Chapter Two #2
“The naumachiae are attested,” he said. “Flooding the arena was possible in the earliest days, before Domitian built the hypogeum, the substructures, beneath the floor. After that it could not hold water and the sea battles were staged elsewhere. The structure seats fifty thousand. Mr Crane’s eighty included standing room and exaggeration.
” He delivered it to the globe, to the window, to the air above his son’s head.
“The travertine is pitted where the bronze clamps were mined out of the stone in later centuries. That is the part the engravings never show.”
It was, word for word, a better answer than any book in the house could have given, and he handed it over flat, the way he might read out a bill of lading.
Theo had leaned forward after hearing the word “hypogeum”.
At the word “travertine” the next question was already forming.
His mouth opened on “Papa, did you…”, but the duke consulted his watch.
“You have what you need for the lesson,” he said. “Carry on, Miss Wrenfield.”
He was gone before the question could launch. Theo looked at the empty doorway, then down at the torn map, and closed his mouth on the unasked question with a care that was worse than tears.
“He stood in it,” the boy said finally. “He never says that part.”
“He said it today.”
“He said it to the window.” Theo squared the map again, a quarter-inch correction it did not need. “Will you put it in the Friday paper? That I made him come in and the lesson was interrupted?”
“You made nothing happen, and nothing was interrupted.”
“Mr Crane wrote things on Fridays. He read them to me first and said it was honesty.”
“Then I shall tell you what I intend to write, and you may audit it: A boy who found his own error in subtraction and corrected it unprompted, which is rarer in grown men than you would credit. A boy who keeps his evidence in order, his maps squared, and his beetle fed.”
He turned that over with visible suspicion, looking for the trap in it. “Papa reads them?”
“I am told he does.”
“He never says.” He drew the slate back toward him. “May we do more supply problems?”
They did more supply problems. He worked them in silence, and got every one right, and did not look at the answers afterwards at all. At noon she set the lesson for the morning, which was French, and he objected that Mr Crane had called French a language for dancing masters.
“Mr Crane lost a war with a seven-year-old,” Elinor said, gathering the slates.
“We do not take strategy from him. Half of what I know of Rome came to me through Frenchmen who troubled to go and look at it. You will have French, and Hector will have bark, and I will have your collar clean by nine, because we are to be inspected by a ladyship and we shall give her nothing to notice.”
***
She found the duke in the long gallery an hour later, where Mrs Garnett had said he walked at midday when the weather kept him in. He heard her coming but did not turn from the window.
“Miss Wrenfield. The schoolroom is two floors up.”
“Lord Theodore is having lunch, Your Grace, and I am told I have the gallery.” She stopped at a distance the most exacting chaperone could have certified.
“You have something to say. Say it and return to your post.”
“Thank you for the Colosseum.”
“You contrived it so that refusal would have cost more than the answer. I recognise the manoeuvre. I have used it in committee.”
“And yet you answered fully. The hypogeum, the clamps, the travertine. He will remember every word of it a year from now. I would stake my wages.”
“Then the lesson succeeded, and this conversation is a redundancy.”
“The lesson failed, Your Grace.” She said it quietly, and watched his reflection in the window glass give up the pretence of looking at the park.
“The facts succeeded. The lesson failed. He did not want the seating capacity of the Colosseum. He wanted his father to stand in the same room with him for more than two minutes. You gave a cold answer to the window and consulted your watch, and he watched you do it the way one watches a coach pull away without him aboard.”
“My son does not lack for anything, Miss Wrenfield. Masters, books, the best instruments money commands.”
“He is provisioned, Your Grace. Like the pass.” She let the word find its mark. “Provisioned, and holding it alone, and counting the loaves.”
“You have been in this house one day.”
“And he has been in it seven years.”
“Seven years in which he has wanted for nothing.”
“He wants for one thing, Your Grace, and it is the only thing in this house that cannot be had by asking Mrs Garnett for it.”
The duke turned from the window. The midday light was behind him, casting his face in shadow.
“You were engaged to teach my son, Miss Wrenfield. Geography. Arithmetic. French, in due course, and whatever else the post requires.” His voice stayed level, and the level was the warning. “You will not instruct me on fatherhood.”
“Then do not make it so easy, Your Grace.”
The silence went one breath past safety. He left without answering, down the full length of the gallery, and his stride was a fraction too quick for a man who believed he had won.