Chapter Three #2
Jane took down a worn volume of children’s verse, carried it to the chair by the fire, the chair that faced the window at a comfortable, harmless distance, sat, and began to read aloud to the empty room, in the voice one uses when quite alone, for one’s own pleasure.
She read the one about the land of counterpane, and part of the swing, and then, turning pages as though hunting an old friend, she found the garden one, the child who keeps a secret garden where troubles cannot follow, and read it through warm and unhurried to the final couplet, which every child in England knew, and which she deliberately ruined.
“And no one there may weep or frown,” Jane read, “for I have pulled the ladder up…” she turned the page placidly, “and eaten all the plums.”
The curtain twitched.
It was outrage, plain as a shout. Jane turned back a page, frowning at it.
“That cannot be right,” she told the book.
“Plums. I could have sworn there were no plums in it at all, but the print is very small, and I am only a governess. I daresay whole orchards get past me.” She sighed, and read the couplet again, and got it wrong yet again.
The hem lifted. Four small fingers came round the curtain’s edge and held it open to a thin bright slice, and the eye behind it, blue, indignant, and seven years old, fixed on the book in Jane’s lap as if it might be rescued from her by force of watching.
Jane did not look at the fingers. She looked at the fire and turned another page. “Perhaps the next one has no plums in it,” she said comfortably, and read on, and let herself be corrected in silence, at length, by an expert.
***
Robert came back down the east stairs empty-handed, having found the linen press open and the window seat vacant, with the beginnings of real fear working at him under the calm he wore for the servants, and stopped two steps into the library, because his missing niece was standing in the window with the curtain wrapped round her like a court mantle, in plain view of the strange woman by the fire, who was reading aloud and taking no more notice of her than of the fire-irons.
He had the sense, arriving late into the still-room, of walking in on the middle of a treaty.
“…though if the boy would only ask the lamplighter,” Miss Prescott was saying to the page, “he’d find posting a much better trade than piracy, and his mother would be spared a deal of worry. But nobody in these poems ever asks the person who knows.”
The curtain-wrapped ambassador watched her with an expression Robert had not seen above stairs in three weeks: interest. There was no sign of a flinch, nor the sentry’s stony posture.
Instead, there was an intent, leaning forward air of possession.
A child listening to her own book mishandled by an amateur who would clearly be lost without supervision.
He glanced at the fire and made his decision the length of one indrawn breath.
“There you are, Miss Prescott,” he said, at exactly conversational pitch, crossing to the shelf as though the window contained nothing but weather.
“I must beg your pardon, as we have to deal with household matters. You have found the poetry from my mother’s collection.
Some of the volumes are older than I am and every one of them is better company.
” He drew one down at random and turned it in his hands.
“You were saying, before we were interrupted. About being an answer worth asking.”
“I was about to say, my lord, that it can’t be hurried, and that I would rather promise you patience than progress.
” She closed the book on her finger, easy, unhurried.
“Progress belongs to Miss Charlotte. It will go at her pace or it won’t go at all, and whosoever should attempt to persuade you to the contrary is assuredly seeking to turn a profit.
” And there it was again, that level grey look that had sat through the wreck of his interview manners without once flattering him, and hadn’t flattered him now.
Robert had spent twelve years in rooms where every sentence aimed at him required something, and had grown as fluent in the dialect as any man in London.
This was not the dialect. This was a woman staking her professional word on the slowest possible answer, in the interview of a post she badly needed, in the full presence of the child, whose attention was entirely captured.
The curtain had fallen quite still, possessed of that eager, clinging stillness so natural to youthful curiosity.
Three weeks, he thought. Three weeks he had crept and coaxed and left biscuits like offerings at a shrine, and earned one eye at a curtain’s edge for it, and counted himself a diplomatist. This woman had been in his house half a morning.
She had not approached, had not coaxed, had done nothing whatever but sit down and be worth watching, Charlotte had come out of the curtain to the length of her own two feet and stood in the open window, holding her ground, for a stranger.
Not for a stranger. For the one person under this roof who had made no attempt on her.
“You’re engaged, Miss Prescott,” Robert said.
“From this morning. Mrs Brooks will see you settled.” He restored his mother’s book to the shelf, and allowed himself, at the door, one look back at the pair of them, the governess reading, the curtain’s small garrison standing down by inches, and found, with an odd sensation somewhere under his waistcoat, that of the two of them it was not his niece he had been looking at first.