Chapter Thirteen
“They are saying it in the village now, ma’am. Not only the gentry. The butcher’s girl asked me outright, plain as washing, whether it was true you had the run of his lordship’s, whether you and his lordship were.” Annie went scarlet and could not get the rest of the sentence over the sill.
“I understand the shape of the question, Annie. You need not supply the verb. The verb is the part they enjoy.”
“I told her it was wicked talk and she ought to be ashamed of her mouth. She said her mother had it from the Pelhams’ cook, and the cook had it from a man who had it direct, and there is no arguing with a thing that has a witness sitting at the bottom of it, ma’am. There just isn’t.”
“No. There is not.” Renae set down the linen she had been folding, because her hands had stopped being any use to it.
“A rumour with a source has a spine, Annie, and you cannot reason a thing out of standing once it has learned how to stand. You did well to bring it to me. I would always rather know the weather than be caught out in it dressed for July.”
“The kitchen doesn’t believe a word, ma’am. Mrs. Croft said anyone who’d seen you count a candle-end would know you’d not the time nor the inclination for sin, and that she’d say so to the butcher’s girl’s mother with a ladle if it came to it.”
“Pray tell Mrs. Croft that I am deeply sensible of her kindness, and that she is to leave the ladle on its hook. A defended woman is a woman worth defending, and that is precisely the impression we cannot afford to give. But you may tell her I shall want the good copper kept bright regardless, scandal or none, because a house that lets its copper dull has confessed to despair, and I am not despairing. I am besieged, a wholly different posture, and far kinder to the complexion.” She found the girl a task, because a frightened girl wants a task more than she wants comfort, and sent her down. Then she went up.
She went up to the old nursery, three floors above the talk, because it was the one corner of the house no living voice could reach. She had a sudden and entire need of a corner as such.
The nursery had been closed longer than the north wing.
The dust sheets had gone grey as moths, and beneath them stood the small furniture of a childhood nobody had been happy in.
A low bed, and a rocking horse with a real mane felted to nothing.
The shelf of improving books had its spines sunned blank.
She lifted a sheet and began, from old habit, to count, because counting was the one prayer whose words she still had by heart.
He came up without her hearing. She had folded the sheet back from a child’s writing desk, small enough for a boy of seven and scarred along one edge with initials cut by a knife in an inexperienced hand, when his voice came from the door.
“You have found the only room in the house worth less than the north wing. I had wondered whether you would ever find the leisure for it.”
“I came up for the quiet, my lord, and the quiet appears to be tenanted.” Her eyes stayed on the desk. “Whose initials are these? They were carved by someone very angry and very small.”
“Mine. I was both of those, that year, and had no other way to say so.” He came in, and the coming cost him something she could hear in the evenness of it.
“It is the one room nobody ever came looking for me in. Alaric filled the rest of the house with noise, as warm boys do, and it went everywhere except up three flights to a nursery no one had used since the nurse was pensioned off. So I used it. A boy will take the room nobody else wants, if it is the only room reliably his.”
“And no one came?”
“No one came. That was its whole value to me. I have spent the better part of my life since arranging to be in rooms nobody would think to look in, and I learned the trick of it here, at that desk, with that knife.” He set a hand to the rocking horse and the worn mane stirred.
“It was never a magical room. People speak of nurseries as though they were.”
“No house is magical to the child who is lonely inside it. The wallpaper makes very little difference.” She ran a thumb along the carved initials.
What the room was doing to her she kept from his sight, though it was doing a fair amount.
She had papered a nursery once herself, in another house, and folded its linen the length of a marriage against a child who never came, and a nursery was a nursery in the end, whoever’s particular loneliness had been stored away in it.
“I came up here to be away from a thing, and I have walked straight into the middle of it. Rooms are unkind that way. They keep what you bring them.”
“What thing did you come away from?”
She set the folded sheet down on the small bed. “The talk, my lord. You will have heard it by now. The whole county has, and the village, and the butcher’s girl, who asked my maid this morning whether I was your mistress, in that word, with the cheerful frankness of the young.”
