Chapter Eleven
“It is real, truly real? Romans stood on it? Real ones, not the ones in the book?”
“Real ones,” Elinor said, for the eleventh time, “who walked on it in sandals and complained of the cold, exactly as you would have.”
“Tell me again how it is on Papa’s land.”
“Ask your father. He arranged the whole expedition. He is entitled to be asked.”
The duke had elected to ride on the box beside the coachman, in another carriage, and he shouted over his shoulder towards his son’s carriage: “A villa, Theo, with a floor of small coloured stones, laid by a craftsman a long way from home and homesick for a sun this island has never owned. It has stood on my land seventeen hundred years. I have not walked down to it in seven.”
“Why not?”
“Because a man needs a reason to walk anywhere, and I had mislaid all of mine. I have lately found one.”
Elinor kept her eyes on the hedgerows and let her face do nothing, for Lady Cassandra sat opposite, next to Mrs Garnett, with the stillness of a woman who heard everything and kept the useful parts by her.
“The sky does not love your floor, Vale,” the lady said, leaning to the glass. “There is weather coming off the western hills. We shall be home by noon, or drowned by one.”
“We shall be quick, then. The boy has waited seven years to see a thing that has waited seventeen hundred. An hour of cloud will not stop us.”
“You indulge him to a fault. You indulge the whole schoolroom to a fault, and it has begun to be remarked upon.”
“Let it be remarked upon. Remark is cheaper than the boy’s happiness, and I find I can afford a great deal of it.”
“Will there be a real hare, Papa? A Roman one?”
“A hare in coloured stone, fled forever from a hound that will never catch it, which is the only kind of hunt I approve of. All anticipation and no blood.”
“That is a strange thing to approve of.”
“I am a strange man, Theo. Your governess will confirm it at length, if asked.”
“I should not dream of confirming it unasked, Your Grace. Only when asked, and then comprehensively.”
“You permit her to speak to you so,” Lady Cassandra observed.
“I permit her to speak to me correctly, which is rarer than deference and worth a great deal more, and a great deal harder to come by in a house full of people telling me what they think I wish to hear.”
The ruin lay in a fold below the old beech hanger, low walls of dressed stone standing knee-high in the grass, and within them, under a rough thatch the estate had raised generations ago, the floor itself.
Elinor came down the slope behind Theo and stopped at the edge of it and forgot, for a moment, that she was a governess at all.
A hound and a hare ran through a border of vines in small coloured stones, the colours dimmed by damp, the design as sure as the day it was set.
It was the nearest thing to Rome she had ever stood over in her life, and it was here, in the rain-smelling English grass, on the land of the man who had brought her to it.
“Miss Wrenfield is crying,” Theo announced, with interest rather than alarm.
“Miss Wrenfield has something in her eye. Get out your paper. We shall draw the hound before the light goes, and you shall tell me which stones the craftsman set first.”
“The eye. Always the eye first.”
“Why the eye?”
“So it knows what it is looking at while you build the rest of it round him. Papa said so, in the ledger. He said a hound with no body is only unfinished, but a hound with no eye is a corpse, and you cannot sell a corpse to an emperor.”
“Your father grows almost poetic. Do not tell him I said so. He will be unbearable.”
The duke had come to the edge of the floor, and for a moment he watched her looking at it rather than the floor itself.
“You brought us all this way for a broken floor,” she said, low, while Theo bent to his page.
“I brought the boy for the floor. I brought you for your face when you first saw it. I have developed an unbecoming appetite for that particular expression, Miss Wrenfield, and I go to greater lengths each week to procure it, which is the conduct of a man who has mislaid his sense of proportion.”
“It is the conduct of a man who has found one, and you, of all people, should be able to tell that gold from the yellow you keep mistaking it for.”
The duke came to the lip of the slope, looking down the bank beyond the walls.
“The path to the lower room is gone. There was a second floor, finer than this, and a way down to it along the bank. The bank has slipped. I shall go and see whether it can be reached, or whether we content ourselves with the hound.”
“Surely a servant may go, Vale.” Lady Cassandra had picked her way down in pattens that kept her clear of the mud, and she laid a hand on his arm.
“You will ruin your boots and catch the chill you always catch, and then I shall have two invalids and only myself to nurse them. Send a groom. Stay dry. Better still, send the groom and let us all go home before the sky opens.”
“A servant does not know the ground. I do.” He detached himself without unkindness.
