Chapter 7 #2
Cynthia watched him from her corner and thought: there it is.
This was the thing she had been working toward, patiently and without map, for six weeks: not a grand gesture, not a formal reconciliation, not anything that required language or acknowledgment.
Just a child asleep against her uncle’s arm, and a man looking at her with a face that had, for the space of several seconds, entirely forgotten to be guarded.
His hands were shaking. Just slightly. Just enough.
He looked up at Cynthia. She had never seen his face quite like this: stripped to something that was not grief and not guilt but was what lived underneath both of them, in the place they had been covering, something unbearably tender and completely unmanageable.
She smiled at him.
He looked at her for a moment that lasted longer than a moment. Then he looked back at Rose.
He did not move her. He sat with his arm very still, his hands in his lap, and his niece asleep against his sleeve.
He did not move until Cynthia rose quietly, lifted Rose from the chair without waking her, carried her the three steps to the bed and tucked her in with practiced ease, having done this for weeks.
He stood and straightened his coat and realized that the shaking in his hands had stopped.
“Good night, Miss Browne,” he said, in a nearly ordinary voice.
“Good night, Your Grace,” she said, in a voice that matched it.
He left. She heard him pause at the top of the stairs, just briefly, barely a pause at all, and then his footsteps went down and away, and the house was quiet.
***
It was three weeks into the evening readings when Cynthia could not sleep.
This was not unusual. She had been a poor sleeper since her uncle died.
She lay in the dark for an hour and felt the walls of her small room in a way she did not normally feel them: present, close.
She thought about the evening’s reading.
She thought about Rose’s drawing that afternoon, which had been different from the usual dark-storm-empty-house catalogue: three figures walking across what was unmistakably the moor, all three facing the same direction; one large, one medium, one small.
She got up.
The kitchen at midnight was the warmest room in Lavenham Hall.
She had discovered this some weeks ago, on a previous sleepless night.
The kitchen had everything a kitchen should have, and at midnight, it had additionally the particular quality of rooms that are meant to be occupied but briefly aren’t: the lingering evidence of industry, the smell of the day’s bread, the dull orange warmth of the banked fire.
She stood at the hearth and thought: I could bake.
Her uncle had taught her. He had been an unexpectedly good baker of the simple kind, the kind that produced reliable and unpretentious results from a small repertoire.
He had taught Cynthia because there was no particular reason to exclude this.
Butter biscuits: flour, butter, sugar and rosewater, a temperature and time, nothing more complicated than an argument with yourself about whether they need another minute.
She could leave them for the staff. There were six people in this kitchen every morning, and biscuits left on a plate were biscuits that would be eaten with no further significance required.
She built the fire up from the embers. She found a bowl, and she began.
The kitchen was warm and quiet, and she worked without thinking very much, her hands knowing the recipe.
She talked to herself very quietly as she worked, about the weather, whether Rose might like to attempt botanical watercolours and the fact that the natural history needed supplementing with a better text.
The biscuits went in. The kitchen filled with the smell of them, warm, sweet and golden, the particular domestic alchemy of butter, sugar and heat producing something that smelled, always, like the safest possible version of indoors. She leaned against the kitchen wall and let it wash over her.
She ate one when they came out, because it was midnight and she had earned it. Then she counted them. Two dozen, which was more than the kitchen staff required for tea and also more than she had intended to make.
She put them on a plate, covered them with a cloth and stood thinking about where to leave it.
She thought about the hall table. The small one, outside the study door, between the study and the library passage. The one where she had left the handkerchief, weeks ago, and where the necklace box had appeared the next morning.
She set the plate on the table and went to bed.
She left no note. She had, she thought, learned something about this household’s language. You did not annotate the gestures. You simply made them and trusted the other person to read them, and in this household that trust had not yet been misplaced.
***
He found it at seven in the morning.
He had not slept well himself; last night had been additionally occupied by the memory of a small dark head against his sleeve, his own hands shaking, and the image of Cynthia’s face when she smiled at him across the room. He came out of his study at seven, saw the plate and stopped.
He looked at it. It was a plain plate, white, covered with a white cloth, sitting on the hall table where correspondence was left. He lifted the cloth.
Butter biscuits. Golden-brown, slightly uneven, one or two with rather more color at the edges than strictly intended, the sort of biscuit that had been made by hand, in a domestic kitchen, by someone who knew the recipe from memory. No note.
He stood at the hall table for a longer time than was warranted.
He did not eat sweets. This was not a philosophical position; it was simply a fact about himself. He had stopped eating sweets at some point in his twenties and had not missed them.
He picked up a biscuit and ate it.
He stood at the hall table and was still for a moment, before picking up a second biscuit.
The taste of it was simple. It was warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
It tasted like someone had made it in the middle of the night in his kitchen because they could not sleep, and had left it here without explanation or expectation, and that was the whole and complete nature of the transaction.
He ate four more over the course of the morning. By noon the plate was empty. He stood at the hall table and looked at the empty plate and thought with perfect clarity: I have eaten six butter biscuits, and I am furious with myself.
He was not, on reflection, very furious.
The biscuits did not reappear for three days. This was not a thing he was monitoring. He was simply in the vicinity of the hall table each morning, and the table had a plate on it, or it did not, and for three mornings running it did not.
On the third morning he found himself at the table at six-thirty, which was earlier than he normally passed it, but the table was empty, and the corridor was cold. He was disappointed as he made his way to the study but tried not to think of the empty table.
That evening she was in the library. She was usually in the library at this hour, after Rose was asleep, before eleven; the time she spent there had become part of the household’s quiet clockwork.
He had taken to going to bed earlier to avoid the awareness of it, which had not worked, and then to working later in his study, which had also failed.
Without realizing it, he found himself standing outside the library door.
He was not going to say anything about the biscuits. He was a duke, he was thirty years old, and the notion of going into the library to say something about biscuits was not something he was going to do. He had letters to find. There was a book he needed, something on estate drainage.
He opened the door.
She looked up from her chair. She had a book in her lap, and she had her hair down; she always did, this late, and the lamplight was doing something to it that he did not look at.
“Your Grace,” she said.
“Miss Browne.” He looked at the bookshelves. He crossed to the third shelf from the left and stood before it with his hands behind his back. Drainage. He was looking for drainage. “The items you left on the table. Several days ago.”
A pause. He was looking at the bookshelves.
“Items, Your Grace?”
“The…” He looked at the bookshelves. “Biscuits,” he said. “They were not objectionable.”
The pause that followed was so long that it meant she was working very hard at something. He did not look at her.
“I am glad they were acceptable, Your Grace.”
He examined the next shelf. “If you were to…If the kitchen were available and you found yourself…”
He could not finish the sentence. He was asking a governess for biscuits. He was standing in his own library, asking a governess for biscuits in a sentence he could not complete because completing it would require him to acknowledge that he had noticed the absence of them.
He heard, from the chair, very quietly, “I often have trouble sleeping. I may find myself in the kitchen again.”
He nodded while he kept looking at the bookshelves. He found a volume on estate drainage and extracted it as though he had come to the library for precisely this purpose.
“Ah,” he said. “Well. Good evening, Miss Browne.”
“Good evening, Your Grace.”
He went to his study and sat at his desk with the drainage volume open in front of him and read it for the better part of an hour, but he could not seem to focus.
***
The biscuits appeared twice a week from that point forward. He did not discuss this with anyone. Mrs. Poole restocked the kitchen’s butter and sugar with a frequency that was not coincidental but which she had the good sense not to remark upon.
The plate was always empty by noon.
But the hall table, which had always been a piece of furniture in a corridor, had become, without either of them naming it, something else entirely.