Chapter Eight
The white ribbon appeared on Jane’s door handle on the second rainy morning, tied in a bow with one end left long, and the long end was new.
She had learned the grammar of the game by then.
A ribbon knotted plain meant good morning.
A ribbon on the schoolroom table meant come and be read to, and this, the trailing end, deliberate as a beckoning finger, meant something had been decided overnight in the small country behind the curtains, and Jane was being sent for.
She put on her shawl and followed where the signs led.
A second ribbon hung looped about the newel post at the foot of the east staircase, whilst a third marked the latch of the long corridor bridging the family wing and the guest chambers.
In that quiet reach of the house, the carpet gave way to bare boards, and the morning light filtered thin through a single high window at the far end.
Charlotte stood halfway down it, waiting.
And when Jane came near, the child did something she had never once done in three weeks of ribbons and slates and corrected poems. She reached up and took Jane’s hand, took it first, of her own accord, fingers cold and certain, and led her to the stretch of panelling below the corridor’s high window, and pressed the beading at the third panel’s edge, and stood back.
The panel swung inward on a dark little room the size of a wardrobe laid on its side.
It smelled of dust and candle-ends. There was a folded blanket, and a wooden horse with a worn mane that Jane recognised from no nursery shelf she had catalogued, and a tin that had once held biscuits, and a view, she bent to see, through a fretted brass grate low in the opposite wall, into the room beyond.
It was the capital city of the hidden country, and she had just been shown it, freely, by its sovereign.
“Thank you,” Jane said, quietly, exactly as she would have thanked a duchess for the tour of a great house.
“I won’t tell anyone. That’s yours to do, if you ever choose, and nobody else’s.
” She looked at the blanket, the horse, the careful housekeeping of it, and something in her chest ached at the sight of it, which she did not stop to examine.
This is where you went, all those mornings.
You built a state where nothing could be taken from you, and you have just given a stranger the key. “May I sit?”
Charlotte considered, and nodded, and they sat together in the dust-smelling dark with the panel drawn to, the sovereign and her first minister, while the rain went on somewhere above, and through the little grate the room beyond showed its furniture in slices.
The corner of a dressing table, a fire lit against the damp, the rose-coloured light of curtains Jane did not recognise.
She was still working out whose room it was when the door of it opened, and Lady Harrington’s voice came through the grate as clearly as if she had spoken across a tea table.
“No, leave the tray, I shan’t want it. Shut the door. The passage is a thoroughfare.” There was a soft rustle of skirts, and the sound of dying embers was roused with a quick turn of the poker. “Well. You may tell me now what you would not say at breakfast.”
“I shall tell you,” said Adelaide’s voice, “that you are rushing your fences.” A chair received her.
“He is not the boy you knew. Something has got into him this spring, clerking, or conscience, or that desk of his, and a man at a desk is a man asking questions. You gave him eight years of silence and then a declaration in a picture gallery. I could have told you he would look for the seam. I did tell you.”
“You told me.” Diana’s voice moved. A glimpse of her figure crossed before the hearth, trailing a dressing-gown of rose silk in her wake.
“And you were right, and I have adjusted. It makes no difference. He may believe me or not as he pleases. Belief is an ornament, Adelaide, it is not a load-bearing wall. What he cannot do is answer Edmund without me. You have seen to that. The whole county has seen to that. The man is penned, and a penned man may take a week or a month to walk through the one open gate, but he walks through it. I am not troubled about Robert.” The fire snapped. “I am troubled about the nursery.”
Beside Jane, in the dark, the small cold hand had crept back into hers. Jane held it and did not breathe.
“The child.” Adelaide’s voice had a frown in it. “What of her? She wants managing, certainly, but once the household is on a proper footing…”
“She wants Bath, or Cheltenham, or wherever it is one sends them,” Diana said, in the pleasant voice she used for everything.
“A good establishment for young ladies takes them at eight. She is nearly it. You cannot mean to keep her in the house, Adelaide, be serious for a moment, a child who does not speak, drifting about behind the curtains like a small ghost, with a hired girl trailing after her encouraging it. It answers while Edmund is watching, I grant you. The devoted uncle plays well in Chancery. But afterwards.” The rose silk crossed the grate again.
A hairbrush was taken up, set down. “Afterwards it is my house, and I will not keep a, a memento in it. He had a brother who is deceased. I am entering into matrimony with and not the mausoleum. She goes to school, the governess goes wherever such persons go, and in two years Robert will thank me for it and believe thanking me was his own idea. It is the kindest arrangement for everyone, and I am perfectly prepared to be patient about it.”
