Chapter Fourteen
“She will have to go, Vale. You know it as well as I do. You have only been too tender lately to say the thing to yourself, so I shall be kind and say it for you.”
“Sit down, Cassandra. You have the look of a woman with a prepared speech, and I would rather you delivered it sitting, where it will take less time.”
“I shall stand. One says difficult things better standing.” She had come to the library at an hour when callers did not call, in a morning gown chosen to look unstudied, and she stood by the cold hearth with the ease of a woman who meant to stand there permanently.
“You have a clever, charming, perfectly respectable governess, and the whole county now knows it, because you stood up at your own table and announced it to them. And one day she will leave.”
“Will she?”
“They always leave. It is the single fixed law of governesses. They marry, or they are wanted elsewhere, or they simply move on to the next cold house and the next lonely child, because that is the trade, and she is good at the trade, which means she has practised it before and will practise it again.”
“You make her sound a woman who has abandoned children across three counties.”
“I make her sound temporary, which is what she is. There is no cruelty in it. A hired thing is meant to be temporary. The cruelty is in letting a motherless boy mistake the temporary for the permanent, and you have done that, Vale, with your maps and your kindness. You will go on doing it until someone with a clearer head than yours at present stops you.”
“And you have the clearer head?”
“In this one matter, yes. You are too close to him to see him. Everything that boy loves, he is going to lose, because you have permitted him to love a person that was hired by the quarter, and the losing will come whether I speak or hold my tongue. I am only asking that it come now, small, while he can mend from it, instead of later, large, when he cannot.”
“You speak as though the only kindness left to him were the avoidance of pain. I arranged that kindness for myself for seven years, Cassandra. I avoided every pain this house could offer me, and I named the avoidance dignity. At the end of it I had a son who flinched when I came into a room and a wife in the ground whom I had kept so carefully safe from my attention that the safety was what killed her.”
“That is grief speaking, not sense.”
“It is the first sense I have spoken in seven years. The grief did all the speaking before it, in the same voice, which is why you never marked the change. Grief and I shared a throat a long while. We have lately parted.”
“How affecting. You should say it to her and not to me. I am sure Miss Wrenfield would be most warmly affected.” The contempt showed and was smoothed away before it could be sworn to.
“But sentiment is not a settlement, Vale. You may feel whatever you like about your grief and your throat. The county does not see your feelings. It sees a widower of four-and-thirty keeping a beautiful young woman under his roof on the pretext of a boy. It has begun to draw the picture that arrangements of that shape always draw, and no quantity of corrected Italian at your table will rub the picture out. It will only fill it in.”
“You assume the picture is a false one.”
There was a pause then, a small one, and into it some younger and less governed thing in her looked out before she could stop it. “Is it?”
“That is the first honest question you have put to me all evening. I shall do you the courtesy of leaving it unanswered, which you may read whatever way costs you the least sleep tonight.”
“He has lost a great deal already. I had thought to spare him losing more.”
“You cannot spare him. You can only choose the size of the wound.” She let that land before she went on.
“Send her off now, with a good character and a quarter’s wages, while he is seven and will have forgotten by Michaelmas.
Or keep her, and indulge it, the maps and the carriage and the Italian at dinner, and drive the hook in another year deeper, and then watch it torn out at fourteen, when boys do not forget.
I have seen the second kind of boy, Vale.
He does not recover the way the first kind does. ”
“And the talk you keep naming. The talk the whole county now knows. Whose is it? Who began it?”
“Does it signify who began it? It exists. A thing said often enough becomes true enough to ruin a girl, and you cannot unsay it by glaring down your own table. You can only remove the subject of it, cleanly, before it grows into the kind of talk that follows her to her grave and fastens, in passing, to yours.”
“You have given this a great deal of thought.”
“I have given this house a great deal of thought. Someone has had to.”
The door had not been latched.
Nathaniel caught it as one catches a wrong note in a familiar room, a coldness behind the argument, a draught where no draught belonged.
He crossed the room and pulled the door wide.
