Chapter Twenty-One
Robert had the household on the gravel inside a quarter-hour, and afterwards the servants would say, with the wonder of people revising a man’s whole ledger in one night, that his lordship had ordered the search like a colonel who had done nothing else all his life.
He would have told them the truth of it, had anyone dared ask.
That twelve years at hazard teach a man exactly one employable skill, which is to think in odds while the table burns.
He stood on the steps with the wind tearing at the lamps and dealt the house out like a hand of cards.
“Torches and stable-lanterns, every man. The women to the house itself, attic to cellars, every press and seat and panel, Betsey has the list of her places, Betsey leads. Travers, the cellars and the leads. The men in pairs, no one alone, I’ll not hunt two lost instead of one.
Coachman, the yard, the barns, the succession-house, and mind the well-cover.
Peters, with me. Saddle the grey.” He was pulling his own girth tight as he gave the last of it.
“Jem rides for the physician, Mr Watson. Tell him to bring what a chilled child wants, and tell him to come to the lake path. And you…” the second stable lad, already mounted, “the vicarage. Ask for Miss Blythe. Tell her Miss Charlotte is out in this, making for Miss Prescott, and has been out…” he made himself say it, “above an hour, we think. Go.”
The searchers went out from the steps in their pairs, and the dark took the lanterns one by one the way deep water takes lights, and Robert stood a heartbeat longer, doing the sum he could not say aloud.
A child’s stride, a black park, water risen in every ditch, and the one person who holds the map of everywhere she goes is five miles off, believing herself dismissed.
“My lord,” Peters said, low. “Where do we ride?”
“East, along the wall to the lodge, then back by the lake path to meet the physician.” He swung up on the horse. “And Peters, as we go, you’ll watch the estate office as we pass it, and tell me what you see, and say nothing else about it.”
What Peters saw, and said in six words with his voice pitched under the wind, was. “Light’s burning, my lord. Blind’s up.”
The blind had never once been up after dark in ten tidy years.
Robert rode on into the streaming black with that fact sitting cold at the back of everything, filed where he filed loaded things, because a man cannot hunt two foxes in a storm, and the child came first, the child came before every reckoning in the world.
But at the turn by the wall he looked back once. And the light in the estate office went out as he watched. Not the dying of a lamp, but the smothering of one.
***
At the vicarage they had given Jane the small room over the porch, and she had spent the evening being a problem the household was too kind to name, sitting where she was put, answering when spoken to, holding the teacup Eleanor filled and refilled without ever drinking it lower.
Eleanor had tried nothing clever, which was its own kindness.
She had sat with her mending and let the clock do the talking, and only once, at the supper, she pretended not to notice Jane not eating, had she laid one card face up on the cloth.
“I’ll say this, and then I’m done saying.
You told me once the whole work was proving you’d still be there while they didn’t speak.
Well, you’re the one gone silent now, my dear, and I’m still here, and that’s all the sermon I know.
” And Jane had looked at the fire and thought.
The ones who are ruined are the ones who go back to running nowhere, and had not been able to tell, all evening, which direction she had run.
The hoof beats came up the lane at a pace no parish errand ever rode.
She was at the window before the knocker went.
She had the sash up and the boy’s face lifted white in the lantern-light below.
She had heard it from the sill, over the rain, in pieces, Miss Charlotte, out in the storm, gone after Miss Prescott, his lordship begs, and afterwards Eleanor would tell it round the parish for years, how the governess came down the vicarage stairs like weather herself, cloak already swinging on, and was into the lane before the boy had his message half-delivered, and had to be run after with a lantern and physically put up behind him on the horse because she had set off on foot, five miles into a rising gale, without appearing to have consulted her own legs on the matter.
Up behind the stable lad with the rain driving level and her hood torn back, Jane rode through the roaring dark and did the only thing left to do, which was her trade.
Panic was a spending of attention, and attention was the whole of her capital, and she gathered it in from every corner where grief had scattered it and set it, all of it, on one small person in the dark.
Think. Think as she thinks, you kept the maps, you know the law of every border.
She goes out the casement, over the leads; she has done it before, then, and never told even me, well, sovereigns keep some secrets.
She makes for the vicarage road because the maids said the vicarage.
But the vicarage road runs past the lodge, all open, all wind, and her first law, always, everywhere, is walls at her back and a sight of the door.
She will not cross open ground in a storm.
Storms are the thing that came for her parents.
She’ll go along cover. The limes, the wall, the…
The horse laboured at the hill and the house came up out of the dark ahead, every window burning, lanterns strung through the gardens like a fleet riding out weather at anchor, and Jane, arriving into the lit chaos of the hall with the rain sheeting off her, stood one instant on the threshold she had left forever at dawn, the same flags, the same stair, the hall that had watched her accused and walled and ruined, and found that the room had no power over her at all tonight, none.
It had been repossessed in its turn, entirely, by one small absence.
Mrs Brooks saw her first and said only, “Thank goodness,” which from Mrs Brooks was an oration.
And then the garden doors went, wind and wet and lantern-light together, and Robert came in with the storm still on him, hatless, soaked black to the shoulders, a lantern in his fist, and stopped short.
The hall held its breath around them, servants frozen mid-errand, and for the space of one long look everything that lay between the two of them stood in the room in plain sight of the entire household.
The tableau, the flight, the forged hand, the resignation weighted with a book of poems, every unspent word of it, and none of it, Jane found, weighed so much as a grain against the single question, and she asked the question, and her voice came out level, and it came out hers.
“Where has she been searched for, and where not?”
Something went over his face; afterwards she would name it, and keep the naming private, because it had looked like a man being handed back his whole fortune in the middle of a fire, and Robert Moorfield answered his governess the way a second-in-command answers, fast and clean, no preamble.
“The house entire, twice, Betsey had her list, every place on it empty. The gardens within the ha-ha. The yard, the barns, the lodge road. The lake path I rode myself as far as the mill lane.” and then he stopped.
Jane went white and still, her grey eyes turning up to his with the arrested look of a clerk who discovers, in a single line, the ruin of a year’s ledger.
“The lake path,” she said. “You rode past the water. Nobody has searched at the water.” Her hand was already dragging the soaked primer-page from her bodice, unfolding it, rain-blistered, the small map of one child’s courage, and her finger came down on the last entry, the one written in the schoolroom sunlight a lifetime ago on Thursday morning, and she read it aloud to him and to the listening hall with the storm hammering the long windows
“The boat-house is lost to us until the paths dry. Mourned daily.” She looked up. “She mourned it daily, Robert. It is walls, and water, and a sight of the door, and it is hers, and tonight every path in Sussex is wet, and nobody told her kingdom the rule was still in force.”
He was already moving. He took a dry lantern from the table with one hand, and, before the entire watching household, with everything between them still unsaid and standing in the room, held out the other to her, palm up, exactly as he had once held it out across a rolled-back drawing-room floor.
“Then we go to the boat-house,” Robert said. “Together, this time. Everything else after.”
Jane put her hand in his, and the hall doors went back before them, and the storm took them both.