Chapter Six
“Are you the lady who lives here now?”
The question came from somewhere about the height of Cecilia’s knee, put to her without the smallest notion that directness was reckoned impolite in company.
Cecilia looked down at a child of four who looked four the way very confident people sometimes look their age, entirely and without apology, dark curls escaping a bonnet that had not survived the road, a smudge on one cheek that might have been mud or might have been yesterday’s dinner.
“I am,” Cecilia said. “And are you Louisa?”
“Lulu. Rosie calls me Louisa when she is cross. Are you cross with me?”
“I have only just met you. I prefer to be properly acquainted with a person before I go to the trouble of being cross with them.”
“That is sensible,” Louisa allowed, and turned back to the fountain as though Cecilia had passed an examination she had not known she was sitting.
They had come at half past two. Cecilia had placed herself on the steps, near enough to the house to seem settled and far enough from the door to seem welcoming.
Mrs Fenn was at her shoulder and Gideon a little apart, very still, braced for a thing he was working not to show.
He was more afraid of this than he had let her see.
Mr Phelps came down first, neat and a little windblown, and gave Gideon a nod that said the journey had been uneventful and the children were intact. Then the door opened, and they came.
Rosalind, first, twelve years old, the twelve plain in the careful set of her shoulders. She looked the house over and then looked at her uncle with a girl’s unsentimental thoroughness.
“Good afternoon, Your Grace.”
“Good afternoon, Rosalind.” His voice was careful. He was trying very hard to be less alarming than he looked, and managing it only in part.
Tabitha came next, close behind her sister’s shoulder, eight and slight and watchful, the quiet in her closer to vigilance than to shyness.
“How do you do?” she said when Cecilia greeted her and stayed precisely where she stood.
And Louisa erupted, bolting past her sisters, Mr Phelps and every hope of an orderly arrival, straight for the fountain.
“Louisa, do come away from the water,” said Rosalind, in a tone she had plainly been using, in just that key, for four years.
“It has fish,” Louisa reported, pressing her face to the basin.
Then she straightened, turned, and saw her uncle.
She looked at the left side of his face, where the scar showed above the collar, the pale, irregular skin along the jaw.
She looked at it openly, with the whole of her attention and no grown instinct yet to prompt her away from what stopped the eye, for a long, quiet, entire moment.
“Does it hurt?”
The forecourt went still. Mr Phelps held motionless at Cecilia’s right; Rosalind drew a sharp, anxious breath, and Tabitha’s hand tightened in her sister’s.
Gideon looked down at the child, and something in his face went very quiet. “Not anymore.”
Louisa weighed it. “Good, then. It must have hurt a very great deal, before.” And with no ceremony and the absolute conviction of a person who had assessed a situation and reached her verdict, she crossed the forecourt, reached up, and took two of his fingers in her hand.
He looked down at the small hand wrapped around his, at the contrast of her untroubled grip and his careful stillness, like a man handed a thing he had no notion how to set down. He kept hold of it.
Cecilia came down the steps before her chest could finish doing whatever it had embarked upon.
The first hour was organised chaos, which suited her far better than the stiff formal reception the day might otherwise have asked for. She knelt in the corridor to meet Tabitha at her own height.
“Your room looks out on the garden. You can see the beeches from the window. Do you care for trees?”
Tabitha studied her, weighing whether the question was the front door to something she would rather not face. “Yes, I do,” she said at last, cautiously.
“Good. So do I. We shall get along on that point at the least, and the rest we may negotiate as we go.”
She was directing a maid over Louisa’s trunk, which held three left shoes, a wooden horse, and a great quantity of gravel, when Rosalind spoke from the doorway of the room that was to be hers.
“You are not our mother.”
Cecilia straightened. The girl stood with her arms at her sides and her chin at the exact angle of a person resolved to say a hard thing cleanly rather than sidelong, but her face was not unkind.
It was the look of a child who had decided she would not be caught hoping for a thing that failed to come.
“No, I am not,” Cecilia said, and held her eyes. “I shall not pretend to be, and you would see through it within the day if I tried. But I am here, which is a different thing, and a steadier one, and I have no present intention of being anywhere else.”
“People intend a great many things.”
“They do. You will have to watch me instead of believing me, then, which is the only sensible way to credit anybody, and I expect you are very good at watching.”
Rosalind said nothing. She looked at Cecilia a long moment with the sharp, measuring eyes that were her particular gift, and then turned and went into her room, but the door did not quite close.
Cecilia understood that a door left ajar where a closed one was expected was a kind of message, and that to remark upon it would be a grave error.
Gideon found her in the corridor when the worst of the unpacking was done.
