Chapter Twelve
“Tell about the mule again. The one that hated you.”
“It is past midnight, Theo, and you have a fever, and a boy with a fever should be asleep, not collecting evidence against his father.”
“I cannot sleep. My foot is the size of an apple, exactly as you said, and it throbs, and when I shut my eyes the room tips. Tell me about the mule. It is the only thing that does not tip.”
So, Nathaniel told him about the mule.
The sickroom was warm and low-lit, the fire banked, the basin of cool water at his elbow and the cloth he had wrung out a dozen times across the boy’s forehead going warm again already.
Theo lay propped against the bolster with his ruined ankle raised on a cushion, flushed and bright-eyed and querulous in the particular way of a child whose body had frightened him and who needed talking back from the edge of it.
The fever was mild. The physician, who was summoned from the village against every instinct Nathaniel had spent the day governing, had said so twice and gone home to his bed.
A chill from the soaking, nothing in it that a night’s watching would not see off.
A night’s watching. Nathaniel had said he would do it himself, and the household had taken the announcement as it took all his recent announcements: with the careful blankness of servants who had learned that the master was doing something unprecedented and that remarking on it would make it stop.
Across the bed, in the chair by the window, Miss Wrenfield sat with her mending in her lap and did not pretend to mend it.
Mrs Garnett dozed upright in the corner with the dignity of a chaperone who intended to wake the instant she was needed and not one moment before.
The propriety of the thing was intact. Everything about the night was intact except the seal that had been on him for seven years, which had begun, somewhere on the slipped bank in the rain, to give.
“The mule,” Theo prompted.
“The mule was called Achille, which his owner assured me meant noble and swift. He was hired to carry me over a pass in the mountains above Genoa, and he hated me on sight, with a completeness I have rarely inspired in anything that was not a relation of mine.”
“Why did he hate you?”
“I have given it a great deal of thought across the years, and my settled conclusion is that he could smell I did not respect him. I was four-and-twenty and respected almost nothing, a mule least of all, and Achilles knew it, as the deserving always know when they are undervalued. So, he waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“For the narrowest part of the path, with the longest drop, and a stream below making a great deal of noise. And there he sat down.”
“A mule cannot sit down.”
“Achilles could do anything that inconvenienced me. He sat down like a gentleman in a club, with the air of one who has nowhere in particular to be, and a drop of two hundred feet on the left, and your father on his back in his second-best coat. He declined, with great composure, to get up again for the better part of an hour.”
Theo laughed, weakly, and the laugh turned into a cough, and Nathaniel had the cloth cool and against his forehead again before the cough was done, his hands having taught themselves the trick of it across the night.
“What did you do?”
“I did what any Englishman of breeding and education does when defeated by a mule on a mountain. I dismounted, with as much dignity as the terrain allowed, which was none, and I led him the rest of the way on foot. I gave the muleteer a great deal of money to tell no one, and the muleteer took the money and told everyone, and by the time I reached Turin there was a song about it.” The cloth went back to the basin and out again.
“There is, somewhere in Piedmont, a folk song concerning an English milord and a mule of superior judgment. I have never found anyone willing to sing it to my face.”
“Tell the inn. The one with the rain inside it.”
“You have a long memory for my humiliations, Theo. It is an excellent quality in a son and a terrible one in a witness.” He turned the cloth.
“There was an inn in the mountains, I have mercifully forgotten where, whose roof had been mended by an optimist. It rained outside, and then, after a polite interval, it rained inside, in a different and more personal way.”
“Inside the room?”
“Onto the precise centre of the bed, with great accuracy, as though it had been surveyed. I complained to the innkeeper, and he was wounded by it. He told me the leak was not a fault but a feature, that it kept the air of the room sweet and wholesome, and that the room I had been given was in fact the most sought-after in the house on account of the freshness of its leak. He claimed that he had given it to me as a particular honour, and I should care to pay the small additional sum the honour commanded.”
“Did you pay it?”
