Chapter 3
“That one,” Rose said, pointing at the page, “is wrong.”
Cynthia looked up from the natural history she had open on the writing table. It was the fourth day. Rose had not, until this moment, addressed any remark to her directly, though she had been present for all the lessons, attending from her window seat.
“Which one?” Cynthia asked. She kept her voice even. Not excited, excitement, she had learned, had a way of startling.
Rose climbed down from the window seat. She crossed the room and stood beside Cynthia’s chair and placed one small finger on the illustration of a curlew, with misplaced confidence.
“That’s a lapwing,” Rose said. “The beak is wrong.”
Cynthia looked at the illustration and then at Rose. “Is it?”
“Curlews have a curved beak.” Rose’s voice was rusty with disuse, but underneath the rust it was clear and precise, the voice of a child who worked with facts and precise measurements. “That beak isn’t curved. It’s just long.”
“You know your birds.”
Rose said nothing. She returned to the window seat, but she did not draw her knees up. She sat with her feet on the floor, which was, Cynthia had come to understand, its own form of statement.
“I’ll make a note in the margin,” Cynthia said. “‘Wrong bird. See Rose Heathe for correction.’” She uncapped the ink and did precisely that, in her neatest hand, in the margin beside the bird. She felt Rose watching her do it. “There. It’s documented.”
“My father knew the birds,” Rose said. “He showed me.”
“He sounds like a man who paid attention to things.”
Another pause, longer. “He did.”
Cynthia moved on to the next illustration, which was of a hare. “I once confused a robin with a wren,” she offered, conversationally. “My uncle found this very troubling.”
“They’re not alike at all,” Rose said.
“No,” Cynthia agreed. “In my defence, I was looking at one from quite far away, and I had not yet had breakfast, which I find impairs my judgement considerably.”
She heard, from the direction of the window seat, something small and involuntary. Not quite a laugh but the ghost of one. The suggestion that a laugh was somewhere in the vicinity and had briefly considered manifesting.
It was enough. For the fourth day, it was more than enough.
The mornings had their own geography.
Rose would be on the window seat when Cynthia arrived.
Cynthia would light the fire; she had taken this task from the housemaid, partly because it gave her something to do with her hands in the first ten minutes and partly because she found that Rose watched the fire-lighting with a concentrated interest that suggested it was acceptable activity.
Then Cynthia would arrange the table, find whatever they were working with that day, and she would begin to exist in the room, warmly and without pressure.
Rose would gradually migrate from the window seat toward the table at whatever pace satisfied her sense of caution.
The pace had been, in the first days, approximately geological.
By the end of the first week, it was merely slow.
By the end of the second, Rose was sitting at the table for most of the morning, which Cynthia counted as a minor triumph that deserved quiet acknowledgment and no fanfare whatsoever.
What Rose liked, when no one was requiring her to like anything in particular, was drawing.
She drew with a focused, almost grim intensity, her small hand moving across the paper in a way that had nothing tentative about it.
She did not show Cynthia her drawings. She drew them and put them face-down on the corner of the table, or folded them and put them in the pocket of her dress.
Without in any way intending to pry, Cynthia had observed enough of them over the child’s shoulder to form an impression.
The drawings were not cheerful things.
Storms, mostly. Clouds with a particular lowering quality, and beneath them, houses, not pleasant country houses, not cheerful sketches of a child drawing home, but large dark houses with small windows and no one in them.
Fields of nothing. A bedroom, clearly a bedroom, with a figure in the bed, a small figure, under blankets, and the proportions suggesting an adult made small, made fragile.
This one appeared more than once. The same bed, the same figure, sometimes with another figure standing nearby who might have been watching or might have been only standing.
And there was a woman. Not in every picture, but in enough of them that Cynthia noticed.
Always the same woman, or always the same suggestion of one: yellow hair rendered as a bright color against whatever gloom surrounded everything else and red lips.
She was always standing apart. Always at the edge of the picture.
Never in the middle of things but always watching.
