Chapter Seventeen #2
The room absorbed the intelligence after the common fashion, a collective stir, a silent murmur, as conviction and doubt quietly divided the room.
And Jane stood in the wreck of her character with her spine straight and her eyes stinging and thought, with the last dry working corner of her mind.
He has just spent on me, publicly, at the worst possible hour, the whole of the capital his aunt begged him to hoard.
Oh, my dear. What have they made you pay?
Adelaide saw it too. That was the horror of Adelaide.
She was never wrong about the sums, only the souls.
She drew Robert to the window with a grip on his sleeve that was almost fear, and her voice, meant to be private, failed of it by exactly enough.
“You believe her, I heard you, and the county will hear you by Friday, that is the catastrophe entire. Robert. Think what this is in Serle’s hands.
The registry girl, and stolen jewels, and the guardian who stood before his own servants and defended, I cannot even finish it as it will be written.
She may be innocent as morning. It no longer signifies.
The story is finished building, and you have just moved into it.
Dismiss her today, quietly, with no constable, full wages, or keep her, and I promise you, I promise you, Edmund files within the month, and it will not be her character weighed at the hearing. It will be Charlotte in the scale.”
“Then the inquiry had better be brief,” Robert said, not lowering his voice at all, “because Miss Prescott remains under this roof until it is concluded, and there is an end of the matter.” And then, because a house must be given something to do with itself, the terrible machinery of compromise.
Miss Prescott was to remain confined to her bedchamber, her meals conveyed above, and all schoolroom duties suspended pending formal inquiry, every decree entirely reasonable, yet every decree a brick, until Jane found herself confined by the total of these sensible mandates, before the eyes of the entire household, in the space of a dozen sentences.
It was precisely at the pronouncement that the schoolroom was to be suspended that a sound arose from the staircase.
Charlotte had kept her station on the half-landing all the while, for it overlooked both doors.
Silent at the baluster, the child observed the destruction of her small world, step by step.
When Mrs Brooks came, with wretched gentleness, to escort Jane above, Charlotte’s countenance gave way.
Her whole body strained into a soundless cry, the agony mounting from her very feet, and ending in total silence.
Not a sound escaped. Her mouth remained agape, the cords of her small throat strained, her eyes weeping freely, yet all was absolute silence, the voice locking itself away as the household looked on.
The patient labour of weeks vanished between one stair and the next; the door Jane had so painstakingly held open swung closed in total stillness, making a silence more deafening than any sound she had ever known.
She broke from Mrs Brooks; no one dared stop her, and knelt on the stair and took the shaking child by both arms. “Charlotte. Charlotte. Look at me, there. I am not leaving the house. I am only upstairs. Count the windows. Mine is the fourth from the oak, you have counted it a hundred times. Put the ribbon on your handle tonight, and I will put mine on the sill where you can see it from the lawn, and that is a treaty, and treaties hold.” The blue eyes, drowning, fixed on hers.
“You know I keep the maps. You know I don’t lose things. Do you hear me, I will not be lost.”
And then Mrs Brooks’s hand was at her elbow, kind as a warder can be kind, and the treaty was all the law Jane could leave behind her, and she went up the stairs she had come down a month ago as nobody, past the long window, along the passage.
Hearing her bedchamber door shut behind her, Jane noted that no key had been turned, for no one had possessed the boldness to lock her in.
Thus she stood in the centre of the disordered room, encircled by her dresses, all decently folded.
Her father’s primer lay on the washstand where she had never once kept it.
Jane looked at it for a long time. Then she picked it up, and sat on the bed’s edge, and opened it to the back pages by lamplight, the Jasper column, the double dates, the eight shillings.
The new-ruled map of a small girl’s courage, and took up her pencil, because the inquiry, whatever the household meant by the word, had in fact been under way for weeks, and the clerk of it was not disposed to resign.
Entry, she wrote, steady. The lining was sewn with waxed twine, heavy, a sail-maker’s or a saddler’s thread; no woman’s workbasket in this house carries it. Whoever sewed my ruin in used estate stores to do it. And he moved this book.
She looked at the last four words a moment, and under them, in her father’s daughter’s smallest hand, she added the sum that was the day’s true balance, the one no hall had heard
Which means he knows I keep accounts. Look to the child. He is not finished.