Chapter Nine #2
“We will both agree it is about the boy, and we shall be entirely convincing.” Something that was nearly dry humour crossed his face but did not stay. “We have a great deal of practice between us, Miss Wrenfield, at being convincing about matters that are not the case.”
“It is everything, Your Grace.” Her voice was not entirely steady, and she let it not be, this once.
“You could have stopped speaking to me. That is what the arrangement of the world expects of a man in your place, and it would have cost you nothing, and no one would ever have called it unkind. Instead, you have sat here and built me a door I am permitted to walk through. I do not think you know how rare that is, to be handed a way to go on by the one person who could have shut the way instead.”
“I am learning, lately, the difference between a lock used against a person and a lock handed to them,” he said. “I had a good teacher. Enter Monday’s lesson. I will read it tomorrow, in full view of the household, with my coffee, like the dullest man in the kingdom.”
***
The ledger lived on the shelf, and it was, as he had promised, the dullest book in England, and it was the most carefully kept book Elinor had ever had in her life.
“A new book, Miss Wrenfield.” Mrs Garnett dusted around it the first morning without once opening it, which was itself a kind of remark. “His Grace tells me it is the lesson account, and that anyone in the house may read it, and that he rather hopes everyone will.”
“Everyone is most welcome to, Mrs Garnett.”
“I am sure they are. It is a very open sort of book.” The housekeeper set down her cloth and regarded it.
“I have kept houses a long time, Miss Wrenfield, and I will tell you what I have learned of books. The most open ones in any house are the ones with the most carefully arranged nothing inside them. I shall recommend this one to her ladyship myself, since she takes such a tender interest in the boy’s education.
Let her read every word of it and find her desert, and let her find it in front of witnesses. ”
“You are a great comfort, Mrs Garnett.”
“I am a great inconvenience to the right people, which I have always found amounts to the same thing.”
She made the first entry that evening in her plainest hand. Monday. Lord Theodore, Latin and geography, the Punic Wars concluded. Item lent from the south room, one Roman coin, Vespasian, for the study of the imperial profile. Returned and signed at four. E.W.
The reply was waiting the next morning in the upright hand she had begun to know the shape of across a desk. Noted. The boy has asked whether the profile is a true likeness or a flattery. I do not know the answer. Enter that I do not know it, so that the record remains honest. N.V.
She had laughed at that, alone, in the cold steward’s room, before she dipped the pen. Entered. His Grace does not know. The record is honest. Lord Theodore considers this the most interesting thing his father has ever told him, and has resolved to find out, that he may correct the record himself.
His answer came the following day. Then we will keep the record honest more often, if ignorance is the price of the boy’s interest. It is a lower price than most. What does he require next from the room? He has worn the Vespasian quite smooth with admiration.
So it went, the two of them keeping a book any spiteful eye in the house was welcome to open, and that any spiteful eye in the house would have found a desert. There was nothing in it.
Wednesday. Lord Theodore, French verbs under protest and the rivers of Italy with enthusiasm. He wishes it recorded that he can name the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po, and that his father has crossed all three with his own feet. E.W.
Recorded. I crossed the Po in a flat-bottomed boat steered by a man who sang the entire way and would not be paid to stop. It is the only useful thing I know about the Po. Give it to the boy. N.V.
The boy asks whether the emperor’s nose was truly so large. He proposes to put the question to his father at the first opportunity. I have told him his father attends the schoolroom rarely, and only by appointment.
Nathaniel read it standing at the shelf, and understood the second question folded inside the dull first one. After a moment he dipped the pen and answered it in the only language the book would permit.
An appointment may be made, he wrote. His father will attend at eleven on Thursday, if it is not inconvenient.
The reply stood waiting in the morning.
Lord Theodore will be very pleased. He has already changed his collar twice against Thursday, and it is only Tuesday.
She wrote it, and set the pen down, and meant to close the book there, the entry complete, the duty discharged, the river running on quietly beneath the safe and careful surface where it belonged.
But when she came back that evening to enter the day’s lessons, a line had been added below her own in the hours between. It was not about the boy, and it was not dull. It was the single sentence in all those guarded pages that no inspecting eye in the world could ever have been permitted to see.
And Miss Wrenfield, it read. Will Miss Wrenfield be pleased?
She stood over the open book a long time, the pen in her hand and the cold coming up off the stone floor.
There was no entry she could make that the world would forgive her.
The only honest one would have set fire to every safe and careful page that came before it, and so she made none at all, closed the book on the unanswered question, and left it on the shelf for anyone in the house to read.