Chapter 2
“Good morning,” Cynthia said, to no one in particular.
The schoolroom did not reply. The child in the corner, who had her knees drawn up to her chest on the window seat, her dark eyes fixed on the moors outside, and who had very clearly heard the door open, also did not reply.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, evaluating the situation.
The room was cold. Not the brisk cold of a morning that had not yet been warmed, but the cold of a space that had been closed off for weeks and left to its own devices, which were apparently mournful.
Fireplace with no fire. Bookshelves along one wall held outdated primers on French grammar, a natural history with a cracked spine, and a globe that had suffered some geographical misfortune at its equator.
The writing table had a thin film of dust, and a vase in the window held the dried remains of something that had once aspired to be a flower arrangement.
She stepped inside and set down the small basket she had brought from the kitchen. She had risen early and persuaded Bess, the cook, to let her have a bit of bread, some cold milk, and a stub of candle.
The child on the window seat had not moved.
Rose Heathe was small for eight, or perhaps she simply seemed so, curled into the corner of the window seat with her arms around her knees, making herself as compact as possible.
She was pale, with dark hair that needed brushing, and enormous watchful eyes.
She watched everything, Cynthia judged. And found most of it alarming.
She was also, quite visibly, pretending with tremendous concentration to have not heard anyone enter.
Cynthia respected this because she had done it herself, at various points in her life.
“I am Miss Browne,” she said pleasantly, to the room in general.
“I’ve been engaged as your governess. I thought today we might simply get acquainted with the schoolroom, and with each other, before we attempt anything so ambitious as learning.
” She paused. “That suits me, at any rate. I’m better company once I know where the windows are. ”
Rose did not respond. Her gaze remained fixed on the moors outside, the only thing worth looking at, her stillness suggested, the only thing that mattered in this room.
Cynthia did not push. She did not sit beside Rose, or attempt to draw her out, or produce the sort of cheerful opening gambit that previous governesses might have tried.
You did not coax a wild creature closer by advancing on it.
You simply made yourself known to it, calmly and without agenda, and you waited.
Her uncle had taught her this in the context of hedgehogs, but she suspected it applied more broadly.
She began to tidy the room.
She swept the hearth first, which occupied her with productive noise for several minutes.
Then she wiped down the writing table. She rearranged the books on the shelves, pulling out the ones that might actually be useful and placing them where they could be seen, and moving the more optimistic Latin primers to the back.
She found a piece of chalk in the drawer and wrote on the small blackboard: Tuesday. Clear skies. Wind from the north.
Practical things. A record of a morning.
All the while she talked.
Not to Rose, exactly. Just into the room, in the same easy way one might speak when one is alone, and the sound of one’s own voice is preferable to silence.
She talked about the moors, which she had been looking at from her window that morning and had decided she found extraordinary in the way of landscapes that were clearly not interested in being pretty.
She talked about a bird she had seen on the window ledge of her room at dawn, which she believed was a curlew, but could equally have been her own ignorance of Yorkshire birds made visible.
She talked about her uncle, who had kept a catalogue of every plant in his village churchyard and had found this a source of profound satisfaction.
She did not look at Rose while she talked. She looked at what she was doing.
By midmorning, she had the fire laid and lit.
By noon, the dust had been addressed, the dead flowers removed, and the general atmosphere of defeat somewhat mitigated.
She sat down at the writing table with a piece of paper and began sketching the botanical illustration from the natural history she had found, not because she was particularly skilled at it, but because she needed something to do with her hands.
She heard, at some point around noon, the faintest shift of movement from the window seat and she continued drawing without looking up.
By the time she rose to look out the window at the afternoon sky, which had moved from pewter to something almost approaching brightness, Rose had migrated approximately four feet along the window seat, and was now close enough that Cynthia could hear her breathing.
Progress.
That afternoon, Cynthia went to the kitchen garden on the pretext of asking Bess about the household’s provisions, and returned with her arms full of whatever was flowering in the beds.
Not much, at this time of year, but there was some late gorse, a handful of dried lavender that had survived the season and a bit of ivy that had opinions about the garden wall.
She brought these back to the schoolroom in her basket and began arranging them in the vase she had washed out that morning.
Rose was still on the window seat. She had eaten the bread and drunk the milk that Cynthia had left near her without comment that morning.
She arranged the gorse, the ivy and the dried lavender, which smelled dustily of summer in the cold afternoon room, and she talked about wildflowers: about which ones appeared in which season, and about the fact that heather, if you looked at it closely, was a more extraordinary purple than it appeared from a distance.
She finished the arrangement, which was imperfect and somewhat more enthusiastic than elegant, and she turned to find Rose three feet away from her, having apparently crossed the room in utter silence.
Cynthia held out a stem of lavender. Just that. No preamble, no encouragement, no fuss.
Rose looked at it and then at Cynthia.
Then, with a deliberateness that suggested she was fully aware of what she was doing and had decided, after considerable internal deliberation, to do it anyway, she reached out and took it.
Her fingers were very small and very cold. She held the lavender with both hands, brought it close to her face and breathed in, her eyes going slightly soft and distant.
Cynthia turned back to the flowers and carried on with her arrangement.
It was, objectively, a very small thing: a child accepting a stem of dried lavender from a stranger. And yet she felt it like something opening in her chest, a door on a hinge that had been stiff with disuse.
Night came early on the moors in October, and with it came a quality of silence that was not merely the absence of sound but felt, somehow, active, as though the dark had weight and the weight was being pressed gently against all the windows.
Cynthia had gone to bed at ten, her candle burning low, the Greek poetry open on the pillow beside her.
She was not asleep, precisely. She was in the vicinity of sleep, negotiating terms, when she heard it.
