Chapter Thirteen
“Whose land is it past the second bend?” said Rosalind.
“Ours, as far as the second bend. Caldwell’s after that.
” Gideon stopped at the rise where the path turned, because she liked to be told things standing still, where she could look at them.
“We share the fishing where the river runs between us, and disagree about the upkeep of the bank, which is the natural condition of neighbours who share a river.”
“Why do you not buy it from him?”
“Because he does not wish to sell, and a man who presses a neighbour over a riverbank spends the next thirty years regretting the bargain whether he wins it or loses it.”
“That seems inefficient.”
“Most of being a landlord is inefficient. The efficient version makes enemies, and the patient version makes hay. You will find, when you have an estate of your own to be tyrannical over, that the second pays better.”
“And the tenants? Do you raise their rents when the harvest is good?”
“No. A good harvest is the tenant’s to keep, or he has no reason to break his back for the next one. I raise the rent when I have spent money that bettered the land, not before, and I tell the man why to his face.”
“My father raised ours every Lady Day, good harvest or bad.”
“Your father was not a careful landlord.”
“He was not a careful anything.” She said it without heat, an accurate finding rather than a complaint. “I should like to be careful. It seems a more interesting way to be rich, and it makes fewer enemies, which you have just told me is the whole of the art.”
That was the last she said for a while afterwards.
She returned none of the further questions he had come to expect from her, the small, relentless engine of a girl who had decided that the surest road to understanding the world was to interrogate it until it confessed.
She had been quiet for the better part of the walk, in fact, which he had put down at first to the cold and the early dark coming on, and then, as the quiet went on, to something he could not name and did not like.
Her pace had fallen a half-step below her habit, and her face under the grey December light had a pallor to it that the cold could not account for.
“You are not asking me anything,” he said.
“I am thinking.”
“You are always thinking. You generally manage to do it aloud and at my expense.”
The corner of her mouth moved, which ordinarily would have been a victory, but then it was gone, and she stopped on the path with one hand pressed flat to her middle, and the colour leaving her face entirely.
“Rosalind, what is it?”
“I am perfectly well,” she said, which was a sentence he recognised, having a wife who deployed it, and then she folded over the hand at her middle as though something had been taken out of her, and made a small sound she plainly did not mean to make, and her knees went.
He had her before she reached the ground, before he had decided anything at all.
His hands were under her, and she was up against his chest, lighter than she had any business being.
Her face was against his coat, and she was shaking, and every coherent thought he owned went out of him at once and was replaced by a single cold certainty that he was losing one of them.
It was not a reasonable thought. He was aware, in some distant and useless quarter of his mind, that it was not reasonable, but the reasonable quarter had no authority over the rest of him.
He had buried his brother. These three had buried everyone they had.
The arithmetic of his life had taught him precisely one lesson about the people he loved, which was that they were taken, so he carried Rosalind up the path and across the forecourt at a pace that was nearly a run, saying her name.
“Send for the physician,” he said to whoever was in the hall, which turned out to be a housemaid and then Mrs Fenn. “She collapsed on the path. She is in pain. Send the fastest man we have; take a horse, I do not care which.”
“Look at me.”
Cecilia was on the stairs. She came down without hurrying, which he could not understand, and enraged him for the half-second before he understood that the not-hurrying was deliberate.
She had taken in both their faces and had seen that the girl was curled against him, and had arrived, somewhere in the space of three steps, at a conclusion he had not reached.
“Put her on the settee in the morning room; the fire is lit there,” she said. “Mrs Fenn, a warming pan and a hot brick wrapped in flannel, and chamomile if there is any made, and if there is not, then ginger. No one is to send for the physician.”
“She is ill,” he said. “She is in pain; she went white as paper; she could not stand.”
“She is not ill.” Cecilia stopped in front of him and put her hand on Rosalind’s hair, and then, briefly, on his arm, and looked up at him with the steady grey eyes that did not, this evening, have an ounce of alarm in them.
“She is not ill, Your Grace. I promise you. Carry her through, and then I am going to ask you to leave us, and I am going to ask you to trust me while you do it.”
He carried Rosalind through and laid her on the settee as though she were made of something that had already cracked once.
Rosalind would not look at him. Her eyes were shut, her jaw was set, and there was, beneath the pallor, a flush climbing her face that had nothing to do with fever.
He understood that he was looking at a kind of distress he had no instrument to measure, and that the woman kneeling beside her did.
“Out you go,” said Cecilia, gently, to him.
“I do not understand any of this.”
“I know you do not. Out, all the same. I will come to you the moment there is anything to tell, and there will be nothing alarming in it. You have my word, and you know what my word is worth by now.”
