Chapter 13
“You are coming with us,” Rose said. She said it not as a question, and not quite as a statement, but as something between the two.
“Yes,” Declan said.
Rose looked at him and went to get her coat.
Cynthia stood in the entrance hall and looked at Declan. He was standing with his hat in his hands, and his expression showed someone who had made a choice and was understanding its weight.
“You don’t have to,” she said at a volume that would not carry up the stairs.
“I am aware of that.”
“Thornwick will…”
“I am aware of that as well.”
She looked at him for a moment. He was coming to the village, not for Rose alone, but as testimony. Let them see him was the thought she had not spoken.
“The blacksmith’s yard sometimes has interesting things,” she said. “Depending on the day.”
“Interesting how.”
“You’ll see,” she said, and went to find her coat, and did not let her face do anything he would be able to read.
They took the path across the heath to the village rather than the road, because the morning was clear and Rose had requested it. Rose’s requests were, by this point in the household’s history, automatically granted by everyone, including the Duke of Lavenham.
The moors received them without ceremony.
Rose walked between them, not because anyone had arranged this, simply because the path suggested it, and no one saw reason to alter it.
She walked with her hands in her coat pockets and her attention distributed across the landscape: the flight of a peewit crossing south, a stone formation at the edge of a rise, the frost in the low ground beside the stream that made the grass stand in individual, stiff attention.
Declan walked on her right with his hands behind him, as he always did when thinking about something other than walking, and he was quiet in the way he was when he was attending to his surroundings without particularly wanting to appear to be doing so.
Cynthia walked on Rose’s left and thought about the conversation with Hartley.
He had not named anyone. He had given her the shape without the substance, the outline without the interior.
She knew it was not enough. But she had not been wrong to go.
A physician with forty years of experience had looked at Edmund Heathe’s final illness and had been privately, silently, unable to account for it based on what he had been told. That was the beginning of something.
She needed Crane’s records.
“There’s a stream,” Rose announced, with significance, a landmark she knew. “The one with the good stones.”
“For skipping?” Cynthia asked.
“We were terrible,” Rose said with satisfied certainty.
“You were two skips. That was not terrible.”
“Uncle,” Rose said, with the directness she used when she wanted information from a specific source, “can you skip stones?”
Declan appeared to consider this question seriously. “I have not attempted it in some years.”
“That means you used to be able to.”
“It means I have not attempted it in some years.”
Rose looked at him, and the corner of his mouth moved.
“We’ll find out at the stream,” she said, with certainty.
They went by the stream on the way. Declan attempted the skipping stones with his usual methodical attention to practical tasks. The stone achieved three skips.
Rose looked at it. “Better than mine,” she said.
“You had two,” he said.
“I know. Three is better than two.”
“It is,” he agreed, in the particular tone he had developed for Rose, simultaneously accurate and not triumphant.
Rose picked up a stone. She threw it with the low, sideways stance she had been refining since October. It hit the water and skipped twice, caught the far bank’s edge on the third contact and flew sideways onto the grass.
“That,” Cynthia said, “is a stone with opinions.”
“It wanted to go a different direction,” Rose said, looking at it with the evaluative focus of a natural philosopher assessing an unexpected result. “You can’t really blame it.”
Declan looked at Rose, then at Cynthia. The expression on his face was that of a man registering something he had not been anticipating. She met his eyes briefly and looked back at the stream.
***
Thornwick received them the way small communities received something unexpected: not dramatically, but with the comprehensive attention of people trained by habit to register anomalies.
She saw it as they came down the high street: the cart driver’s head turning, the woman outside a shop whose conversation stopped mid-sentence, the boy with the bucket of feed who stared with the uncomplicated directness that only children could deploy without social consequence.
Declan was aware of it. She could see the awareness in the slight additional quality of his stillness, the incremental reinforcing of the surface under scrutiny, the straightened spine, the controlled forward focus.
He had been managing the awareness of being watched his entire adult life and he managed it now with the same competence: total composure, not a single concession to the discomfort.
But he was uncomfortable. Genuinely, specifically uncomfortable, not from fear of attention, but from knowing that other people’s perceptions of him were uniformly unflattering.
Let them see him, she thought, and kept walking.
They had reached the haberdashery, and Cynthia had a note from Mrs. Poole about darning wool, when Rose stopped.
She had stopped at the entrance to the blacksmith’s yard.
The yard was separated from the high street by a low stone wall over which a great deal could be observed: the blacksmith at his anvil, an apprentice at the bellows, a water trough, various implements of the trade, and in the corner of the yard beside a pile of clean straw, a dog of indeterminate breed and maternal aspect, around whom there were arranged in the disordered abundance of very recent existence five kittens.
Rose found them in approximately three seconds and pressed her face to the top of the stone wall.
The kittens were very small. Several were striped. One was ginger. They moved with the comprehensive randomness of creatures that had not yet negotiated the question of direction.
Rose was looking at them the way she looked at things she had decided to love.
“May I?” She said to the general vicinity.
The blacksmith’s wife appeared from the adjoining house, alert; she had heard the particular silence that fell when something was being watched from outside.
She came to the wall and looked at Rose.
