Chapter 21
“Ihave brought your book.”
Eleanor stood on the front step of Rath House holding a slim volume in one hand and a purpose she had not bothered to disguise in the other.
The book was real enough—a collection of Cowper’s verse that Rosamund had mentioned weeks ago and promptly forgotten—but the delivery could have been entrusted to any penny-post boy in London, and both women knew it.
“You could have sent it.”
“I could have. But then I would not have an excuse to drink your husband’s exceptional coffee, and I have been thinking about it since Tuesday.” Eleanor stepped past her into the entrance hall briskly, not waiting for an invitation “Besides, I wished to see Clara. She sent me a letter.”
“Clara cannot write.”
“She sent me a drawing of a horse with six legs and what I believe to be a crown. I have chosen to interpret it as correspondence.” Eleanor unbuttoned her pelisse and handed it to the footman with a nod. “Is she about?”
A shriek of delight answered from somewhere above. Footsteps—rapid, uneven, accompanied by the percussion of a rag doll being dragged along a banister—descended the staircase at a speed that would have given Mrs Alcott heart failure.
“Eleanor! Eleanor, come and see, I have taught Bess to curtsey!”
Clara arrived at the bottom of the stairs flushed and triumphant, her pinafore buttoned incorrectly and one stocking pooled around her ankle. She seized Eleanor’s hand and began hauling her toward the corridor.
“She curtseys very well. She is better than the footman. I showed him and he was not impressed but I think he was only pretending.”
“I am certain he was devastated by the competition,” Eleanor said, allowing herself to be towed.
The morning room had become Clara’s preferred stage for demonstrations, primarily because it contained a rug soft enough to cushion Bess’s more ambitious manoeuvres and a window seat wide enough to serve as an audience gallery.
Eleanor was installed on the window seat.
Rosamund took the chair nearest the door.
Clara positioned herself and Bess in the centre of the rug with the grave ceremony of a conductor preparing an orchestra.
“Watch. You must watch properly. No talking.”
“We are silenced,” Eleanor said.
Clara held Bess by both arms, bent the doll forward at what she apparently considered an elegant angle, and announced: “That is a curtsey. It is how duchesses greet the King.”
“The King may be somewhat startled by the execution.”
“He will be impressed. His Grace said so.”
Rosamund’s hand stilled on the arm of the chair. “His Grace told you that?”
“He said Bess has the finest curtsey in the household and that the King would be honoured to receive it. He said it yesterday during tea.” Clara straightened Bess with proprietorial care.
“He also said that the Earl of Carrots is overdue for a promotion, but I told him promotions require a ceremony and he has not yet scheduled one.”
Eleanor turned to Rosamund. “The Earl of Carrots.”
“A velvet rabbit. It is a long story.”
“I suspect it is a very short story with a very tall duke in it.”
Clara, satisfied with the curtsey’s reception, had already abandoned ceremony in favour of her next objective. She crossed to the sideboard, stood on her toes, and peered at the biscuit tin with the focused intensity of a general surveying the field before battle.
“Clara, you have not been given permission—”
“Mrs Alcott said I might have two after luncheon. It is after luncheon.”
“By twelve minutes.”
“After is after.” Clara prised the lid off the tin, selected the largest biscuit with surgical precision, and bit into it with the unhesitating confidence of a girl who had been promised that there would be more.
Eleanor watched. Rosamund watched Eleanor watch.
“She does not check,” Eleanor said quietly.
“Check?”
“The biscuit. She took it and turned away. She did not look back to see whether anyone would take it from her.” Eleanor’s gaze had not left Clara. “Watch her hands, Rosa.”
Rosamund watched. Clara’s fingers moved loosely around the biscuit, arranging crumbs on the saucer she had requisitioned from the tea tray, rearranging them into a pattern that appeared to satisfy some private aesthetic code.
In the townhouse, Clara had held on to everything as though it could vanish at any moment—food, toys, Bess, the edges of Rosamund’s cloak.
Her grip had been the grip of a child who had learnt that the world could not be trusted to leave things where she put them.
