Chapter Twenty-Two
The lake path lay submerged in stretches, the lanterns of the distant searchers had been reduced to small, scattered sparks behind them, and Robert held Jane’s hand firmly in his own the entire way, impelled to do so by necessity rather than mere gallantry.
The ground had given way to treacherous mud, yielding beneath their feet; thus, they proceeded together, like some singular, four-footed creature pressing through the deafening roar of the storm.
The boat-house stood at the water’s edge beneath its sagging roof, a silhouette of deepest black against the shadow of the night.
Except that it was not black. At the shutter’s seam, low, where no light should be, there glimmered a slender thread of yellow light.
Jane felt it go through him, through their joined hands, the same instant it went through her. He drew her off the path, in under the dripping alders, and put his mouth to her ear. “That’s an oil lamp. She’d have no lamp.” A breath. “Someone is in there with her.”
They came the last yards off the path, on the grass, silent, and Robert eased along the wall to the streaming window, with Jane, at his shoulder, looked through the gap in the shutter into the little lit room and stopped breathing.
Charlotte was sitting on the old bench against the far wall, wrapped in a boat-cover, small and white and alive, and across the room, between the child and the door, Jasper Winthrop was cording a travelling-trunk by lamplight.
A valise stood by. His coat was on. And he was talking, the low, ceaseless, reasonable talking of a man who had been explaining himself to a silent child for an hour because it was easier than silence.
“…and it will look very bad, do you see, that is the whole difficulty,” the voice came thin through the shutter.
“Not the money. The money could always be explained. Money can be anything. But a man who leaves on the night a child is lost, that cannot be explained. So we must think, Miss Charlotte. We must think what is to be done with you.”
Robert’s hand found the door.
Jane caught his wrist. One instant, enough.
She put her eyes to the gap again and read the room the only way she knew, sums first. The trunk half-corded, he is not ready.
The lamp is on the shelf by the window, away from the door.
Charlotte dry, wrapped, unhurt; he covered her.
Whatever he is, he is not yet that. And she is watching him.
Not with the flat sentry blankness. Watching the way she watched a poem being read in the wrong manner, waiting for her moment.
She has her feet under her, under the cover. She is already playing her own game.
“The door will be barred,” Jane breathed. “She’ll bolt to a corner if it’s forced, away from us, towards the water. Talk him to the window first. Let her see me.”
Robert looked at her one heartbeat. Then he stepped to the door and knocked, knocked, civilly, like a caller, and spoke through the rain in the pleasant, carrying voice of a man arriving at a card table.
“Winthrop. It’s Moorfield. Open the door, there’s a good fellow. Half the county is out with lanterns, and you have the one thing everybody’s looking for.”
Inside, the talking stopped.
The light shifted within. Footsteps resounded upon the timber.
And the voice, when at last it spoke, had shed all its accustomed professional composure, grown thin and drawn taut, as an iron wire strained nigh to its breaking point.
“My lord. This is, I found her, my lord. On the path. I brought her in out of the wet weather, and that is the whole of it. I was going to bring her up to the house directly.”
“With your trunk corded and your coat on. Yes.” Robert’s tone stayed easy. Almost kind. “Open the door, Jasper. I’ve stood at tables with men holding worse hands than yours, and I’ll tell you what I told them. The only money left in the game is in how you play the losing.”
A profound silence reigned within, broken only by the relentless drumming of the rain upon the roof above, and under it the lake, risen and shouldering the pilings, and the whole old building working in the wind like a ship.
Then the bar scraped, and the door came open on the lamp-lit room, and they went in out of the storm.
***
Jasper had backed to the middle of the floor. He stood between the trunk and the bench, and his hands were empty, and his tidy face had come apart into its pieces, the deference, the fright, and the arithmetic, all of them showing at once with nothing left to order them.
Jane crept along the wall, not directly towards Charlotte, but veering indirectly in the manner of a timid child seeking concealment, her eyes steadily averted.
She felt the cold, blue gaze fasten upon her and hold.
Beneath the boat-cloth, the small figure drew itself together, subtly tensing for action.
“Stay there,” Jasper said. His voice cracked upward.
“Stay, everyone will stay, if you please, and we will arrange this like sensible people. My lord. You’ve been fair to me.
