Chapter Six
“Leave it. Do not touch the map, leave it exactly where it lies and fetch me the pounce box, quickly now.”
Nathaniel reached the schoolroom door on the sound of Miss Wrenfield’s voice, gone level the way a voice goes when its owner is managing a disaster and means not to let it become one.
The scene arranged itself in a glance. The ink bottle lay on its side at the table’s edge, a black tongue of it spreading across the deal toward the borrowed map, and Theo stood pressed back against the shelves, his hands held away from his body, his face the colour of the ruined paper.
“What have you done?”
It came out of him flat and hard and seven years deep, before he had decided to say anything at all. He watched it land. The boy drew smaller, shoulders climbing, chin tucking, the hands curling in toward the wrists to hide that they had ever been near the ink.
“I did not mean to. The bottle was at the edge, and I only reached so it would not run onto the map.” The words came apart in his mouth. “I will pay for it. I have a shilling. I will pay for the map, please, I will.”
“Lord Theodore.” Miss Wrenfield set the pounce box down and stepped, without hurry, into the line between the boy and his father, her skirts to Theo and her face to the duke.
“The map is unharmed. Look at it. The ink stopped a clear inch from the coast.” Her voice did not rise, and her eyes did not drop.
“His Grace asked a question, and I shall answer it, since I was the one in the room. The bottle stood at the table’s edge because I left it there, which was careless of me.
Lord Theodore knocked it, reaching to save your map from a danger I created.
If there is fault to be found, Your Grace, it is wearing my apron. ”
“You are protecting him.”
“I am telling you the truth, which this once happens also to protect him. The two are not always so obliging, and I would not waste a lie on an afternoon that does not require one.”
He had built exits of that kind for other men, in committee, and watched them scramble through grateful. He looked past her at his son instead.
The boy was still braced against the shelves, still waiting, and that was what went in and stayed.
No sullenness in it, no defiance. A small person had spilt some ink and now stood very still, braced for the blow, the banishment, or the worse thing, the proof he had always half suspected of himself.
He had decided his father’s patience was a loan at a cruel rate, demanded back over a knocked bottle.
Nathaniel had stood near no face in seven years, long enough to recognise that look, and he read it now, wishing he had not.
“Put your hands down, Theo.” He made his voice do a thing it was out of the habit of doing.
“You are in no trouble. The map is whole, ink is cheaper than your shilling, and I would not take the shilling in any event, since it appears your governess set the table against you and must now apologise to us both.”
“I do apologise.” Miss Wrenfield was grave as a magistrate. “Profoundly. To you, Lord Theodore, for the fright, and to His Grace for the deal, which will want sanding.”
“It truly stopped?” Theo’s eyes were still on the map. “It did not touch the coast?”
“It truly stopped. The Bay of Naples lives to be copied another day.” Nathaniel set the bottle upright with his own hand. “Sand it, blot it, and we will say no more of the matter. I came up to tell you the long windows are open in the gallery and the swallows have got in among the ancestors again.”
“Real swallows? In the house?”
“Four of them, behaving disgracefully. Lady Cassandra has been insulted twice from the air, and I thought a natural philosopher of seven might wish to study them before they are chased out.”
The boy went, in a clatter of pure relief, and the hands that had been hidden at his wrists swung free before he reached the door. Nathaniel stood with the righted bottle and the ruined nothing on the table, and did not look at Miss Wrenfield, being unsure what his own face would do if he did.
***
She came to him in the gallery that evening, where the swallows had been let out the window and the candle light lay long and gold along the floor.
“You did a thing this afternoon you do not know you did,” she said. “So, I have come to tell you, since no one else will, and because you should be allowed to know when you have done well.”
“I frightened him. I heard myself do it.”
“You did. And then you stopped, which is the whole of the matter.” Her distance from him stayed as careful as ever.
“He does not need a father who never errs, Your Grace. There is no such article to be had, and a child raised to expect it cannot forgive himself the first time he proves to be a person. He needs a father who errs and comes back. You spoke too sharply, and then you crossed the room and righted the bottle and offered him swallows. That is the coming back. He will remember the coming back long after he has forgotten the sharpness, if you let it be a habit and not an accident.”
“And how is a man to make it a habit, having no copy to work from?” He turned the question over as he said it, surprised to be asking it aloud.
“My own father came back from nowhere, Miss Wrenfield, on account of having gone nowhere. He was present the way a clock is present. In the room, keeping time, consulted when one needed to know the hour and otherwise ignored by everybody including himself.”
“Then you have something he never gave you, which is the memory of wanting it.” She said it gently.
“You know the shape of the lack from the inside. Most men who had cold fathers spend their lives proving the cold was correct. You spilt your temper on your son and your first instinct, before the dukedom caught up, was to go back. That instinct came from somewhere. I should be glad to think it came from every hour you spent as a boy waiting for a clock to look at you and find you worth the time.”
He said nothing for a moment.
“You speak as if you had studied it.”
“I have lived it, which is a poorer study and sticks harder.” She looked at the failing light and not at him.
