Chapter Two
“You have not eaten since breakfast, Your Grace.”
Mrs Fenn set the dinner tray on the corner of the desk with the quiet precision of over thirty years’ service, nudging a stack of drawings half an inch aside to make room, as though the drawings were the imposition and the dinner a settled matter.
“I am aware of it.” Gideon did not lift his eyes from the report under his hand.
“I merely mention it.”
“You always merely mention it.”
“And you always let it go cold, and one of us is obliged to be consistent in this house.” She had no apparent expectation of an answer, which was as well, for he gave her none.
She had been at Aldenmere many years, had run his father’s household, and had outlasted three dukes, two estate agents, and one memorable kitchen fire, not one of which had ever taught her to quit a room without the last word in it.
“Phelps tells me you mean to bring children into the house.”
“Phelps talks a great deal for a man so careful of his own breath.”
“He does, when a thing wants saying, and the master will not say it.” She straightened the cloth on the tray. “Three of them, I am told. Girls.”
“My brother’s daughters. You will have the rooms in the east wing opened and aired, and the nursery floor put right. I will give you the particulars in the morning.”
“I shall want a week’s notice before they come, not a morning’s.
” A pause at the door, shorter than her custom.
“And I shall want to know whether they are coming to a house or to a duke, Your Grace, for they are not at all the same thing to a child, and you have rather more practice at being the second.”
“Then it is as well they will have you to teach me the difference.”
“Flattery, and on an empty stomach besides. You must be in earnest about these children after all.” She went before he could answer, and the latch settled behind her almost without a sound.
The study took the lamplight and gave very little of it back; his own drawings hung on every wall, elevations, floor plans and sectional views in his own hand, some gone yellow at the edges and some still sharp with new ink.
He had been home three hours from London and had already written to Vane from the road, the message as spare as everything else he sent the man.
The situation is worse than Phelps reported. Proceed with what we discussed.
He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. The afternoon would not leave him, and he had given up trying to make it go away.
He remembered then his visit to his brother’s children. Mrs Norwood had received him in a cold front parlour with a fire too small for the grate and a warmth of manner that did not reach past her teeth.
“Your Grace honours us. You will forgive the quiet of the house. We keep very much to ourselves here, the girls and I, and they are not at all used to visitors.”
“I have come to see my brother’s daughters, Mrs Norwood, and not your front parlour. Will you take me up to them?”
“They are at their lessons just at present. Rosalind is most particular about her lessons, and Tabitha frets so at any disturbance to the hour. I am sure Your Grace would not wish to unsettle the poor things on his account.”
“I am sure I would not, but take me up regardless.”
She had taken him up, in the end, being unable to refuse a duke the sight of his own wards under his own brother’s name, but she had taken him the long way and talked the whole of the climb, and contrived that he should be shown almost nothing at all.
A door stood ajar on the attic floor. Through it, he saw the eldest at a desk, sitting far too straight for twelve, a book held rigid before her, and when she looked up, her eyes met his for the length of a breath before Mrs Norwood drew the door gently with a bright word about not disturbing the child’s reading.
From behind another door came a small sound, a cup or a dish going over, and a gasp swallowed almost before it was made.
“Tabitha is clumsy when she is startled,” Mrs Norwood said. “It is of no consequence. She will be spoken to about it.”
He marked the word, and the relish she gave it, but said nothing.
The youngest he found in a cold upstairs parlour, lining carved wooden animals along the sill and talking to them under her breath.
She looked up at him with the whole of her small face, open and unguarded, and drew breath to say something.
Mrs Norwood spoke the child’s name once, flat and quiet, and the small mouth closed on whatever it had held; her small shoulders crept by degrees toward her ears, and she turned back to her animals in a silence that told him a great deal more than the front parlour had been arranged to tell him.
“I should like a quarter of an hour with them,” he said. “Alone, if you will permit it. They do not know me, and a man they do not know is only one more thing in this house for them to be afraid of.”
“I think not, Your Grace. Not today. They are tired, and strangers upset them. I will not have them fretful at their bedtime for the sake of a visit that might as easily wait for another.” She had already begun to steer him toward the stairs.
“You may write to them if it would ease you. I shall see that anything suitable is read out to them.”
“Read out, and suitable, and the whole of it decided upon by you.”