It was a scream.
Not a word, at first. Just a sound, raw, high and terrible, the kind of sound that bypasses reason entirely and goes directly to the place in the body that knows, before the mind has caught up, that something is very wrong.
Cynthia was out of bed and in the corridor in the time it took to find her feet. She grabbed the candle from the bedside and went through the door and down the corridor to the room at the end, which she had understood from Mrs. Poole’s brief geography of the third floor was the child’s bedroom.
The door was not locked, and she opened it without knocking.
Rose was thrashing in the bed, her body rigid and twisting, her eyes open but unseeing, her dark hair plastered to her face with the effort of whatever the dream was doing to her.
She was crying for her father. Not calmly.
Not a blurred murmur of ordinary distress.
She cried with the force of someone desperate, shattering, as if he were somewhere close, as if he might still hear her if she were only loud enough.
“Papa, Papa, please…” Her voice broke on it. “Don’t go, don’t, Papa…”
Cynthia set her candle on the bedside table, sat on the edge of the bed and gathered the child up without hesitation, arms around her, pulling her in close.
Rose struggled at first, the way people struggle when they are still inside the dream and the dream has not yet let them go. Her small fists pressed against Cynthia’s shoulders. She was shaking; fine, violent tremors that ran through her whole body.
“I have you,” Cynthia said. Not hush or shh, not the meaningless sounds of comfort that are essentially a request for the distress to be less inconvenient. “I am right here. You are safe. I have you.”
She repeated it at intervals, keeping her voice low and even, and she held Rose against her and rocked her slightly in the way she had once been rocked herself, when she was small, and her uncle was alive, and there was still someone who knew exactly how to hold her.
Gradually, slowly, in stages, the way the tide retreats, the shaking lessened. The rigid quality left Rose’s body. The crying changed, from something desperate and clawing to something simply heartbroken, which was still dreadful but was at least conscious and real.
“There,” Cynthia said softly. “There. You’re all right.”
Rose pressed her face into Cynthia’s shoulder and held on with both fists to the front of her nightgown.
She was damp with tears, sleep-sweat, and she smelled of childhood and grief.
She clung with a ferocity that said, very plainly, that she had been let go of before and she did not intend to allow it again.
“It’s all right,” Cynthia said. “I’m here. You’re safe.” She hummed, not a particular tune, just the shape of one, something low and rhythmic that her uncle used to hum when he was working in his study. “I have you.”
Rose cried for a long time, but Cynthia held her tight.
When the crying finally slowed and softened, and Rose’s grip loosened fractionally as sleep began to pull her back, gentle this time, Cynthia eased her down against the pillow and arranged the blankets around her.
She decided not to leave so she stayed sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand resting lightly on the child’s back, until she was certain the sleep had settled properly.
Until the breathing had slowed to the long, deep rhythm of someone genuinely resting.
Then Cynthia sat back against the headboard, in the cold of the small dark room, with the single candle guttering low on the table beside her.
Whatever the duke is or isn’t, whatever this house is, and no matter what is wrong here….
This girl needs me. And I will not leave.
She had said it to herself as a decision. She found, sitting in the dark with a sleeping child beside her, that it had become something more than that. Something settled and absolute, the kind of knowing that doesn’t require repeating because it is simply, plainly true.
She lay down on top of the blankets, and closed her eyes.
***
He had heard it from his study.
Declan Heathe, Duke of Lavenham, had not been asleep.
He had been doing what he generally did between the hours of ten and two in the morning: sitting at his desk with a glass of whisky he did not drink, reading correspondence he could not concentrate on, while the house pressed in around him with all its particular nighttime weight.
When the screaming started, he was already on his feet.
He covered the distance from his study to the third floor in the time it would have taken most men to find their coats. He knew this passage as intimately as a man could, because he had stood in it at midnight more times than he could count.
He stood at the door with his hand on the frame.
Inside, he could hear Rose, frantic, broken. His brother’s name in his niece’s voice. The sound that had woken him on every bad night for two years.
He could go in. He should go in. She was his niece, his ward, his responsibility, his brother’s child, and she was in there crying as though something essential was being torn out of her, and he was standing in the corridor with his hand on the doorframe because…
Because every time he walked into that room, she woke fully and looked at him; his features were Edmund’s features arranged into something harder.
She would look at him and see her father in him, but then she would realize that it was not her father and the look on her face when she understood the difference was…
He stood at the door, and he listened.
And then suddenly he heard a new voice. Low, steady and unhurried, saying I have you; you are safe; I am right here. The new governess. Miss Browne. Her voice made it sound manageable. He stood at the door and listened to her.
The screaming and the crying changed. He stood at the door and listened to it change. On any of the previous nights, the previous governesses had gone to Rose’s room and attempted to calm her but had failed and left.
He waited until the crying had subsided entirely. Until the silence that replaced it had the settled quality of sleep rather than the taut silence of a child holding her breath.
Then he turned and went back down the stairs.
In his study, he poured himself a second glass of whisky.
He stood at the window and looked out at the moors, which were black and indifferent under the overcast sky.
He thought about a woman who had asked him, without preamble or apology, what Rose liked, as though the answer mattered.
As though it was the most natural question in the world.
He thought about the fact that he had had no answer. That he had waved the question off with she likes what children like and she had looked at him with those steady brown eyes and said nothing.
He was very good at not thinking about things further. It was one of the few skills, in his experience, at which he excelled.
He went to his desk, sat down and looked at the correspondence. He found that he was listening for footsteps on the floor above him, the soft back-and-forth of someone settling a child, the creak of a door.
But the house was quiet.
He sat in his study alone, and the only thing he could think of was that somewhere above him, on the third floor, a governess was holding his niece while she slept.