Chapter Twelve #2
He cooled the cloth again, and let himself feel, for the first time all night, the shape of the room.
A low fire, a basin, a bed with a sufferer in it, a chair drawn close beside the bed, and himself in the chair and not at the window.
He had been in this room before, in every room like it, always on the wrong side of it.
Across the bed Miss Wrenfield watched him notice where he sat, and said nothing, which was the kindest thing she could have done, and he was grateful for the silence in a way he could not have entered in the ledger.
“The guide is the last story, if you can hold your eyes open for it,” he said.
“A man in Naples who told me a hundred facts about the bay and got each one of them wrong with perfect confidence. I followed him three days and corrected not a single error, because he was so happy in them, and I had not yet learned that being right is a poor reason to spoil a man’s joy.
I have wondered since whether he was the only honest teacher I had on the whole Tour.
He told me the world as he believed it, with his whole heart, and was wrong, but loved me for listening.
The accurate men only ever told me the world as it was, and despised me a little for needing to be told. ”
But Theo did not hear the guide. Theo had gone, between one cool cloth and the next, into the deep flushed sleep of a child whose fever had broken its own back, and his hand had found his father’s sleeve somewhere in the telling and closed on it, and held.
The dawn came grey at the window, and the fire had sunk to coals, and Mrs Garnett slept on in her corner with her chaperone’s conscience clear. Theo stirred once, surfacing, his fingers tightening on the sleeve they had not let go of all night.
“Papa?”
“I am here.”
“You will not go when I am asleep, will you? You will still be here.”
It was the question Nathaniel had been asked once before, in a room very like this one, by a person he had failed to answer, and he had spent seven years discovering that there is no procuring your way out of having failed to answer it. His own hand closed over the small hot one on his sleeve.
“I am here,” he said. “I am not going anywhere. Go to sleep. I will be here when you wake, and the morning after that, and you may check as often as you require, and find me each time exactly where you left me.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. I am told my promises have been worth very little until lately. I am attempting to mend the rate of exchange, and you may begin to collect on this one at any hour you like.”
“Even in the night? If I wake and check?”
“Especially in the night. The night is when the checking counts. Wake me, and I shall be cross about being woken, but I shall be here, and the second part is the part that matters.” His thumb moved once over the small knuckles.
“I have nowhere in the world I would rather be than precisely this chair, which is a thing I did not know about myself until tonight, and which has cost me an unconscionable amount of foolishness to learn.”
The boy sank back into sleep, satisfied, the way only the very young can be satisfied by a promise, taking it entirely on trust because trust was all they had.
Nathaniel sat without moving so as not to disturb the hand, and watched his son breathe.
He did not look at the window; the window where a younger version of himself had stood arranging a fourth opinion while the only opinion that mattered slipped away behind him.
“You did very well,” Miss Wrenfield said, very quietly, across the bed.
“Do not praise me for arriving seven years late.”
“I am not praising you for arriving. Anyone may arrive. The roads are full of people arriving, late, with their hats in their hands and their excuses prepared.” She set the mending aside at last. “I am praising you for staying. You have sat in a chair nine hours with a child’s hand around your sleeve and a window at your back that I think you would have given a great deal to walk to, but you did not walk to it.
That is the hardest thing. The thing he asked you for, and the thing she asked you for, and the thing you could not do then and have just done now, while everyone of consequence slept and no one kept the account but me. ”
“She asked me to sit down. I have sat down at last. Seven years too late, in the wrong chair, beside the wrong sufferer.”
“Not the wrong sufferer. The living one.” She did not let him keep the comfort of the self-reproach.
“The dead ask nothing of us but to be remembered, Your Grace, and you may do that from any chair in the house. The living ask you to stay in the room. You have stayed in the room, and so the boy will not spend his own thirties learning what it costs to be left, because his father sat in a chair one night and did not get up. That is not too late. That is precisely on time for the only person it can still be on time for, and being on time for the living is the whole of what the dead would ask of you. They leave that to the people who loved them, who ask it of themselves, forever, at unhelpful hours.”
He was quiet a long moment.
“You make mercy sound a practical accomplishment,” he said. “Something one might be commended for at an audit.”
“It often is, Your Grace. The most practical thing in the world is to be in the room when you are needed and to remain there after the need has stopped being interesting. Nine men in ten can manage the first. It is the staying that empties the room.” She rose, gathering her mending, careful not to wake the housekeeper.
“You have learned the staying. Rather late, as you say, and at a cost, and to no one’s profit but your son’s.
I should not, on the whole, call it a poor bargain. ”