“I am their grandmother, Your Grace. Who else should decide it?”
He had not been permitted a single word with any of the three. That, in the end, was the thing that decided him. A man might argue with a cold room and an ungenerous fire. He could not argue with three children taught to go quiet at the sound of their own names.
“You keep them very close, Mrs Norwood.”
“I keep them safe, Your Grace, which is a grandmother’s whole office once the mother is in the ground. They are settled. They know their hours and their rules. Children are happier, in my experience, when they know exactly where they stand.”
“They are kept in attic rooms with the fires unlit, and the smallest of them falls silent when you say her name. If that is your settled, I find I do not care for the word.”
“You will forgive my plainness.” The warmth had gone a shade brittle.
“A gentleman situated as you are, alone in a great house, and, if I may say it, marked as you are, is not at all what a court has in its mind when it speaks of a suitable home. People will talk. For the girls’ sake, one is obliged to think of such things. ”
“People have been talking for over twenty years. I have survived the whole of it.” He held her eye until she found somewhere else to put her own. “I will have my brother’s daughters out of this attic, Mrs Norwood, even if I must carry them down the stairs one at a time myself.”
“You will find it is not so simply done.” She smiled the entire way through it, which was worse by some distance than if she had not.
“I have my own counsel, and the law is a slow business, and a very great deal may be said of a man in three months that he will not unsay in three years. Wanting a thing, Your Grace, and being judged fit to keep it, are two matters entirely separate.”
“Then we have agreed at least that it is a contest.” He had taken up his hat.
“I will tell you without any heat, Mrs Norwood, that I have lost a great deal in my life and learned the trick of minding very little of it. I do not intend that three children should be added to the account, and I have never in my life wanted a thing as quietly or as completely as I want them out of this attic.”
He had come away from that house with the cold clarity he brought to anything that could be solved instead of merely borne.
Arthur would have wanted it. That was the short of the matter, beneath all the rest. Of the whole family, his brother alone had looked at him after the fire with none of what the others carried, not the horror, not the pity, not the careful distaste that hardens into never quite meeting a man’s eye.
“It signifies very little, does it not?” Arthur had said, being but eleven years old and entirely persuaded of it.
Gideon, who had only that week been informed by their father that no one would ever again regard him without shrinking, answered with a confidence he did not possess.
Yet his brother’s unaffected certainty remained with him for years afterwards, lending him a measure of steadiness he could scarcely have found elsewhere.
Arthur was in the ground now, his wife beside him, and his three daughters were stacked in a Mayfair attic, kept by a woman who could quiet a child of four simply by walking into the room.
He had put the rest to himself as a problem with a solution, because a solution was a thing his hands could close around.
Find me a wife, he had written to Vane that morning, before the sensible part of him could object.
Someone practical. Not a girl wanting her season, not a creature who would need managing, but a woman who would take the house and the children in hand and ask him to be no other man than the one he was.
He had added, since it was only just, that he would require no pretence of her in return, this being no arrangement of that kind.
His father’s voice had arrived on its usual cue. No one will ever look at you without flinching. He had set it down again with the ease of long practice, though it always cost him something to do it.
He ate because Mrs Fenn had carried the tray up the stairs and he was not, in the main, an unreasonable man, tasting none of it, his eye travelling the drawings he had made and remade for six months together.
The east wing. The children’s rooms. The garden front with a conservatory pencilled along the south wall, drawn long before he had any right to expect it built, in the hours when sleep would not come and there was nothing for it but to draw.
He had never once pencilled the conservatory with any particular person in mind, and he saw no occasion to begin tonight.
Vane’s letter had been waiting on the blotter, forwarded up from town, read through once and now read again.
I may have found someone, which meant Vane had begun looking before having received his letter.
They had discussed it once, and he had started looking, on the strength of nothing but a single visit and his own long habit of being right about Gideon before Gideon was right about himself.
He set the letter down, and kept himself, that evening, from the word that had been waiting at the edge of the whole business, the small unfamiliar shape of it sitting awkwardly in his chest where there had been nothing for it to sit beside in a very long time.
The fire burned down to its last embers, and he let it go out.
He sat in the dark a good while, which was an ordinary enough thing for him, and which had never, until tonight, had the particular quality of waiting in it.