Chapter Eight #2
He found Theo in the nursery, which he had not entered except at quarter-day for seven years, and which he entered now without ceremony, because a man who had spent the morning lecturing a governess on the duty of being tended could hardly stand in his own son’s doorway honouring his own rule.
Theo looked up from the floor, where he had arranged his soldiers in a formation of doubtful strategy, and went very still.
“You came in.”
“I did. Miss Wrenfield is being looked after by Mrs Garnett, who frightens even me, so there is nothing to fear on that account, and I find I have an afternoon and nobody to spend it on but you. I am told there are maps to be drawn.”
“You do not draw.”
“I draw extremely badly, which I am given to understand is the chief pleasure of having me about. Fetch the paper from the new table. The key is yours, I believe.”
The boy unlocked the drawer with the solemnity of high office, and they sat together at the worktable: the duke and the future duke.
Nathaniel drew the boot of Italy with a hand that had not held a drawing pencil since Naples.
He made it too fat, set Rome in the wrong place on purpose, and was corrected with a severity that warmed him to the soles of his feet.
“Rome is here, Papa. You have put it nearly in the sea.”
“So I have. A grave error. Romans were famously disinclined to be put in the sea.”
“Miss Wrenfield never puts it in the sea.”
“Miss Wrenfield is a great deal cleverer than your father, which you will find is true of most people worth keeping near you. Show me where the road ought to go, then, since you have the right of it and I have drowned the capital.”
“Why are you not cross today?” Theo asked, bent over the road he was correcting. “Not even a little. You are sometimes, and I never know which day it will be. I stay mindful of it in my head, so that I am ready.”
The pencil stopped in Nathaniel’s hand. In seven years, he had built nothing that he was as ashamed of as this: a boy keeping a private almanack of his father’s tempers so as not to be caught in the open by a storm.
“Stay mindful,” he said, when he could. “But set down today. And on a day that I am cross, you may show me today’s entry, and I shall be ashamed of myself.”
They drew roads until the light moved across the floor, and the boy forgot to be afraid, and the man forgot to consult the clock, and the rule that had kept the two of them apart for seven years lay quietly broken among the soldiers, and nobody bent to pick it up.
***
Lady Cassandra, who had returned, was at her correspondence in the morning room, and inquired, as he passed, whether the household had been disarranged, for she had heard a quantity of running about.
“A trifling matter, set right,” he said.
“The governess, I collect. Mrs Garnett was sent for at a most unfashionable pace.” Her pen paused.
“I do hope she is not sickly, Vale. A sickly governess is a false economy. One pays for the teaching and gets the nursing into the bargain, and a duke’s household ought not to be a charitable infirmary for young women who cannot keep their health. ”
“Miss Wrenfield’s health is not your concern, Cassandra, nor a subject on which I require your economy.”
“Everything under this roof is my concern, since I am the only soul left who takes any care of it.” She returned to her letter, the nib resuming its small spiteful scratch.
“You used not to run upstairs for the staff. I remember a winter when you would not have crossed the hall had the housemaid taken fire. I cannot decide whether the change is an improvement or a symptom, and the uncertainty keeps me here longer than I had intended.”
“Then let me resolve it for you. It is neither. It is a man remembering, somewhat late, that the people under his roof are people, which he had mislaid for a period and has lately recovered. You may write that down if it assists your correspondence.”
“I shall write that you are not yourself, Vale, which is true, and which worries me, as your friends are entitled to worry.”
He did not answer her, because the only true answers available to him were ones he had no intention of handing across a writing desk to be read aloud later in better houses than this one.
He wrote the note himself, at his own desk, which he had not done for any member of his household in seven years, and found it took three attempts before it said the correct amount and no more.
There were to be no lessons the following day, it said, unless Miss Wrenfield woke entirely recovered and wished otherwise, in which case she was to send word and not present herself unasked to prove a point.
Lord Theodore had been instructed to spend the day drawing quietly and was on his honour not to terrorise the household, which honour His Grace estimated would hold until approximately eleven. The schoolroom would keep.
He read it over, struck out a warmer line that had got in without his leave, and gave it to Mrs Garnett to carry up, and asked her nothing.
Mrs Garnett came back down a quarter of an hour later, set at his elbow a tray of correspondence she had plainly invented as a reason to return, and stood there until he looked up.
“She read it twice, Your Grace,” the housekeeper said.
“And then she smiled, which she has not done once today through considerable provocation, and then she put it under the candlestick where the maid would not clear it away with the breakfast things. I thought you would wish to know, having taken such trouble over the second sentence.”