There was a silence from Adelaide’s chair, a silence with weight shifting in it, and Jane, who had spent four years reading the pauses of women who ruled rooms, heard something in it that Diana, brushing her hair in her rose light, did not.
Resistance, unformed and unwilling, the sound of a woman hearing her own campaign continued past where she had meant it to stop.
“She is my nephew’s child,” Adelaide said at last, slowly. “James’s daughter, in James’s house.”
“And she will be beautifully educated fifty miles from it, which is where everyone of our kind is educated, Adelaide, including you and including me. Truly, you look at me as though I had proposed drowning her.” The laugh came low and easily.
“It is only school. It is no uncommon custom in genteel families.”
But the small hand in Jane’s had gone rigid, and then it was gone entirely, and Charlotte was through the panel and running, soundless on her stockinged feet as only Charlotte could be, down the bare corridor and away, before Jane could so much as catch her sleeve.
The panel stood open to the thin morning light.
Through the grate, serene, the hairbrush went on with its work.
Jane went after her, quick and quiet, closing the panel on its secret because some part of her was already keeping accounts even now, she does not know she was heard, that is an asset, guard it, and came out of the corridor’s mouth onto the landing at the exact moment a door below swung and a tall figure took the stairs two at a time, so that the whole disaster met itself in one place.
Charlotte flying blind along the landing, Robert rising onto it, and the child running full into him, hard, with a sound, the first sound Jane had ever heard grief make in her, like a sob with no voice under it.
“Here, here now.” He had gone down on one knee before his own surprise finished, coats and all, both hands out but not closing, the way he never closed them. “Charlotte. Look at me. What is it, are you hurt? Charlotte, please.”
And Charlotte, shaking, backed one step out of his hands, looked her uncle full in the face with her mother’s tears on her father’s eyes, and spoke.
“Will you let her take Mamma’s place?”
Seven words. Five months. The sentence came out cracked down its middle, half a whisper and half a cry, in a voice gone rusty with disuse, and Jane, frozen at the corridor’s mouth with her hand pressed to the door frame, watched Robert Moorfield take the full weight of it without one instant of the wrong astonishment.
No crowing, no you spoke, no snatching at the miracle.
He went white. His hands, still open, came down slowly to his sides, and he knelt there looking at his brother’s daughter as though the question had been put to him by the whole assembled house of Moorfield, living and deceased.
“No.” The word came out of him plainly, with nothing dressed about it.
“No one will take your mamma’s place. Not while I live, Charlotte, not that lady, not any lady, not for any reason under heaven.
Your mamma was your mamma, and this is your home, and you will not be sent from it.
I give you my word.” He drew out a long breath.
“I have been many worthless things, but I have never once broken my word. Ask anyone. It’s why I gave it so seldom. ”
The landing was silent. Somewhere below, a house went on with its morning, not knowing the ground had shifted above it.
Charlotte stood looking at her uncle a long moment, the tears going down her face without any sound at all, and then she turned, and walked, not ran, the three steps to Jane, and was gathered up, and buried her face in the grey wool where her one spoken sentence in five months had come from and gone back to rest.
Over the small head, Robert’s eyes came up to Jane’s, and Jane, holding his niece and his gaze together at the top of the stairs, understood that he knew.
He was sensible that a female was implied in the child’s utterance, and an address linked to her name; he knew the inquiry had been carried forth from some room in his house that morning, and he was persuaded that the lady in grey had been in attendance wherever his niece had been when she acquired the knowledge.
He did not ask. He looked at her the way a man looks at the one other witness to a treaty, and then past her, down the corridor’s length, to the guest wing’s distant doors, and what came into his face then was quiet, and cold, and entirely without performance, and Jane thought, there.
That was what the newspapers never saw. Have mercy on the account that did not reconcile.
***
That night Charlotte would not be put down in the nursery, and nobody proposed to insist. She fell asleep at last in Jane’s narrow bed with the white ribbon wound round her fist and her hand knotted in Jane’s sleeve.
Jane sat propped against the bolster in the candlelight, keeping still, doing sums of a kind her father had never taught her, and it was long past the house’s last noises when the light in the passage shifted, once, at the gap under the door.
A shadow that came, and stood, and stayed a moment too long to be a servant’s, and went away without knocking.
The sound of soft steps walking away towards the guest wing.
The scent that came under the door after them, faint as an entry in invisible ink, was orange-flower water.
Noted, my lady, Jane thought, and did not sleep for a long while, and kept her hand over the small fist and its ribbon in the dark.