The passage stood empty. On the floor, where a small person might have sat against the wainscot to listen, lay a single square of linen.
It was the lesson cloth she had been stitching too tightly the night before, half a map of Italy worked across it in coloured thread for a boy who wanted to see the world. He had taken it up off the floor before he understood why his hands had reached for it.
“Theo.”
Nothing answered but the rain on the long windows.
“Mrs Garnett.” He was already at the door. “Where is my son?”
She met him on the stairs with her candle and her face gone white above it.
“Not in the schoolroom, Your Grace, nor the nursery, nor the kitchen, and the garden door stands wide to the weather. Miss Wrenfield has gone out after him bareheaded. I could not stop her. She would not wait for so much as a shawl.”
“How long?”
“Minutes. No more. I came straight to you.”
Beyond the windows the afternoon had gone to slate and water, the storm arriving all at once the way the last one had.
Somewhere in it a child was running with half a map of Italy crushed in his fist, because he had heard through an unlatched door that the one person he trusted was to be sent off cleanly, with wages, like a thing.
“Lanterns. Every man you can wake. The orangery first.”
“The orangery, Your Grace? It has been shut these five years, the glass half out of the roof, it is no fit place for a child on a clear afternoon, let alone a night like this”
“It is the one place on this estate a frightened child believes no grown person ever goes, which is exactly why he has gone to it. I have lately troubled to learn the boy. The orangery, Mrs Garnett. Now.”
***
“Theo? Answer me. It is your father, you are not in any trouble, only answer me so I can find you.”
The dead glasshouse gave him back nothing but rain through the broken roof and the smell of cold earth and rotted citrus, and then, from the black angle of the far wall, a voice that was not the boy’s.
“Here. Your Grace, here, I have him.” Miss Wrenfield, somewhere in the dark, low and steady and frightened underneath the steadiness. “He is not hurt. He will not come out, and he will not let me lift him, and he keeps saying the same thing, and I cannot talk him out of it.”
“How did you know to come here?”
“I did not. I followed the only door in the house that was banging in the wind, and it brought me here, and here he was.” Her voice caught and held. “He will not tell me why this room. Of all the rooms.”
“I can tell you why. I told him once that this was the saddest room on the estate, when he asked me why it was shut. A sad child goes to the saddest room he knows, the way water finds the lowest ground. I taught him the room was sad, and he remembered, because he remembers everything I let fall and I let fall a great deal without examining it first.”
The lantern found them in the angle of two cold walls.
She was on her knees among the broken slates, soaked through, her hair come down and plastered to her face, both arms around a small shaking shape, and she was not saying anything wise or instructive.
She was only saying his name, the way one says the single word that is also a hand held out in the dark.
“Everyone leaves,” Theo said into the wet cloth bunched against his chest. “Mama left, and they sent her away in a box, and nobody let me see. Now they will send Miss Wrenfield away in a carriage, and nobody will let me see that either. And I will still be here. I am the thing that gets left.”
The lantern shook in Nathaniel’s hand. He set it on a slate before it could betray him further, and then he did the one thing that thirty-four years, a dukedom and seven years of standing at windows had trained him never to do.
He went down into the mud.
His knees found the cold black muck of the orangery floor and the rain came through the broken roof onto the back of his neck.
He brought his face level with his son’s streaming one, because some promises cannot be made standing up, and he had stood for the whole of this child’s life and it had very nearly cost him the child.
“Look at me, Theo. Not at the cloth. At me.”
“You will send her away. I heard the lady say it. She said cleanly. She said wages.”
“I heard the lady say it too. I was in the room when she said it, and I had not yet given her my answer, and you ran out before the part where I gave it.”
“What is the answer?”
“Are you listening to me the way you listen for the order of the forks? Listen, because I shall only say it once and you will hold me to it forever, which is as it should be. I am not sending Miss Wrenfield away tonight. There will be no carriage. No wages. No box. And no one is going out of this house into the dark, least of all you, who are one cold hour from the fever your governess is about to take on your account.”
“You promise? The way you promised about the night. The being there.”