Chapter Thirteen
Lady Fenwick called on Monday, before the knocker was properly awake, which in the county’s grammar meant she had news she could not keep over a second breakfast.
Robert was sent for to the drawing room and went with his ledger-hand still inky, and found the visit already at full sail.
His aunt was upright at the tea table, Diana arranged by the window with needlework she never advanced, and in the place of honour, sat Lady Fenwick herself.
“Lord Moorfield.” Lady Fenwick gave him her hand and her most charitable smile, which was the one that came with sentence attached.
“I was just telling your dear aunt what a triumph Saturday was. The whole village speaks of nothing else. So affable, so wonderfully unstudied, quite the new fashion of lordship, everyone says so. My coachman had it from the sexton that you subscribed to the church roof on the spot.”
“The roof leaks on the parish, ma’am. It seemed the neighbourly place to put money.”
“And you danced.” Her lorgnette came up, less to see him than to have something judicial in her hand.
“With the whole green, I hear. Even now, who was it? Your little niece’s governess.
Miss… Prescott. I do recall her from my dinner, quaint little thing, I may say.
” The name arrived carefully, like a card laid face up.
“Down the middle of the Roger de Coverley, hand in hand, before every soul in three parishes. My dear Lord Moorfield, how democratic. I said to Sir Giles, it is exactly what dear Lady Harrington was saying to me at Christmas, that Robert Moorfield never did anything by halves, bless him, and never will.”
“You are all kindness, Lady Fenwick,” Robert said. “It’s a great comfort to a man, knowing his Saturdays are so well attended.”
She stayed three-quarters of an hour, and it was masterly in its way.
Not one sentence that could be repeated as an accusation, and not one that was anything else.
The governess was mentioned several more times, always in praise, so capable, they say, so very much trusted, quite one of the family, one hears; each compliment was bestowed with all the deliberate care of a woman stacking firewood, whilst Adelaide received every grain of it with a countenance as impassive as a closed ledger.
Diana’s needle, by the window, went in and out, in and out, advancing nothing.
It was the repetition that struck Jane most upon reflection.
To praise a person once is a courtesy; to praise them repeatedly, and from the lips of a woman who never expended a word without calculating its return, is an act of deliberate design.
It was to establish a reputation, to fix it irrevocably in the minds of the family, so that when a darker sentence was eventually needed, the ground should be well prepared.
So capable. So entirely relied upon. Quite one of the family.
Each one true, each one warm, each one a small neat stone laid in a wall whose purpose would not be visible until the wall was finished and something stood behind it that could not get out.
Lady Fenwick had not come to engage in idle gossip as gossip was merely a small coin.
She had come to lay foundations, and to mark, in the countenances of the family, whether the ground were fit to receive them.
Adelaide, meeting each stone with the impassive air of a closed account book, permitted her to proceed undisturbed; for Adelaide had learned half a century since that one does not interrupt a builder in the midst of his wall.
You wait, and you learn the shape of what she means to build, and then you decide whether to let it stand or bring it down on her while she is still inside it.
At the door, farewells given, Lady Fenwick paused for her parting shot, which she delivered with tenderness.
“You must bring the dear child to me again at the Grange, Lord Moorfield, before the summer ends. And do give my regards to Miss Prescott.” The lorgnette came up one last time, and travelled, unhurried, from his inky hand to his face, and there performed its small arithmetic in public.
“So few households would be brave enough to keep her.”
The street door had barely shut on her before Adelaide said, to the room at large, in a voice Robert had last heard the day his father had passed away. “Diana. You will excuse us.”
***
Diana went, trailing one glance that offered him sympathy and terms in the same look, and Adelaide crossed to the writing table, unlocked her correspondence-box, and laid a letter on the cloth between them with the flat finality of a magistrate producing the weapon.
“That came Friday. I had meant to spare you until I’d answered it. After this morning I find sparing you is a luxury this family can no longer bear the cost of. Read it.”
Pettigrew’s hand was that of a clerk, small, dry, and cramped.
Robert read the sheet standing. The first page was all preamble and apology; the second was the blade.
…must inform you that Mr Edmund Moorfield has now retained Mr Serle of Lincoln’s Inn, who is known for Chancery work of exactly this character…
a petition respecting the guardianship and the management of the ward’s fortune is, I am given to understand, in preparation, wanting only what Mr Serle calls “matter” to lay before the court…
and I regret extremely to add that among the matter now spoken of is the assertion, I give it as it was given to me, of an unsuitable intimacy between his lordship and a young person lately engaged from a London registry, said to be conducted before witnesses in the public view of the parish…
The paper was very steady in his hands. That surprised him distantly, like news of a stranger.
“Before witnesses,” Robert said. “In the public view of the parish. That letter was written Friday, Aunt. The festival was Saturday.”
