Chapter 2 #2
Then he said, very softly, “You are so like him.”
She could not speak. It pleased her immensely to hear that, even if it was not true. Even if she was one-and-twenty and had never done anything, not really.
“You are so like him it hurts my heart to look at you sometimes. He would have done exactly this. He would have cocked his head at me across this desk and told me he was going and that there was nothing I could do to prevent him. And then he would have gone. And I would have watched him ride away and known that I might never see him again.”
Her father gazed into the dancing flames of the fireplace, his expression distant as though he were rifling through old memories.
“I saw him ride away a great many times, Lucy. I always knew I might not see him back. And then one day I did not. And now you are sitting there with your chin up in exactly the way he used to do, and you are telling me you are going too, and I want to say something wise to stop you, but I have not the words. I do not think there are words. I do not think there were ever words for either of you.”
Lucy stood. She did not wish to be cruel, but her life was waiting to start.
She went round the desk without thinking and put her arms around his neck, and he embraced her, clearing his throat.
She held him.
She did not say anything. There was nothing to say.
After a while, he drew back and bussed her cheek and said, in something like his ordinary voice, “When do you propose to go?”
“As soon as it can be arranged.”
“Within the fortnight?”
“Sooner. Within the week.”
“Your mother will not have prepared herself in a week.”
“My mother will never prepare herself, Papa. Not in a week or a year or a lifetime. Better to be quick about it.”
He looked at her with something in his face that was very tired and very sad but not at all disapproving.
“Yes. Perhaps you are right.”
She stepped back, her legs feeling strange under her. “May I take the will?”
“You may take a copy. The original stays here. I shall have Whitby bring you the papers you will need. Deeds. Bank arrangements. Letters of authority. It will take a day or two to prepare everything.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
He nodded. He was looking down at the desk again. The court ruling was there. The two wills were there. The papers that had brought her here.
“Lucy?”
“Yes.”
“I hope you find at Grey House whatever it is you are going looking for. I hope it is not disappointment. And, my dear, when you have had time to absorb all of this, I hope that you will come home.”
She said nothing. She could not promise it. He knew she could not.
She left the study with her hand on the door and the cold reaching in at her back. She stopped in the hall a moment to breathe before she went to look for Bessy.
The corridor was colder than the study. Early spring light came through the window at the far end, and Bessy was in the linen cupboard turning out the summer sheets.
She had a pile of lavender bags in her apron and a duster over her shoulder and a smudge of dust across her cheek that Lucy would not have pointed out for the world.
Bessy was fifty-two now. Her hair was going gray at the temples, and she was a little rounder about the middle than she had been the morning of Lucy’s fourteenth birthday.
But her eyes were the same and her hands were the same, and she was the person in the world Lucy trusted best after her parents.
Bessy looked up when Lucy came into the doorway, and put the lavender bags down.
“What has happened, Miss Lucy?”
“Uncle Henry has been declared dead. And he has left me everything. And it turns out he owned rather more than we had known. Grey House is mine along with a considerable fortune.”
Bessy went still.
“I am one-and-twenty, Bessy.”
“I know that. I have been counting the years myself.”
“I am going to Grey House. To live.”
Bessy nodded slowly. She did not appear surprised, as if she had known that Lucy would one day leave her parents’ home.
“When?”
“Within the week.”
“Your mother—”
“I know.”
Bessy folded a sheet with brisk hands. She was thinking.
“You will want me with you?”
“If you will come.”
“I will come.”
“You have not asked what I mean to do there?”
“No, Miss Lucy, because I know what you mean to do there. You have meant to do it since you were a bairn. You will have an adventure.”
Lucy could not answer, so she smiled and nodded, her throat thick with emotion.
Bessy set the folded sheet on the stack and dusted her hands on her apron.
“I will begin the packing today. Discreetly. Your mother is at her devotions until eleven. That gives us an hour before she comes out of the chapel and takes a turn about the drawing room. We can have most of what you will want out of your dressing room before then. The rest can go tomorrow. Do you mean to travel by post or by your father’s carriage? ”
“Papa’s carriage, if he will lend it.”
“Mr. Carroway will lend it. He would put the horses to himself if you asked. Which of the trunks?”
“The two flat ones from the box room. And the leather one Uncle Henry brought me from Constantinople.”
“That one for what?”
“His things. The trinkets on the shelf. All of them. I am not leaving them here.”
Bessy nodded. “Very well. I shall see to it. You had best go and eat something. You look as though you have not eaten. Grief comes back at us in strange ways when we forget to eat.”
“It is not grief exactly, Bessy.”
“No?”
Lucy stood in the doorway with the light coming through the window at the end of the corridor, her hands cold and her heart beating hard, and she said something out loud that she had not said out loud in seven years.
“He might not be dead.”
Bessy did not answer at once.
Then she agreed, “No. He might not.” And she picked up the lavender bags and went on with her folding.
The words felt raw on Lucy’s tongue after seven years of keeping them inside. But Bessy only nodded, slow and sure, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It felt like a weight off her chest just to say it and be heard.