Chapter Nine
“This is the wing, then. The one the house pretends it has not got.”
“It is. Wells gave me the key this morning as though he were handing over a thing that might bite, and then he found a sudden press of urgent business at the far end of the house.” Renae fitted the key, and the lock gave with a complaint.
“I cannot spare a maid for it, my lord. They are every one of them counting linen I have not yet the heart to tell them is past counting. So it is the two of us, or it is another winter shut.”
“Then it is the two of us.” He took the door before it could swing back on her. “I should warn you that I have reopened nothing in my life. You will have to tell me which end of a dust sheet is the dangerous one.”
“Both ends, my lord. That is the first lesson, and the only one most people require. A sheet has spent three years collecting everything the room wished to be rid of, and it gives the lot up at once, to whoever is nearest and best dressed.”
He glanced down at the worn cuff of his coat. “Then I am glad I wore the old coat.”
“You wore the old coat to a wing you have not entered in years, having known since breakfast that I meant to open it. I draw my conclusions about a man’s hopes from his choice of coat, my lord. It is the most honest thing most gentlemen tell me in a day.”
The room beyond held the particular cold of a place that had given up expecting anyone.
Furniture stood under sheets in the shapes of furniture, somehow worse than bareness would have been, a roomful of patient grey ghosts waiting to be told the family was not coming back.
He could not have said how long it had been since he last stood in it without sitting down to count, and the not being able to say was its own kind of answer.
“Your family abandoned a fair part of itself in here.” She lifted a corner and folded it back. “There is a writing desk under this one worth more than a quarter’s wages, sitting in the dark, doing no one alive any good.”
“My family was rich enough to be careless and proud enough to name the carelessness taste. We did not abandon things. We merely ceased to regard them, which my father will maintain is an entirely different matter, though it is no such thing.”
She placed the catalogue book and the lead pencil into his hands. “Then you shall write and I shall lift, and between us we will make the house confess what it owns. Read me back the last thing I said, so I am sure you are attending.”
“A writing desk worth more than a quarter’s wages, doing no one alive any good.” He wrote it down. “I attend. I have always attended. It is the one talent a second son is permitted to cultivate, the elder being fully occupied in being attended to.”
“Then attend to this.” She folded the sheet back from a long table crowded with the leavings of people who had stopped. “We do not leave a room half-looked-at. It is how a room learns it may be ignored, and a room that has learned the lesson takes no end of patience to unteach.”
“You speak of rooms as though they sulk.”
“They do. A neglected room is precisely a neglected child. It grows quiet, and then it grows strange, and then one morning you open the door to find it has become a thing you no longer recognise and cannot easily put right.” She set a tarnished candlestick upright.
“This house came very near to it. A pair of branched candlesticks, silver, wanting a polish and an honest owner. Worth more than you paid the footman who pawned the match, I should think. Write them down.”
“You are enjoying yourself.”
“I am. It is the only honest grandeur there is, my lord, a true account of what a house actually holds. Everything else is fright in a handsome coat, and I have had my fill of fright in handsome coats.”
She tipped a tall sheeted rectangle away from the wall, and it was a glass, a pier-mirror with the silvering gone to black freckles along its edges.
His glance went to it before he could prevent it.
Two grey figures stood in the spotted glass, a man with a catalogue and a woman with dust in her hair, and for a moment the mirror made of them a thing the room had not held in years. The thing was company.
“It wants resilvering,” he said absently.
“It wants nothing of the kind. A little blackening at the edges is honest. It tells you the glass has been somewhere and seen something and is no longer young enough to speak falsehoods about either.” She angled it back against the wall.
“Leave it. Not every old thing in this house wants mending into a pretence of being new.”
“You are not speaking of the mirror.”
“I am speaking entirely of the mirror, my lord. You may apply it where you wish. That is the chief use of speaking of mirrors.”
They worked on through the long grey afternoon.
