Chapter Eight
“Papa! Papa, you must come up. Something is the matter with Miss Wrenfield, and she will not say what it is.”
Nathaniel set down his quill pen. Theo stood in the study doorway, breathless from the stairs, his face arranged in an expression it had not worn in weeks, the look of a child afraid of a thing he had no name for and no power over.
“Sit a moment and tell me plainly. What is the matter with her?”
“She has gone grey, like a candle nearly out, and she is holding the edge of the table and pretending she is not holding it. Her voice has gone slow. She stood to fetch the globe and had to stop and take hold of the chair, and she told me it was nothing and to attend to my Latin.” The boy’s hands worked at the hem of his jacket.
“She is doing the thing I do, Papa. When I am frightened, and I make my face ordinary so no one will look. I know the thing because it is mine. She is doing it, and she will not stop, and there is nobody up there but me.”
“Has she eaten today?”
“No. She said she was not hungry, and she has never said that before. She makes me finish my plate and finishes her own to set the example. Today she finished nothing and told me to mind my Latin and not her.”
That last carried the weight of an older terror, the small boy alone in a high room with a grown person who would not be well, and Nathaniel was on his feet before he had finished deciding to be.
“You did exactly the right thing in coming for me, and I shall tell her so. Now go to the kitchen, not the nursery. Find Mrs Garnett and send her up, and tell Mrs Coombe to make the strong tea, and then you are to stay below, eat something and not come up until you are sent for.”
“Is she going to be ill and not get better?”
“She is going to be perfectly well. Governesses are notoriously hard to break. I have it on the best authority. Go on.”
The schoolroom door stood open. Miss Wrenfield was upright at the table, a primer open before her and her hand flat, holding the furniture down rather than herself up.
She had gone the colour Theo described, a grey with no blood under it, a fine sheen at her hairline, and she straightened the instant his shadow crossed the threshold, with a discipline that cost her visibly and bought her nothing.
“Your Grace. Lord Theodore should not have disturbed you. It is nothing. I am quite able to finish the morning.”
“You are not, and he should, and he did.” Nathaniel came no further than was decent and looked at her with the plain attention he gave a tenant’s broken fence or a flooded field; a thing to be assessed before it could be mended.
“You are grey, Miss Wrenfield. You have not let go of that table since I came in. You have frightened a boy who is the foremost authority in this house on the hiding of fright, which means you have done it badly. So, mayhap you are worse than you intend to appear. The lesson is over.”
“Lord Theodore is in the middle of the Second Punic War.”
“Lord Theodore may leave Hannibal precisely where he is for one day. The elephants are not going anywhere. They froze in the Alps two thousand years ago and have shown no inclination to move since.”
“It will pass within the hour. I have never in six years lost a morning’s work to it, and I do not propose to begin under your roof, of all roofs, where I can least afford it.”
“To what do we owe it?” He said it without heat, as he might ask the bailiff the cause of a washed-out road, and watched the question land.
“You cannot ask me that.”
“I have not asked you anything I require an answer to. I asked because you will manage your own treatment better than I can guess at it, and I would rather be told than guess. But you need not tell me. I am not without the power of inference, having run a house with women in it for the whole of my life.”
“It is only a woman’s inconvenience.” She got it out flat and small, the words chosen to be the least possible, a coin pushed across a counter to make a man go away.
“Then it is a common inconvenience, and not a shameful one, and you will stop holding the table as though it were a confession.”
“A gentleman does not discuss such matters.”
“I am four-and-thirty years old, Miss Wrenfield. I have seen blood, birth, fever, death and Parliament, which is the worst of the five and the only one I would not wish upon an enemy. A hot brick does not unman me, and I will not stand in a corridor pretending a woman is not in pain six feet from me to spare myself a conversation. Sit down before you fall. That is not a request, and I outrank you comprehensively.”
Her body made the decision her pride would not, and she folded down into the chair with a small careful breath that told him more than any answer would have.
“Who will mind Lord Theodore,” she asked, trying to be useful from the chair, “if there are no lessons?”
“I will mind Lord Theodore.”