“I paid it. I was four-and-twenty, and I had not yet learned to say no to a man with a straight enough face. I slept under my own umbrella, indoors, in the freshest room in the mountains, and in the morning he asked, with great sincerity, whether I had rested well. I answered that I had, because by then I had begun, just begun, to admire him.”
He had not told these stories in seven years.
Somewhere in the second hour it came to him that he had never told them at all, not like this, not as a string of small defeats laid out for a child’s amusement.
He had only mentioned them to his son as the mule and rainy inn incidents but with no details.
He had carried the Tour as he carried everything, a catalogue of acquisitions and corrected guidebooks, a performance of a sophistication he had not felt.
The disasters had been the part worth keeping all along, and he had locked them in the same dark room as the paintings and never thought to give the boy the only part of Europe that had ever done him any good.
Across the bed, Miss Wrenfield watched him do it. She had stopped any pretence of mending. She watched and was alert to the first crack, careful not to make a sound that might persuade it to refreeze.
“You were happy, on the Tour,” Miss Wrenfield said quietly, while the boy’s eyes were closed between stories. “In the disasters, at least. You are happy now, telling them, which you are not when you tell the other parts, the galleries and the coins.”
“I was free, which I mistook at the time for happy. And I was lonely, which I mistook for free. It has taken me until this year to learn that the three are different countries, and that I spent the Tour in the wrong one, with very good maps.” He wrung the cloth.
“I learned the difference in a schoolroom, in the end, and not on any mountain. It was a great deal cheaper than the mountain and a great deal harder to reach.”
“Miss Wrenfield, tell one of yours,” Theo said, rolling his hot head toward the window chair.
“I have none, Lord Theodore. I have never been further than Bath, and nothing whatever amusing has ever happened to me in Bath.”
“That cannot be true,” the duke said, to the cloth, not to her. “Everything amusing happens in Bath. It is very nearly the only thing Bath is for.”
“Then I was sent to the wrong Bath, Your Grace, and given the dull one, which is a fate that has befallen me with some regularity.”
“Tell another,” Theo said. “Tell the painter. The one who cheated you.”
“That is not a story that does your father any credit.”
“Those are the best ones. Miss Wrenfield says the best stories are the ones where you lose, because nobody learns anything from winning.”
“Did she?” Nathaniel looked, briefly, across the bed, and found Miss Wrenfield looking studiously at her mending.
“Then I shall sacrifice my credit to your education. There was a painter in Rome, a Frenchman, very charming, who showed me a small dark picture of a boy with a candle and told me, with tears standing in his eyes, that it was a lost Caravaggio that had been in his family three generations and that selling it would break his heart but his children had to eat.”
“Was it a Caravaggio?”
“It was a Caravaggio in the way that I am a mule. It was painted, I should think, the previous Tuesday, by the charming Frenchman himself, who had a great gift for candlelight and an even greater gift for the tears of a man parting with his heritage. And I, being four-and-twenty and certain I had the eye of a connoisseur, paid him a sum I will not say aloud in front of a child. I had the thing shipped home in a special case, and hung it, and was admired for it for nearly a year before a man who actually possessed an eye looked at it and laughed until he had to sit down.”
Theo was laughing again, the good kind, the kind that did not turn to coughing. “What did you do with it?”
“It hangs in the south room still, behind a sheet, with the others. I could not bring myself to burn it, because it had taught me the single most expensive and most useful lesson of my education: a man weeping over his heritage is very often a man who painted his heritage last Tuesday. I never trusted a tear again. It cost me a great deal of money and very poor company, and I have lately begun to suspect it was not, on the whole, a bargain.”
“You trust tears now,” Miss Wrenfield said, before she had quite decided to say it.
“I trust one or two particular instances of them, lately, against the whole of my training, at considerable risk, and I have not once been cheated by them yet.” He did not look across the bed as he said it. “It is early days. Ask me again in a year.”
“What is the lesson?” Theo’s eyes were going heavy at last, the fever loosening its grip toward sleep.
“That I was a fool at four-and-twenty, and proud, and easily flattered, and that the man who cheated me did me more good than all the guides who told me the truth. The guides made me clever. The painter made me careful, and careful is worth more and costs more.”