“Then you have been matter since before you danced, and Saturday you were kind enough to provide the illustrations.” Adelaide’s voice did not rise.
It settled, which was worse. “That woman came this morning to see whether the story would hold when she carried it. You watched her weigh it. By Thursday it will be in every drawing room from here to Chichester, and by Michaelmas it will be set down in an affidavit, formally framed, sworn, and dated. Do you comprehend the nature of Serle’s business, Robert?
It is not proof. Chancery requires no proof for such a matter.
It requires only a story a judge may repeat to himself as he sets his hand to the paper.
The rake. The parish-register girl. The silent little heiress and her forty thousand pounds. And the family that did nothing.”
“The story is false.”
“The narrative is compelling, and before a judge, that is a vastly different and infinitely stronger matter.” She sat, at last, and for the first time in his life Robert watched his aunt’s hands, folding the letter, miss the crease.
“I have buried a husband and two brothers, one of them your father, whom I did not like but mourned anyway, and I have never once in my one and seventy years asked a member of this family to hear me as though I might be right. I am asking now. Enter into matrimony with Diana. This week. Let the notice run in the Gazette before quarter-day, and Serle’s petition expires on his desk, because his story ends there is no rake in it any more, only a settled wedded man of rank, and no judge in England takes a child from that.
” Her eyes came up. “Or keep on as you are, and gamble Charlotte on the difference between what is true and what is repeatable.”
The fire subsided into a gentle, rhythmic ticking as the embers settled in the grate.
Somewhere above them, faint through the floors, a pianoforte was working at a country dance, patient, hands separately and then together, the schoolroom, the afternoon lesson, the ordinary sound of the two people under discussion going on with their day in the sunlight, not knowing they had become matter.
“You have not asked me,” Robert said at last, “whether the assertion is true.”
“I have not,” said Adelaide, “because it is beneath both of us, and because I watched you on that landing three weeks ago make that child a promise with your whole face, and I know what I saw.” A breath.
“I will say this once, and then never again, because it is not a thing our family says. Miss Prescott’s character is not in question.
I have watched her a month with every intention of finding fault, and I have found a woman who does her work, holds her tongue, and cherishes that child with better judgement than the rest of us have shown together.
If she were a squire’s daughter I would be planning the wedding myself and taking the credit.
” The letter went back into the box, the box locked with a small brutal click.
“But she is not a squire’s daughter, Robert.
She is the registry girl in Serle’s story, through no fault of her own and no virtue of yours, and her character is not the question.
Yours is. Twelve years of yours, printed, witnessed, and waiting in a solicitor’s drawer for exactly this use.
You made yourself quotable, and now the bill has come in, and it is made out in Charlotte’s name.
” She rose. “Wed Diana, and the account is settled by Friday. That is all I came to say a fortnight ago. I am sorry it has taken a Fenwick to make me say it plainly.”
***
He did not go down to dinner.
He sat in the study instead while the light went, with the ledgers shut for once and the two futures open on the desk in their place, and did the sum honestly, which was the discipline the spring had taught him and the cruellest thing it had taught him.
Item by item, without the least faltering, that was the calamity of it; he heard everything in her voice then, the sums first, my lord, and the wanting after.
Item. Serle was real, the letter was real, and the story was good.
Item. Wedded to Diana by quarter-day, the story expired. Charlotte kept her home, her uncle, her schoolroom, her sightline, for a season
Item. And the governess goes wherever such persons go.
Item, and here the sum stopped being arithmetic, because there was an entry in him now that would not sit in any column, that had walked out of a lime-walk three days ago and taken up freehold, item.
There was one woman under this roof whose presence had begun to mend his family, and every road his aunt called safe ran over her.
The decanter stood at his elbow where Travers left it nightly, a decade’s habit outliving its master.
Robert looked at it a long while, the old door, the easy dark, twelve years of not being asked to be anyone, and then he took it up, crossed to the hearth, and poured it out upon the fire.
The flame went up blue and gaudy and brief, a conjuror’s trick, gone, the room smelled of hot sugar and burned years, and he set the empty decanter on the mantel with the care a man gives a retired adversary.
“Not this time,” he told it.
Then he crossed to the window. The house lay dark along its wings, but two lights burned in the north front, one above the other.
The schoolroom lamp, where the accounts of a small kingdom were kept, and higher, fainter, the nursery night-light standing its watch.
Robert stood with his hands on the cold sill, looking up at the two windows he was being invoiced for, and did what he had once spent whole seasons of his life avoiding.
He stayed with the difficulty, in the dark, sober, and let it look back at him.
The story is good, his aunt had said.
Then I’ll want a better one, he thought, and somewhere under the cold arithmetic, patient as a second calendar, the beginning of one turned over.