakfast table, in a small vase at the center of the table, placed with the precision of someone who had thought about it.
She had stood in the doorway and looked at the flowers and had thought, with private honesty: I am going to be insufficiently sensible about this.
She had sat down and been entirely sensible. She had then touched her chin with a jammy finger while thinking about the previous evening, which was not, on reflection, the most sensible available behavior.
The schoolroom had a fire. She stood in the doorway and felt the warmth of it, not the barely-catching warmth of a fire laid in haste but the deep, settled warmth of one that had been laid and lit and attended to. The kind someone had decided to provide.
She stood in the warm schoolroom doorway and thought: All right, I see what is happening here.
What she was less certain about was what she was supposed to do with it.
She had been certain last night. She had stood at the library window with his hands on her face and had the specific, unambiguous certainty of arrival. They loved each other, and these were not complicated propositions.
This morning the certainty was still present. That was not the difficulty.
The difficulty was the specific, persistent, entirely reasonable question that the cold light produced: Can a duke truly want a governess?
She thought about it honestly. She had no name that meant anything in the relevant circles.
No fortune, not even the modest fortune of a well-connected clergyman’s daughter or even niece; only the absolute nothing of a poorly connected one.
She had one blue dress, one gray, a necklace with a new clasp and the total of everything her uncle had taught her, which was considerable in Greek poetry and botanical identification and not considerable in any of the areas that society generally regarded as relevant.
He had said I love you in the library the previous night.
He had said many things in the genuine, undefended, underneath voice, and she believed him when he used that voice.
But he had said them in the aftermath of the drawing room confrontation, in the relief and exhaustion of something that had been threatening the household for months finally being addressed. He had said them in a day that was not an ordinary day.
She went to her chair in the schoolroom corner and sat in it and thought about this with the patient, methodical care she gave to things that required it.
Rose arrived in the schoolroom full of energy.
She came through the door with the particular quality of movement that Cynthia associated with the moors and the blacksmith’s yard, the openness, the unguarded quality. She sat down at the table and looked at the botanical specimens from yesterday with a brightness that was not performance.
“The goldenrod has held,” she announced. “I told you the new method would work.”
“You did,” Cynthia agreed. “You were right.”
Rose accepted this with modest satisfaction. She turned the specimen over and looked at it carefully from both sides.
Then she said, entirely casually: “Uncle said he loves us.”
Cynthia’s heart did something it was not supposed to do during botanical instruction.
“Did he?” she said, pleased with her steady voice.
“Last night. When he came to tuck me in.” She traced the edge of the goldenrod with one finger.
“He said he was sorry that I had been frightened for so long. I said I wasn’t frightened anymore.
And then he said…” She reconstructed it with precision.
“I love you. And then, I love you both. And then: We are my family now.”
She looked up.
“I think he meant all three,” she said, helpfully.
Cynthia looked at the botanical reference in her hands, at the specimens on the table and at the window. She was trying to realize what his words meant.
She turned away from Rose under the pretext of going to the shelf for the botanical reference, and stood at it with her back to the room for a moment. She allowed herself, briefly and privately, to feel the full weight of what she had been handed.
She had no family. It had been true for two years since her uncle died.
We are my family now.
She breathed once, carefully. She pulled the botanical reference from the shelf and turned back to the table.
Rose looked up when Cynthia sat down, with the reading look at its most gentle.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” Cynthia said. She opened the botanical reference. “Winter specimens today, I think. The ones that survive the frost.” She turned to the relevant section. “There are some extraordinary things that persist when everything else has gone.”
Rose looked at the page and then at Cynthia. She seemed to find what she was looking for.
“The hawthorn berry,” Rose said, pointing. “There is some on the breakfast table.”
“There is,” Cynthia said.
“Uncle put it there. I saw him this morning, in the corridor with it. It looked like he had thought about it.”
Cynthia looked at the hawthorn berry illustration.
“Winter specimens,” she said.
“Winter specimens,” Rose agreed, and bent over the book.
***
She did not see him until late morning.
She was in the library, sitting in her chair, not reading, because she could not concentrate, when she heard his footsteps in the corridor.
He came in.
He was not wearing the duke expression. The controlled, managed surface of the public man was simply absent. What was underneath was an uncertain man.
She had not seen him uncertain before. She had seen him grief-stricken, furious and raw, but this was different, the uncertainty of someone who has said the most important thing and is now standing in the morning after it without knowing what the morning requires of him.
He stood in the library doorway and looked at her.
She looked at him and thought: He is wondering whether last night was true and whether I woke up and had second thoughts.
He came in, but he did not go to his chair. He stood near the writing desk in the corner.
He looked at her. “Did you mean what you said last night? Did you mean that I was not the monster? That I was waiting for someone to stay.” He asked without covering his uncertainty: “Did you mean it?”
“I meant every word,” she said.
“Then will you stay? Not as governess,” he said.
“Not as anything you have been. Not in any form that requires…” He stopped.
His face was doing nothing managed, nothing constructed.
It was only this: a man in a library, uncertain, asking a question that mattered more than any question he had asked before.
“As my wife,” he continued. “Will you stay as my wife?”
The library was very quiet.
“Yes,” she said.