Rose drew this woman with a particular quality of line, not the quick, unthinking strokes she used for everything else, but something deliberate. The way you drew something that you needed to get exactly right.
Cynthia said nothing about the drawings. She asked Rose about birds, corrected the natural history, read aloud from the fairy stories she had found at the back of the shelf, and she waited.
She found the library on the eighth day.
She had been given, by Mrs. Poole’s terse initial briefing, a general map of the parts of the house she was permitted to occupy and the parts she was not.
The east wing was not, emphatically. The duke’s study was not.
The family dining room and drawing room were not, except when specifically required, which had not yet happened.
Everything else was, theoretically, accessible.
The library was theoretically accessible. It had simply not announced itself.
She found it by chance, a door she’d taken for a linen closet opening instead onto a narrow passage that led her into the largest room on the ground floor; enormous, high-ceilinged, its walls lined on three sides with books.
The fireplace was imposing and cold. There was a writing desk near the window, empty, and two chairs drawn up near the hearth with the look of furniture that had stopped expecting to be sat in.
And there was dust on every surface, even on the window glass, thickening the afternoon light to amber.
Cynthia stood in the doorway and looked at the books.
Several thousand of them, she estimated, collected across several generations by people with different interests and variable levels of discernment: serious scholarship alongside popular novels alongside what appeared to be an extensive collection of pamphlets on agricultural improvement.
There were encyclopaedias missing volumes F through H.
But they were books, real books, and they were here.
Even though the room was cold, dusty and abandoned, she wanted to be in it immediately.
She wiped down a chair with her handkerchief. She pulled a volume from the nearest shelf; it turned out to be a history of the Roman roads of Britain, which was not what she would have chosen but was perfectly acceptable, and she sat down in the cold, dusty, amber-lit library and began to read.
She returned every evening after Rose was asleep. After a week, it was the part of the day she thought about most.
She noticed how the books, in small and subtle ways, carried the marks of those who had read them.
Some were read carefully, the spines barely cracked.
Some were worn with handling, the margins pencilled over in a hand that grew from childhood to adulthood across successive volumes.
She found the hand on the third evening and spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at it: slanted and clear, occasionally impatient with itself, crossing out observations and writing corrections above.
Someone who thought in ink. Someone who had read here, in this chair, perhaps, and left traces.
She did not ask Mrs. Poole whose hand it was because she thought she knew.
One of the next days, it rained.
Proper rain, the kind that had made up its mind about things: heavy, gray and horizontal, driven in off the moors by a wind that had clearly been saving itself for the occasion.
The moors disappeared behind a curtain of it, but Rose pressed her nose to the glass in the schoolroom and watched, silent and focused.
Cynthia was behind her, shelving the natural history, now extensively annotated, when she happened to glance out the window at a lower angle and saw him.
He was at the graveyard.
The hill was partly visible through the rain from this angle, through a gap in the trees on the eastern side of the garden, and there he stood among the stones without a hat, and without an umbrella. His coat was already dark with wet, but he was completely still.
Cynthia watched for perhaps thirty seconds before she made herself look away.
A man doing penance.
She had heard various versions of the story: that he had been cold toward his brother, that he had neglected him, that the cruel Duke of Lavenham had driven his own family to ruin.
She did not know how much of it was true.
She was beginning to suspect that what was true was considerably more complicated and considerably sadder than any rumor had the patience to be.
He stood in the rain for almost an hour. She knew it from the clock on the schoolroom wall and the way the light changed. When she allowed herself to glance back at the hill, he was gone.
“Miss Browne,” Rose said, from the window seat.
“Yes?”
“Why does Uncle go there?”
Cynthia set down the book she was pretending to read. “To the graveyard?”
“He goes a lot.” Rose’s voice was matter-of-fact, the way children’s voices are when they have been observing something troubling for so long that it has become ordinary. “He stands there for a long time. Even when it’s cold.”
“Sometimes,” Cynthia said, after a moment, “people go to places like that to talk to the people they’ve lost. Or just to be near them.”
Rose was quiet for a moment. “My father is there.”
“Yes.”