Chapter Three
The chaise put her down in a fine grey drizzle, and Moorfield Manor made no move to welcome her, which Jane found honest of it.
The house stood long and stone-faced above its lawns with half the east wing shuttered, resembling a gentleman with one eye closed, and though she could see a dozen windows from the sweep, not one of them held a face.
She had been looked at by houses before.
This one declined, and there was information in that too.
The door was opened before she reached it, not for her sake, she understood at once, but so that the woman opening it might have the advantage of the steps.
“Miss Prescott.” A woman of some fifty years, the housekeeper bore a crown of silvery hair and a demeanour as sturdy and unchanging as the finest heirloom oak, and her gaze went past Jane’s face to the valise, the corded box on the chaise, and back, completing the inventory of her in the time it took to say her own name. “Mrs Brooks. You’re expected.”
It bore little resemblance to a true welcome, and while the conviction was mutual, both parties preserved a discreet silence upon the matter.
Jane was led through a hall that wanted flowers and got none, past a drawing room with its door shut fast, a smell of new beeswax and old smoke about it, a room lately scrubbed of something, and along a corridor hung with Moorfields going back two centuries, every painted eye of them managing to look elsewhere.
Mrs Brooks talked as she walked, in the flat voice of a woman who had given that very same account twice already that spring and expected to give it again by Michaelmas.
Instead of listening, Jane, having already gathered the essentials from Mrs Wilkins and her own observation, read the house.
It was a habit as involuntary as her own breathing: to her, a room was a ledger, keeping account through dust, wear, and deliberate display.
Moorfield Manor, observed as she walked from door to schoolroom, was a house that had ceased its accounts the preceding winter.
The flowers stood neglected; the drawing-room door remained closed upon a scrubbed emptiness; and the portraits in the gallery seemed to stare studiously past her.
Beneath the third frame, a pale rectangle of silk marked where a picture had been removed.
There was no nail which could only mean that it had not been sold, but taken down, a quiet act of a house unable to bear its own gaze.
She filed it all without meaning to, the way her father had filed a shop’s whole solvency in the time it took to buy a paper of pins.
A house in arrears with itself. Grieving, and behind on the grieving, and paying the interest in small neglects.
The fault lay not with the child; she was but the visible symptom of a deeper disorder.
“You’ll want to know about Miss Charlotte, and I’ll tell you plainly what the others weren’t told plainly enough.
The child doesn’t speak. Not won’t, doesn’t, not a word since January, not to me, not to his lordship, not to the rector’s wife who has a gift with children, or so the rector says.
She hides. Behind the curtains, in the linen press, under the stairs, we lost her for a whole morning once and found her folded onto the bottom shelf of the still-room like a tablecloth.
She’ll appear for meals when it suits her and vanish when it doesn’t, and if you go pulling her out of places, I’ll tell you now, and you’ll be the third this year to leave by the door you came in. ”
“I don’t pull children out of places,” Jane said. “It teaches them nothing except to find better places.”
Upon reaching the staircase, Mrs Brooks turned her eyes full upon Jane for the first time since her arrival, an observation at once sharp and fleeting, before her expression resumed its former indifference. “Well,” she said, which committed her to nothing, and turned to lead on.
Jane followed, and did not look up, since the briefest upward glance would have betrayed her, and spoiled the entire impression.
On the half-landing above, at the edge of her sight, something pale had drawn back behind the baluster a moment after she entered the hall, a glimpse of a hem, the flash of a stocking, and then she was gone.
She kept her eyes on Mrs Brooks’s keys and her face composed, and allowed herself to be observed the whole length of the stair by the small sentry above, with the particular care of a woman being introduced to a wild bird.
There were no sudden movements, and no notice taken, and every fibre of her attention exactly where it appeared not to be.
You have kept vigil since first my carriage turned into the drive. She thought. Splendid. Then you saw me arrive with one box, and you know I’m nobody. Nobody is a very restful thing to be watched by.
***
In the library, at last, she found a semblance of openness.
