Chapter 7
“Someone is at the door,” Rose said.
Cynthia looked up, but Rose was not looking at the door.
She was looking at her paper, where she had been drawing a moorland scene with absolute clarity.
However, her pencil had stopped moving, and her shoulders had acquired the slight, particular tension that Cynthia had learned to read the way sailors read weather.
Cynthia looked at the door and found him.
He was standing in the schoolroom doorway in a way that suggested he had only just arrived.
Rose had not looked up.
“Your Grace,” Cynthia said.
“Miss Browne.” He moved his eyes to Rose and then away, and then back, in the way of someone practicing looking at something difficult until it became less so. “I had thought to read to the child this evening. If that is… If the hour is suitable.”
The hour was exactly the hour at which Cynthia had been reading to Rose every evening for the past three weeks. He knew this. He had heard it, from the corridor, more than once.
“Of course,” Cynthia said, as though this were an ordinary thing. “We were just finishing up.”
Rose’s pencil had not moved since he appeared. She was looking at her paper with an intensity that was not about the paper.
Cynthia began to clear the table: She stacked the drawings, image-side down, with the neatness Rose liked, closed the natural history and all the while she talked, filling the air with something manageable.
“I was thinking we might hear the end of the moonlight river story tonight. We left the girl on the far bank last time. She has found what she was looking for, but she has to get back.”
Rose looked at Cynthia. Then she looked, quickly, the brief, assessing dart of someone checking whether a thing is still as alarming as it was fifteen seconds ago, at her uncle in the doorway.
He was still there. He had not retreated. He was standing in the doorway of the schoolroom in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, and he looked, Cynthia thought, rather more like a man about to face a war battle than a man about to read a fairy story.
“The girl on the far bank,” Rose said to Cynthia, as though testing whether the offer was genuine.
“The very same,” Cynthia said. “She has to step back across the stones.” She stood, picked up the book from the shelf, crossed directly to Declan and placed it in his hands.
He looked at her, and she gave him a look that said, very plainly: You are going to be fine. Then she moved to the chair in the corner of the room, sat down, opened the Greek poetry she carried everywhere and did not look at him, because he did not need that right now.
She heard him cross the room to the chair beside the table and after a moment she heard him going through the pages of the book.
He read badly.
There was no other honest way to characterize it.
He read in the voice he used for everything, the voice that was measured, clear and entirely without texture, proceeding through the fairy story with the steady, uninflected pace of a man dispatching a document rather than inhabiting a world.
The moonlight river became a thoroughfare.
The girl might as well have been filing correspondence.
Cynthia kept her eyes on her book. She heard Rose, across the room, shifting in her chair.
He read for perhaps three minutes before she said, from her corner, without looking up:
“The fairy queen has a different voice, I think. Higher. She’s amused by the girl, rather than frightened of her.”
He stopped.
She could feel him looking at her. She turned a page in the Greek poetry, which she was absolutely not reading. “We’ve been doing the voices,” she said, pleasantly. “Rose is excellent at that.”
“I am,” Rose confirmed, from her chair.
There was another silence, but Cynthia waited. She was holding her breath in a way that seemed disproportionate for the question of whether a duke would attempt a fairy queen voice or not.
“The fairy queen,” he said carefully, testing the words as if translating something strange.
“The queen of the moonlight court,” Cynthia said.
“She speaks to the girl at the ford. It is the speech beginning…” She leaned forward in her chair and indicated the page from a distance, which was not actually helpful but conveyed intent.
“There. She says: What do you carry, child, that is heavy enough to bend the light?”
A pause of several seconds.
Then: “What do you carry, child…” His voice climbed. Not quite falsetto, but he had found a higher register and was marching through it with great dignity and absolutely no joy. “That is heavy enough to bend the light?”
From across the room, Rose made a sound.
It was small. But it was almost a sound of amusement, the involuntary compression of something that wanted to be a laugh.