Her expression performed the recalibration Cynthia had seen everywhere this morning, the adjustment of expectation to accommodate the unexpected presence of a duke on a Thursday.
“She’s welcome to hold one,” the blacksmith’s wife said.
Rose was over the gate with efficient speed. She went straight to the kittens with purpose because she knew exactly what she wanted. The dog raised its head, assessed Rose with the experienced eye of a mother who had seen a great deal, and lowered its head again.
She picked up the ginger one.
She stood in the middle of the blacksmith’s yard with the kitten in her arms, small enough to fit in both her cupped hands, regarding her with the enormous, unfocused gaze of something that had not yet developed a sufficiently clear picture of the world to have opinions about it.
Then she turned to her uncle. This was not the checking glance she had been deploying for weeks. This was something else. She turned to him fully and naturally, with the kitten held out slightly, and she said:
“Uncle, look.”
Cynthia looked at Declan.
He looked at the kitten and then at Rose, and he looked at her with something in his expression that she had not seen before in quite this arrangement.
Then he crossed the yard.
He crouched before Rose in the mud of the blacksmith’s yard in his good coat.
He looked at the kitten at close range with the serious attention of someone conducting an inspection.
Then he reached out and stroked the kitten’s head with two fingers, the light and specific touch of a man being careful with something small.
“A fine specimen,” he said.
Rose giggled, brief and entirely ungoverned, pure and uncomplicated delight at the specific absurdity of her uncle using that phrase about a kitten the size of his fist. He looked up at her, and the corner of his mouth moved, further than it usually moved. Something that was genuinely a smile.
Cynthia stood at the gate and felt something press very warm against the inside of her chest.
The blacksmith’s wife made a very quiet sound while the village watched.
She was aware of the gradual gathering of attention, the way the high street’s peripheral vision oriented toward the blacksmith’s yard.
The woman outside the shop had not resumed her conversation.
The cart driver had found a reason to linger, and Mrs. Fenwick had appeared in the haberdashery doorway.
Declan was crouched in the mud, making a child laugh about a kitten, and Thornwick was watching him do it.
This is who he is, she thought. The man who bandaged a fingernail in a dark corridor, stepped into a moorland ditch, read fairy stories and had been standing outside a child’s bedroom door every bad night for two years, unable to go in, but unable to stay away, as well.
This was who he had always been. The cruelty had been a story told by people who had only seen the armor.
She did not allow herself to think about what Hartley had said, not here, not now. This was the blacksmith’s yard with Rose holding a kitten and a duke in the mud, and this moment deserved to be its own thing, separate from all the rest.
She held onto her resolve and watched Declan stroke a kitten in the mud and felt Rose’s laugh carry across the yard.
***
When it was time to leave, they walked home across the moor.
The path was the same, but the afternoon light was different, lower and more golden, the shadows stretching east in long diagonal lines. Rose walked between them as before, except that she was no longer walking with her hands in her pockets. She had one hand in Cynthia’s and one in Declan’s.
This had happened without announcement, without ceremony. Rose had simply reached up on both sides, and both adults had taken the offered hand without looking at each other.
None of them remarked on it, but all of them felt it.
Cynthia felt the grip of the child who had decided to hold and meant it.
She looked ahead at Lavenham Hall against the horizon. Dark stone, tall windows, the ivy doing what ivy always did. That house is holding its breath, but I am going to help it breathe again.
She looked past Rose at Declan, who was also looking ahead, and when he looked at her, she gave him a small, private smile. He looked at her for a moment, then at the moors, then at his feet.
But the corner of his mouth moved.
Behind them, Thornwick was carrying on with its Thursday in the reorganised way of a community that has received new information about a long-standing assumption and is currently revising its position.
The feared Duke of Lavenham had crouched in a blacksmith’s yard and called a kitten a fine specimen, and his ward had laughed.
Stories in villages traveled quickly, but this one would reach London within the week.
Cynthia was aware of this. She had been aware of it from the moment she understood that Declan was coming to the village.
Lucinda would also hear it, and she would understand that she was losing ground. And a woman who understood she was losing ground was a woman who would move faster.
Then so will I, she thought. She held Rose’s hand more firmly and walked on across the moor.
***
She went to the library after supper.
Declan was already there in his chair, looking at the fire.
She sat in her chair, looked at the fire and was trying to decide whether tonight was the night to tell him what little she had. She did not have enough. She looked at the fire and decided not to say anything yet.
“The village,” he said, still looking at the fire.
“Yes.”
“They were looking.”
“Yes. They were.”
He was quiet for a moment. “What were they seeing, do you think?”
“Something they did not expect,” she said.
“Which was?”
“You. As you are.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“Rose was happy today,” he said.
“She was.”
“The kitten…” The corner of his mouth lifted.
“She is going to ask you for it. She has not asked yet because she is deploying the more effective strategy, which is not asking and allowing time to do the work.”
He looked at her. “Is that what she is doing?”
“It is what I would do.”
He considered this for a while and said, “She can have the kitten,” as though reporting a decision he had made hours ago in a blacksmith’s yard.
Cynthia held the Roman roads in her lap, looked at the fire and let the evening be what it was: warm and quiet and the two of them in their chairs, without putting anything else into it.
It was enough. For tonight, it was more than enough.