EPILOGUE
One Year Later
“You are holding her as though she is a document you have been asked to witness and are not entirely sure is legal.”
“I am holding her the way one holds a thing one is afraid of dropping, which is precisely how a sensible man holds a creature of eleven weeks who cost the pair of us a very great deal of trouble to obtain.” Theodore did not look up from the bundle in the crook of his arm.
“She has your chin. She has been levelling it at me since six on the early hour of this morning, when she formed the opinion that I was not feeding her quickly enough, and she was right, and she knew she was right, and she looked at me exactly the way you looked at me across a breakfast table the morning I told you we were going to the country.”
“She cannot possibly look at anyone in any particular way. She is eleven weeks old. The book says they cannot even see across a room.”
“The book is wrong about her, then, as books generally are about the interesting cases.” He shifted the baby a fraction, with the absurd exaggerated care of a large man who had spent thirty-five years touching nothing more fragile than a wine glass and a great deal of paper.
“Good morning, Sophia. Your mother does not believe you can see me. We will prove her wrong together, you and I, over a number of years, which is the chief occupation of a family, I am told.”
Ellen sat down beside them on the window seat, where the autumn light came in long and gold across the floor of the room that had been the duchess’s bedroom and was now simply their room, the two chambers run together by the open door between them that no one in the house could any longer remember having seen shut.
She had not planned to be particularly fond of this hour of the morning. She had planned, a year ago, a great many sensible defensive things, and life had declined to consult her plans, and she had stopped, at some point in the year, minding very much that it had.
“You named her for your mother,” she said. It was not a question. They had settled the name in the spring, before the child was anything but a certainty and a great deal of sickness, but Ellen liked to say it aloud, because she liked watching what it did to him.
“Sophia rode that ridge,” he said, looking out at the line of it through the window, brown now with the turning year.
“She named this house the cottage to spite the great one, and she was the last warm person this family produced before you walked into it carrying a vase you meant to empty. I should like there to be a Sophia on the ridge again. I should like it a great deal.” He was quiet a moment.
“I could not have said any of that to you eighteen months ago. I could not have said good morning to a child where another person could hear me do it. You have made the whole house able to talk, Ellen. I do not think you know the size of the thing you did, coming in here and refusing to be furniture.”
“I know the size of it. I did it on purpose.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, on the side away from the baby, and the three of them watched the light move on the floor.
“Mostly I did it because I was too angry to do anything else, which is not the same as bravery, whatever Augusta tells people at her card tables.”
“It is exactly the same as bravery. Bravery is only fear that has run out of other options. I have been brave perhaps four times in my life, and every one of them was a thing I did because the alternative had become unbearable, which is the only engine any of us ever really has.”
He bent his head and, with great solemnity, kissed the top of his daughter’s, and Ellen looked away out of the window so that he might do it without being watched, because she had learned in a year that the unwatched tendernesses were the ones he could still only just manage, and that the kindest thing she owned was the trick of looking out of a window at the right moment.
The garden, when she went down to it after breakfast, was the second thing she had made that year and the one she could point to, which the matrimony was not, the matrimony being a thing made of a great many small invisible repairs that left no mark a visitor could see.
The kitchen garden could be seen. It had come on past anything she had let herself hope for in that first cold spring of clearing withered beds in a borrowed apron.
The autumn things stood in their rows, the late beans and the leeks and the great ribbed pumpkins gone orange against the dark earth, and Coyne, who had spent the first six months of her tenure treating her like an affliction the family would surely cure itself of and the second six months following her round the beds asking her opinion, straightened from the espalier he was tying in and touched his hat.
“The Burtons’ boy come up this morning, Your Grace, with a sack of their own apples.
He said his father told him that you was to have the very first of the harvest off the land that’s come back into their hands and that he’d not take no for an answer, and that I was to tell you he said it just like that, the not taking no, so you’d know he meant it as cheek and not as begging. ”
Ellen took an apple out of the sack he held and turned it in her hand.
It was a good apple, sound and unbruised, off a tree on a piece of ground that a year ago had belonged through a chain of London lawyers to a man now wintering somewhere on the Continent because England had become a place where people did not return his bows.
“Tell young Burton I said it was the best apple in Hertfordshire,” she said, “and that I will be the judge of that, having eaten a great many indifferent apples in my life and learned the difference. And tell his father the cheek is noted and approved of, and that he is to keep sending it, because a tenant who sends cheek with his apples is a tenant who has stopped being afraid of the house, and I have had quite enough of people being afraid of this house.”
Coyne’s weathered face did a thing that on a less guarded man would have been a grin. “He’ll like that, Your Grace. He’s a great one for the last word, is Burton, now he’s got his ground under him to stand on while he has it.”
That was the whole of it, she thought, watching the boy’s father’s apples go up to the house in the boy’s father’s restored confidence.
A man with his own ground under him stood differently.
She had stood differently herself, this year, for the same reason, and the ground under her was not soil but something harder to draw on a survey and a great deal harder to take away, and she had got it the same way Burton had got his, which was by refusing, very stubbornly, over a long time, to be quietly dispossessed.
She went round by the stables on her way back, as she did most days.
Heather put her head over the box door at the sound of her step, the way she had once put it over a yard gate at an hour her mistress no longer came, and Hibbert straightened from the hoof he was paring and let the mare have her moment before he spoke.
“She’s carrying well, Your Grace. Another month and there’ll be a foal on the ground to go with the one up at the house, and the two of them can grow up learning the ridge together, which is worth living to see. ”
“You said something to me once, Hibbert. By way of a housemaid and a breakfast tray. About how the clever ones go off their feed when they are used to a person and the person stops coming.”
The old groom’s face did not change a great deal, but something settled behind it. “I might have said something of that sort, Your Grace. I disremember the particulars.”
“You remember every particular of every horse you have ever had under your hand, and most of the people besides, and we both know it.” She laid her palm flat against the mare’s warm nose.
“I never thanked you for it. You sent me the only message a groom could decently send his mistress, and I was too far under to read it, and by the time I could read it, it had already done its work. So. Thank you. For asking me to come back, when no one else in the house had found a way to ask it that I was able to hear.”
“A horse’ll tell you a thing about a person, Your Grace, if you’ve the years to stand still and listen,” Hibbert said, and bent again to the hoof, which was the most he would ever say on the subject, and was, from him, a very great deal.
***
The letter from Henry came on the Thursday.
They had a system for Henry’s letters now, which was that Ellen read them first, alone, and then decided what of them to carry to Theodore, who had promised her on his honor that he would never again have her brother watched, and had kept the promise, which meant that what they knew of Henry now they knew the ordinary way, from Henry, in Henry’s own hand, which had grown steadier across the year in a manner she did not let herself read too much into and could not quite stop herself reading something into regardless.
Ellen, this one began, the plain address they had agreed on, no flourish, no appeal.
We are in winter quarters at last and I have survived my first year of soldiering, which the major informs me is the hardest, on the grounds that a man who has not yet learned the work is given all the work, and a man who has just learned it is given more of it for being able.
I have been useful. I write that down because it is the strangest sentence I have ever set on paper about myself and I wished to see whether it would hold its shape in ink. It held. I have been useful.
She read it twice, the way she read all of them, once for the news and once for the thing under the news.