Here was a room that wore no mask and was brightened by firelight, lined with books worn soft by frequent study, and dominated by a grand desk buried under a sea of ledgers, papers, and the hasty hand of its master.
Jane had been asked to wait, and she waited standing, and read the room instead of touching it.
The poetry shelf was at eye level and had been visited recently.
The estate volumes on the desk had been visited in anger, if the quill marks meant anything, and they did.
The door opened on a man in his shirtsleeves with his coat over one arm and ink on two fingers, already talking.
“Miss Prescott, you’ll forgive the state of me, I’ve been three hours in last quarter’s accounts and I’ve lost the habit of coats. Sit, please. I won’t. I’ve been sitting since breakfast and it has done neither me nor the arithmetic any good.”
So this was the Wastrel Viscount. Jane sat, folded her hands, and revised the newspapers.
The papers had drawn her a soft man, blurred at the edges with claret.
The man at the window was none of those things, tall, unshaven by half a day, and restless in the manner of harnessed impatience rather than dissipation, and his gaze, when at last it fell upon her, was total and unreserved.
It was a small shock, like a step down in the dark.
She was accustomed to being glanced at. She was not at all accustomed to being read, and she sat very still under it and gave him nothing to read, which appeared, unaccountably, to interest him.
“You’ve seen the terms,” he said. “Mrs Wilkins will have shown you my letter, if she’s the woman her handwriting suggests.”
“She did.”
“And you came anyway.” He set the coat down on the ledgers, decided against the window, and took the chair opposite her instead, forearms on knees, closer than an interview required and apparently unaware of it.
“So we’ll not waste each other’s morning.
I don’t care greatly about globes and French.
What I want to know is what you’ll do on the day my niece spends four hours behind a curtain, misses her dinner and won’t come out for anyone.
The last governess had a method. Her method was to pull back the curtain and be brisk.
I am given to understand this is the accepted method. ”
“It’s the usual one.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“No,” Jane agreed. “What I would do is nothing, my lord. I would bring my needlework to that room and sit down where she could see me and be uninteresting for as long as it took, the first day, and the second, and the tenth if she needed the tenth. A child in hiding is not being defiant. She is governing the only country she has left. If I lay siege to it, I teach her that nowhere is safe and that adults cannot be trusted at their word, and she’ll speak to me around Christmas of never.
” She paused. “Your letter stated she watches from behind the furniture. A child who watches is asking a question. The whole of the work is to be an answer worth…”
The crash arrived from somewhere across the hall, china, and comprehensive.
Robert was on his feet before the echo settled. The door came open on Mrs Brooks with her composure worked loose at last, “The blue vase in the morning room, my lord, there is not a soul anywhere near it, and now I can’t put my hand on Miss Charlotte anywhere on the ground floor.”
“The east stairs. She’ll have gone up the east stairs.
She breaks things when the day’s been too full, and the day has been quite taxing for her.
” He caught himself in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and looked back at Jane, and she watched a man weigh pride against sense and throw pride out of the scale without a second glance.
“The day has been too full because of your arriving, Miss Prescott, which is no fault of yours and entirely a fault of mine, I told her nothing until this morning. Wait here, if you’d be so kind. ”
He was gone. Jane sat a moment in the wake of it, revising the newspapers a second time.
He knows why she breaks things. He counts her days by their fullness.
From the floor above came the heavy sound of a door closing hard, followed by a slow, deliberate tread upon the stairs, the unmistakable step of a formidable man, who sought neither stealth nor surprise.
She rose, and went to the poetry shelf, because waiting was a task like any other and she preferred to do usefully, and because the pale observer from the staircase had not gone up the east stairs at all.
Jane had heard what Mrs Brooks and his lordship, in the midst of their distress, had missed: no footstep had passed the library door, and the softest murmur in the room was not the crackle of the hearth.
The window curtains at the room’s far end fell straight and heavy to the floor. All but the left one, which sat a half-inch proud at the hem, over the toes of two small shoes.