“My father was a kind man and an absent one. Never cruel, you understand. Only somewhere else, mostly. Inside a book, or a scheme, or a debt. He taught me five languages and could not teach himself to pay the coal merchant. He would forget I was in the room, and then look up and be so glad to find me there that I forgave him the forgetting every time, because the gladness was real. That was the trouble with him. One could not even resent him properly.”
“Theo forgives me the same way,” he said. “Each time. He was halfway to the swallows before the fright had finished leaving his face. It unsettles me, how cheaply the boy forgives.”
“It is not cheap, Your Grace. It is only quick, and you of all men should know the difference. A child forgives quickly because he cannot afford the alternative, the same as I could never afford the resentment. Do not mistake the speed for a low price. He is paying you in full, every time, and he is a boy who has very little to spend.”
“And the coming back. Did your father do that part?”
“Beautifully, and too late, which is not the same as never, and I have never settled whether that is a comfort or the opposite.” A breath.
“He left me schooled enough to want a great deal and poor enough to spend my life teaching other people’s children to want it in my stead.
I do not tell you this for your sympathy, Your Grace. ”
“I had not offered any.”
“No. You are the only person in some years who has not, and I find I am grateful for it, which I had not expected to be.” Her mouth moved, not quite a smile.
“I tell you so that you will believe me. I know to the farthing what it is worth to a child when the man comes back. It is worth more than the man can ever afford to discover, but he should do it anyway, every time, for as long as he is let.”
“You make it sound a simple thing.”
“It is the simplest thing in the world and the hardest, which is true of nearly everything worth the doing. To say sorry to a child costs a man nothing but his dignity, and dignity is the one currency you have hoarded for seven years as though there were a shortage of it in the kingdom.”
“You are remarkably free with your opinion of my economies, Miss Wrenfield.”
“You engage me to improve your son’s mind, Your Grace. I throw in your own at no extra charge, as a kindness, and you may dock my wages for the impertinence whenever you can bring yourself to admit you have read the bill.”
Nathaniel did not tell her he was sorry for any of it. She would have heard the charity in it, and charity from a duke to a governess is a coin she could not hand back, and handing it back was the only thing that would have let her keep her footing.
“Your father was a fool,” he said instead. “To have a daughter of that quality and put the coal merchant ahead of her on the list of things he meant to remember.”
The laugh came out of her before she could stop it, one startled note. “He was. He was exactly that, and thank you for saying it plainly. Every soul I have ever told has assured me he did his best, which is true, and useless, and I have wanted for years to hear one person simply call it foolish.”
“I am reliably informed I am very good at calling things foolish.”
“You are, Your Grace. It is nearly your most endearing quality, which is a sentence well beneath my station, and I shall take it and myself up to bed before I produce a worse one.”
***
He had the joiner up from the estate yard before seven, which surprised the joiner considerably.
The man built well and quickly under instruction.
By the time the household was properly awake, the spindly old table in the schoolroom was gone, and in its place stood a worktable of seasoned oak with a surface that would not stain through.
There was a rack of good pencils, a ream of paper that had not been bought to be economised, and at one end a shallow drawer fitted with a small brass lock.
Nathaniel did the last part himself, because he did not care to explain it to the joiner.
He set the borrowed map in the drawer, laid the Vespasian beside it, turned the key once, and left it standing in the lock.
Then he went out into the corridor and waited against the wainscot, by the board that always gave him away, and he did not announce himself, because a thing done to be admired is a thing done for the wrong person.
He heard them come in. He heard the small silence that meant Theo had stopped dead in the doorway.
“Miss Wrenfield. The table is different.”
“It is. A great deal sturdier than the last.”
“There is a lock on it.” A pause, the particular pause of a boy who had spent his short life understanding precisely what locks are worth. “There is a key in the lock.”
“So there is.”
“Whose key?”
A longer pause. In the corridor Nathaniel held still and listened for what she would make of it, having not told her what to say, because he had not known himself.
“Yours, I should think,” Miss Wrenfield said.
“It is your schoolroom. The map and the coin are inside, where no spilt bottle can ever reach them again, and the only person who can open the drawer is the one holding the key. Your father has given you somewhere safe to keep the things you are most afraid of ruining. That is what a lock is for, Lord Theodore, when it is handed to you instead of turned against you.”
Theo did not answer in words. There was the small click of the lock turning, and turning back, and turning a third time, a boy weighing the unfamiliar heft of being trusted with a thing he had only ever had to seize.
Then Nathaniel heard his voice: low, pitched for his governess and not for the corridor. “He did not have to.”
“No. He did not.”
“Will he be cross if I lose it?”
“You will not lose it. You have kept one key safe in this house for four months while grown men spent their whole wits trying to take it from you. I have no fears at all for your guardianship of a second.”
“Why did he, then?”
“You will have to ask him yourself, one day, when you are both braver than you are this morning.” Her voice gentled.
“For now, you keep the key, and you keep the fact of it. He did not have to, and he did it anyway. That is the part you fold up small and put away somewhere even the ink cannot reach.”