Chapter Eleven
The invitation came on a Tuesday, on paper so heavy it stood in the toast rack by its own authority, and Adelaide read it aloud at breakfast with the expression of a general reviewing an ally of doubtful value.
“We are to dine with the Fenwicks on Friday, and she requests the child be presented before dinner: a liberty disguised as an attention, and entirely in character.” A pause followed.
The paper turned. “And she writes, beneath. The little one’s governess will of course attend her, and as we sit down thirteen without, perhaps Miss Prescott would oblige us at table.
I cannot abide thirteen. The late Sir Giles’s mother passed away from it, or of the salmon, and one cannot be too careful. ”
The silence at the table had a texture Jane was learning to read like weather. Diana buttered toast. Robert had stopped with his cup half-raised.
“Thirteen,” Adelaide repeated, flatly. “She has juggled her own table to arrive at thirteen, and I am meant not to see it. Augusta Fenwick has wanted a look at this household since January, and now she has contrived to seat the whole of it in her dining room like specimens on a card.” She folded the invitation.
“We accept, of course. Refusing Augusta is the one thing more dangerous than obliging her. Miss Prescott, you will need your grey silk, if you possess one, as you will be examined from soup to dessert, and you will survive it, because you have been examined by myself for a month and Augusta is merely louder.”
“I possess a grey wool, and a governess is furniture at such tables. Furniture survives most dinners.”
“At most tables,” said Adelaide. “At Augusta’s residence, every article of furniture has been formally catalogued and set to account.”
***
The Grange dressed itself handsomely, glowing with candles enough to light a campaign and boasting a drawing room upholstered in the very shade of prosperity.
The company numbered fourteen, comprising Jane, the Fenwicks, a marchioness’s widowed cousin down for the season, the Reverend Mr Purslow, a young curate whose ambition was rivalled only by his anxiety, two squires with their wives, and the Moorfield party, who were presented to the room like the principal course of a banquet.
Charlotte was presented before the soup was served, as requested.
She came in on Jane’s hand in her good frock, performed her geometric curtsey to the assembled candlelight, and stood, pale, contained, her eyes doing the room in one sweep and finding Jane’s station by the door before anything else in it was permitted to exist. Lady Fenwick descended in dove-grey magnificence.
“And here is the little heiress herself. What a solemn great pair of eyes, to be sure. You shall tell me, child, which you like better, the seaside, or town? Speak up. My devotion to children is well known.”
The room’s talk dimmed helpfully. Charlotte looked at the enormous, kind, looming face, and her chin went down, and the silence began to stretch towards the place where silences become events, and Jane stepped in from the margin, unhurried, and did the only mending such moments allow.
She gave the child a task in place of a performance.
“Miss Charlotte, Lady Fenwick keeps a globe in her library, I believe, the famous one, with the discoveries painted in. Perhaps her ladyship would let you find the great southern ocean on it after dinner, if you make your goodnights prettily now.”
She offered another deep and flawless curtsey, tugging lightly at Jane’s hand to signal their business was concluded.
Diverted from an answer she was never to receive, Lady Fenwick promptly declared herself charmed.
She raised her lorgnette, her gaze drifting thoughtfully between the child and the governess.
“How well she manages her,” said the lorgnette’s owner, to the room, in the voice of a woman filing a specimen. “How very well.”
Dinner was announced, and Jane went in last and unescorted, taking her seat near the bottom of the board between Mr Purslow and the deaf ear of a squire.
The table itself mapped the social geography of the realm: Robert sat at Lady Fenwick’s right hand, Diana shone opposite him in the full favour of the candlelight, Adelaide anchored the centre like a bastion, and the vast expanse of white damask stretching between the head of the table and Jane’s humble station was as wide, as charted, and as cold as any ocean on the globe. The examination proceeded by courses.
With the fish, the marchioness’s cousin wondered aloud, to the table, over Jane’s head, in the third person, which was the grammar of it, whether governesses did not find dining in company awkward, poor things, neither one thing nor the other, and Lady Fenwick said that dear Miss Prescott seemed to manage everything, by all reports, and let by all reports sit on the cloth like a card played face down.
With the saddle of mutton, one squire’s wife told the other, at conversational volume, that her sister had turned off a governess at Michaelmas for encouraging the children to be attached to her, which was the ruin of discipline, and both looked nowhere in particular with great precision.
Jane ate what was put before her, answered what was addressed to her, twice, in three courses, and kept her spine as her father had kept his books, and found the whole of it survivable in the way of known weather.
She had dined at the foot of tables four years, and the third person was her native climate.
What was new, what pulled at the table’s current like a moon, was the head of it.
Robert was doing his duty by his hostess, and doing it well.
