Chapter 8
“There is a storage cupboard,” Mrs. Poole said, in the tone she used for announcements that were practical on the surface and carried additional freight beneath, “that wants sorting.”
Cynthia looked up from the breakfast table in the servants’ hall, where she had been making a list of things the schoolroom needed. “The one off the third-floor landing?”
“The same.” Mrs. Poole set down her cup with a decisive click.
“It has not been properly organised since Miss Rosalind’s things were brought.
There are boxes in it that belong in the schoolroom, boxes that belong elsewhere and boxes that I cannot account for at all.
It wants someone with the patience to go through them properly. ”
“I’ll do it this afternoon,” Cynthia said.
Mrs. Poole looked at her for a moment. Not the assessing look she had given her on that first evening, when Cynthia had arrived travel-worn and wind-bitten.
This was a different look, one that had developed across weeks of small observations and revised conclusions.
It was a look that said: You have earned a small extension of trust.
“There is a set of boxes on the left,” she said, “near the back. They were brought with the child’s belongings.
Some of the Duke’s late brother’s correspondence and personal effects that were packed in haste and have not been gone through.
” She stopped. Then, more quietly: “I thought it best to leave them. But they want sorting eventually. The rest of his belongings were placed in the east wing where his bedchambers were before he was married. But the east wing has been sealed after his death, so nobody has ever been there.”
“I’ll be careful with them,” Cynthia said.
Mrs. Poole picked up her cup. “The cupboard key is on the ring by the linen press,” she said, and left.
Cynthia set her quill pen down and thought about Edmund Heathe’s correspondence, packed in haste two years ago, sitting in a cupboard on the third floor of his brother’s house.
The cupboard was, as Mrs. Poole had implied, a situation.
It was a large cupboard, the sort that large old houses accumulated without quite meaning to.
There were trunks of old curtains, rolled and wrapped in canvas.
There was a rocking horse with a broken rocker carrying an expression of startling optimism.
There were boxes of candle-ends and boxes of chipped china and a complete set of weights for a scale that had not itself survived.
And at the back, as Mrs. Poole had said, three wooden boxes stacked with the slight awkwardness of things packed in haste.
Cynthia spent the first hour on the practical work: sorting, stacking, identifying what belonged in the schoolroom and carrying it there in stages. Rose was with Mrs. Poole, they had developed a Tuesday afternoon arrangement involving needlework, which gave Cynthia the afternoon free.
She worked through the first two boxes efficiently: old primers, a collection of maps, and a box of watercolour paints that had dried to optimistic husks. Practical, manageable, the domestic archaeology of a schoolroom that had not been used properly in two years.
The third box was different.
She knew it when she lifted the lid. The contents had not been packed with any of the functional logic of the first two; these were things swept together quickly, by someone who was not thinking about organisation but about removal, about getting these things away from a place where something terrible had happened.
Papers and letters, tied loosely with a ribbon that had once been white.
A small diary with a broken clasp. A folded document she recognized, when she unfolded it, as a baptismal certificate… Rose’s.
She sat down on an old trunk and looked at the letters.
She should put them aside for the duke. They were his brother’s papers, his family’s correspondence.
But she thought about Rose’s nightmare and her words: The bottle.
Don’t give him. She thought about a woman with dry eyes who smelled, to a child who had watched her father die, like the medicine room.
She thought about Mrs. Poole’s face when she said some of the late Lord Heathe’s correspondence, and the particular quality of silence that had followed.
She untied the ribbon.
Most of the letters were exactly what she might have expected: the correspondence of a sociable, good-natured man with a wide acquaintance, pleasant, warm and entirely unremarkable.
Notes from friends in London planning dinners that would never now happen.
Letters about horses, about card games at various clubs, and about a bill in Parliament that Edmund had opinions about.
The voice that came through them was clear and immediately likeable: a man who wrote as he spoke, with ease and warmth that were native rather than performed.
Your brother, she thought, was someone people were glad to hear from.
She read through them with the methodical patience she brought to things that needed to be done carefully, setting aside the mundane in one stack and keeping the ones she wanted to reread in another.
Most went into the mundane stack. But three letters, dated across the last year of Edmund’s life, did not.
The first was to a man named Gerald, she gathered from context a friend of long standing, and it was dated thirteen months before Edmund’s death.
Edmund wrote that he had been unwell these past few months, nothing alarming, but a persistence of it that he found tedious.
He mentioned a physician Lucinda had engaged from London, a Mr. Crane, who was apparently very well regarded in his field and then, in the same sentence, with a breezy tone that was not successful, he added: His treatments are rather vigorous, but Lucinda says one must trust the expert.
The second letter, to the same Gerald, was dated nine months before Edmund’s death. The tone had changed. There was something under the lightness now, a shadow of it:
I confess, Gerald, that I do not feel I am improving as I ought.
Crane insists the treatment takes time, and Lucinda supports him.
She has been very attentive and devoted to the management of my care.
I do not wish to seem ungrateful. But I find myself returning, more and more often, to the weeks before Crane arrived, when I was merely unwell in the ordinary sense, the sort of illness that passes in time.
I am not certain the treatments agree with me.
Lucinda says I am simply impatient, so I shall trust her judgment.
Cynthia read the last sentence twice. He was performing trust. Admitting doubt would have required certainty he didn’t have.
She set that letter in the keep stack.
The third letter was different from the others in kind, not just degree.
It was not to Gerald. It was on a single sheet, dated three weeks before Edmund Heathe’s death, and it was unfinished.
Half a page, then nothing, and the quill pen set down with some force, the last line ending in a slight streak.
It was addressed to Declan.