Chapter One #2
“I shall tell you what I know, so that we begin even. I know three tutors have resigned. I know you fed Mr Crane’s Cicero under the door one page at a time, in order, which tells me you have an organised mind and a sense of justice, and that Mr Crane offended both.
I know your father means to send me away after breakfast. I asked him for ten minutes first, and I have spent three of them on this floor, so you may calculate for yourself how the rest is going.
And I shall add one thing more. I have been locked out of better rooms than this one, Lord Theodore, and I have never yet held it against the person holding the key.
So here is my proposal. If you would rather I went away, knock twice upon the floor, and I shall take myself back down the stairs and trouble you no further.
If you would rather I stayed, do nothing at all.
Doing nothing is the easiest yes in the world. ”
The silence on the far side changed texture; the listening kind giving way to the deciding kind. Then the lock turned, one slow tooth at a time, and the door opened the width of a wary eye.
The boy was small for seven, dark-haired, with a pale, guarded face and an ink stain along one finger. He looked at her sitting on the floor in a wet travelling dress, glanced past her at his father, and retreated into the room without a word, leaving the door open behind him.
Elinor rose, shook out her skirts, and went in alone.
The room was clean and cold, the fire banked low, the shelves ranked with soldiers in painted regiments. The boy had taken the window seat with his knees drawn to his chest, watching her with the flat patience of a child who had outlasted larger adversaries.
“Thank you for the door,” she said. “I shall not touch your soldiers, your shelves, or your key. And your fire wants coal, which I shall mention to someone whose business it is, and not as a complaint against you.”
He said nothing. She had expected nothing, and so she let her eyes travel the room once, slowly, as one reads a page that matters.
The table held a slate wiped clean with a defiance she could read from across the room.
Beneath the bed, just past the shadow of the counterpane, lay a sheet of heavy paper with a torn edge, the tear white and recent against old engraving.
She crossed the room, knelt on the cold boards, and looked at it without reaching.
“May I?”
Silence again, though its quality changed, and she took the change for consent.
She drew the sheet out with both hands, careful, as with anything that matters.
It was a map of the Mediterranean, engraved and hand-coloured, torn raggedly in half so that the sea ended in a white wound.
Italy survived on this piece. The other was nowhere she could see.
“This is good engraving,” she said. “Older than you. Older than me, I should think. Whoever coloured this sea mixed the paint by hand, and it has kept its temper, which is more than most of us manage.” She laid it flat on her knees and studied the coastline as though the room held nothing more urgent.
“Tell me, Lord Theodore. Which do you prefer, Greece or Rome?”
The quiet stretched so long she heard the fire settle. Then, despite himself, in a voice rusty with disuse around adults, the boy said: “Greece.”
“Why Greece?”
“Rome copied everything from Greece and then said it was theirs.” His chin came up over his knees. “Everyone praises the Romans for things the Greeks did first. It is not fair.”
“It is not. Though the Romans built better roads, which the Greeks would resent hearing.”
“Roads only matter if you have somewhere worth going.”
“Spoken like a Greek. The agency undersold this post.”
“The Greeks had Thermopylae.” He unfolded by an inch, his knees coming down. “Three hundred men held the pass. They knew they would lose and they held it anyway. Do you know about Thermopylae?”
“I know what the books say. I have never stood in the pass.”
“Nobody stands in it. Nobody goes to Greece. Papa went to Rome, Naples and Florence.” His mouth shut hard on the last word, as though the sentence had escaped under a door before he could feed it through page by page.
She let it lie where it had fallen. She turned the torn map toward him instead. “Where does the tear go? I have lost half the sea.”
He slid off the window seat, crossed the floor on quiet feet, and put one ink-stained finger on the white edge where the paper ended.
“Through Corinth,” he said. “It goes through Corinth.”
“Then Corinth has suffered worse than the Romans ever did to it. Does the other half still exist?”
The finger stayed on the torn edge. His eyes came up to hers, measuring, and the answer he gave was not the one she had asked for. “Are you truly going away after breakfast?”
“That is your father’s decision, not mine.
I asked him for ten minutes, and you have given me rather more than that, for which I am grateful.
” She set the map carefully on the bed, smoothing the torn edge straight.
“If I am still here tomorrow, I should like to hear about Thermopylae properly. From the beginning, with the geography done correctly. Most people tell it wrong.”
“Everyone tells it wrong,” said Lord Theodore Vale, with the weary authority of a scholar of seven, and for one unguarded instant something close to a smile crossed the pale face and was gone, the way a carried light passes a window and leaves the glass dark again.
“Good evening, Lord Theodore,” she said when she got up. “Keep your key.”
He did not answer, but he stood in the middle of the room and watched her go, and he did not lock the door behind her.
The Duke of Rothmere had not moved six feet down the corridor. He stood where she had left him, one hand on the chair rail, and his face had gone still, the stillness of a man who had overheard a thing he had no place to put.
Elinor closed the nursery door with care. “How long were you standing there, Your Grace?”
“Long enough.” He looked at the door, then at her, and held the look a beat past courtesy, as one looks at a problem that had declined to behave like the ones before it. “He said Greece.”
“He said a good deal more than Greece.”
“Corinth.” He said the name as though testing whether it would answer him as well. “What did you do, Miss Wrenfield? Word for word. What did you say to him?”
“I asked him a question, Your Grace, I listened to the answer, and I declined to be astonished that he had one.”
“That is not a method.”
“It is the whole method. There is no trick in it for the next tutor to learn.”
“He has not answered a direct question from any adult in this house since February.” His voice stayed level, and hidden underneath ran something she chose not to name yet. “His nurse, his tutors, his own father. Silence, or the door. Ten minutes, and he gave you Corinth.”
“Then perhaps, Your Grace, no one since February has asked him a question he wanted to answer.”
“You will find this is not a warm house, Miss Wrenfield.”
“I did not come for warmth, Your Grace. I came for the post.”
The corridor clock counted four seconds of rain against the window glass.
“Mrs Garnett will show you to a room and find you a dry gown,” he said. “Unpack your trunk, Miss Wrenfield. You will stay the month.”
He was gone down the corridor before she could curtsy.