Chapter 3 #3
Someone had recently burned something. In the hall fireplace rather than the study, which suggested it had been done in haste, or in a state of feeling that had required immediate action.
She looked at the ash and went upstairs.
The paper birds happened by accident.
She had been showing Rose how to fold paper, no particular purpose, just the mechanics of it, the way you fold a corner to a corner and then again, and again, and the flat page becomes a thing with dimensions.
The bird was a simple thing when it was finished, angular and improbable, not much like an actual bird. She held it up.
“That is terrible,” Rose said. “It doesn’t look like any bird.”
“It doesn’t claim to,” Cynthia said. “It is more of a bird in spirit.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means if you look at it very quickly and with great goodwill, you might momentarily think it’s a bird before you look properly.”
Rose took it from her and looked at it with great goodwill. Her mouth twitched. “No,” she said. “Still no.”
“A harsh judge. Make a better one if you can.”
Rose looked at her. Then she looked at the paper.
She took a new sheet, slowly, and followed the folds with a concentration that was entirely characteristic of her, absolutely serious, the tip of her tongue just visible at the corner of her mouth, her hands making each crease with deliberate care.
When she held up her finished bird, it was, undeniably, slightly better than Cynthia’s.
The angles were crisper, and it had a more confident beak.
“That,” Cynthia said, “is a significantly superior bird.”
“Yours is still a bird in spirit,” Rose said.
And then she laughed.
Not the small, involuntary almost-laugh of the previous week.
A real laugh, open, sudden and free, with no caution in it at all.
It lasted only a few seconds. But it was genuine, and it rose, filling the schoolroom.
Cynthia felt it in her chest as though someone had pressed a warm hand flat against her sternum.
She laughed too. Of course she did. It was impossible not to.
***
The Duke was outside the schoolroom door.
He had not intended to be. He had been coming upstairs to find Thomas Leigh, his steward, who had left a surveying note in the east corridor and who was generally to be found in the room above the kitchens that served as an estate office.
He had taken the back stairs, as he usually did; the main staircase felt, on certain days, like more architecture than he wanted to contend with, and he had rounded the corner of the third-floor passage when he heard it.
Laughter. Rose’s laughter.
He stopped.
He had heard it before. When Edmund was alive, and Rose was five or six, and she had no particular reason to be careful.
When the sound of her came down through the ceiling of whatever room he was in below her, and he had thought, without examining it, there’s the child, and continued with whatever he was doing.
He had not heard it since Edmund’s death.
He stood in the passage and listened to it, her voice, high and unguarded, and beneath it the governess’s laugh, lower, warm, unrestrained.
Paper birds. They were making paper birds.
He knew from the conversation that came before and after the laughter, which was an exchange that made no particular sense but had a quality he recognized as playfulness.
Easy and unguarded. The sound of two people who have begun to trust each other.
Rose was trusting someone.
He was aware of something happening in the upper part of his chest, in the region where he generally kept everything sealed. A pressure, or perhaps the absence of one. He had been carrying something there for two years, which was the shape of his own interior: the permanent geography of grief.
And now Rose was laughing, three walls away, about paper birds.
He turned around before anyone came into the passage and went back down the stairs.
He found Thomas Leigh in the estate office and discussed the surveying note, the drainage matter in the east field and the upcoming accounts, with complete focus.
He acted as if that was the only thing that mattered.
He was very good at that. It was, at this point, largely automatic.
However, today he found that he could not stop thinking about the laughter for the rest of the afternoon.
That evening, he went to the library. He paused in the doorway, taking in the cold, rusty room and felt, without quite naming it, the faint, unwelcome recognition of something he had long avoided.
He called for one of the housemaids and instructed her to have the fireplace cleaned and laid.
Then he went to his study and closed the door.
He sat at his desk but did not touch the ledger. He looked through the window at the moors, which were dark, losing their edges.
After a long time, he picked the quill pen and wrote three letters, which was what he had intended to do with the evening. He thought about nothing at all except the letters, even though the laughter from the schoolroom was in his ears and would be for the rest of the night.