Chapter Ten #2
“Then do not make it large.” She said it gently now, the hardness spent.
“He is seven. He cannot hold the sickroom, and he should not be asked to. He can hold one thing, and it must be true, and it must be small enough to carry up to bed. Begin with honesty the size of a child. Tell him you do not hate him. That is true, and it is small, and it will be enough for one day. The rest you give him a year at a time, for the rest of your life, which is how long it takes and is meant to take. But today, the small clean true thing. Go up and say it before he files the question any deeper, because a thing filed deep in a child at seven is very hard to dig out at thirty. I should know.”
***
The nursery was lamplit, the soldiers were put away, and Theo was in his nightshirt with a map across his knees. He looked up when his father came in and went carefully still, the way he had learned to go still.
“Papa?”
“I came to say a thing, and then I will go, and you may go to sleep.” Nathaniel sat down on the edge of the bed, which he had not done in the boy’s whole life, and felt the small mattress give under him.
“I have been a poor father to you, Theo. I want that said plainly, because you are owed it plainly, and because you have been carrying a wrong explanation. I would rather you carried the right one even though it is heavier.”
“Are you going to send me away?”
It came out fast, the question under all the questions, the one he had been holding behind the rest as he held his hands behind his back at the locked door.
“No.”
“Is it about Mama?”
The question came out very small, but Nathaniel did not flinch.
“Yes. But that is the heavy part of the answer, Theo, and you are not to carry the heavy part tonight. Tonight you carry only the light part, which is true. I do not hate you, and I am not sending you away. The rest I will give you a piece at a time, when you are older, and we shall carry it between us, the way two people carry a thing too heavy for one.”
“Because Miss Wrenfield told you not to?”
“Because I should have told myself, long before Miss Wrenfield came, and I did not, and that is my fault and none of yours.” Nathaniel looked at the small face that was Honoria’s face, and for the first time in seven years he made himself look at it as the boy’s own and not his mother’s.
“I do not hate you, Theo. I have never hated you. You decided I did, because I kept away, and a boy must have a reason for a thing like that, and you chose the only one that was on offer. The true reason is not yours to carry tonight. But it was never hate. I want you to take that up to sleep instead of the other, and I want you to keep it, the way you keep the key.”
Theo looked at him a long time, weighing it as he weighed everything, hunting the trap in it.
“You sat on the bed,” he said at last.
“I did.”
“You never sit on the bed.”
“Will you do that even when Miss Wrenfield is not here to tell you to?”
It was the sharpest thing the boy had ever put to him, and the most frightening, and Nathaniel did not insult it with speed.
“Yes. Though I may need reminding on the bad days. You keep a weather for that, I am told. You may show me the entries. I am going to do a great many things I never did, and badly, and you may correct me, since you are better at most of them than I am.” Nathaniel stood, because if he stayed, he would say more than the boy could carry, and the whole art of it tonight was the not-saying.
“Go to sleep. You have French in the morning, and I am told you have been disgraceful about your verbs.”
“Papa?” The voice was small in the lamplight. “I will keep it. The true thing. I will keep it with the key.”
He came out into the corridor and pulled the door to behind him, and Elinor was there.
She had not meant to be seen. He understood that at once.
She had stationed herself far enough along the wall to be only a governess waiting properly for a report on her charge.
The lamplight from the cracked door fell across her face, and her face was wet.
She had been crying where no one was meant to find her, silently, with the discipline of a woman long practised at weeping in places where it will not be charged to her account.
She turned her head away the instant she understood he had seen, and reached up to deal with it herself, quickly, as she dealt with everything herself.
Nathaniel took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it out.
“I have no use for it tonight,” he said, low, which was a lie, and they both heard it be one. “You may as well.”
She looked at the square of linen with his initials worked into the corner, and she did not take it for a moment, because taking it meant a great many things.
A man’s handkerchief in a governess’s hand was the admission of having been seen; the small unbearable intimacy of being offered comfort by the person who had caused it.
She understood exactly what it was, and he watched her understand it.
Then she took it, careful of his fingers but not careful enough. She pressed it once to her eyes, and held it folded in her hand rather than give it back, because giving it back would have been its own conversation and neither of them could afford to have it in a corridor six feet from the boy.
That was all: a handkerchief, accepted. And it was dangerous enough that neither of them said a single word more. He went down the dark stairs without a candle, and did not trust himself to look back at her standing in the lamplight with his initials closed inside her fist.