Chapter Fourteen #2
“I have not broken that one yet, have I? You may go on collecting on it. Add this to the account and collect on both.”
“Will Miss Wrenfield take the fever? You said she would take the fever.”
“Not if you let me carry you out of here this minute, so that she will follow, because she will not leave this freezing place while you are in it. Which is the very same reason you would not leave any room she was in. You are exceedingly alike, the pair of you. You each stay put for the other’s sake and then call it stubbornness, and I am the fool who has to come out in a storm and carry the stubbornness home.
” He got his hands to the small shoulders, careful as he had been with the turned ankle, careful with the most breakable thing he owned.
“Now let go of the map. It has done its work. It brought you somewhere I could find you, which is the whole of what a map is for.”
The grip on the cloth loosened. The boy turned his face into his father’s soaked coat, and Nathaniel gathered him up out of the mud and stood with him, and over the small drenched head he found Miss Wrenfield’s eyes in the lantern light.
He had expected relief in them. He had knelt in the mud and made the vow and earned, he thought, that much.
What he found instead, before she closed it away, was something quieter and a great distance off.
It was the look of a woman who had heard a man hand a child everything he owned and caught, in the handing, one small word he had not known he was keeping back.
“You found him,” she said. “Thank Heavens. We should get him in before the cold sets.”
“You said tonight, Your Grace,” she added, very low, when the boy could not hear, on the long, wet walk back across the lawn. It was not a question.
“I said what was true. I do not make him promises past tonight, because a man who has broken every larger one has no business making them in an orangery in a storm.”
“And tomorrow? When the storm has blown out, and the boy is mended, and her ladyship’s letter is halfway to London? What do you promise him then?”
“I promise him when tomorrow comes. It is the only unit of time I have ever managed to keep.”
“Indeed. I know it is.” Her voice had gone very even, which he would learn, in time, to fear more than tears.
“And that is the trouble with you, Your Grace, and it is the one trouble you cannot see. From the inside, a man who keeps every promise he makes looks precisely like a man who may be trusted with anything. He cannot tell, from in there, that he keeps them all only by taking great care to make them small.”
She said nothing else the whole way to the house.
He did not understand why naming the one virtue he was sure of had emptied her voice of everything, and he set the puzzle aside with the other things he meant to understand later, never suspecting it was the most important thing anyone would say to him that year.
They came up the drive soaked and lantern-lit, the duke with the boy against his chest, the governess at his side with her hair down and a borrowed lantern in her hand.
Under the portico, dry, waiting, stood three people of Lady Cassandra’s arranging.
A footman sent for an apothecary no one needed.
A maid with blankets no one had ordered.
And Lady Cassandra herself, who had stayed the whole storm through, it was now plain, for no purpose but to witness exactly this homecoming.
“Thank Heavens,” she said, warm and clear and pitched to reach the servants’ hall and travel onward from there.
“Thank Heavens you are all safe. Out in such a storm, the three of you together, half the night, and the poor child in such a state. I shall write to reassure the people who will hear of this tomorrow. Because gossip travels fast.”
“It is late, Cassandra.”
“It is never too late to reassure people who love a child. They will want to know how it all came about, every particular, and I shall be sure to tell them. Everyone.”
“You are very thorough, Cassandra.”
“I am very fond of this family. Thoroughness is what fondness looks like in a woman who has no other way to show it.” Her glance moved over the loosened hair, the borrowed lantern, the mud blacked across the duke’s knees, and gathered each of them up like coins.
“Goodnight, Miss Wrenfield. You must be so very cold. Do change at once. It would be a tragedy if you took a chill, and a great inconvenience to everybody, on top of the inconvenience of the evening.”
She went into her letters, and Nathaniel stood a moment longer in the rain than he needed to, holding his sleeping son, while Mrs Garnett held the door.
“She stayed the whole storm, Your Grace,” the housekeeper said, low. “In the dry. With the apothecary sent for and the blankets fetched down, all before the child was so much as found. A great deal of arranging, for a lady taken so by surprise.”
“I have been thinking the same thought, Mrs Garnett. Arriving at it late, as I arrive at everything.”
“The outing, Your Grace. The day of the carriage and the boy’s ankle. I have been trying all evening to remember whose notion that was, in the end.”
“Hers. The notion was hers. The splitting of the party was hers, proposed so prettily I thanked her for the prettiness of it.” He kept his voice level for the sake of the sleeping child against his chest. “She arranged the danger in the morning, and she has stayed up tonight to write the county a letter about the danger. The same hand. I let it sit two years because it wore a glove, and I was too well-bred to look at what was inside the glove.”
“And now, Your Grace?”
“Now I look at it. Her ladyship’s letters will go out with the morning post. Before a single one leaves this house, I want to know to whom each is addressed. Every name. Can it be done without her learning it was asked?”
“It can, Your Grace.” Mrs Garnett had waited seven years for the master to ask her a question of exactly that shape, and her plain face, in the lantern light, was something close to joyful. “It will be the greatest pleasure I have had in this house since the old duke’s day to manage it for you.”
He could track every letter and outwait her ladyship a full twelve months, as he had once outwaited an art dealer over a forged saint until the man wept.
He had the patience for a slow war and the means to win one.
The trouble, as he stood in the wet doorway with his son’s heartbeat going against his own, was that one correspondent beneath his roof would move before the morning post ever went out, and against that single move he had no strategy in the world.