Here, she set a biscuit on the saucer and left it there. Walked to the window. Came back. The biscuit had not moved. She did not seem surprised.
“When did that start?” Eleanor asked.
“I do not know. I did not notice until now.”
“Children do not do that in houses where they feel unsafe.” Eleanor’s voice held no argument—only the flat, clear certainty of an observation that did not require agreement.
“They do not run through corridors without looking over their shoulders. They do not shout for the attention of adults unless they believe the attention will come without cost.”
Clara, oblivious, had returned to the tin. “May I have one for Bess? She was very good during the curtsey.”
“Bess does not eat biscuits.”
“She eats them in her heart.”
Rosamund pressed her lips together. “One more. And then you must share with Eleanor, because she has come a very long way and has not been offered anything.”
“She can have the small one.” Clara placed a biscuit the size of a ha’penny on a saucer and carried it to Eleanor with the gravity of a duchess hosting a state dinner.
“You are too generous,” Eleanor said.
“I know.”
Tea arrived—Mrs Alcott brought it personally, which was unusual and telling. The housekeeper set the tray with quiet precision and withdrew, and from the corridor came the murmur of the household’s ongoing machinery—footsteps, a door closing, a low exchange between servants..
Clara had finished her biscuits and was now constructing a small village out of sugar cubes she had liberated from the tray. She built a wall around the sugar-cube house, knocked it down, rebuilt it taller. Knocked it down again. The destruction pleased her enormously.
“His Grace does this,” she announced. “He builds things and I knock them down. He says I have a gift for demolition.”
“Does he build often?” Eleanor asked, and the question was directed at Clara but aimed at Rosamund.
“Every day. After tea. He sits on the floor even though Mrs Alcott says the floor is for children and dogs, and he builds towers and I knock them down and he says—” Clara dropped her voice to a growl that bore a passing resemblance to a constipated bear.
“‘That was a structurally significant wall, Miss Clara, and you have committed an act of war.’”
“And what do you say?”
“I say ‘good’ and I knock down another one.”
Eleanor bit her lip. Rosamund reached for her teacup and discovered her hand was not entirely steady.
“Is she happy?” Eleanor asked, and the question had shed its disguise now. “Truly?”
“She sleeps through the night.” The words came before Rosamund could weigh them, pulled to the surface by something stronger than caution.
“She eats without watching the door. She runs—Eleanor, she runs through this house as though it has always belonged to her. She told Mrs Alcott last week that this is her home. Not her house. Her home. She has never used that word before. Not in four years.”
Eleanor set her cup in its saucer without a sound.
Clara, bored with demolition, slid from the window seat and crossed to the door. “I am going to find Parsons. She promised me we could look for the fairy door under the beech tree.”
“What fairy door?” Eleanor asked.
“The one His Grace told me about. He said there is a door at the bottom of the oldest tree in the garden and that if you leave a biscuit beside it, the fairies will write you a letter by morning.” Clara paused in the doorway.
“I have left four biscuits and received two letters. The fairy has very bad handwriting. It looks exactly like His Grace’s. ”
She vanished into the corridor. Her footsteps faded—quick, confident, the tread of a child who did not look back.
The room settled.
“Rosa.” Eleanor’s voice had changed. Stripped of its usual dry warmth, it carried instead the steadiness she reserved for things she refused to let be argued past. “I need to say something, and I need you to hear it before you build a defence against it.”
“I am not building anything.”
“You are always building something. You have been building since you were nineteen years old, and you are very good at it, and it has kept you alive, and I love you for it. But I am about to say a thing, and I want you to let it land.”
Rosamund folded her hands in her lap. The gesture felt like bracing.
“A man who tells a six-year-old girl that fairies live at the bottom of his garden and then stays up past midnight forging letters in a fairy’s handwriting is not performing kindness.
” Eleanor held her gaze without blinking.
“He is living it. And I have watched you for four years, Rosa—four years of grief and poverty and carrying everything alone—and I know what performed kindness looks like, because you have endured plenty of it from people who wanted credit for the gesture. This is not that.”
“You have known him for two suppers.”