Chapter 5
“It is remarkable how easily one may be believed, provided one is consistent.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on her husband’s unexpected death.
* * *
He was fourteen again.
Simon’s room was empty. The window was open, the curtain lifting in the night air. Nicholas stood in the doorway and regarded the open window and thought … He has done it!
Their father had had the servants lock up the house.
It was the kind of locking that went beyond doors and shutters.
The kind that was a statement of intent.
A declaration that the Baron of Blackwood had opinions about the daughter of the tradeswoman next door and intended to enforce them by restricting all avenues of exit until Simon had seen reason.
Lord Blackwood was very good at restricting avenues.
He had been practicing on his family for years.
Simon had not seen reason. Simon had never seen reason. Which was one of the traits Nicholas admired most about him.
He thought about what Simon had said that afternoon.
In the corridor outside their father’s study.
After the arguing had stopped. Simon had smiled at Nicholas with his easy, undefeated expression.
He was a young man who had absorbed a great deal of their father’s displeasure over the years, and remained, through some constitutional miracle, entirely himself.
‘He is a bitter old man,’ Simon had said, ‘so it is important that you do not care what he thinks. Be brave. Be your own man. Follow your own path. Father will never allow you to do anything interesting if you pay him mind.’
Nicholas had considered this with the careful seriousness he applied to everything Simon said. ‘I want to be like you,’ he had said, finally. ‘You are never afraid and everyone likes you. Father is always complaining about the state of the world, and the commoners next door.’
Simon had considered him for a moment with a complicated expression Nicholas could not entirely read. Then he had clapped him on the shoulder and accompanied him to the family drawing room to talk about school.
Nicholas stood at the open window and thought about being brave.
He could see the vine trellis from here.
It ran from the ground to the sill and beyond.
Thick and old. The kind of growth that suggested it had been supporting the weight of ambitious boys for decades.
Simon had gone down it, and he was a fully grown man who was now out there somewhere in the dark.
Being his own man. Following his own path.
Doing something interesting while Nicholas stood in an empty room and thought about it.
He climbed onto the ledge.
The height made itself felt before anything else. The height and the dark and the cool air outside a window at night. He reached for the trellis. Found it. Felt the vine rough under his palms. He hauled himself out.
He was suspended. Between the wall and the air. His weight on his hands and his feet finding purchase in the vine. Below him was the ground. Above him was the dark. All around him was the silence of a house that did not know he was outside it.
He peered down.
The paralysis hit without warning and without mercy.
His breath went shallow in a single instant.
His vision narrowed to the dark ground below in a way that made the distance feel both rigid and enormous.
He had not been this high. He had not understood what this high meant until this moment.
His hands tightened on the vine and he told himself to move and his body declined the instruction entirely.
Simon is brave, he thought. Simon does this.
He tried to reach back toward the window.
He threw his weight back toward the ledge.
Scrabbling for it. And his foot caught. Caught in the vine.
In the tangle of old growth that had appeared solid and proved treacherous.
For a split second, he was dangling, inverted, the ground rushing upward in his vision as the sound tore out of him. The vine gave way and …
Nicholas woke with a start in the gray dawn. His leg was conducting its usual morning argument with the rest of him, but not as loud as his heart, shouting at considerably higher volume than the occasion warranted.
He lay still, staring up at the beamed and slightly uneven ceiling of the Exeter inn and studying it until his pulse settled into something more reasonable.
This took longer than he would have preferred.
He had dreamed of the fall before, with some regularity in the years immediately after and then less often as the drinking had served its purpose of suppressing memories he would rather not revisit.
Sobriety had restored his physicality and, it turned out, had resurrected the dreams. He had not expected that and intended to raise it with Angelo at the earliest opportunity.
Surely there was a soothing draught of some sort to drink and prevent these dreams?
But, was he willing to admit to such personal strife? Nicholas liked his privacy.
He adjusted his position, carefully, and became aware of two facts in quick succession.
The first was that his leg, despite the dream and the dawn and the general unpleasantness of everything before eight o’clock, felt materially better than it had felt in weeks.
The persistent ache, that had become so familiar he had stopped distinguishing it from his baseline existence, was quieter this morning.
Present, but quieter. He noted this carefully, with slightly suspicious attention, having learned not to trust good news until it has had time to prove itself.
The second fact was that he was covered.
He had not covered himself. He had fallen asleep, he recalled, mid-thought.
The comfort of the liniment and the heat of her hands and the warmth of the room had conspired against him in the most effective ambush his dignity had sustained in recent memory.
He had been staring at the ceiling and thinking about the cipher.
Then he had simply not been thinking about anything anymore.
The coverlet had been draped over him with thoughtful attention.
Millie had seen him asleep and been sensible without making a production of it.
He stared at the ceiling for a moment with a feeling he could not immediately name.
That was kind, he thought. He was more moved by it than was comfortable. And he was not going to question why at this hour of the morning.
He was dressed and downstairs before Miss Metcalfe and Betty had come down for breakfast. He sat at the table in the private dining room with coffee and the morning quiet and told himself it meant nothing that he was aware of the exact moment she came through the door.
She arrived on time. He was beginning to understand that she was always on time.
For everything that mattered to her, and everything mattered to her.
With her notebook already open and her spectacles already sliding down her nose and a question that she had clearly been composing since at least yesterday evening. Possibly since Cornwall.
She sat. Accepted coffee. Considered him across the table and said, “Does the Radcliffe Camera admit readers before ten o’clock?”
“Good morning, Miss Metcalfe,” Nicholas said.
She blinked. “Good morning,” she replied, not objecting to the ritual so much as appearing to regard it as an oddly inefficient use of time. “Does it?”
“It does not. Not in my experience,” he said.
She wrote this down without looking up. “And the stairs to the gallery.”
“Narrow,” he said. “And steep. Difficult to climb with—” He gestured to his leg. “But I will find a way to manage if it is required.”
She looked up. “You have used them before.”
“Some years ago. My leg was considerably less opinionated at the time. Or, it was at least a lot younger.”
She considered this with the expression she wore when she was filing information she intended to act on. “Then we arrive at ten. You sign the register and proceed to the gallery.” She was already writing again.
Nicholas examined her. “You have been planning this for some time.”
“Since before Cornwall. I have been trying to find a candidate to help me for some time,” she said, without glancing up.
“The gallery is accessible throughout the day once you have signed in. I would prefer you not go immediately to the Leland. Spend time with other volumes first. A man consulting several shelves reads differently from a man who has come for one specific book.”
“You have given this considerable thought.”
“I have had considerable time to think about it,” she said. She peered, briefly, over the sliding spectacles. “Does that surprise you.”
It does not, he realized. It does not surprise me at all.
Betty entered. She sat and accepted toast with a quiet contentment, a woman who had learned that meals at Miss Metcalfe’s table were reliable and excellent and required nothing of her except appetite.
The late-night visit was, based on Miss Metcalfe’s manner, already a concluded chapter. She had filed it, apparently, in whatever internal system she used for matters that had been addressed and required no further attention.
Nicholas found this, despite everything, rather admirable. He also found it faintly maddening. Which he suspected was the appropriate response.
The road from Exeter northeast toward Bath was better than the road from Cornwall.
The Exe Valley gave way to the long rises and dips of Somerset.
The land lifted into open Somerset country, green folds of pasture divided by ancient hedgerows and low stone walls, with church towers rising from distant villages as though they had grown there naturally alongside the oaks.
Betty, for the second day, was devoted to her window with praiseworthy conviction.