Chapter 8 The Missing Volume #2
Wroth glanced over the page. His eyes paused not at the east cabinet entry but at Dacre Family Devotions, private print. He looked down too quickly.
Constance noticed.
Jasper noticed her noticing.
"You find Mr. Wroth's reading method interesting?"
"All reading methods are interesting. Some people search for content. Some search for danger. Mr. Wroth reads as if the paper might accuse him if he met it too directly."
Wroth flushed. "Miss Brown, that is a fanciful observation."
"Most observations are called fanciful before they become inconvenient."
Jasper laughed. "Enough. I begin to suspect the library is making you theatrical. Wroth, leave us a moment. I will join you in the study."
The solicitor looked relieved and alarmed together. "Of course."
When he left, Jasper placed the folded list on the table between himself and Constance. "You enjoy testing men who cannot decide whether to dismiss you."
"I do not enjoy it. I find it informative."
"Information can be overeaten, Miss Brown. The mind becomes bilious. One starts seeing systems where there are only habits, cruelties where there are only manners, conspiracies where there are only old shelves and older women with melancholy handwriting."
Constance kept her eyes on him. "Older women with melancholy handwriting often had reasons."
"Everyone has reasons. Reasons are the weeds of moral life.
They grow whether cultivated or not." Jasper touched the folded list. "You will not lift bookplates.
You will not open locked cabinets. You will not discuss family names encountered in marginalia with my wife.
You will not allow Lady Dacre to feel herself the heroine of a tragedy merely because a woman from outside the family has arrived with ink and indignation. Do you understand?"
"I understand the instructions."
"That is not the same answer."
"No."
For the first time, the smile left him entirely. Without it, he was not less handsome. He was more precise. "You mistake your position. I hired you to arrange books. I did not hire you to educate my wife in discontent. She has natural talent enough for that without professional assistance."
"Discontent is rarely created by the person who names it."
"You think yourself brave."
"No. I think myself employed. There is a difference. Bravery is too grand a word for asking why a catalogue has been altered."
Jasper leaned slightly toward her. His voice dropped, though no one else was in the room.
"Do not become attached to her. It will not improve her life, and it will shorten your usefulness.
Helena is beautiful in the way certain locked rooms are beautiful: most striking when one does not ask what the lock is for.
Admire the door if you must. Do not imagine you have been invited to enter. "
Constance felt the words as intended, a hand closing around the private place where concern had begun to become something less easily named. She did not show it. "I have not asked to enter any room beyond those required for the catalogue."
"Ah," Jasper said. "But you have begun to stand in thresholds. That is often where women make their worst decisions."
He took the list and left her with the echo of his warning.
Constance did not sit for several minutes.
She had expected control. She had expected condescension.
She had not expected jealousy, not because Jasper loved Helena, but because he considered all attention paid to Helena a theft from his ownership.
It was a collector's jealousy. Another eye had valued an object he preferred to keep under glass.
The thought made Constance feel ill.
At luncheon, Helena did not appear. Marianne did, and so did Roland.
Jasper was absent with Wroth. The meal was less theatrical than breakfast but more dangerous because no one performed cheerfully enough to disguise the danger.
Marianne ate very little and spoke less.
Roland drank water with the grim devotion of a man making temporary peace with his liver.
"You look pale, Miss Brown," Roland said eventually. "The library is attacking you. It does that. I advise retaliating with claret."
"At luncheon?"
"When attacked by family history, one should not be narrow about the hour."
Marianne's fork touched china with an exact sound. "Family history does not attack. It instructs. Weak minds experience instruction as assault."
"Then I have been assaulted since boyhood," Roland said. "Which explains much and excuses more."
"It excuses nothing."
"Dear sister, if nothing is excused, then no one in this family should sleep."
Marianne looked at him. The look had no heat, which made it more severe. "Some of us do not confuse confession with wit."
Constance saw Roland's face change. For once, the charm slipped not into calculation but into hurt. It was gone quickly, covered by a shrug.
