Chapter 6
“It has the admirable effect of reducing the world to its proper proportions.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on trying laudanum for the first time.
* * *
This time he was fifteen. He knew because he could barely walk.
The staircase was the longest he had ever seen.
Simon had his arm, encouraging and matter-of-fact in the consistent way Simon was, as though the effort required was beneath mention.
Nicholas had the banister on his left and months of lying in that room above.
Which he had memorized in every particular, every crack in the plaster, every swirl of the crown molding.
And this was the first day they were trying the stairs.
Down, Simon had said that morning, with a brisk confidence because he had already decided the outcome. Just down. That is all we are asking of it.
Their father had come to the room again last night.
He did it regularly now. Which was new. Their father, who had never been a man to visit a sickroom or any room that did not serve his immediate purposes, appearing in the doorway with the diminished demeanor Nicholas had been trying not to name since autumn.
The accident had altered Lord Blackwood. Reduced him, somehow, in ways that Nicholas had not anticipated and could not entirely account for. He was an old man in a way he had not been old before Nicholas fell.
His mother he had not seen in some time.
She has never really liked sickrooms, Simon said, when asked. Said it pleasantly, without inflection, with the ease of repeating a fact of nature. And said they would show her how well he was doing and then perhaps she would visit again.
Nicholas had believed this. He had believed it with the faith of a boy who has been lying in one room for months and needs to believe in something.
Simon got him to the bottom of the stairs. The breakfast room door was open. Nicholas could smell tea. He thought about how long it had been since he had smelled that without it being carried up to him on a tray … and a weight in his chest lifted.
His mother glanced up from her plate.
Lady Blackwood’s face was, as it always was, composed.
She did not smile. She did not frown. Her eyes did not do anything that could be described as a reaction.
Because reactions were aging, she said. Emotions created lines.
She articulated with dispassion, having decided this long ago, and she had no intention of reconsidering it.
Her eyes found him in the doorway.
They moved, briefly, to the cane in his hand.
Then she returned to her plate.
Simon’s hand tightened on his arm. Just once.
Then he was smiling and being encouraging and guiding Nicholas forward to his chair.
The footman was pulling it out. The tea was being poured.
All of it happening around Nicholas in the terrible way of events that continue to happen regardless of how one felt inside.
So he sat and stared at his plate and willed himself not to show any emotion. Not because it was aging, but because it was humiliating to feel so small.
He knew, without being told, exactly what his mother’s expressionless expression had contained.
He had always been able to read it. Because he had studied her face for the emotions that were never permitted to live on its surface.
Learning to find them in the set of her jaw and the angle of her attention.
She liked perfection. She had always liked perfection. And he, before the fall, had been the apple of her eye for that reason. The youngest, the prettiest, the one whose legs worked correctly.
He understood, sitting at the breakfast table in the room that smelled of tea and warmth and the life of a house that had continued without him, that he was no longer that. He was no longer perfect.
Nicholas woke.
The light outside the inn window was the thin, provisional light of a winter dawn that had not yet fully committed to the day.
He lay still for a moment in the manner he had developed since the dreams had returned, examining the contents of the room until his heart settled into a pace that no longer required his alarm.
Better, he told himself, doing his best not to notice that he had been doing this for long enough that it had become a reflex rather than a conviction.
His leg, for its part, was reasonably optimistic about the coming day. He noted this with cautious appreciation and did not make too much of it. There was no point in crediting an improvement before it had proved its intentions.
He dressed and was downstairs before the others.
It was becoming, without any intentional design on his part, a habit.
The private dining room was quiet at this hour.
The fire recently built up. The table laid.
He sat with his coffee and listened to the morning silence.
He had been learning, in the months since sobering up, to allow the silence to exist without immediately filling it with something.
Miss Metcalfe entered strictly on time with Betty at her side. She had her notebook open before she sat down. Which he also recognized as habit.
“The road today,” she asked. “Cotswolds country?”
“Yes,” he said. “Limestone. Wide skies.”
She wrote something down. “I suppose we will reach Cirencester before dark?”
“Yes,” he said again.
She wrote that down too. Nicholas was beginning to realize that it comforted her in the same manner as he used humor to deflect his emotions.
Betty accepted toast with the serene contentment of a woman whose primary professional requirement was that she enjoy her breakfast.
And then they were on the road before the light had properly established itself.
The road northeast out of Bath climbed through the Cotswolds, and the landscape changed with a conviction that lesser country lacked. Limestone walls, wide skies, and the pale gold of the stone caught and held the weak March light in a way that made the distances feel deliberate.
Nicholas had seen this country before and had not, he realized, examined it properly. He had a tendency to do that. To pass through things. It was a habit he was still in the process of identifying in himself. Which meant he had not yet formed a view on whether he intended to do anything about it.
Betty Smith was awake today. She was watching the view. She glanced at Miss Metcalfe. She glanced at Nicholas. She returned to the view because, Nicholas surmised, she had been paid not to observe something and was earning every penny of her keep.
Miss Metcalfe was in what Nicholas had come to understand, in the past two days, was a good mood. It manifested as a greater than usual volume of theory on Sir Thomas Malory.
She was building an argument about Malory’s use of his French sources. The distinction between what Malory took from the Lancelot-Graal and what he made his own. And the unique nature of his editorial intelligence, which she did not consider to be adequately credited by the scholarship.
Nicholas had his own theories about Sir Thomas Malory.
He was not going to produce them unsolicited.
He had made that error twice yesterday and had spent a combined forty minutes being corrected.
Which he had not disliked as much as he felt he should have but nevertheless was not going to provoke without good reason.
“The French sources,” he said. “He took the structure and left the ornamentation.”
“More than that,” she said. “He understood which elements were load-bearing and which were decorative. The Lancelot-Graal is elaborate. Malory stripped it. What survived the stripping was what mattered.”
“And the scholarship does not credit him for the stripping.”
“The scholarship treats it as simplification,” she said, with a disgruntled tone that suggested she found this intellectually objectionable. “It was not simplification. It was judgment.”
“Editorial intelligence,” he said. “Malory understood which elements were load-bearing and which were decorative. He stripped the Lancelot-Graal of its ornamentation and what survived the stripping was what mattered. The scholarship calls it simplification. It was judgment.”
She peered at him with a suspicious frown. “That is what I said.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then why are you—” She stopped with a surprised expression. “You are agreeing with me.”
“I have been agreeing with you for the past several minutes.”
She considered him as though encountering something new and taking a moment to determine how she felt about it. “You are usually sardonic.”
“I am sardonic about things I disagree with,” he said. “I am quiet about things I agree with. You have simply not encountered the agreement register before.”
She scribbled in her notebook. He did not ask what.
He was watching her. Which he was also in the process of identifying as a habit he had developed without noticing.
The way she moved between expressions without managing them, without any of the curated composure he had grown up around and learned, by necessity, to deploy himself.
A woman not afraid to display emotion. Curiosity on her face looked like curiosity.
Satisfaction looked like satisfaction. When she was amused, good humor danced in her eyes before she had time to decide about it.
One need not have a Rosetta Stone to decipher her feelings on any given matter.
She was in every single way the opposite of Isla Scott.
He said, without quite making the decision to, “My mother believed emotions aged a woman. Created lines on the face.”
Miss Metcalfe reached up and touched her face. Her brow furrowed in the way that implied she was processing something she had not been given sufficient information to process. Her fingers rested against her cheek with uncertainty; she clearly wondered if she had just been insulted.
He understood, a second too late, how it had sounded.
“I mean to say,” he said, with great care, astonished at his clumsy wording, “that I always thought it was a great deal of stuff and nonsense.”