Chapter Fourteen
“I take,” said Lord Vane, stepping down from the carriage and surveying Aldenmere Park like a man pleased to find a thing improved since he last troubled to look at it, “full credit for all of this.”
“You arranged a marriage,” said Gideon from the steps. “You did not build the house.”
“I arranged the marriage, which is a great deal harder than building a house and wants far more social intelligence, a quality you have never properly valued.” He shook Gideon’s hand without the least self-consciousness about the scarring, fifteen years having worn that out of him.
“You look well. The country agrees with you… Or something does.”
“You have been here thirty seconds.”
“I am perceptive. It is my chief asset, and you have spent fifteen years declining to admire it.” And he came up the steps and went in.
He had come for a long weekend, Friday to Monday, which Cecilia had read as the act of a man either very sure of his welcome or very comfortable assuming it.
She suspected both, and within a quarter of an hour, she had the proof of it, for he had charmed the entire nursery before his boxes were off the carriage.
Louisa, who kept no social defences and saw no reason to acquire any, was won at once and entirely, for Vane proved to have an inexhaustible appetite for her opinions on every subject going.
“You must be very rich,” Louisa informed him over dinner, “because your coat has no mending in it anywhere that I can find.”
“Louisa, one does not remark on a guest’s coat,” said Rosalind.
“It is a compliment.” She returned to her soup.
“The fish still have no names, in case you were going to ask. Rosie says distinguished fish must earn distinguished names, which is unfair, because how is a fish to earn anything, shut in a fountain? And the biscuits with the currants are the best ones, and that is not a matter of opinion, whatever anyone tells you.”
“I would not dream of telling you otherwise,” said Vane, with perfect gravity. “On the fish I shall reserve judgment until I have met them. On the biscuits, I yield entirely. A man who argues with a four-year-old about biscuits deserves the indigestion he is courting.”
Tabitha came to him more slowly, in her own careful fashion, watching him the better part of the first afternoon before she ventured a question about something he had said, and getting for it exactly the same whole attention he had given Louisa.
After that, she appeared to file him as acceptable.
Rosalind was not charmed, charmed being a thing Rosalind did not do, but she was a degree more interested than she meant to be, which was as near as Rosalind came.
She watched him and said little but missed nothing.
The house changed shape around him the way quiet households do when a thoroughly sociable man is dropped into them.
Meals ran longer. The drawing room, lately the venue chiefly of legal consultations, was returned to its proper use.
And Gideon became in Vane’s company very slightly more than he was without it.
Not another man. Only more of the one he was, as though Vane’s ease reached something in him that ordinary days kept submerged.
He argued at dinner with the open enjoyment of a man who had at last found someone worth arguing with.
He also told a story, which she had never once heard him tell, about an incident at Oxford involving a horse, a quantity of port, and a set of circumstances he plainly considered fully accounted for by those two facts, but which Vane supplied with the missing third, and which made her laugh properly, twice.
She had not known he had stories. She added it to the account, along with very nearly everything else that weekend, having long since made her peace with the account, if not yet with the direction in which it was so steadily accumulating.
After dinner on Saturday, Vane proposed cards. Gideon declined, with the brevity of long practice, having refused it many times before and meaning to go on refusing. Vane received the refusal as an opening bid rather than an answer.
“Then I shall teach Rosalind,” he said.
Rosalind looked up from the corner where she had been reading and listening to everything. “I know how to play.”
“You know how to play correctly. I propose to teach you how to play interestingly.”
“Those are different things?”
“Entirely different things. One of them wins the game. The other wins the room, and the room, I promise you, is the more useful prize of the two.”
Rosalind weighed that with the look she kept for arguments she was not yet sure were wrong, and then she set her book aside and came to the table.
Cecilia caught Gideon’s eye across the room, and his face held its usual composed neutrality.
Underneath it, though, where she had learned to look, something warm and private moved, but he turned his attention to the fire before it could reach the surface.
Vane dealt, Rosalind took up her hand and plainly meant to win whatever she was taught, Louisa materialised to demand a part in the proceedings, and Tabitha drew her chair near her sister. For two hours, the drawing room had the particular sound of a room being thoroughly used.
On Sunday, Vane walked the estate with Gideon.
From the library window, Cecilia watched the two of them cross the lawn toward the kitchen gardens.
