Chapter Twenty-Two #2
She went out from under the boat-cover the way she had gone from under every hand that ever reached for her, boneless, twisting, practised, seven years old and undefeated at the only game she had ever needed, out of the path of the falling dark, under Jasper’s flailing arm, across the bucking light towards the wall where Jane was, and halfway there, in the middle of the wreck and the roar, her voice tore its way home.
“Jane!”
Full. Enormous. Five months of it, arriving all at once.
“Jane! Uncle Robert!”
Jane had her before the second cry finished, took her out of the air, went down over her against the wall, made her own back the roof, and felt the small arms clamp round her neck and the small voice, unstopped now, sobbing words, actual words, into her collar, “you came back, you came back”, while the beam met the floor where the bench had been and the thatch came down after it in sodden ruin, and the rain stood in the open wound of the roof like a silver wall.
Robert reached them in two strides; she felt his arms come round them both, felt him make himself the outer wall, and past his shoulder, through the streaming lamplight, Jane saw the end of it.
Jasper Winthrop face down and howling by the door, his leg pinned under the beam’s foot, held for the law by the house he had robbed to its rafters.
Then lanterns illuminated the doorway, revealing Peters, drenched and wild-eyed, with several men at his back, as Hamish’s voice cut sharp above the din.
“Hold the light, hold it steady”, already down at the pinned leg, already working, the physician arriving into ruin the way he arrived everywhere, as though expected.
Charlotte would not let go, and no one asked her to.
She had Jane by the neck and Robert by three fingers, and she talked, cracked, rusty, unstoppable, the vault door off its hinges, a stream of it, half sense and half weeping.
You came back. I looked for you. The window was dark.
I kept the ribbon. I was going to bring you home myself.
“You found me,” Jane said, into the wet gold hair. Her own voice was not steady, and she let it not be. “You always find me. You’re the best there has ever been at this game.”
Above the wrecked roof the storm was moving off east, spending its last over the Downs.
Hamish had the beam levered, and the leg splinted with Jasper, grey, docile, weeping, telling his confession over again, unasked, to Peters, to the lantern, to anyone, as though he could not now stop the ledger from reading itself aloud.
And Robert knelt on the ruined floor with his family in his arms, and looked at Jane over the small talking head between them, and said only, quietly, under the child’s voice, in the tone of a man entering the one sum that had ever mattered
“Everything else now.”
***
They came up from the lake in procession, through the last of the rain.
Robert carried Charlotte the whole way, wrapped in his own coat over the boat-cover, her cheek on his shoulder and her hand, this was the arrangement, negotiated wordlessly and absolute, knotted in Jane’s sleeve beside him, so that the three of them went up the sodden lawn as a single slow procession, and the lanterns of the search fell in behind and around them without being ordered, and nobody spoke above the rain.
Somewhere back along the path, Hamish’s voice was managing the beam and the hurdle they had made of the boat-house door and the groaning burden on it; that procession would come after, at the law’s pace.
This one came first, for the family’s safety.
Charlotte talked most of the way, a small worn thread of voice, winding down, spending its five months in farthings now.
The roof, the cold, the lamp, you came, I called and you came, and then, between one step and the next, stopped mid-word, asleep, entirely, her whole weight arriving onto Robert’s shoulder at once in the old sudden vertical way, and Jane felt the small fist in her sleeve go loose, and covered it with her own hand, and kept it there, and walked on watching the lit house grow.
For the house seemed to observe their approach, its windows fixed upon them like vigilant eyes.
Every ground-floor window shone with golden light, and the doors stood flung open to the night.
The entire household had assembled to fill the entryway, from the scullery to the garrets, with Mrs Brooks front and centre upon the uppermost step, her cap still missing, holding a lamp aloft.
Maids and grooms crowded the light behind her, none making any pretence of duty; all stood transfixed, watching the lawn, the lanterns, and the solemn procession advancing through the darkness with the sleeping child at its centre.
No voice cheered; the silence itself was a profounder tribute.
As the three of them came into the light, the crowd parted, quietly, completely, pressing back against the jambs to make the way wide, and Mrs Brooks looked at the sleeping child, at the man carrying her, and at the woman whose hand covered the small fist in her own sleeve, and said, in the voice of a housekeeper resuming a house
“Hot water is up in the nursery, my lord, and the fire’s been built this hour.
Betsey’s warmed the bed.” And then, with a housekeeper’s precision, distributing the next words exactly where they were owed, to Jane, before the assembled household, in the voice she had once used to say you’re expected.
“The fire is lit in your room too, miss. And your candle is on the sill, where it belongs.”