Chapter 4 #2
She did not touch Rose again after that first moment. She sat across from her and talked continuously, in monologue, as if Rose were a surface rather than a person who might speak back.
Rose sat through all of it silent, absolute. She had learned long ago that the safest thing was to give nothing.
Cynthia stood in her corner and thought: Edmund’s wife. Edmund’s wife, whom he warned Declan about with his last breath. This woman who weeps without tears, assesses rooms and looks at an eight-year-old child she has not seen in two years and asks no question that would require an actual answer.
When the hour was over, Lucinda stood, smoothed her skirts and looked at Rose with the soft, injured expression she had been maintaining throughout, the one that suggested she was the wronged party in a situation not of her making.
“I will see you again soon, my darling,” she said. “Your uncle cannot keep us apart forever.”
She kissed the top of Rose’s head, a light, clean, formal gesture, and left the room.
Her perfume stayed behind her. It was expensive, sweet and heavy, the kind that announced itself and kept announcing for some time after the person was gone.
Cynthia looked at Rose and saw that her face was very still.
Then, slowly, she climbed down from her chair and went to the corner of the room where she kept her particular things: her drawings, her folded papers, a small stone she had found on the moor and brought inside because it had a good weight.
She sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and pulled her knees up to her chest and was very quiet for a long time.
Cynthia left her to it. She went to the window, looked out at the moors and gave the child the space of her own feelings, which was sometimes the only courtesy available.
After a while, ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, she heard Rose’s voice from the corner.
“Miss Browne?”
“Yes?”
“She smells like the medicine room.”
Cynthia turned. Rose was looking at her steadily from her corner, dark eyes clear, certain. She had known this for a long time. She was only now finding words.
“The medicine room?” Cynthia kept her voice even.
“At our house. When Papa was sick.” Rose’s voice was matter-of-fact, the flatness of precise memory rather than detachment. “There was a room where they kept his medicines. The bottles. It smelled like that. Like what she wears.”
Cynthia looked at her for a long moment.
“I see,” she said.
She turned back to the window and thought about a man wasting away, the smell of medicine in a room where someone was supposed to be getting better. She thought about green eyes that were dry when they should have been wet.
She did not jump to conclusions. She gathered particulars quietly, turned them over, and waited. Her uncle had called this patience. She called it, privately, the cost of having been wrong before.
She did not have enough yet. What she had was a child who was afraid, a woman who wore grief without inhabiting it, and a smell that meant medicine to a child who had watched her father die of an illness that did not get better.
She did not have enough.
But she had enough to know she would be paying attention.
***
He found her, she suspected, entirely by accident.
She had gone downstairs after Rose was settled; the child had eaten little at dinner and gone to bed early, curled tight and quiet.
She accepted Cynthia’s presence at the bedside without asking for it.
Cynthia had provided it, sitting on the edge of the bed reading aloud from the fairy stories until Rose’s breathing deepened and the sleep was real.
Then she had gone downstairs, not to the library though that was where she was headed, but to the entrance hall first, because she wanted cold air or something close to it and the front door at the end of the hall had a gap at the threshold that would offer exactly that.
Declan came out of the drawing room as she was crossing the hall.
He had taken off his coat, something she had never seen before, and stood in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, which on another man might have seemed informal, but on him looked like the quiet cessation of a performance. His jaw was set in the way she recognized now as controlled anger.
He stopped when he saw her. They were in the entrance hall together, Cynthia three feet inside the front door and he three feet outside the drawing room.
“Miss Browne,” he said. He was careful and controlled.
“Your Grace.” She hesitated. “Is there something you need?”
He looked at her for a moment, the careful, complete way he sometimes looked at things when he was deciding whether to address them. “Rose,” he said. “How is she?”
It was another question disguised as a statement. She had learned that this was how he asked what mattered most: without changing his tone, so no one could hear how much he cared about the answer.
“She ate very little this evening,” Cynthia said. “She’s asleep now. She was composed through the visit. But she came to sit in her corner afterwards, which is what she does when something has cost her more than she means to show.”
He was quiet for a moment. She watched the controlled anger move behind his eyes, which was held with considerable effort.
“She shouldn’t have come,” he said.
“No,” Cynthia agreed. Then, because she was tired and because Rose’s eyes had been very clear and very certain when she added: “Rose told me that Lucinda smells like the medicine room. The room where her father’s medicines were kept.”
Something went very still in him. “What?”
“That was what she said.” Cynthia kept her voice even and met his eyes. “I don’t know what it means, but I thought you should know.”
He looked at her. She had never seen him look precisely like this, not the controlled flatness he wore as armor, but something rawer, older and less managed than that. He was, she thought, genuinely trying to determine what she had just handed him, and was genuinely uncertain whether he wanted it.
“Perfume,” he said, after a moment. “She wears the same perfume she always has. Expensive and heavy. Rose would have…” He stopped. “Edmund was ill for nearly a year before the end. She would associate the smell with that period.”
“Yes,” Cynthia said. “That’s probably what it is.”
He looked at her in a way that suggested he had heard the reservation in her words and was filing it alongside other reservations he kept in a place he rarely opened.
“Is there anything else?” he asked.
She thought about telling him the rest of it, the dry eyes, the inventory gaze, the smile that didn’t quite reach the correct place on a person’s face.
She thought about telling him: I watched your sister-in-law perform grief for an hour, and I would like to know more about what your brother died of.
She thought about how little she had, still, and how much weight she would be asking him to place on the instincts of a governess who had been here three weeks.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
He looked at her for a beat too long. Not yet was a particular construction and he had heard it.
“Good night, Miss Browne,” he said.
“Good night, Your Grace.”
She went to the library and heard his footsteps heading away across the stone floor but did not look.
The entrance hall was cold and empty, and the draft came in under the front door.
Cynthia stood in it for a moment, thinking about medicine rooms, the smell of expensive perfume and a child with very certain dark eyes, and then she went to find a book she could hold in her lap without reading.
That was how she spent the rest of the evening, very quietly, working out the shape of something she could not yet see clearly enough to name.