She could hear the runs of laughter, Lady Fenwick’s and Diana’s braided through his.
But three times before the cloth was drawn, she counted, because counting was what she had instead of blushing; his attention came down the table’s length to her end.
Not idly. Deliberately, once at the third-person beat with the fish, arriving with a look that was a hand set flat on a table.
Once at the squires’ wives, with something at the mouth’s corner that at closer range would have been dangerous, and once for no reason at all that the table supplied, which was the worst of the three, because Lady Fenwick was mid-sentence beside him at the time, and Lady Fenwick’s sentences never ran on without her eyes running with them.
The lorgnette did not come up that time. It lay by the hostess’s plate while its owner talked on, brilliantly, of nothing, and watched the viscount observe the foot of her table, and put it away somewhere behind her powder with the rest of the evening’s inventory.
Mr Purslow, meanwhile, had discovered Jane could talk.
He was young and clever and terrified of the upper half of the table, and somewhere in the second course, safely below the salt, the two of them had fallen into actual conversation, parish schools, and whether girls should be taught figures, on which Mr Purslow held advanced views he clearly aired seldom, and Jane, answering him honestly, forgot her voice’s schoolroom setting for one sentence too long.
“…but teach a girl her own arithmetic, Mr Purslow, and you have not made her a clerk. You have made her ungovernable by falsehood, which I grant is why the practice spreads slowly.”
It came out clear into one of those sudden pools of quiet that long tables breed, and travelled further up the cloth than it was addressed.
The marchioness’s cousin’s fork paused. Diana’s head turned, candlelit, incurious as a cat is incurious.
And from the table’s head came Robert’s voice, pleasant, carrying, unhurried, entering the conversation across four ranks and every rule of the geography
“Miss Prescott has the right of it, Purslow, and I can furnish the proof. My own household accounts were falsehood’s home park until a person who could read them looked at them. Ungovernable is the very word. I recommend the condition to the whole county.”
He said it and returned to Lady Fenwick’s talk with perfect ease, and the table resumed, and it had lasted five seconds entire.
But Jane sat below the salt with her ears burning, doing the sums, he crossed the whole map for that, and two places up, the squire’s wife who had spoken of attachment looked at her plate with new calculation, and at the table’s head the lorgnette rose at last, ceremonious, and considered the length of white cloth from the viscount to the governess as a surveyor considers a distance he intends to publish.
***
In the withdrawing room the ladies arranged themselves, and Jane took the chair by the far lamp with the workbag she had brought for armour, and was let alone, which is to say, examined at leisure.
She sat, and stitched, and watched the room’s true business conduct itself on the sofa by the fire.
Lady Fenwick and Lady Harrington, heads inclined, teacups going, the low contented hum of two fluent speakers of the same language.
She could hear none of it. She could read all of it, Diana’s small deprecating gesture towards the card room where the men sat.
Fenwick’s lorgnette lifting towards Jane’s corner and being gently, smilingly redirected.
Diana’s lips parted into an expression that suggested either solitude, regret, or misfortune.
The older lady responded with two deliberate nods, listening like one who was being steadily supplied with detail, with sympathy, and with precisely those polished turns of phrase that a delicate narrative requires when it is repeated in polite society.
She is not gossiping, Jane thought, with her needle steady. Gossip scatters. This is being aimed.
The carriage home rolled through the black lanes with Charlotte asleep against Jane’s arm; the globe had been a triumph.
The great southern ocean had been found, silently, to Lady Fenwick’s loud delight and the child’s private, sightline-checked satisfaction, and Adelaide delivered the evening’s audit to the dark in general.
“Augusta was in spirits, which is always expensive for somebody. Diana was in looks, which is always expensive for somebody else. And you, Miss Prescott, were addressed twice in five courses and managed to be the most remarked-upon person at the table, which I would call carelessness in a designing woman and must therefore call talent in you.” The old eyes glinted once in the carriage lamp.
“That sentence about ungovernable girls will be in three drawing rooms by Sunday. My nephew’s gloss upon it will be in six. ”
Robert, opposite, watched the dark hedges go by and said nothing at all, but at the Grange’s gate, as the carriage had turned out between the lamps, Jane had looked back once through the glass, and seen the door still open, and their hostess standing in her own light with the lorgnette lowered, watching the Moorfield carriage go with the stillness of a woman who has finished her inventory and is composing, even now, the covering letter.
That night, in the primer, below the week’s other entries, Jane ruled a line and wrote
Friday, the Grange. Addressed twice, examined throughout. He crossed the table for me once, in company, and the whole room saw it. Lady F. and Lady H. spoke low and long, and it was aimed. I have been priced before. This was different. This was being written down.