Chapter 17 #4
“Just so,” he said softly. “You have grown formidable, cousin. She would have liked that, I think. She always said you wanted only a reason.” He rose, and gathered his hat from the desk, and for a moment the old deference came over him from habit, the slight apologetic stoop, and then he seemed to think better of it, and stood straight.
“I will send the accounting within the week. You will find it complete. Whatever else I have been, I have always been thorough.”
He went to the door, and paused there, his hand upon the frame.
“She chose well,” he said, not looking back. “The girl. Better than I knew, and better than you knew, the day you walked into Braithwaite’s office wanting her gone. I hope you have the wit to see it now.”
And then he was gone. His footsteps went away down the tallow-smelling stair, unhurried to the last. Julian stood alone in the orderly little room where so much quiet harm had been done, and felt no triumph in it at all — only the cold, clean ache of a thing set right too late.
And beneath it, rising, the need to be where Viola was.
* * *
The accounting came from Pendleton within the week, as he had promised, thorough to the last, a clerk’s neat columns running down page after page, every family, every sum, every year.
Julian brought it to Stoneleigh and laid it on the library table where so much of the rest had been found, and they went through it together in the failing afternoon light, as they had gone through all of it.
It was longer than either of them had expected.
“I had thought a handful,” Viola said at last, very quiet. “The Aldous family. The Colbournes. My father. I had not thought — ” She turned a page, and another. “There are so many of them.”
“Years of it.” Julian’s voice was low. “She kept on, all that time, helping where she saw need, and he followed behind her, taking. The wonder is not that she was deceived. The wonder is how much of it still got through, despite him. She was relentless, your benefactress. He could not skim it all.”
Viola looked at the names. Some she would never know: a widow in Bath, a clergyman’s family in the north, a young man set up in a trade.
The Colbournes again, more than once; the late earl, and after him others of the name.
People scattered across years and counties, none of them aware of any of the others, each believing themselves the solitary object of one woman’s unaccountable kindness, or believing themselves forgotten, when they were not.
And then, slowly, she understood the design of it, the thing that had been just beyond her grasp since Braithwaite first read out that impossible will.
“It was not only us,” she said. “The will, I mean — the way it was made, the bequest that comes only after her death, sealed past any meddling. She did not do that only for me.” She looked down at the pages.
“She did it for these others too, did she not? Whatever she could not finish in her life, she set in motion to finish after, put beyond his reach, where he could not follow.” She lifted her eyes to his.
“We were not singled out, Carrington. We were part of something she built to outlast her.”
Julian looked at the pages a long moment before he spoke.
“Braithwaite will have the rest,” he said.
“Her instructions. Whatever she meant still to do.” He set his hand flat upon the accounting, as though to keep it from blowing away.
“It is not finished, I think. Not all of it. There are wrongs in here that were never set right, and she will have left some provision for the righting of them, knowing her. She thought of everything else.”
“Then someone will have to see it through.” Viola said it simply, not knowing she spoke of anything beyond that room, that table, the work in front of her.
“Someone will.” Julian’s mouth curved, faint and tired and warm. “She seems to have had a gift for choosing them.”
Braithwaite had called at Stoneleigh the morning before, dry as ever, half-moon glasses and all, to tell her the next of the staged sums would be released at Michaelmas.
The occasion, he had said, with the smallest of bows, having arisen.
She had not needed to ask which occasion he meant.
No condition had ever been read out to her; no task had been set.
And yet, step by step, without once being told what was asked, she had done exactly what Lady Warrington believed she would do.
That was the design. That had always been the design.
Viola looked down at the long roll of names — at the proof of a kindness so vast and so patient it had needed a death and a sealed will to complete itself — and felt the last of her bewilderment ease away.
She had spent this whole strange season asking why me.
She saw now that it had never been the right question.
She had not been chosen for what she was.
She had been chosen for what she might do, and what she might become, and what she might help to finish — as her father had once been helped, and the Aldous family, and the Colbournes, and all the quiet others whose names she would carry now, whether or not she ever met a one of them.
She gathered the pages gently together and gave them back into Julian’s keeping.
“Then we are not at an end,” she said. “Only at a beginning of a different kind.”
“No.” He took her hand, and the warmth of it ran all the way through her. “Not at an end at all.”