He went out.
He stood in the cold corridor outside the morning-room door, a grown man of five-and-thirty who had managed a duchy, a lawsuit and the burying of his own brother, and could do nothing whatever with his hands.
The door was shut. Through it came the low run of Cecilia’s voice, the cadence without the words, and now and then Rosalind’s, smaller, and once a sound that might have been the girl beginning to cry and being talked out of it.
Arthur came into his mind, and the one lesson his life had ever taught him about the people he loved was that a house could be full one season and emptied the next with no warning given and none accepted.
More than twenty years he had spent arranging to have as little as possible to lose, and had failed so completely, in a single autumn, that he could not now bear the length of a corridor between himself and a girl’s closed door.
It was the better part of an hour before the door opened.
Cecilia came out, and her face was not the face of a woman bringing bad news, and the band round his chest loosened by a degree it had no right to before he had heard a word.
“She is perfectly well,” she said. “I want to say that first, and I want you to believe it before I say anything else. There is nothing wrong with her. There never was.”
“She collapsed.”
“She fainted, a little, from the pain and the fright of it, and the fright was the larger part.” Cecilia chose her words as she did when she meant to be both truthful and kind, which he had come to know were not always the same task.
“It is a thing that comes to girls, in its time, and her time has come, today, rather sooner than she was ready for it. She has become a woman, which is the polite way of putting it. There is no illness in it. It is only the body doing the thing it was built to do, and doing it, in her case, with a great deal of drama, which I expect you will agree is entirely in character.”
He looked at her. The cold certainty that had owned him for the last hour drained out of him so fast that he had to put a hand to the wall, and what came in behind it was so large and so unfamiliar that he could not, for a moment, find the word for it.
After a few moments, he found it; it was relief, plain and enormous, the relief of a man who had set a thing down he never knew he had been carrying at the run.
“I thought,” he said, and could not make himself say the rest of it.
“I know what you thought. I saw it on your face from the stairs.” Her voice gentled further. “You are not the first man to carry a girl in from the garden convinced she is dying when she is only growing up. You will not be the last. It does you credit, whatever you may think of yourself just now.”
“She was frightened.”
“She was terrified. No one had told her what to expect, which is the usual cruelty, that we send girls into it knowing nothing and let it frighten them half to death.” Something crossed Cecilia’s face, brief and old.
“No one told me either. I was a year younger than she is, and I was certain I had taken some mortal complaint, and there was no one in the house I could ask without dying of the shame of asking. So, I told her that. I told her I had been every bit as frightened, and that the fright is the worst of it and passes. I also told her that there is a warming pan, a cup of something hot and a great deal of lying down, and a person on the other side of the door who is not going anywhere. She took it well once she stopped trying to take it bravely.”
“May I see her?”
“In a little while. She has asked me to tell you that she does not wish it discussed, and I have promised her on your behalf that it will not be, because you are a man who lets people keep their composure, and she is at the age where her composure is the dearest thing she owns.” Cecilia paused.
“You may go in and say nothing whatever about any of it. That is what she needs. You are good at saying nothing. It is one of your gifts.”
He lingered before going in, the loosened band still slack round his chest, and looked at his wife, at the competence and the kindness that had come down the stairs so calmly and settled in three steps a thing he could not have begun to manage.
Here was the matter that the solicitors, the petition and the careful arguments about a stable establishment had only ever circled.
He could give the girls a name, a house and a thousand a year and the whole weight of a dukedom set between them and Mrs Norwood.
But he could not give them this, and had not the first idea how.
There was a thing the children needed that lived entirely in the woman in front of him, whom he had married for a reason he had written down in a letter and which had turned out to be the smallest and least of the reasons.
The sight of her standing there, having done unasked, moved him so completely that he had to look away from her, briefly, to keep hold of his face.
“What is it?” she said.
“You walked down those stairs without hurrying,” he said. “I have been trying to work out how.”
“Because hurrying would have frightened her worse, and frightened you worse, and neither of you needed that kind of help.” She considered him.
“It is the same reason you will go in there in a moment and speak of soil drainage as though nothing has happened. We each have our way of standing very still so that the person beside us can fall apart in peace.”
“I find I have nothing whatever to say to that,” he said.
“I know. I am told it is one of your gifts.”
She almost laughed, and put her hand on his arm again, and went back to the girl, and he stood a moment longer in the corridor in the cold.
He was aware, with the whole of him and for once without any quarrel from any quarter, that he was the most fortunate man in England and had spent years training himself to expect to be the unluckiest.
He went in later, and sat with Rosalind by the fire, and said nothing about any of it, and she let him, and that was its own kind of conversation.