“You.”
“I am his father, Miss Wrenfield. It is rumoured to fall among my duties. I shall draw maps with him very badly and permit him to correct me, which he prefers to Christmas and most saints’ days.
We shall manage one afternoon between us without supervision, though I make no promises regarding the ink. ”
Mrs Garnett arrived on the word, took in the grey face and the duke standing his careful distance, and required no briefing at all.
“Bed, Miss Wrenfield, and no argument, for I have buried two husbands and raised a parish, and there is nothing you can say to me on this subject I have not said myself, louder, to better men than are presently in the room.” The housekeeper had her by the elbow with the brisk tenderness of long practice.
“Your Grace, if you would absent yourself, I shall see to what wants seeing to.”
“Hot bricks,” Nathaniel said. “Wrapped in flannel, not bare, she is not a chestnut. A fire laid in her room whatever the hour and the month. The strong tea is coming, and broth at noon whether she wishes it or not, and she is to be let alone to relax and not get up unless by her own choosing.”
“I shall want her stays off, her feet up, and a deal of sugar in the tea,” Mrs Garnett said, “and you, Your Grace, removed to another part of the house entirely, for there is a point past which a duke is of no earthly use in a matter of this kind, and we have been past it some minutes.”
“I yield the field, Mrs Garnett. It was never mine to hold.”
“You have done this before,” the housekeeper observed, gathering her charge.
“I have sat in a great many sickrooms. I am only ever useful in the doorways of them.” He said it before he had weighed it, and did not look at Mrs Garnett, who had been in the house long enough to know which sickroom had taught him the doorway.
Miss Wrenfield, halfway risen on the housekeeper’s arm, stopped and looked at him across the schoolroom, and there was something in her face that the pain had loosened past her usual guard.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “I have had this affliction in eleven households, and in none of them was I anything but expected to teach through it or pack my trunk. I learned to teach through anything. I taught a French lesson once with a fever of a hundred and two because the alternative was a character that said unreliable.”
“And the family permitted it?”
“The family did not know, which was the entire point. I conjugated through it, corrected the accent, went up to bed, and was at breakfast in the morning, and the mother told a caller how very reliable I was. I have lived on that word for six years, the way other women live on being told their eyes are fine.”
“It is a poor diet.”
“It is the only one set before a woman with my face and my purse, Your Grace. Reliability is the single quality the world consents to pay a governess for. Charm is suspect in us, beauty is dangerous, opinions are insupportable, and affection, as her ladyship was good enough to instruct me, is a cruelty to the child. Reliability is the whole of what remains, and I have made myself exceedingly good at it, because the alternative to being good at it is the road. You are not required to do any of this. I am paid to be reliable. That is the whole of what I am for.”
“That is the whole of what you have been permitted to be for. That is entirely different.” Nathaniel held the doorframe and did not cross it.
“You are under the impression that rest is a thing you must earn by first collapsing in front of a witness, so that no one can accuse you of having taken it cheaply. You are mistaken. In this house illness is taken seriously, and the unwell person is tended, and does not have to bleed on the floorboards to prove she was not malingering. I should have thought you would find that a relief. Instead, you argue with me about it, which tells me chiefly how long it has been since anyone offered.”
“I do not know how to be tended, Your Grace. I never learned. I know how to tend, but the opposite way is a language I was not taught.”
“Then learn it slowly, and badly, the way Theo is learning his Latin, and I shall be patient with the errors. I have made a great many of my own this season, and you have been remarkably patient with mine. Go up. Mrs Garnett will not poison the broth, and I will not let the house fall. Your one duty between now and tomorrow is to be unwell competently, which I have no doubt you will manage better than most, since you manage everything better than most. Theo is provided for, and the schoolroom can survive a day without Latin.”
That reached her where the rest had not.
Something happened at the corner of her mouth, there and gone, the expression that lived under her composure showing itself for once, and then Mrs Garnett had her through the door and along the corridor, and Nathaniel was left in the empty schoolroom with the open primer and the globe she had not reached.
He shut the primer, and for a moment his hand rested on the worn cover.
***