Chapter Four
By the end of her first week, Jane had learned the geography of a household that did not appear on any floor plan.
There was the Moorfield the servants used, and the Moorfield his lordship paced over his rents, and then there was the third estate, the important one, which was Charlotte’s.
The linen press with the loose panel, the gap behind the morning-room curtains, the half-landing with its view of both doors, the space beneath the schoolroom window seat where a folded child fit exactly.
Jane mapped it the way her father had taught her to read a ledger, not by demanding entry, but by noticing what the totals declined to mention, and she was careful never once to look directly at any of it.
The schoolroom kept its own treaty. Jane arrived each morning at nine and read aloud for an hour to an apparently empty room, working through the verse book with a serene disregard for accuracy that would have scandalised its publisher.
Lessons, such as they were, she did aloud to herself, sums on the slate with one error in the working, geography with the rivers of England running through the wrong counties, and marked her own mistakes with a frown when she caught them, and missed one in three.
The window seat corrected her sums by leaving the slate, re-chalked in a small fierce hand, where she would find it after nursery dinner.
On the fifth morning she had left a length of blue hair-ribbon on the schoolroom table, the twin of the one that had been knotted round her door handle her first night, for the ribbon game, she had discovered, ran in both directions, and was the closest thing to conversation the small country would yet permit.
On the sixth morning the ribbon was gone from the table, and a white one lay in its place.
On the seventh, Jane ruined the garden poem again.
She accomplished it at her ease during the quiet hours of the morning, the room warm and heavy with sunshine.
She knew the window seat was occupied merely by the quality of the stillness, a silence that possessed a distinct texture whenever Charlotte was present, akin to a breath suspended two rooms away.
“And no one there may weep or frown,” she read, “for I have locked the little gate, and lost the key among the…”
“Roses.”
The word came from inside the window seat, muffled by the cushion and furious with correction, and it was out in the world before its owner could call it back.
Jane’s heart performed something complicated and painful against her ribs. She did not lift her eyes from the page.
“Roses,” she agreed, as though the cushion had every right to an opinion and frequently offered one.
“So it is. I had it wrong the whole week, and you have been very patient with me.” She turned the page and read on, voice level, hands steady, while behind her the window seat settled by one careful inch, and the morning went on as mornings do, except that somewhere in the room a door that had been locked since January now stood open the width of one word, both of them were pretending not to look at it, for fear it should shut.
She wrote to no one about it. There was no one to write to, which she noted that evening with less bitterness than usual, because for the first time in some years the fact had an advantage. The word was hers. The first in months, and the child had spent it on her.
***
By the second week, the household had begun deciding about her; Jane could read the deliberations the way she read any slow-moving account, in small entries.
The schoolroom fire was laid earlier. Her washing came back folded in the manner of the family’s rather than the staff’s, a distinction invisible to anyone who had not spent four years on the staff.
And on the Friday, Mrs Brooks appeared in the schoolroom doorway at eleven with her mending basket and an expression that forbade the drawing of conclusions.
“The light’s better in here of a morning than anywhere in my own quarters,” she said, to the room at large, and established herself in the window’s far corner with a pillowcase, and mended.
She said nothing further for the whole of the hour.
Jane, who understood perfectly that the light in the housekeeper’s south-facing parlour was the best in the house, went on with the morning as it stood.
Read aloud to the apparently empty room, worked her sums on the slate with the day’s planted error, frowned over the rivers of England, and was aware, throughout, of being observed at work by a professional, which was an examination no governess mistook for company.
The window seat held its breath and its counsel.
The small country did not care to perform before magistrates.
At the hour’s end Mrs Brooks folded the pillowcase, rose, and delivered her findings at the door, in the manner of a woman leaving a remark behind rather than addressing anyone with it.
“The last one did lessons at her. Talked at her, read at her, pulled her out of places and stood her in the middle of the carpet like a mat wanted beating.” A momentary pause ensued, as she shifted the weight of the basket to her hip.