"Then I shall be witless and unconfessed," he said. "It is practically a Dacre motto."
"You are not a Dacre by discipline," Marianne said. "Only by accident of birth."
"And yet accident may inherit when discipline has no son.
" Roland raised his glass, then seemed to remember it contained water and lowered it.
"Do not look so appalled, Marianne. Jasper is alive, Helena is young enough to be persecuted by hope, and the lawyers are forever finding new ways to keep property from becoming interesting.
We are all safe from my accidental importance. "
The sentence landed awkwardly. Helena's absence grew larger. Jasper's childlessness, so far unspoken before Constance, entered the room and took a chair.
Marianne turned to Constance. "You see what professional people are spared. Family conversation. It is an argument conducted by people who cannot leave the table because the silver belongs to them jointly."
"Professional people have tables too," Constance said. "They are smaller, but the arguments are not necessarily kinder."
"No doubt. Poverty is often sentimentalized by those who do not smell it at close range."
"As rank is often worshipped by those who do not see what it permits behind closed doors."
Roland made a small sound that might have been approval. Marianne went still.
"You are bold for a woman dependent on reference letters," Marianne said.
"Only because reference letters are less dangerous than silence in some rooms."
"You have been speaking to Helena."
It was not a question. Constance set down her glass. "I have been cataloguing books, Lady Marianne. In old houses, books and rooms often speak before people do."
"Be careful which rooms you believe. Houses flatter newcomers by seeming to confide in them. It is how they make servants of the curious."
"And families?"
"Families survive by deciding which truths deserve burial. Do not mistake burial for murder. Some things are put underground because exposure would rot the living."
Roland leaned back. "Marianne, you make luncheon sound like the opening argument at a trial. Miss Brown has not yet stolen the silver or married the coachman. Must we bury her too?"
"Do be quiet, Roland."
"I am quiet. My soul is in revolt, but my manners remain excellent."
Constance did not smile. Marianne's warning had unsettled her more than Jasper's because it contained not only threat but creed. Jasper controlled because control pleased him. Marianne controlled because she believed uncontrolled truth was a form of contamination.
After luncheon, Constance returned to the library by way of the portrait passage.
She stopped before Lady Beatrice. In daylight, the portrait was less obscure and more disturbing.
Beatrice had been painted in pale blue, one hand resting on a closed book, the other holding a sprig of rosemary.
Her face was not conventionally beautiful, but it was intelligent in a way the painter had not managed to soften.
Someone had later darkened the background around her shoulders, perhaps to make the blue gown stand out.
Or perhaps to place her more firmly in shadow.
Below the frame, the brass name plate read: Lady Beatrice Dacre, beloved daughter, 1819-1847.
Beloved daughter. Not wife. Not mother. Daughter. The family had chosen the safest relation and polished it in brass.
Constance looked closer. The closed book under Beatrice's hand bore a faint mark on its cover. Not letters, perhaps only a painter's suggestion of decoration. Still, the shape resembled a small red cross.
"She disliked sitting for it," a voice said.
Constance turned. Helena stood at the end of the passage, one hand on the newel post. She looked less pale than earlier, but more tired.
The afternoon light showed no bruise because her clothing allowed none, yet Constance could no longer look at her covered skin without imagining the hidden map beneath.
"You knew her?" Constance asked.
"No. She died before my birth. But women in families know dead women by the spaces left around them. Beatrice was always spoken of as a lesson. Lessons have sharp edges when one is expected to resemble the warning and not the woman."
"The plate calls her beloved daughter."
"Then the plate lies elegantly. She was inconvenient while alive and useful once dead. Beloved is often what families call women when they have finished refusing to understand them."
Constance looked back at the portrait. "She is holding rosemary."
"For remembrance. Or because the painter was told to make melancholy tasteful." Helena came beside her, though not close enough for their sleeves to touch. "Jasper hates this portrait. He says the eyes follow him. I think he objects less to being watched than to being recognized."
"Did Beatrice own books?"