Chapter 16
“My son, Nicholas, and I are not as different as I once thought.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on recognizing in her son the same habit of substituting smoothness for sincerity.
* * *
He had never seen this expression on Millie’s face before.
He had seen her frustrated and he had seen her fixated and he had seen her amused in the dry way she found things amusing when she had not intended to find them amusing and was attempting not to show it.
He had seen her moved and uncertain and hopeful.
He had seen the expression she wore when she was arriving at a conclusion she had not yet decided whether to announce.
He had seen her face in the unguarded moments when she did not know he was watching, and in the managed moments when she was presenting the version of herself she had decided was appropriate for company.
He had been learning her expressions since the bedchamber at Grimsfell, paying the kind of involuntary, attracted attention that he had not been able to stop and had not tried very hard to.
He had not seen this one.
Disappointment.
Not anger, which he could have deflected.
He had been deflecting anger since before he could properly walk and had developed over the subsequent years a comprehensive repertoire for it.
The sardonic remark arriving at the precise angle to shift the weight of a confrontation sideways.
The pleasant neutrality that communicated goodwill and conveyed absolutely none of the thoughts underneath it.
The crooked smile that had been relieving situations since he was old enough to understand that a smile was cheaper than an argument and considerably more efficient.
Not outrage, which he could have managed.
Which was the response he had been prepared for, or had told himself he was prepared for, in the abstract theoretical way he had been preparing for this conversation since somewhere around Bath when he had understood, without yet being ready to acknowledge it fully, that this conversation was inevitable and the only variable was the timing.
Just the silent devastation that follows beginning to believe in something and then, suddenly, not believing in it anymore.
It reached into his chest to crush his heart.
Nicholas realized exactly what he had done, painful truth presenting itself when he had spent years successfully avoiding self-examination and was suddenly deprived of the means to continue avoiding it.
He had taken her trust. Freely given, cautiously managed, hard-won from a woman who allowed very few people close to her and had arrived at that position through years of well-founded experience with people who had not merited it.
And he had spent it. He had spent it on the pleasure of being Nick Scott, private secretary.
A man with a bad leg and a sardonic habit and no significances attached to his name except what he chose to put there.
And on the selfish enjoyment of being seen by someone who saw exactly him and no more.
Not with the title or the family or the accumulated weight of the name of Scott attached to the Blackwood title that he carried with it wherever he took it.
He had spent it on twelve days of the study table and the candlelit rooms and hands covered in liniment and the mornings at the breakfast table with the coffee and the Latin text and Mr. Metcalfe finding Arthurian significance in his toast and the pianoforte and Oxford Street and the journal joyfully received in both hands and the scarlet ribbon catching the afternoon light and all of it.
And the spending had been a choice made every morning from Grimsfell forward. And the choice had been his. Which was the part he could not excuse away no matter how long he stood in a public street in the cold trying.
Exhaustion bent his shoulders, and he had not the will to jest. For the first time in recent memory, he had no performance available.
The entire comprehensive collection he had been assembling and deploying since the trellis and the fall and the long months in the room above, through the drinking years and the sobering months and all that had accumulated between them and after them.
Simply absent. Every crutch unavailable.
No defense mechanisms in reserve. He had always had something.
He had been relying on always having something for so long that the absence of it had its own quality.
Arriving now with the weight of a truth that was true whether or not it was comfortable.
He walked beside her and said nothing. Because nothing he could say in a public street was adequate to the gravity of what was happening.
And he knew it and did not attempt to fill the silence.
That silence was the loudest noise on the street.
Her hand was on his forearm with the reluctant correctness of a hand that had been placed there by propriety rather than inclination.
Performing the social convention of two people walking together and communicating, through the presentation of normalcy, ignoring that which was not being said between them.
Which was a great deal. And he walked in it and could not think what to do about it.
He understood where he had turned up, with discomfort. He had been successfully avoiding a certain room for years and had just found himself locked inside it. He had been living in a very sheltered place for a very long time and had arranged the shelter with considerable ingenuity.
His mother had been an excellent structural element. He had read her journals, sitting alone with his anguish, confirming what he had long suspected but had not permitted himself to know, and the journals had given him a great deal of material for the shelter of self-pity.
Words and evidence and the weight of documented proof.
She had lost interest in him after the fall.
She had written about it with an arid simplicity, considering her own preferences the primary fact of any situation, who had found imperfection distasteful, who had reclassified him with the same dispassionate efficiency she brought to all inconsequential pieces she had decided were no longer worth her attention.
All of this was true. He had also been using it as an explanation for choices that did not require an explanation from outside himself. Which was the shelter. And he had been building and maintaining it for years.
He could not use it now. He could not blame his mother, who was dead and whose accounting was complete.
He could not locate Simon and direct the expression toward his older brother who had been producing results since Nicholas was fourteen years old and had discovered that Simon’s guilt was a reliable resource.
Simon was Lord Campbell now, in London with Madeline, managing his own life and his own hard-won freedom from the expectations that had been pressing the air out of him for thirty years.
Simon had given him enough. The guilt Nicholas had drawn on and the patience Simon had provided in return had been considerable and were not the point.
The point was that this mess was Nicholas’s alone. Of his own making. The fixing of it was going to have to be accomplished on his own two feet, one of which was considerably less cooperative than he required.
By the time they reached the house, he was going to need to have thought of something adequate to say. The house was not far enough away for the thinking to have produced anything adequate, and he walked with a muted despair raging through his veins.
The house appeared at the end of the street.
The door opened before they reached it, and Pike was in the doorway.
Not the Pike who moved at the steady pace, running the household the past two years, settled into its rhythms. Not the Pike who managed the accounts and turned away intrusive callers and let the silver go unpolished when Mr. Metcalfe needed attending and announced visitors with the flat, barely contained contempt he felt for most of Oxford’s academic establishment.
This was a different Pike standing in the hall.
The same five feet exactly and the same bald scalp and the broad shoulders and the thick wrists and the grounded confidence of his presence.
But the nature of his stillness was different from the butler stillness.
Recognizably different to anyone who knew what the other kind looked like.
A man in a state of panic under a surface of studied calm.
He stared at Nicholas first. Then at Millie.
“Mr. Metcalfe is not in the house,” he announced, with an economy that suggested that hedging would cost time they did not have.
“Cresswell called while you were out. I stepped away for no more than a few minutes to see to the tea. When I came back, Cresswell had gone and Mr. Metcalfe was not in his chair.”
Millie went pale.
Nicholas had seen her in many states. He had not seen this. The color left her face in a single complete wash and what remained was entirely without the mask of composure over it. The visceral fear of a woman for whom this danger had a name that she had been dreading for some time.
“Where is he,” she said. Not quite a question. Her mind was already moving through the problem at speed. Her voice had not caught up.
Pike said nothing. Because if he had known where Mr. Metcalfe was, he would not be standing in the hall.
Nicholas observed her face and felt the full weight of what she had been carrying settle over him like bad weather, all of it arriving at once.
The years and the quest and the lonely management of all of it and the scholars and the two years of Pike keeping an eye on him and Betty keeping pace and Millie running all her father’s affairs because there was no one else to run them.
All of it settling now on their gathering in the way of problems that have been present all along and are only now being fully comprehended.