“I will have whoever started it.”
Her voice stayed as level as a ruled line.
“You will have no one. That is my entire point, and I will make it again until it takes. The man who started it sits nine miles off behind a writ, and the one thing that travels faster than his lie is the sight of you trying to outrun it. Stand still, my lord. It is the single thing your rank has never asked of you, and the only thing that can serve me now.”
He went still in the particular way he had, and then he crossed the small distance between the desk and the window where she stood, and stood near enough that she could have learned the width of a hand and been against him.
The whole air of the shut room changed its pressure.
The true thing rose in him, and she caught it rising.
She had learned to read it as a farmer reads weather, before it broke, while it was still only a heaviness in one corner of the sky.
Then she watched him put it down again, and step back into the cool dry shelter of his manner, and ask her in the voice he kept for stewards whether the inventory would be finished by the quarter.
“You need not flee every kind word, my lord. They will not detain you long.”
“I do not flee.”
“No. You dismiss the room and expect your heart to follow you out of it on command.” She turned from the window at last. “I have noticed it does not always obey. It lingers where it has no reason to linger. It carries soup up staircases it might have sent a footman up. You are an extremely disciplined man in every particular but the one that signifies, and that one keeps wandering off without your leave and embarrassing the rest of you in public.”
“And if I let it wander. If I stopped recalling it to its tether?”
She held his look and did not soften it.
“Then you would need to be ready for where it went, my lord, and for what it cost when it arrived. One does not put that question in a nursery at four in the afternoon, with the talk already loud in the lane below him. Ask it somewhere it can be answered without ruining the woman you ask it of. Or do not ask it at all, and we shall both go on blaming the wallpaper.”
“You are a dangerous woman to be honest in front of.”
“I am the safest woman in England to be honest in front of, my lord, which is precisely why it frightens you. There is no one for me to tell, and nothing for me to gain by the telling, and a man who has spent his life guarding his accounts has no notion what to do with a creditor who refuses to collect.”
The corner of his mouth eased, and was put away again. “You make a poor case for your own safety, Mrs. Trelawney. The dangerous women are precisely the ones who insist they are nothing of the kind.”
“Then you have nothing whatever to fear from me, my lord, for I have just insisted at length, and the genuinely dangerous never trouble themselves to. Now help me get this sheet back over the desk before the dust persuades itself we have asked it to stay, and we will both agree the last quarter hour was about the inventory and nothing besides.”
He helped her with the sheet. Neither of them spoke of the wallpaper again, and that was its own small mercy, in a room that had heard a good deal more truth than one grey afternoon was built to hold.
***
The talk did not stay talk. By the end of the week it had teeth.
Women she had nodded to in the lane found the far hedgerow suddenly fascinating.
The draper who had called her madam for a month called her missus now, with a hook in the smile, and weighed her ribbon short and dared her to remark on it.
A ruined name cannot earn wages any more than it can attend a ball, and she reckoned the figures alone at night and did not care for the total they kept returning.
“I want Fenwick be charged with the business of it,” Declan said grimly, when she could no longer keep it out of the household accounts and he had read the meaning in the grocer’s padded bill.
“And I want the man carrying it traced and made to wish he had carried water instead. There are laws against this kind of thing.”
“There are laws against any number of things that happen daily, my lord, and the law is the slowest and loudest way of announcing that a thing is worth denying.”
“So I am to remain idle?”
“You are to do the single hardest thing there is, which is to look as though nothing whatever is being done. A rumour cannot be threatened into silence. You can only confirm, to every soul watching you spend lawyers on it, that there is something here worth the spending. No man hires Fenwick to defend a woman who is nothing to him.” She kept her voice low.
“Let it starve. It has no food but our recoiling, and I intend to serve it none. At looking unbothered I have a clear advantage over you. I have had the practice. You have had a title to spare you the need of it.”
“It is intolerable to watch.”