“You leave the middle of the carpet empty. I’ve watched you do it a week, everything you do in this room leaves a space beside it the size of a child, and you never once look at the space.
” The housekeeper’s eyes went, briefly, to the window seat, and away, with a tact that thirty years of great houses had ground fine.
“My sister’s boy came back from the sea after the Amphion blew up in harbor with all his mates aboard, and he’d not speak either, the first year.
Everyone shouted at him kindly. It was the blacksmith who cured him, gave him the bellows to work and stood beside him at the forge every day for a month with his mouth shut.
” She was through the door before the last of it came back over her shoulder, flat as a delivered invoice.
“The fire’ll be laid at seven from tomorrow.
Growing minds want a warm room. It’s in no one’s accounts, so no one need be thanked for it. ”
Jane sat a moment when she had gone, and then wrote nothing down at all, which was its own kind of entry. Some households told you their verdicts. This one laid fires.
***
The estate office stood at the service end of the house, past the gun room, and it received Jane on the Saturday with a smell of ink and tallow and a man rising from behind account books with unimpeachable courtesy.
“Miss Prescott. The new governess. I had heard you were settling in famously.” Mr Winthrop was perhaps five-and-forty, dressed one degree better than his station, and his desk was the tidiest surface she had seen at Moorfield, squared papers, clean quills, everything at right angles, the desk of a man whose accounts closed to the penny because he had decided in advance what the pennies would be. “What may I do for the schoolroom?”
“The quarter’s allowance, if you please. There’s an account standing at the stationer’s in the village for primers and copybooks, and Miss Charlotte wants a proper paint-box. The one in the nursery has been mixed to mud.”
“Of course.” He did not move towards the strong-box.
“Though I wonder, Miss Prescott, a paint-box, for a child who cannot be got to lessons? The last lady found the allowance more than sufficient, and she kept a full schoolroom timetable. Or believed she did.” A small smile, inviting her to share it.
“You have been with us a week. Perhaps the wisdom is to see whether you stay a month before we go furnishing academies. It has not, historically, been a settled post.”
Each word was reasonable. That was the art of it, Jane knew the art, had eaten it for four years at other tables, the slight built entirely of prudence, unanswerable without appearing to be exactly what it implied she was.
Temporary, excitable, not worth the outlay.
She let the pause sit just long enough to be noticed.
“His lordship engaged me for the year, Mr Winthrop, and the schoolroom allowance is Miss Charlotte’s, not mine. If it wants his lordship’s authority to release his ward’s own funds, I’ll ask him at dinner. He takes an interest in the schoolroom.”
Beneath the man’s polite demeanor, something wavered, a brief, calculating glance, vanished as soon as it appeared. “No need in the world,” he said warmly, and went to the strong-box. “We are all delighted the schoolroom is under such careful management.”
He counted out the money on the desk’s edge and had her sign the receipt book, and it was while she was signing, received, ￡4, the quarter’s schoolroom allowance, that two things presented themselves to her at once, in the effortless way that figures had always presented themselves to her, as though her father were leaning over her shoulder tapping the page.
The first was that the coins under her hand came to three pounds twelve, the difference being explained, smoothly, as “the stationer’s account settled direct from this office, Miss Prescott, to spare you the carrying of it.
” The second was the petty-cash book lying open at his elbow, and the column of entries down its page, every one of them carrying two dates in the margin, one against the entry, one small and cramped against the sum.
A clerk who dates a sum twice, Janie, is keeping two calendars, one for the man who pays him and one for the truth. Ask which calendar the money lives in.
She had been twelve, and it had been a game, her father’s finger on a tradesman’s bill by lamplight.
It was not a game now. She signed her name without a tremor, thanked Mr Winthrop for sparing her the carrying of eight shillings, and left, and made a point, at the door, of fumbling her reticule, dropping a glove, stooping for it.