He breathed out. It was the smallest sound, barely a breath, the sound of something released that had been held for a very long time. The sound of a man who has asked the most frightened question available to him and has received the answer he hoped for.
He crossed the room. He sat in his chair, the one across the hearth from hers, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together and looked at her.
That is the man who was always underneath, she thought.
I am going to be seeing that face for the rest of my life.
She found, examining this prospect, that it was the most straightforwardly excellent news she had received in recent memory. She was not going to be sensible about it.
“Rose already knows,” she said.
He looked at her. “Already…”
“She told me this morning what you said to her last night. About loving us both. About family.” She paused. “She told me before you did.”
He pressed his fingers briefly against his eyes. “Of course she did.”
“She was very matter-of-fact about it.”
“She is always matter-of-fact. It is simultaneously her most effective quality and her most…” He stopped. “She knew before either of us was ready to admit it.”
“I think she was simply waiting for the appropriate moment to confirm it officially.”
“This morning’s conversation was the official confirmation?”
“The botanical reference provided useful cover,” Cynthia said. “She deployed it well.”
“I don’t know how to do this. The ordinary daily version of it,” he said.
“I have not, I have never…” He stopped and looked at his hands.
“I know how to manage an estate and address the House of Lords and conduct a legal investigation, apparently. I do not know how to be a… I do not know how this works. The daily version.”
She thought about this honestly. “Neither do I,” she said.
“Not this kind. I know how to love practically. I know how to do things for people, hold them in the dark and make biscuits at midnight. I am less familiar with the version where someone does those things for me.” She paused.
“I suspect we will both have to learn as we go.”
“That is not a reassuring prospect,” he said.
“No,” she agreed. “But I think it is probably the honest one.”
He looked at the fire and said, in the specific register of someone who has been arriving at a sentence for a long time: “I have been alone in this house for a very long time.”
“I know,” she said.
“I am not asking you to fix that. I am not asking you to be the remedy for it. I am asking you to be here. As yourself, as everything you are. I am asking you to be the person who asked what Rose liked, baked in the dark and told me the truth about my brother. The person who made this house into something I do not recognize but understand completely.” He looked at her.
“I am asking you to stay as that person.”
She held his gaze. She thought about everything she was, everything she had been and everything she was becoming in this house.
“I will stay.”
She said it not as a promise about the future, but as a fact about the present.
He looked at her for a long time.
Then he said: “Rose is going to be insufferable about being right.”
“She already is. She simply hasn’t said so yet.”
“She will say so,” he said. “With great composure and absolutely no subtlety.”
“Indeed,” Cynthia agreed. “She will consider it her professional obligation.”
“Mrs. Poole will need to be told,” Declan said.
“Mrs. Poole already knows,” she said.
“She…”
“She has known since approximately October,” Cynthia said. “She told me so, in the linen room.”
He looked at the fire, revising his understanding of how his own household communicated. “Thomas Leigh,” he said.
“Probably since the east field drainage report. He has had opportunities to observe.”
“Bess, the Cook?” he asked.
“Since the biscuits.”
He pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes, as he did when he found himself in a situation that he had not fully anticipated. Then he looked at her.
“It appears,” he said, “that the only person in this household who did not know was me.”
“You knew. You simply took some time about it.”
He looked at her. “I took a significant amount of time.”
“Indeed. You did.”
“I am going to write to Ashby today. About the investigation, and about…” He stopped. He looked at her. “About the arrangement.”
She held his gaze. The arrangement. Not the governess arrangement. The other one. The one that was going to require a different set of documents, a different conversation with Ashby and a visit to the church in Thornwick.
“Yes,” she said. “Write to him.”
“And I want…” He stopped. He looked at his hands and then at her, with the direct, undefended look that was his when he had something to say. “I want to take you to the graveyard.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Not today,” he said. “When you are ready. I want to take you and introduce you. He should know.” He looked at the fire. “Edmund would have…”
“Yes,” she said softly. “He would have.” She knew that Edmund would be happy for his brother. “Whenever you are ready.”
He nodded, and after a while he said: “The biscuits.”
She looked at him.
“On the hall table. I found them at six this morning.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“You baked at what time?”
“Midnight, approximately,” she said. “The kitchen was warm.”
“You baked biscuits at midnight on the night that Lucinda left.”
“Yes,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment. “Why?”
She thought about it. The kitchen at midnight, the warmth of it, the recipe that lived in her hands and the specific quality of needing something familiar when the world had been very large and very frightening.
“Because it is my language,” she said. “The same way the latches, the necklace and the tea in the afternoon were yours. I put things on that table because it is how I say the things I don’t always have the words for.”
He looked at her.
“Last night, what I was saying was: We are still here. The house is breathing, you are in your study, I am in the kitchen, and we are all right.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. “The plate was empty by seven,” he said.
“I know, it always is.”
She looked at him and thought about everything it had taken to arrive at that.
“Declan,” she added.
“Yes.”
“Write to Ashby. And then come and find us. Rose wants to go to the moors this afternoon, if the weather holds.”
“It will hold,” he said.
“Then we’ll be outside.”
She rose, crossed to the door, but at the threshold she stopped.
“Declan,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The hawthorn berry…. At the breakfast table.”
He looked at the fire but did not speak.
“It was the correct thing,” she added.
He looked at her, and his expression made her think: That is what I am staying for.