Gideon was taller and broader by a good measure, listening with the stillness that was attention rather than absence, while Vane was talking using his hands for gestures she could not understand, until the beeches took them both.
At noon she was in the garden with the two younger girls, Louisa’s fish-naming project having swelled into a general audit of every named and unnamed feature of the grounds, when Vane let himself in at the gate.
“May I join you?”
“You needn’t ask.”
“I know. I like to.” He fell in beside her, watching Louisa lecture a dormant rose bed at length. “The estate looks well.”
“It is getting there. It had been let alone for a long time.”
“Gideon tells me you have been in the garden every week since you came. He told me as a plain fact, which is how he reports the things he has feelings about and would rather not be caught having.”
“I shall bear that in mind,” she said, “the next time he reports a plain fact to me.”
He laughed, and they walked a while in a companionable quiet not unlike the library’s, and then he said, more carefully: “You should know that the house he has written me of these last six weeks is not the house he wrote me of for the ten years before them. He describes meals now. He has not described a meal to me in a decade. He describes things the children say. He describes small things, the kind a man notices only when he has begun attending to his days instead of getting through them.”
Cecilia kept her eyes on Louisa, who had abandoned the rose bed for a stone of evident significance.
“He is good with them,” she said, which was the most neutral true thing available to her.
“He always would have been, had the circumstances let him. I used to wonder what he might have been, when the house was as it was, if his father had been very nearly any other man.” He stopped himself. “I ought not to say that.”
“You ought, I think. It is true, and he has had a great shortage of people willing to say true things about him in his hearing or out of it.”
Vane glanced at her sidelong. “He has changed since you came. I want you to know that I see it, and that it is not the children alone, though they are a part. It is not only the children.”
“I am glad the house is better,” she said with great care.
“So am I. And I take credit for that as well, naturally.”
“Partial credit.”
“I will accept partial,” he said, having plainly been angling for partial from the very first.
He found her in the library that evening, Gideon having been carried off by an afternoon letter from Phelps.
Vane settled into the chair across from her like a man arriving for a conversation rather than paying a call, and for a while they spoke of the children, of Rosalind’s frankly alarming improvement at cards, of Tabitha consenting more and more often to sit somewhere other than the farthest corner of a room, and of Louisa, of whom there was always a great deal to be said and most of it a pleasure.
Then he said: “He has not laughed in company for longer than I can put a date to. He laughed at dinner last night. Twice.”
She said nothing.
“He watched you laugh, the first time, like a man who had just remembered a thing he had given up for lost. I tell you because I believe you ought to know it, and because I do not think he will tell you himself, not yet.” He looked at her steadily.
“He is afraid of it, of what he feels. He has been afraid of wanting things for a very long time, and he has not yet decided that wanting them is a thing he is permitted to do.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
Vane regarded her a moment with the look she had first marked in Lady Foskett’s drawing room, pleased and more careful than pleased and something underneath both of them.
“Then that is what I had hoped to hear,” he said and stood.
“I will leave you to your reading. But for what it is worth, and I think it is worth a good deal, I believe you are exactly what that house wanted. I mean the house, I mean the children, I mean him, and I mean the whole of it.” He gathered the whole of it in one wide gesture, as though it were too large to itemise.
“The whole of it,” he said again and left.
She sat alone in the library a while after he had gone.
She had stopped thinking of it as someone else’s house at some point she could no longer fix, and she had been telling herself it was the children, the household, and the legal necessity of the thing, but she was no longer at all certain she believed her own account of it.
Outside, the December wind moved in the beeches, the fire burned, and the library kept its particular quiet, which was one kind of quiet when she was alone in it and quite another when she was not.
His desk sat with the pen in its holder, the chair pushed back, and a book open at the page where he had left off.
She looked at the empty chair a good while and did not pretend, any longer, that the room felt complete without the man who belonged in it.
She picked up her book. She read two pages, but could afterwards have told no one a single word of either, the print sliding past while her mind kept its own counsel about empty chairs and the men who belonged in them.
She gave it up before the third page. The fire had burned low, and the house had gone to that deep midnight quiet that made a person honest. She sat in it a while longer without the pretence of reading, and let the thing settle in her at last, the thing Vane had come all this way to be sure of, and had been right about, and had gone off well pleased with himself for being right.
Then she banked the fire, took her candle, and went up to bed through the dark and quiet house that had stopped, at some point, being anyone’s home but her own.