He heard it, and there was a slight shift in his breathing.
Then he continued with the story, keeping the fairy queen’s voice elevated, and at the creature’s next appearance he swung so far the other way that it became something between a rockslide and a very bad mood given sound, and Rose’s compressed almost-laugh escaped as a brief, swallowed, entirely genuine thing.
By the end of the chapter, Rose had migrated from her chair. Not to him, not yet, not quite, but the chair she was sitting in was now the chair beside his chair, and she was leaning slightly forward with her elbows on her knees and her eyes on the page, following the story.
He was reading without looking at her, and she was listening without looking at him. They were in the same small sphere of lamplight, sharing the same page, and neither of them acknowledged that anything in particular was happening because if they did, something particular might stop happening.
Cynthia looked at the Greek poetry and felt something press warmly against the inside of her chest.
He reached the end of the chapter. The girl crossed back over the river, the moonlight held, and she made it home.
Rose breathed out slowly. “That’s the good part.”
He closed the book and looked at the cover of it for a moment, with his hands on either side of the spine. Cynthia watched his face in her peripheral vision, the part of him he had not managed to fully compose in the time it took to close a book. There was something raw there.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
He set the book on the table and stood, because sitting beside a child he had not sat beside in two years was only so much as he could manage in a single evening.
He was already reassembling the surface of himself, the careful, controlled architecture of the Duke of Lavenham going back into position.
He looked at Rose, but Rose kept looking at the book. Her hands were in her lap, and the corner of her mouth was still turned up, slightly, with the remnant of the swallowed laugh.
“Good night,” he said, to the room.
“Good night, Your Grace,” Cynthia said.
Rose did not say anything. But as he turned to leave, she reached out and picked up the book from the table, put it in her lap and held it there with both hands the way she held things she intended to keep close.
He saw it, but left without a word. His footsteps went down the corridor, measured and quiet, and then down the stairs.
Cynthia looked at Rose, who had an expression Cynthia had not seen on her before.
Not happy, exactly. Not the open, unguarded happiness of the fell or the skipping stones.
Something more careful than that. Something that was feeling its way toward something it wasn’t certain of yet, testing the stone before it stepped.
“Same time tomorrow?” Cynthia asked.
Rose considered this with all due seriousness. “He’ll need to practise,” she said.
“He will,” Cynthia agreed.
***
He came back the next evening. And the one after that.
On the third evening, Cynthia moved the chairs.
Not dramatically, just a fractional shift.
She drew Rose’s chair two inches closer to the one she had set for Declan, and moved the lamp so it stood between them rather than behind him.
When he reached the doorway and took in the arrangement, she saw him register it in that brief, calculating way of his, and watched him decide, just as quickly, to say nothing.
By the fifth evening, Rose was sitting close enough that her shoulder was almost touching his arm.
She did not do it intentionally, or at least she did not appear to. She drifted, chapter by chapter, drawn without acknowledging it.
He read better now. Not performing it, not self-conscious about the voices.
He had found, across the several evenings, a gruff competence with the character that Rose endorsed and a fairy queen that remained technically a note too low, but which Rose had decided was acceptable because this particular fairy queen was the businesslike kind who had no patience for theatrical highs.
Cynthia sat in her corner and listened to the sound of the room: his voice, the fire, Rose’s occasional brief commentary, and somewhere in the wall a small, persistent creak that Lavenham Hall produced every evening at around this hour.
Unexpectedly, sometime later, Rose fell asleep.
It happened during the last chapter, gradually and then completely, her head tipping sideways by degrees, her breathing lengthening, her grip on the book she had been holding loosening until it slid off her lap and Cynthia caught it silently.
Declan read on for perhaps a page before he realized, and then he stopped.
He looked at Rose.
She was asleep against his arm. Not against his shoulder; she had not quite reached that, but against his arm, her dark head tilted into the fabric of his coat sleeve, entirely trusting and entirely unaware of what she had done.
He went very still.