“They are not frightened of you,” she said. “The youngest had your hand in a minute. Whatever the afternoon cost you, that was something significant.”
“She asked whether it hurt.” His voice stayed level, though something moved beneath it. “No one has asked me that in more than twenty years. They look, and then they decide they have not seen, and we all go on pretending together. She only asked.”
“Children do. It is the best thing about them, and the first thing the world teaches them out of.” She looked at him steadily. “You were right to bring them here.”
“I have done very little so far but sign papers and alarm three girls in a forecourt.”
“You stood still and let a child of four take your hand in front of your whole household. I should not call that very little, Your Grace. I should call it the hardest thing you have done in some years.”
He had no answer ready for that, which she counted, privately, as the truest thing he had said all day.
***
By early evening, she was crossing the east corridor toward the stairs when she passed the study door. It was not open, and she could hear Mr Phelps’s careful voice carry further than he possibly wished.
“The counter-petition has been filed formally. Mrs Norwood’s counsel argues that the marriage is too recent and too sudden to stand as a settled household, and that the very timing of it invites the suspicion that it was got up for the hearing. The court may appoint an observer.”
And then Gideon, quiet and flat. “Then we will show them otherwise. Every day, if we must, for as long as they care to watch.”
She walked on and said nothing of it.
Dinner was the five of them at one end of a table built for thirty, and Louisa addressed the disproportion before the soup was well served.
“Do the fish have names?”
“I have never thought to ask them,” Cecilia said.
“You should. Everything ought to have a name. The horse is called Horse because he arrived already knowing it, but no one has ever asked the fish, and they have been waiting in that fountain a great while with no names at all.” She applied herself to the soup and found it wanting.
“This is too hot at the top and cold underneath. Someone did not stir it.”
“Louisa, mind your manners,” said Rosalind under her breath.
“It is only the truth, and Cece said she likes the truth. I heard her say it to the cook.” She turned the full weight of her attention down the table. “Gideon, may I name the fish? All of them, even the ones at the bottom?”
Gideon, who had plainly never in his life been addressed across his own table by his bare name by a person four hours resident in his house, took a moment to find the answer. “You may name the ones you can see. I make no promises for the ones who keep to the bottom.”
“The ones at the bottom are only shy. They will want names more than anybody.” She nodded and turned to Tabitha. “Tabby will help me. Tabby is very good at quiet things.”
“Louisa, that is quite enough about the soup and the fish together,” said Rosalind under her breath.
“Then between the three of you,” Cecilia said, “the fish will be the best-named in England by Michaelmas.”
“They are already the best-housed. There is a whole fountain to themselves, and most fish have only a bowl, or else a river, and a river is not truly yours, because it only goes past.” Louisa frowned at the injustice of it. “Gideon, whose is the river beyond the trees?”
“Mine, as far as the second bend. After that, it belongs to a man called Caldwell, who is welcome to it.”
“Then we shall name the fish only so far as the second bend, to be polite to Mr Caldwell.”
“That seems very proper to me,” said Gideon, with perfect gravity, and Rosalind looked at her uncle as though she had caught him out in something he had not meant to be caught at.
Tabitha had gone faintly pink at being named her sister’s helper and said nothing, but she had stopped eating with quite so much desperate care, which Cecilia counted a quiet victory and made no remark upon.
Rosalind observed an entire scene, her uncle and Cecilia alike, and the silent exchange that transpired when Cecilia passed the bread unbidden, and Gideon took it without remark: two strangers who, unawares, had begun to learn each other’s mannerisms. Her countenance betrayed nothing.
Across the table, Gideon caught Cecilia’s gaze, and she understood the signal.
He had seen her in the corridor and was evidently aware that she had overheard.
She met his glance with a slight inclination of her head, and after a moment, he returned it.
In that silent communication, they had reached an understanding, an agreement, without the need for words.
She finished her dinner, thinking of Rosalind’s door standing not quite shut, and of the careful man in London assembling the law against them.
She looked in at the nursery as she was passing some time later, and found Tabitha sitting up with her hands folded and her eyes very wide; a child not yet sure whether this was the sort of place a person might sleep in without keeping watch.
“The beeches make a sound in the wind,” Cecilia said from the doorway. “Like paper turning. Not a loud sound.”
“I know that sound,” Tabitha said very softly.
“It is a good sound. It is the kind that means the house is still standing, and means to go on standing all night, whether or not anyone keeps watch on its behalf.”
Tabitha’s shoulders came down by slow degrees from where they had been sitting about her ears, and after a while she lay down, and Cecilia stayed until her breathing had gone even.
Out in the corridor, she stood with her palm flat against the cool plaster. She had come to Aldenmere prepared to be competent. She had not come prepared to care, but she did already.