The clumsy, apologetic exit of a woman who noticed nothing, performed for the man she could feel watching her the whole length of the passage.
That evening she ruled a fresh page at the back of her father’s primer and made the first entry in her own small ledger.
Saturday. Schoolroom allowance ￡4, received ￡3 12s, stationer’s account claimed as settled direct, verify at the village.
Petty-cash book, entries double-dated throughout.
She looked at the page a while, then added, beneath it, in the interest of accuracy.
He watched me out of the office. First person at Moorfield to find me worth the watching.
I would rather it had been almost anyone else.
***
Eleanor Blythe arrived on the Monday with a basket of physic herbs for Mrs Brooks and the general air of a west wind getting into a shut house.
Jane, crossing the kitchen garden with Charlotte’s silent shadow drifting along the espaliers ten feet behind her, was hailed over the lavender without ceremony or introduction.
“You’re the new governess, no, don’t tell me, you can’t be anyone else, you have the look of a woman doing six things while appearing to stand still.
Eleanor Blythe. My brother has the parish.
I’ve been wanting to get a look at you for a week.
” She said it with such open good humour that the words carried no impertinence at all, and her handshake was a gardener’s, warm and unceremonious.
“The whole village has, if we’re honest. You’re the third this year, you know. ”
“So I’ve been told. Twice.”
“Yes, we’re a small place. We make our news last.” Eleanor’s glance went past Jane’s shoulder, touched the small figure stationed among the apple cordons, and came back without lingering, done so lightly, so exactly rightly, that Jane warmed to her on the spot.
“And how do you find Moorfield? You may be diplomatic, I’m only the vicar’s sister, and we are bred to discretion. ”
“You are nothing of the kind,” said Mrs Brooks, arriving for her basket, and the two of them fell into the easy quarrel of long acquaintance, while Jane stood in the sun and listened to Eleanor talk, about the orphan children at the parish school, mostly, where she spent three days a week teaching sewing and letters to children whom grief had made strange, and whom she discussed neither in the voice of charity nor of complaint but as colleagues in a difficult trade.
“The little Ferris boy has started speaking again, did I tell you, Mrs Brooks? Eight months. His sister simply carried on setting his place at table the whole time, and one morning he asked for the salt as though nothing, well.” Her eyes came to Jane, and for the second time in a week Jane had the disconcerting experience of being looked at with attention and no agenda whatever.
“But I expect you know all about that kind of waiting, Miss Prescott.”
“I’m learning it.”
“It’s the whole of the work, my brother says, and he’s only wrong in thinking he learned it at Oxford.
” Eleanor gathered her shawl. “Come to the vicarage on your half-day. I mean it, Sundays we keep open house, and the physician, Mr Watson generally calls, so you’d have sensible company, or at least company.
” The colour that spread across her face at her own sentence was slight, and swiftly governed, and Jane kept it with a private smile among the week’s other discoveries.
It was as Eleanor turned to go that Charlotte came out from the cordons.
She came the long way round the bed, at a tangent, in the manner of a small ship tacking against notice, arrived at Jane’s side, and put into her hand, without a word, without looking up, in front of the visitor and the housekeeper and the open windows of the house, one dandelion, stem bent double from clutching.
Then she retired three feet to the lavender border and stood inspecting the middle distance, a person with no knowledge of any dandelion.
Nobody remarked on it. Mrs Brooks became occupied with her basket, and Eleanor said something easy about the borders wanting rain.
But Jane, closing her hand carefully around the ruined stem, caught the look the two women exchanged over the lavender, and the look, quick and quiet as it was, had the weight of a verdict delivered in a full courtroom.
In front of witnesses, she thought, standing very still with her heart absurdly loud, holding a weed. She claimed me in front of witnesses.
From the tail of her eye she saw Eleanor Blythe looking at her, no longer with curiosity, but the way one looks at the answer to a question the whole parish had been asking.