Chapter Twenty-Five #2
They went, exchanging one look over her head, and Charlotte led them along the quiet corridor where the carpet gave out, and the light came thin from the high window, and stopped at the panelling below it, and turned, and faced them both with her hands folded, a monarch at a treaty table.
“You are entering into matrimony,” she said.
“Everyone says everything changes.” A breath, drawn from somewhere old.
“So the borders have to change too. That’s the law.
” And she reached up and pressed the beading at the third panel’s edge, and the panel swung inward on the small dark room, the blanket, the wooden horse, the biscuit tin, the whole capital city of the hidden country, and she stood back, and looked at her uncle, whom she had never once shown, and gave him the freedom of it in the flat brave voice of a sovereign ceding her last sovereign secret
“This is where I went. When it was too loud. Jane knew. Now you know.” The blue eyes came up, fierce with the cost of it. “You can know where I am always now. Both of you. That’s my wedding present, because I haven’t any money, and Mrs Brooks says presents should cost the giver something.”
Robert went down slowly on his heels before the little dark doorway, before the blanket, the horse with its worn mane, the year of it, and Jane watched him take the present’s full weight, watched him understand it entirely and refuse, absolutely, to make it small with comfort.
When he spoke, his voice was as grave as the giver’s.
“It is the richest present I have ever been given, and I have been given estates.” He looked into the little room a long moment.
“I hid behind a curtain once, in the old parlour, and I told you nobody was better at looking. I withdraw it. Somebody was worth coming out for, in the end. She’s to be your aunt in a fortnight, and this room stays yours, Charlotte, borders open, crown intact.
A country doesn’t stop being a country because it signs a treaty. It just stops being alone.”
Charlotte considered this ruling from all sides, found it constitutionally sound, and nodded once, and then the state occasion ended as her state occasions ended, all at once, and she was between them, one hand in each, hanging her whole weight and swinging, and the three of them went back down the thin-lit corridor together, past the high window, out of the hidden country and into the ordinary golden one, with every border standing open behind them.
***
The banns were read on the Sunday, in the parish church whose green they had danced on, and the vicar, Eleanor’s brother, a mild man who had waited his whole incumbency for a sentence this good, read them with a relish that was remarked upon as far as Chichester.
Robert Edward Moorfield, of this parish, and Jane Prescott, of this parish.
Of this parish. Jane sat in the Moorfield pew between Charlotte and Adelaide and heard the words settle over the crowded church, and understood what the vicar’s small emphasis had given her, deliberately, in front of everyone.
Not the viscount’s name beside hers, but the belonging.
Four years of nowhere, and a parish had claimed her in open church.
The congregation did not even pretend not to turn.
Jane sat straight under the wheeling of every bonnet in Sussex, and Charlotte’s hand crept into hers along the pew cushion, and from the front rank of the gentry seats Lady Fenwick, who had arrived early, in her best dove-grey, and stationed herself where the whole church was obliged to file past her, turned with the rest, raised her lorgnette in a slow deliberate arc, and bowed over it.
The county’s own instrument of judgement, publicly reversed, in the sight of every household that had repeated her.
It was, Robert murmured afterwards, the most expensive apology in the county’s living memory, and it had cost her nothing but everyone’s memory of the alternative.
Lady Fenwick dealt in no other currency.
The second piece of news went round the churchyard before the first had cleared the porch; the physician, Mr Watson, had spoken.
To the vicar, formally, on the Thursday, three years’ silence broken in six words, the parish said.
Eleanor maintained it had been nearer eleven and two of them were finally, and the banns would run for both couples through the same Sundays, and the village, drunk on its own gossip, had already decided the match had been somehow its own doing, dating from the festival. No one was disposed to argue.
“Two weddings,” said Mrs Wilkins’s letter, come that week from Holborn in answer to Jane’s, for Jane had written to her, one of the strange, certain instincts of that fortnight, the letter of a woman paying her debts of attention backwards down the years.
You will forgive a registry woman her records.
I have placed one hundred and forty governesses, Miss Prescott, and I told you that you would do, and I enclose my card for your daughters’ governess in due season, the trade being best served early.
I find I was never once so pleased to lose a client from my books.
Jasper Winthrop went to Lewes gaol to wait for the assizes, splinted and quiet, and made no trouble.
Aldergate’s audit ran through the estate office like clean water through a fouled pipe, and the sums came out, eleven years, one thousand and ninety pounds, smaller, in the end, than the ruin they had purchased.
Aldergate observed that this was the invariable proportion in his experience of the trade.
Robert paid Peters’s courage in the only coins courage takes.
A footman’s wage made a senior footman’s, and his name was spoken plainly at the servants’ dinner as the man whose eyes had saved the house.
Of Edmund there came, in the end, nothing at all.
Pettigrew wrote drily that Mr Serle, upon reading the county’s news, had returned Mr Moorfield’s papers with a note regretting that the matter no longer presented the features that had first recommended it, and that this, in the language of Lincoln’s Inn, was the sound of a story ending on a desk.
And Diana was heard of once, a paragraph in a Morning Post that Adelaide read aloud at breakfast with terrible serenity.
Lady Harrington, gone north, was said to be a great comfort to the Earl of Armstrong’s household in his illness.
“A weak chest and eleven thousand a year,” Adelaide observed, folding the paper.
“She will nurse him devotedly and bury him grandly, and I hope his relations count the spoons and examine his codicils, and I have written to suggest they do. More tea, Miss Prescott? You are to be wedded in nine days, and you have stopped eating. It is conventional, and I forbid it.”