Chapter Ten
“It was only a dream. Look. Do you see the light outside the window?”
Gideon’s voice was low and steady, and it was not the careful steadiness he kept for drawing rooms and solicitors. It was something quieter, a thing that had not been assembled for anyone to hear.
Cecilia stood in the doorway of Tabitha’s room and held where she was.
She had heard the cry from two corridors away and been into the corridor before she was rightly awake, two weeks’ practice at reading this house carrying her toward the nursery wing. The door to Tabitha’s room stood open, but Gideon was already there.
He sat on the floor beside the bed, not on its edge nor in the chair that would have been the sensible adult post, but with his back against the side of the bed and his long legs folded at an angle that could not have been comfortable, his face turned up to the window.
He had come in his shirtsleeves, which told her more than the rest of the scene put together.
And Tabitha sat up with her knees to her chest and both small hands wrapped around one of his, the left one, the scarred one he kept turned from the world and never offered without first deciding to.
She had simply taken it, the way she had taken Cecilia’s hand in the garden.
He was talking about the stars.
“That one,” he said, tilting his chin to the window where the October sky stood hard and clear above the beeches, “is there every night. Every night since before you were born, before your mother was born, before this house was built. It is entirely indifferent to anything that happens beneath it, which sounds unkind, and is in fact a great comfort, if you take it the right way.”
Tabitha’s breathing was evening out, her shoulders coming down from the rigid set of the nightmare, the grip on his hand easing toward holding rather than clutching.
“How long has it been there?” Her voice was small and a little rough.
“Longer than anyone has troubled to count, which is a very long time indeed.”
“Was it there when my papa was little?”
A beat, very brief, a man taking something with more force than he let reach his face. “Yes. He used to point it out to me when we were boys together.”
“What else did he show you?”
“A great many things. Which bird was which by its song. How to set a line in the river so the current did the work for you. The names of more stars than I have managed to keep, though I have kept that one.”
“Will you show me the river and the birds?”
“If you like. They are better learned in summer, when a person may lie on the grass to do it and not take a chill. We shall begin when the nights turn warm.”
“You will still be here in the summer, then.”
It was not quite a question. He answered it as though it were the most serious one she had asked. “I will. And so will you, and your sisters, the whole summer long. This is where we all live now.”
Tabitha thought about that, and some last rigid thing in her seemed to put itself down. “Do you miss him?”
Outside, the beeches moved in the wind, and the corridor lamp threw its long rectangle through the open door, and Cecilia held her breath where she stood.
“Every day,” he said, without any of the management he usually carried.
Tabitha turned that over with the grave logic of eight years old. “I think probably he can see the star too. From where he is now.”
Gideon was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was exactly as steady as before, and only a person listening very hard would have caught the thickening at its edges. “I think that is very probably true.”
“Will you stay until I am asleep?”
“As long as you like. I have nowhere in the world I would rather be tonight, and a great deal of floor still going spare.”
The ghost of a smile moved across her face, the first he had been given, and she lay back down, slow and careful, returning to a place she had decided was safe again. She kept his hand a few moments more, and then her grip loosened all at once as she crossed back over into sleep.
He stayed where he was a moment, his back to the bed, looking at the window, at the star or the sky or something with nothing visible to it at all. Then he stood, slow and quiet for so large a man with a sleeping child in the room, and turned, and saw her.
His face changed at once, not to blankness but to something tight and corrected, a man caught at a kindness he had not meant to be witnessed. Colour moved at the base of his jaw, but he straightened as though setting right a posture that had been right already.
She looked at him as she had looked at him since the day they met, level and unhurried, and said quietly: “Thank you.”
He gave one small precise nod and came toward the door, but in the narrow space of it, he stopped, as though some account of himself were owed and he could not quite find the shape of it.
“She woke,” he said at last. “I was nearest.”
“You were three corridors and a staircase further off than her own bed, Your Grace, and you sat on a cold floor the better part of an hour. I do not think nearest is at all the word for it.” She said it gently. “But I will let you keep it if you would rather.”
He looked at her a moment, as though weighing whether he might be annoyed, and found, it seemed, that he could not manage it.
“I would rather,” he said, and went past her, very close in the doorway, near enough that she caught the cold night air still on him from his open window and the faint scent of lamp oil, and then his footsteps were going off down the corridor as carefully as he had moved inside the room.
Sleep would not come, which was no surprise in this house, and after an hour of failing at it, she gave the attempt up and went down for the book she had left in the library, by way of having somewhere to put herself that was not the ceiling.
The library was not empty. The fire had burned low, a single lamp was lit, and Gideon sat in the chair nearest it with a book open and plainly unread on his knee, still in his shirtsleeves.
He looked up when she entered, like a man who found himself unexpectedly caught off guard, unsure how he had found himself in this situation twice in one evening.
“I came down for a book,” she said. “Not to disturb you. I can take it and go up again.”
“You are not disturbing me. Sit, if you like. I am poor company for myself tonight, and you can hardly be worse.” There was a pause, which she understood to be an apology for the bluntness of it. “Is she still asleep?”
“Sound. I looked in on my way down.” She took the chair across from him that had become, without either of them deciding it, hers. “You did that very well, you know. The stars. I should not have known how to begin.”
“She asked me whether Arthur could see the star.” He turned the unread book closed over his thumb. “I told her yes, because it was what she wanted, and then I sat there afterwards unable to be certain I had not simply told a grieving child a comfortable thing to get her back to sleep.”
“You told her a thing neither of you can prove, and offered it as comfort, which is the whole of what anyone does at a child’s bedside in the dark. It was not a lie. You are only troubled because you meant it, and meaning it costs you more than the saying ever could.”
He looked at her, and for once did not look away. “You do that a great deal. Say the thing I have not yet got round to admitting to myself.”
“It is a failing of mine. Lady Foskett complained of it without remission for eight years.”
“I find that I do not share her complaint.” He turned the book again.
“I do not sleep. The house will have told you as much, since the house tells everyone everything. I walk the corridors at an hour when no reasonable man is awake, and have done so long that I have stopped counting it as anything but the shape of my nights. It is a strange thing to be heard at it. Stranger still to be sat up with.”
“I do not sleep either of late. We might contrive to be unreasonable at the same hour, and at least save the household some candles.”
The corner of his mouth moved, and this time he let it go most of the way out. “That is a remarkably practical proposal, even from you.”
“I am a remarkably practical woman. I am given to understand it was my single qualification for the post.”
He let that lie unanswered a moment, and the fire ticked down, and she was aware all at once of the warmth of the room, the lateness of the hour and the plain fact of being the only two souls awake in a sleeping house.