Chapter 8 #2
“Knowingly, and with considerable skill.” Papa picked up the Latin text from the floor without looking at it, as though his hand knew where it was independently of the rest of him.
“That is the mark of the sophisticated propagandist. He does not suppress what he knows. He simply declines to know it.”
Millie took it in, suppressing the urge to applaud.
And, to her dismay, her admiration of Nick Scott grew.
She had not looked at Cresswell. She was aware that Cresswell had stopped talking and was also watching, with scrutinizing eyes and a composed expression despite having resoundingly lost the room’s attention.
He was likely calculating how to retrieve it and whether to bother.
She did not attend to this calculation. She was attending to Nick who had his tea forgotten on the side table and his full attention on Papa, asking the next question with the special method she had identified first in the carriage from Cornwall as the method of a trained mind.
Patient and directional. Building toward something without announcing the direction.
He had done exactly this at breakfast, Nick entirely nonchalant about the whole affair.
Picking up their discourse each time Papa surfaced from a reverie without remarking on the interval.
Without adjusting his register or his manner.
He simply continued from wherever the conversation had been left as though the gap had not occurred.
As though Papa trailing off to stare at the fire for five full minutes before returning mid-sentence was a natural interlude.
Which was not natural. It was the troubles she had been managing alone these past years.
The accurate navigation of the gaps. The practiced art of not drawing attention to them.
Because drawing attention made Papa aware of them.
And awareness of them distressed him in a way that was hard to watch and harder to remedy.
She had developed the whole architecture of it by trial and error and solitary effort.
She had not explained any of it to Nick.
He had simply worked it out for himself.
It spoke to a great sensitivity and kindness that she had not hitherto suspected.
That is not what men do, she thought, and then, immediately after, with the flat certainty of a final conclusion, I still do not know exactly who he is.
She turned her attention back to Cresswell.
He was still in the room. Hat beside him.
Tea cooling in its cup. His proposal not yet proposed but present in the atmosphere the way certain views were present when someone was biding their time toward the right moment to voice them.
He had resumed his soft, learned speech about the complexity of managing research materials in cases of diminished capacity, about what the college could offer in terms of cataloguing and preservation and long-term care.
She listened to it now with the attention she had not been applying before and heard, under the reasonable surface of it, the truth of what it was.
She knew she was prone to take people at their word, to trust they were as honest as she was, which sometimes got her into trouble.
It was one of the reasons she depended on Pike.
And it seemed Nick possessed both the cynicism and the compassion of her cantankerous butler.
And with their guidance, she could hear what was said between the statements. The words not said.
Mr. Cresswell was not here to protect Papa’s interests. He was here about the collection. He was here about the manuscripts and the research materials and the library and the endowment.
Papa was the route to all of it. Cresswell had been making this visit once a fortnight since January with the patience that declared that time was on his side. He assumed he could guide her.
He underestimates me.
Or rather, he underestimated the value of her new private secretary and her socially unacceptable butler who were both advising her with their disdain.
She let him finish.
Then she said, “Thank you for calling, Mr. Cresswell. I will give the matter my consideration.”
He was a man who understood such signals. Had the practiced smoothness not to press past them when pressing would draw an undesired response.
He retrieved his hat and rose with a composed grace that signaled he had not lost out and was declining to behave as though he had.
He said the appropriate utterances. He expressed his continued goodwill toward Papa’s work and his hope that they might speak further on the subject at a convenient time.
He inclined his head to Nick, who inclined his in return with a pleasant neutrality but Millie could tell he had concluded that he did not like what, or whom, he was seeing.
Pike, who was still in the doorway, stood aside to let Cresswell through.
He did not speak to Cresswell. Cresswell did not speak to him.
He spoke past him, as he always did, which Pike received with the immovable dignity of having been spoken past before and finding it an acceptable price to pay for his own peace of mind.
The front door closed.
The drawing room was quiet. Papa had returned to his Latin text, the Geoffrey conversation apparently concluded to his satisfaction.
The fire crackled in the silence that followed.
Outside the window, the morning continued sedately in a city that observed its Saturdays with an institutional conviction that had weathered centuries of kings and governments and even churches changing hands, remaining constant throughout.
Nick was watching her. He picked up his abandoned tea.
Found it cold. Sipped it with the equanimity that stated he had made his peace with cold tea on prior occasions.
“Oxford administration,” he said, “and their tireless appeals in the service of scholarship. There is a prevalent species of college man who has discovered that the word legacy opens purses that no other words can reach.”
“He has been calling since January,” Millie said.
“I had supposed it was frequent,” Nick said.
She had to admit he was terribly attractive.
The dark hair. The Nordic-blue eyes. The sense of right and wrong.
She thought about breakfast and the Geoffrey conversation and the single eyebrow raised at the window.
She thought about the carriage and Cirencester.
The four evenings of warm hands and firelight, and his thumb tracing slow patterns over her knuckles.
She had a thought she was not going to say aloud—that she had hired a private secretary and, somewhere between Cornwall and Oxford, had instead acquired a complication she did not yet have a name for.
That she was not certain what to do about it.
“He did not speak to Papa once,” she said instead.
“No,” Nick said. “He did not. I hazard he dismissed Mr. Metcalfe so thoroughly, he had quite forgotten he was in the room.”
Pike reappeared briefly in the doorway. Assessed Nick with thoughtful eyes, before smiling in approval. Then he withdrew.
The morning settled. Papa turned a page.
The fire made its quiet observations. Millie sat with her hands folded.
She thought about Geoffrey of Monmouth. About the words a man chose to write.
The facts he chose, of set purpose and with considerable skill, not to know.
Whether those choices taken together told one who he actually was. She thought they probably did.
She opened her notebook. She peered at the blank page for a moment.
Then she wrote: Nick Scott is not what he presented himself as being.
She examined it, then she wrote beneath it with the accuracy she preferred when she committed to paper: Neither, I suspect, am I.
She closed the notebook and went to sit beside Papa.