Chapter 3 #3
Comfrey root, dried since August, going to a coarse grey meal under the pestle. It was slow work and it wanted a steady grinding pressure rather than force, and force was what she had felt like using since about eleven that morning.
The mortar had been her mother's. It was heavy marble and it moved on the tabletop if she was careless, and the sound it made when it moved was the sound of stone dragging on wood, and it carried.
She did not hear the footsteps until they were at her door.
Amelia was up before she had finished registering them.
Lamp down. Mortar off the table and into the wooden box.
The folded papers of dried root after it, the little jar of lard, the muslin, the spoon — all of it swept in together with no care for order, the lid on, the box under the bed and her foot pushing it back against the wall.
The counterpane pulled straight. Her hands wiped hard on the inside of her apron and the apron off over her head and behind the screen.
The knock came.
She looked at the table. Bare. She looked at her hands. Grey in the creases, and nothing to be done about that.
"Come in."
Her father opened the door. He was in his dressing gown with a candle in his hand, and he looked older by candlelight than he did by day.
"You are awake."
"I am."
"I heard a noise." He glanced past her at the room. "A scraping. Some minutes ago, and then again just now."
"My drawer." Amelia gestured at the chest by the wall without looking at it. "Something has gone down behind it. I was trying to shift it out from the wall to reach whatever it is, and it is heavier than it looks."
Her father frowned at the chest.
"You ought not to be hauling furniture about at ten o'clock at night."
"I had rather hoped it would move."
"I shall have Frederick see to it tomorrow." He set the candle on the nightstand. "He will have it out in a minute and you will not put your back out doing it."
"Frederick always tries to help," Amelia said. "Even when he cannot alter the thing that wants altering."
The Baron looked at her for a moment.
"I see this morning is still with you."
"It is." She sat down on the edge of the bed. "It is with me because we have had it a dozen times, Father, and it ends in the same place every time. In a year or two years I shall be married to a man I did not choose, and everything I care for will be put down and left behind, for him."
Her father did not answer straight away. Then he pulled the chair out from the table and sat down in it, slowly, the way he sat when his hip was troubling him.
"My dear," he said. "What would you do, in my position?"
"I would let it come naturally."
"Naturally."
"As it does for other people. As it did for the Cobbs and the Hollises and everyone else in this county who is permitted to look at a person and decide for themselves." She spread her hands. "I would let my daughter live, and let her meet whom she met, and trust that she had sense."
"I understand you," he said. "I do. And I wish it were a thing I could give you." He turned the candlestick a little on the nightstand so the flame stood straight. "Our position provides a great deal. It also asks. I accepted what it asked of me a long while ago, and this is what it asks of you."
"I do not want a comfortable life," Amelia said. "I want a life that means something."
"I want both for you." He said it without heat, which made it harder to argue with. "Comfortable and meaningful. A house of your own. Children in it. A husband. Protected. Provided for. Loved, if there is any justice in the world at all."
"It sounds very well."
"It is very well."
"It is very well from the outside, Father." She looked up at him. "That is exactly what those marriages look like from the outside. You have sat at their tables. So have I. And most of them are rotten all the way through and everyone at the table knows it and passes the salt."
The Baron was quiet.
"Some of them are," he admitted. "Yes."
"Then—"
"And I would still rather that risk than the other one.
" He leaned forward, forearms on his knees.
"Because here is what I know, and you do not yet, and I would spare you learning it the slow way.
If I leave it to you — if I stand back and let it come naturally, as you say — then the years will go by, because they always do.
And at thirty you will be considered difficult.
At five and thirty you will be considered impossible.
And the men who will still come to this door by then will not be the ones you would have had at twenty.
They will be the debt-ridden and the second sons and the ones nobody else would take. "
"Father—"
"And there is the other matter," he said, "which I will only say once, because you are my daughter and not my physician.
A woman bearing her first child at older age is in danger.
Real danger. I have buried people over it.
" His hand closed on his knee. "I will not have that.
I will not stand at a graveside and know that I could have said something at five and twenty and chose to be delicate instead. "
Amelia looked down at her hands.
"I feel your fear," she said at last. "I do. I am not deaf to it." She lifted her head. "But selling me to a man in the hope that he will one day love me is not a remedy. It is a wager, and I am the stake."
Her father surprised her by smiling.
"You put it well," he said. "You always did.
" He sat back. "Then let me tell you what I am actually wagering on, since you will have it plainly.
I would sooner see you married to a powerful man who grows to love you — and he will grow to love you, because you are impossible not to, and because you will make him — than to a gentle one who adores you and cannot keep a roof over you.
Love is a great deal. It is not a settlement.
It does not pay a physician and it does not hold off a creditor. "
"That is a very cold way to put it."
"It is a father's way to put it." Something in his face gave slightly.
"I am sixty-one, Amelia. I do not know how many years are in front of me.
Two, perhaps twenty. And when I am gone I want there to be a man standing where I am standing now, who will see to it that you are looked after.
That is the whole of it. That is all I am trying to buy. "
"Frederick will see to it."
"I know he will." The Baron's mouth twisted. "Frederick would walk into fire for you and I have known that since you were four years old. He is also sixty-eight, my dear, and his hands shake in the mornings, and he cannot hold this county off you when I am not here to stand behind him."
Amelia said nothing to that.
Her father rose, and picked up the candle.
"Earl Somerset dines with us tomorrow," he said. "He brings his son. I have never met the young man and I know very little of him, and it may well come to nothing at all."
"And if it does not come to nothing?"
"Then we shall have a conversation," he said, "and I shall listen to what you say in it. That is my promise and it is the only one I have got."
He stopped at the door.
"Do not shift that drawer," he said. "Frederick will have it out tomorrow."
"Good night, Father."
"Good night, my dear."
She sat where she was until his footsteps had gone from the passage and the stair.
Then she got up and went to the balcony doors and opened them, because the room smelled faintly and bitterly of comfrey and she was not entirely sure it had not smelled that way while he was sitting in it.
The night was cold and very clear. Frost coming. Below her the garden lay in silver and black, every flowerbed of it crowded to bursting, and beyond the hedge the land fell away to the lake and rose again to the ridge.
Amelia looked east, as she always did, without deciding to.
Russell Hall stood black against the stars.
And there was somebody in the garden.
She saw the movement first and understood it second — a shape crossing the pale ruin of the terrace, unhurried, moving along the line where the balustrade had come down.
A man. Tall, by the look of him. He had a light with him but it was down at his side and it lit almost nothing, and he was not using it to see by; he was simply carrying it while he walked.
Amelia did not move.
Nobody went up there. Nobody had gone up there in her life. She had watched that hill through every season she could remember and it had never once had anything on it but weather.
The figure stopped.
For a long moment it stood perfectly still at the edge of the terrace. And then it turned, without any hurry at all, and faced west.
Toward Whitfield.
Toward the house.
Toward her window, where a lamp was burning behind her and she was standing in front of it in her nightdress against the light.
Amelia stepped back so fast she caught her heel on the threshold.
She got the doors shut and the catch across and stood with her back against them, and her heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her throat, and she made herself count to twenty before she moved.
Then she pulled the box out from under the bed, because the comfrey would spoil if she left it, and set the mortar back on the table and turned up the lamp.
Her hand was not quite steady on the pestle.
"Damn Frederick," she said aloud, to the empty room, "and damn his ghost stories."
She had been six years old when he told her that one. Six years old, and she had not slept for two nights, and she had believed every word of it for the better part of a decade.
Amelia worked on the comfrey rather harder than the work required.