She lifted and named, and he wrote and argued the valuations down out of habit and up again the moment she met his eye over them.
The dust came off the sheets in slow weather and hung in the bars of light from the single unshuttered window, and it settled on the both of them without the smallest preference for rank.
There was dust in her hair, a fine pale grey along the part of it, and he did not mention it, and he went on not mentioning it with a thoroughness that was beginning to cost him a measurable effort.
She uncovered a clock and stood over it a moment without lifting it. “Stopped at twenty past four. Someone let it run down and never wound it again, which is the saddest thing a clock is able to do, and very nearly the most truthful.”
“Why truthful?”
“Because a clock standing still marks the precise hour the house surrendered. Twenty past four, on some afternoon nobody thought worth the remembering, a person decided it was no longer worth the winding. You could rebuild a household from a thing like that, if you were the rebuilding sort.”
His lead pencil stopped over the page. “And are you?”
“I am the counting sort, my lord. I make the inventory honest, and I hand back the keys. The rebuilding I leave to people with a claim to the place. I have learned, at some expense, to know the one office from the other, and to present a bill for only the first of them.” She moved along the table.
“Lift the corner there. Gently. That shape is china, or I am no judge.”
He lifted instead the sheet from a small frame propped against the china, and held it to the window. It was a sampler, the alphabet and a worked verse and a name picked out below.
“A child’s sampler,” she said, taking it from him. “The alphabet and a moral and a name. The name has gone, though. Damp got the lower thread. Some daughter of this house learned her letters in it, and the house has contrived to lose even her name.”
“That is the entire wing in a single frame.”
“It is. Write it down regardless. Sampler, worked by a child whose name the damp has taken, worth nothing and not for selling.”
He drew the sheet off a low chest, and found on the top of it a wooden horse with one ear gone and the paint worn clean off the saddle by the patient thumb of some long-ago child.
“That one is not for the catalogue.”
“No?”
“It was my brother’s first. Then it was mine, once he had grown too grand for it, which is the entire history of everything I have ever owned under this roof, set out for you in a single toy.
” He turned it over in his hand. “I used to wind that clock, as it happens. I was the one who minded that it ran. No one set me the task. It only seemed a thing that ought to be done, and I appeared to be the one person in the house who thought so.”
“And then you stopped.”
“I went away to school, and there was no one to mind it after me, and it ran down at twenty past four on an afternoon nobody troubled to remember.” He set the horse upright on the chest. “You will write that I have gone maudlin in a dusty room, and that it does not become me.”
“I shall write nothing of the kind. I shall write that the clock is worth the mending and so is the horse, and that the man holding the horse had far better put it where he will see it than where he can pretend he has not.”
“You speak as though you have made a study of me, Mrs. Trelawney.”
“I have made a study of houses, my lord, and a man is only a house that argues back. You leave the same evidence behind you. A thing kept thirty years and hidden. A clock wound by the child no one thought to thank.” She set the sampler down beside the horse.
“I read a room, and I read you by the very same light, and the second reading costs you nothing over the first.”
“That is either the most flattering or the most alarming thing anyone has said to me in a decade.”
“It is both,” she said, and went back to the lifting. “The two are rarely far apart, in my experience, and never at all where you are concerned.”
She paused with her hand flat on the next sheet. “You have gone quiet, my lord.”
“I am attending. You instructed me to attend.”
“You are attending to something that is not the catalogue. I can hear exactly where the lead pencil stops.” Her back stayed to him. “If it is the chair beneath the window, it is sound, only wormed in the one leg, and well worth the saving.”
“It was not the chair.”
“Then it was idleness, and idleness is dear at present, with only the two of us and the light already going. Lift.”
He lifted the next of them, and the family came out of the dark a piece at a time, each thing she named and he wrote, until there was a tall shape against the far wall, sheeted to the floor, the wrong shape entirely for furniture.
“That one is yours, my lord. I keep a rule about faces. I do not unwrap a person I have not been introduced to.”