Chapter 12
The search at Lord Carrington’s had given Viola no peace.
It had given her the opposite: a name she did not know, recurring where she could not account for it, sums that would not sit quiet however she turned them, and a great many questions that fit together no better for her turning them over half the night.
It was Mrs. Hartley she went to in the morning.
She found her in the small parlor off the side hall, the one Lady Warrington was said to have favored, going through linens with the care she gave to everything. Viola had meant to ask her question plainly and found, when it came to it, that she did not quite know how to frame it.
“Mrs. Hartley. Did Lady Warrington — ” She stopped. “Was she in the habit of keeping papers? Private ones, I mean. Letters, and the like. Apart from what her solicitor would have held.”
Mrs. Hartley set down the linen. “She was,” she said.
“She kept a box. A writing-box, walnut, with a brass lock. She had it always by her, these last years, and would not have it put away with the rest.” Something gathered in her face, slow and careful.
“Mrs. Roberts will know where it was set. After — after, we did not like to disturb it.”
“Might I see it?”
“It is yours, Miss Trent. It is all yours.” But Mrs. Hartley did not move at once to fetch it.
She stood a moment, her hands folded, and when she spoke again it was with the air of a woman setting down something she had carried a while without quite knowing she carried it.
“She was very particular about that box, at the end. More than she had been. There was a gentleman who came about her affairs in those last months, when she was too unwell to see to things herself, you understand. Business matters. I thought nothing of it; a lady in her position has a great deal of business, and someone must see to it when she cannot.” A small pause.
“Only she did not care to have him near her things. I remember that. She would have the box brought up to her room before he came, and kept by her until he had gone. I took it for an old woman’s fancy.
She had a great many, towards the end, and I did not like to cross them.
” She looked at Viola. “I do not know that it signifies. But you asked, and it came to me.”
Viola’s mouth had gone dry. “Do you recall his name? The gentleman?”
“I never had it. He came to her rooms, not to the hall, and the staff were not introduced.” Mrs. Hartley shook her head slowly.
“A quiet man. Soft-spoken. I should not know him again, I think, save that he had a way of — ” she searched for it — “of seeming sorry to trouble anyone, even as he troubled them. I could not have told you why it sat ill with me. It was not my place to wonder.”
It was not a great deal. And yet it sat in Viola’s chest like a stone going down through water, slow and cold, settling somewhere she could not reach.
Mrs. Roberts brought the box within the hour, set it upon the parlor table, and withdrew.
It was as Mrs. Hartley had said: walnut, worn smooth at the edges where a hand had rested on it for years, the brass lock long since unfastened.
Viola did not open it at once. She sent, instead, for Lord Carrington.
She could not have said precisely why, except that the papers from his own house had spoken of her father, and she found she did not wish to open the rest of it alone, and that, of all the people in London, he was the one she most wished beside her when she did.
He came within the hour, and Hannah, with a tact Viola did not at the time appreciate the full weight of, took herself to the far end of the room with her needlework and left them the table.
Inside the box was not what Viola had braced herself for.
There was no ledger, no account, no neat damning column.
There were letters — bundles of them, tied in faded ribbon, in a dozen different hands.
Keepsakes: a child’s drawing, a pressed flower gone to brown paper, a miniature of a young man Viola did not know.
The private leavings of a long life, kept close because they had been loved.
And among them, tied in ribbon of their own, her father’s letters.
She knew his hand before she had read a word of it. She drew the bundle out with fingers that did not feel like hers.
“These are my father’s,” she said.
They read them together, Lord Carrington’s shoulder a steady warmth at her own.
They were not many — a handful, across some years — and they were exactly the letters her father would write: careful, proud, grateful in the stiff way of a man who hated to need gratitude.
I cannot easily say what your kindness has meant.
I will not insult it by pretending I did not need it.
And, in a later one, the same pride bending under strain: You must not think of sending more.
We do well enough. I would not have your generosity become a thing I lean upon.
Tucked with them, in Lady Warrington’s own hand, were notes Viola took at first for nothing — a line here, a figure there, the private memoranda of a woman keeping track of her own intentions.
Tyne — the spring quarter. And again at Michaelmas, the same.
He will not ask; see that it is sent regardless.
A sum beside it. Another note, months on: Tyne again.
He writes that they do well enough, which means they do not.
Send more, and do not say from whom. A sum beside that one, too.
Viola read them through twice. Then she sat very still.
“Viola?” It was the first time he had used her name. She did not mark it then. “What is it?”
“She sent more than this.” Her voice came strange to her own ears.
“These sums — she set down what she meant to send. Here, and here, and here.” She touched the notes one by one.
“And she sent them. She says so. See that it is sent. My father — ” She stopped.
The cold thing in her chest had reached the bottom now, and she understood it.
“My lord, my father never had the half of this. I would have known. I did know. I knew to the candle-end what came into that house, because I counted it, year after year, and there was never — there was never — ”
She could not finish.
She thought of the single candle her father carried from room to room.
Of the coal measured by the scuttle. Of the gowns turned and turned again.
Of a man who would not light a second taper because the cost of it frightened him — while in this box, in a dead woman’s careful hand, lay the proof that she had meant him warm, and fed, and easy, and had sent the means of it, year after year, into a dark that swallowed it whole.
“It did not reach him,” she whispered. “She sent it, and it did not reach him, and he sat in the cold believing the world had simply forgotten him.”
The tears came then, and she did not fight them, and she was distantly aware that Lord Carrington had taken her hand and was holding it, not lightly, not with the careful courtesy of a near-stranger, but firmly, both his hands about hers, as though he could press some of the steadiness of his own grip into her.
His voice was low and rough. “We do not yet know — ”
“We do.” She turned and looked at him, and saw in his face that he knew it too, and was reaching, as she had reached all night, for any other explanation and finding none that held.
“We know what she meant to do. And we know what was done. The only thing we do not know is the name of the hand between them.” She drew a breath that shook.
“But it was a hand, my lord. Money does not lose itself so tidily, so many times, by accident.”
He did not answer. His jaw worked once and stilled.
And Viola, even in the midst of her own grief, saw the thing move through him that she had been too wrapped in her father to name — saw some thought reach him and be refused, pushed under, denied a hearing — saw him close his hand harder about hers as if to hold them both away from it.
“Whoever it was,” he said at last, and his voice was not quite steady, “we will have the truth of it. I promise you that.”
He believed it. She saw that he believed it. And she did not yet understand why, having promised it, he looked like a man who had just been handed something he was afraid to open.
It was only later, when the box stood closed and the letters were tied back into their ribbon, that Braithwaite’s words from the reading returned to her.
There is something she believed you would do.
Viola set her hand flat upon the worn walnut lid and went very still.
She had asked the right question at last, the one the whole strange gift had been built to bring her to. Not a reward, then. Not only that.
A charge.
* * *
Lady Cordelia Asher called at Stoneleigh that same afternoon, as she had threatened to, and Viola discovered that grief and a headache were no defense whatever against a determined duke’s daughter.
“I did warn you I should come and extract it properly.” Lady Cordelia settled herself in the blue drawing room as though she had sat there all her life, stripped off her gloves, and looked about with frank approval.
“What a house this is! You must stop apologizing for it with your face, by the way. You do it every time a person admires anything. Thursday. My supper. I have seated you already, so refusal will only disarrange my table and starve an earl.”
That won a laugh from Viola, walnut box or no. “Then I can hardly refuse.”