Ten years, and you were fair to me even this spring, even when…
” He stopped. Wiped his mouth. “I saw it, you know. At the rents this morning. You looked at me the way your brother never learned to. He checked the books. You checked me. And I sat there adding the same column four times, and I thought, he knows. Whatever he can prove, he knows. And a man can’t sit still under knowing. It isn’t in nature.”
“So you ran,” Robert said. “And found her on the path.”
“On the lawn edge, in the dark, going like a little ghost for the lake, she’d have walked into it, my lord. The bank’s gone under, she’d have…” His breath heaved. “I brought her in. I did that much. Whatever else, I did that.”
“You did.” Robert had not moved from the door.
His voice stayed level, and he laid the next card face up, gently, the way Jane had watched him lay a letter on a blotter.
“And then you barred the door and corded your trunk and sat an hour telling a seven-year-old child that something must be done with her. I heard it through the shutter, Jasper. So we’re past whatever else.
Louth’s chaise. The axle. Was that yours? ”
The rain filled the pause. Jasper’s eyes went to the window, to the door, to the water-sound, the exits, all of them spent, and Jane watched the last of the office fall off him, and what was underneath was not a villain.
It was worse. It was a clerk, drowning, reaching for the one thing drowning men reach for, which is to be understood.
“You don’t know how it starts.” It came out low, and then it came out in spate.
“It starts as a loan. That’s the truth, my lord, the first was a loan, eleven years ago, your brother’s time, forty pounds against my sister’s husband’s debts, and I paid it back.
Paid it back, every shilling, and no one ever knew, and that…
” a sound that was almost a laugh. “That was the ruin of me, because then I knew it could be done. And your brother was so easy to keep books for. A gentleman’s eye runs down a column like a gentleman’s carriage down a good road.
It looks for the jolts. Give it no jolts, and it arrives happy.
Ten years I gave that family a smooth road.
” His hands opened, empty, pleading the craft of it.
“And then he passed away, and you came, the Wastrel, the card-player, and it occurred to me, easier yet by far. And you sat down at that desk, and you didn’t read the books like a gentleman.
You read them like a creditor. And,” the voice went thinner, “then the governess.”
Jane stood still against the wall. Three feet from the bench now. Charlotte’s eyes had never left her.
“Her.” Jasper did not look at Jane. He looked at Robert, and his face worked.
“You brought her the schoolroom money, and she signed the book, and I watched her eyes go down my petty column like a bailiff’s.
Twice-dated. She saw it, I watched her see it and pretend she hadn’t, and drop her glove at the door like a girl, and I thought.
That is the most dangerous person in this house.
A governess who reads ledgers. Who’d believe it?
And then Louth. Louth I could, the axle, yes.
Yes. You want it said, I’ll say it, it is past mattering, I sawed it Tuesday sennight in the Swan’s own yard at four in the morning, and I was sick after, if that’s worth anything, and it bought me nothing, because you only smiled and hid the next man’s very name from me.
” His breath went ragged. “So there was only her left. The brooch was to hand, Mrs Moorfield’s case stands open half the morning, and the twine was in my own stores, and I sewed it in her lining on the Tuesday while the house was at its dinner, and moved her little book to do it, and, forgive me, she stood in that hall straighter than any of us, and I let her… ”
“Say it plainly.” Robert’s voice had gone quiet as a held knife. “Miss Prescott took nothing.”
“Miss Prescott took nothing.” It broke out of him almost with relief, the sound of a beam finally letting go.
“She never touched a shilling of anything. She found me. She was the only honest person. I put it there. I, Jasper Winthrop, with my own needle. Write it down. Someone write it down, I’ll sign it, I’ll sign anything, only tell me what happens to my sister when… ”
The storm answered before anyone else could.
It came as one long shouldering gust off the lake, and the old building took it wrong, a crack overhead like the world’s own knuckle, and the roof’s lake-end let go.
A slide of rotten thatch and one black beam swinging down out of the dark, and the lamp jumped from the shelf, and the light pitched sideways and went to a mad tilting shadow-play, and Jasper lunged, for the door, for flight, for nothing rational. He was a body spending its last coin.
It was then that Charlotte moved.