Chapter Nine #2
He drew the sheet down himself. The dust came with it in a soft fall and he let it come.
There was a portrait on the stairs that he passed every day and had long since stopped seeing, and this was not that one.
This was older, and larger, and she was young in it, younger than he had ever managed to imagine her, painted before the house had finished its work on her, and the painter had caught something about the mouth that the stairs portrait had either lost or never held.
His hand went to the frame to steady it. Hers was already there, at the same corner, and neither of them drew back. The moment ran a breath past the point where it could still be called an accident.
“She would have liked you,” he said, and surprised himself in the saying of it.
“You cannot know that. We never met.”
“She liked people who said true things to my brother’s face. There were never enough of them. You would have been an oasis.”
She turned the question back at him without releasing the frame. “And did you say true things to his face, my lord?”
“No. I was the second son.” He let his attention rest on the painted young woman who had not lived to see what the house would make of either of her boys. “I said true things to ponds, where they could do no damage.”
“That is a great waste of true things.”
“It is the second son’s economy. You learn early which of your true things the house can afford, and you say only those, and the rest you carry down to the water.
” He paused over it. “I have perhaps four memories of her, and I am no longer certain two of them are not borrowed from the portrait on the stairs. A scent. A green sleeve. Her hand at the back of my neck the once, in church, when I would not sit still. That is the whole estate she left me, and I have spent it carefully, and I am nearly through it.”
“That is not nothing.”
“It is very nearly nothing. Four coins and a face I must take on the word of a painter who was paid to flatter the sitter.”
Her hand was still at the frame’s corner, near his. “Four coins more than a great many people are ever left, and you have not lost the one of them in thirty years, which tells me precisely what they were worth to the boy who kept them.”
His attention came off the portrait and onto her. “You are very certain, for a woman who never met either of us.”
“I am certain of the boy. The man I am still counting.” She looked from the portrait to him and back.
“But the boy who wound a clock no one asked him to wind, and kept his brother’s horse, and carried his true things down to the water so they would trouble nobody, that boy I have entire.
He is not a difficult sum, my lord. He is only one that no one before me has troubled to do, because the doing of it asked for someone to sit in the cold with the books and genuinely want the answer, and this house has been very short of both for a very long time. ”
She laughed then, not a large laugh, and she tried to keep the most of it behind her hand. He watched her do it, the dust still pale in her honey blonde tresses and the laugh she did not quite trust herself to spend, and he understood he was in trouble past any sum he could foot.
“You may enter her in the catalogue,” he said, once his voice was reliably his own. “Under things the family abandoned and ought not to have.”
“I shall do no such thing. She is uncovered now, and uncovering is the very opposite of abandoning, and I shall send Annie up to dust her and the chair beneath the window, and the room may give over pretending to be empty.” Renae folded her sheet across her arm.
“Houses do better when someone consents to look at them. I have said it to you before, and I begin to bore even myself with the saying of it.”
“You do not bore me.” He let it out before he had cleared it for release.
“That is also a true thing, and I find I have lately run quite out of ponds, and a man without ponds is obliged to say his true things to whoever is standing nearest, which I am beginning to suspect was the whole design of the arrangement.”
He had carried the letter in his coat since breakfast, meaning to read it alone as he read everything that mattered.
He took it out instead in the half-cleared room with the dust still hanging in the light, and he read it aloud to her, because she had become, without his ever having decided it, the person he thought aloud in front of.
“Renton will extend the loan against the spring rents.” He went down the page. “On conditions. He should wish, and I give you the man’s own phrasing, proof of a settled heir before he commits another shilling to a house whose future he confesses he cannot read.”
“He requires proof you are settled.”
“I am extremely settled. I have not stirred from this county in months. This very afternoon I reopened a wing. A more settled man has never lifted a dust sheet in the history of the practice.”
Her hands went on with the work. “He means a wife, my lord.”
“Yes.” He folded the letter along its old crease. “I gathered, somewhere about the second reading, that the letter and I were not using the word in the same spirit.”
“What will you tell him?”
“The truth that the rents will cover him by spring and his nerves are entirely his own affair. Men like Renton do not lend against land. They lend against the comfortable feeling that some responsible person is awake at night on the far side of the books. I shall give him the feeling and keep the wife to myself, which is an arrangement that has served this family three generations and may as well serve it once more.”
She set her work down and faced him. “And are you? Awake at night.”
“Lately. Though not, as it happens, over Renton.” He let that stand a moment, then moved off it. “He will not be content with the truth. Creditors never are. They want a wife because a wife is a hostage the bank is able to see, a sign that a man means to stay and be ruinable in one fixed place.”
“I had such a fixed place once.” She straightened a sheet over the desk. “The bank was very pleased with it.”
“You have a bleak view of the institution, Mrs. Trelawney.”
“I have an accurate view of the institution as the world chiefly keeps it. Most bargains of that kind are struck by frightened people, and a frightened bargain is a poor one before the ink has dried.”
He set the lead pencil against the catalogue and did not write. “Yours was a bad one. They are not all bad ones, whatever a widow’s hard-won evidence may tell her, and I say so as a man who has lately spent no small labour gathering evidence to the contrary.”
“No. Only most, and only for that reason.” He had not meant to ask the next thing, and he heard himself ask it. “And which would yours be, if you struck one now?”
She was a moment in answering, and the moment was not an empty one.
“I am in no position to strike one, my lord, frightened or otherwise. A housekeeper does not bargain. She is the thing bargained over, on the rare day she is anything in the matter at all. You are asking the wrong woman what sort of bargain she would make. Ask the people who have made them on her behalf since she was nineteen and her father’s debts fell due.
” She set the sheet straight. “Write to Renton tonight, and tell him only the truth, since it is the cheaper article and he will trust it the less for that. The light has nearly gone, and I have a sampler to mourn and a clock to send out for mending.”
He put the letter back inside his coat, against his chest, where it sat with no more weight than a page of any other man’s accounts and a good deal more than that besides. The word was in the room now, settling over everything like the dust, without troubling to ask his leave. Wife.
He had been walking around the word for a month, as one skirts a known hole in a familiar floor, aware to the inch of where it lay and declining, on principle, to look down into it.
He looked down into it now. Renae had gone back to the chair beneath the window and was easing its wormed leg with the flat of her hand, talking to Annie’s absent dust cloth about what the room would want come morning.
She had not heard the word land, because to her it had been a creditor’s word and nothing further.
He stood in the grey settling light and let himself want the thing he had spent the month refusing, for the whole length of one unguarded breath.
Then he folded that away as well, and put it where the letter was.