Prologue
The two gentlemen had been the better part of an hour at the table under the trellis, and the paper between them was signed and sanded and signed again, and Cordelia Marchmont, who was ten years old and had been made to wear her good stockings for the occasion, considered the whole proceeding the dullest thing that had ever been done to her on a fine afternoon.
“I do not see why I am wanted,” she said, “if no one will tell me what is in it.”
“You are wanted,” said her father, without looking up from the blotting of his own name, “because it concerns you, and a person ought to be present at the things that concern her, even when she is too young to be told the half of them. Stand up straight. You are slouching at the Duke.”
“I am not slouching at the Duke. I am slouching at the table. The Duke happens to be behind it.”
The old Duke of Ravensmere, who was a wide kind man with a laugh that came up out of him like weather, put his hand over his mouth. His shoulders gave one treacherous shake.
“She has your tongue, John,” he said, when he had command of himself.
“She has her mother’s, which is worse, and she has had the loan of mine on top of it, which is past all bearing. Cordelia. Come round the table.”
She came round the table. The boy came round the other side of it at the same moment, pushed by a look from his own father, and the two children fetched up facing one another in the heat with the roses going over behind them and a bee working the trellis and both fathers watching with the particular gravity of men who have arranged a thing they are very pleased about and do not mean to show how pleased.
The boy was twelve and had grown, that spring, faster than his coat had been able to keep up with, so that a quantity of wrist showed at each cuff, and he held himself as though he had been told a great many times that morning to hold himself well and had not yet found anything to do with his hands.
He looked at Cordelia. Cordelia looked at him.
She had known him four days, which was long enough to have formed several opinions, and she was on the point of forming another when he produced, from the pocket of the disgraceful coat, a small twist of paper, and unwrapped it with the care of a person handling gunpowder, and there was a ring in it.
“It is for you,” he said. “You are to have it. They have settled it between them, so there is no use either of us arguing, I have already tried.”
“What is it for?”
“It is for later.” He frowned, as though later were a country he had heard described and did not much fancy the journey to. “When we are grown. They have written it down so that nobody forgets. You are to keep it until then.”
Cordelia looked at the ring. It was a small, plain thing: a single seed-pearl in an old, worn setting, with no glitter to it anywhere, and nothing of the grandeur she would have chosen for herself had anyone been so unwise as to consult her.
She looked at it a moment longer and found, to her great surprise, that she liked it the better for its plainness, though she could not at once have said why.
“Why this one,” she said. “Your grandmother’s box must have a hundred in it, and they will all of them be finer than this.”
The boy went a slow and painful red from his disgraceful collar upward.
“Because the fine ones did not look like you,” he said, all in a rush, as though the sentence had got away from him before he could stop it, “and that one did, and now I wish I had not said so, and you are not to repeat it to anyone as long as you live.”
It was, Cordelia decided on the instant, the most interesting thing anyone had ever said to her, and she resolved to think about it a great deal later, in private, where she could take it apart and see how it worked.
For the present, she held out her hand, because it seemed to be expected, and he took it, and his own hand was damp-warm and not quite steady, and he pushed the ring onto her finger, where it was at once too large and went round and round and threatened to come off altogether.
“It does not fit,” she pointed out.
“It will fit when you are grown. That is rather the point.” He turned the ring on her finger until the pearl sat uppermost, and held it there with his thumb so it should not fall.
The holding of it brought their two heads close together over her hand, and his ears, she observed with interest, had gone as red as the rest of him.
“There. Now it is done. You are not to lose it.”
“I do not lose things.”
“You will lose this if it falls off in the grass, and then where shall we be?” He looked at her with sudden twelve-year-old severity.
“I had to scratch the year inside it with my own penknife, so that we should both remember which August it was, and I made a very poor job of the four, and I am not doing it twice. So you are to keep it safe, and not climb anything while wearing it.”
“I shall climb whatever I please while wearing it.”
“You shall not.”
“I shall, and you cannot stop me. It will be on my hand, not yours, and a thing on a person’s own hand is that person’s own business.” She considered him. “Is that what the paper says? That I am to be looked after?”
The boy hesitated and glanced towards the two fathers, who had drawn a little apart and were pretending to admire a rosebush, and deceiving nobody. Then he looked back at her and told her the truth, because under the disgraceful coat and the red ears, he was a truthful boy.
“More or less,” he said. “That is the gist of it. I am to look after you when we are grown, and you are to…well. They did not say exactly what you are to do. I think you are only to let me.”
“Then they have made a poor bargain on your side,” said Cordelia, “for I do not need looking after, and never have, and I am not going to begin merely because it has been written down and sanded. You may tell them I said so.”
“I am not going to tell them anything of the kind. They are very pleased with themselves, and it would be a pity to spoil it.” But he was smiling now, the redness leaving him by degrees; a real smile, the kind that comes to a boy when he has stopped minding a thing and begun, in spite of himself, to be glad of it.
Cordelia, who missed very little, did not miss it.
“You may look after me if it makes you happy,” she allowed, with the enormous condescension of which only the very young are capable.
“I shall not stop you. I only say that you will find there is very little of it to do, and then you will be left standing about with nothing to look after, like a shepherd whose sheep have all wandered off, and it will serve you right for agreeing to such a foolish arrangement in the first place.”
“I shall risk it,” said the boy.
And her hand, which had been pulling restlessly against his the whole while, eager to be off to the orchard and the trees and the long bright afternoon that was being so shamefully wasted on paper and sealing wax, went suddenly still in his.
It remained there, for no reason she could afterwards have named, for the length of three slow circuits of a bee about the trellis.
She let it be still.
He held it, and did not say anything more, having for once in his twelve years the sense to leave a thing alone.
The roses nodded behind them. One of the fathers said something low to the other that neither child caught.
The afternoon lay wide and gold and unhurried about them, as though it meant to remain that exact afternoon forever, and had no notion of the years that were coming, or of the single cut cord along which all of it would one day be carried away into darkness.
The old Duke came back to the table and rubbed his hands together.
“That is the most important quarter of an hour’s work this family has done in twenty years, and the two principals in it are about to expire of boredom, which is exactly as it should be.
Go on, the pair of you. Off with you. There is an orchard beyond the south wall with a tree that wants climbing, and I give you both my leave to ruin every stitch you have on. ”
They did not need telling twice.
The boy let go of her hand, and she snatched up her skirts without a thought for her good stockings. Together they flew down the gravel towards the green door in the south wall, the girl in front and the boy a stride behind and gaining.
And the ring on the chain that was not yet a chain, the ring on her too-small finger, held fast beneath the curl of her own fingers the whole way so that it should not, after everything, be lost in the grass.