“Miss Wrenfield, keep the boy to the upper floor and out of the wet. Mrs Garnett, the hamper under the thatch before the cloud arrives. Cassandra, you will be drier by the carriages. I shall not be a quarter of an hour.”
“As you like.” The lady turned for the high ground at once, gathering Mrs Garnett with a glance.
“Come away from the edge, then, and leave Miss Wrenfield to her sketching. She seems entirely at home in the mud. Some are born to the parlour, and some to the field, and it is a kindness to let each keep to her element.”
Only afterwards did Elinor see how neatly it had been arranged for him.
The duke gone down the bank alone, the party split, herself and the boy left at the open lip of the slope with no roof but the thatch, and Lady Cassandra holding the dry high ground, from which a great deal could be seen and nothing whatever charged to the watcher.
“Which stones first, Lord Theodore?”
“The eye. I told you. You never listen to the part you already agree with.”
“A grave fault in a teacher. I shall reform.” A first drop struck the thatch like a fingertip on a drum. “Quickly, then. The eye, before the sky finds us.”
The rain came down all at once, a grey wall walking up the valley, and within a minute the thatch was a sieve, the grass a marsh and the hound was running on the page.
Elinor had Theo by the hand, making for the high ground, when the boy half-turned to shout something down the bank to his father. His foot found a slick of mud over stone, and he went down with a small surprised cry that became, the instant after, a wholly different cry.
“My foot. Miss Wrenfield, my foot, it has gone wrong, it has gone wrong.”
She was in the mud beside him before she had thought about her dress, both hands already on the small ankle swelling against the wet stocking.
“You have turned it. Not broken. Turned. Look at me, not at the foot. I have turned mine a dozen times and lived to be tiresome about it. Breathe the way I breathe. There. Your father is coming. Do you hear him?”
“It hurts. It hurts more than turning.”
“It always does at first. Hold my hand and squeeze as hard as the hurt, and let me feel exactly how much, so that I shall know.”
“Will Papa be angry that I spoiled the morning?”
“You spoiled nothing. The floor has survived worse than a small boy, and so will your ankle. Listen to him coming. That is not the sound an angry man makes coming up a bank in the rain.”
The duke came up the slipped bank at a speed it had no right to permit, hatless, his coat already black with rain, and he was on his knees on the far side of the boy before she had finished.
“Where?”
“The right ankle. Turned, I am nearly sure, not broken. He cannot weight it.”
“Theo, look at me.” His hands went over the joint, careful, competent, a man who knew the language of a bone through wet wool. “She is right. It is turned. It will be the size of an apple by supper, and you will be insufferable about it for a week, but then you will be perfectly well.”
“It hurts, Papa.”
“I know it does. You may say so as often as you like, the whole way home, and I shall not get tired of hearing it. That is what fathers are for… among the things I am late to discover. Arms about my neck. Do not be brave. I am tired of bravery in this family.”
He lifted the boy against his chest, and Theo, who did not weep before people, wept into his father’s collar, and the duke did not tell him to stop.
They came up into a scene of orderly emergency, Mrs Garnett already letting down the step of the closed carriage, the grooms holding the horses against the rain, and Lady Cassandra dry beneath a footman’s umbrella at the centre of it.
“The closed carriage, Your Grace, at once,” Mrs Garnett said. “Warm and dry and the foot up. In here.”
“Miss Wrenfield comes too.” Theo’s arms locked about his father’s neck and his voice climbed. “I want Miss Wrenfield. Do not put me in without her. She knows about the foot, she knows.”
“Lord Theodore, I shall ride in the other carriage and be at the house before you.”
“No. No, you come. You said you would not leave. You said it.”
“He will fret the foot into a fever,” the duke said, low, to her alone. “Get in. We will answer for the propriety on dry land, and not at the boy’s expense.”
“Your Grace, you know what it will look like.”
“I know precisely what it will look like, and I know precisely what it is, and the two are not my master today. Get in, Miss Wrenfield. Argue with me at the house, where it is warm, and you will win.”
So, she got in. The carriage was warm and dark; Theo was lying along one seat with his foot on a folded rug and his head in her lap. The duke opposite, the door shut, the rain on the roof, and no one else at all.
“We cannot ride alone together, Your Grace,” she said, over the boy’s hair. “You know we cannot.”
“We are not alone. There is a chaperone of seven years between us with a turned ankle, and a household that watched the necessity of it.”