Chapter Fifteen
“It is very loud,” said Tabitha from the doorway of the drawing room.
She was in her nightgown, barefoot, her hair loose, but she was not in the sharp grip of the nightmare night.
She had not screamed, had not woken in distress.
She had simply got up in the middle of a December storm and gone to find the nearest responsible adult and stay close to her, which Cecilia counted as the most hopeful thing the night had yet produced.
“It is,” Cecilia agreed, from the door of the room she had just lit. “We shall be loud back at it, and see how it likes that.”
The storm had come on at nine, the thorough December sort that rattled the frames and leaned the candle flames sideways.
She had built the drawing-room fire up, fetched two large blankets from the linen press, and gone to the nursery to find Tabitha with Louisa sitting bolt upright with her arms round her knees, wanting to know more about it.
“Can we go somewhere?” Louisa had asked.
“Yes. Bring whatever you cannot do without.”
“I cannot do without Bartholomew.”
“Then Bartholomew comes.”
Bartholomew was a knitted rabbit of advanced years and uncertain colour, missing the better part of one ear, and he came down the stairs gripped by the surviving ear in Louisa’s fist, swinging, dignified in the resigned way of a thing that had long since stopped expecting better.
They were in the corridor, Louisa’s free hand in hers and Tabitha pressed to her other side, when she found Rosalind at the top of the stairs.
She was dressed in her day frock and not her nightgown, the buttons done up wrong in the dark, standing very straight and holding a candlestick.
“I heard them,” Rosalind said, as a woman stated a position she meant to hold.
“Good. We shall want the candle. Come down.”
“I am not frightened. I came down in case the others were.”
“That is the most sensible reason anyone has given me all evening. Bring it down anyway, frightened or not; a candle is a candle.”
The drawing room was warm by the time they were all in it. Cecilia settled the girls with the practised efficiency she had brought to every domestic trouble since she came, unfolding blankets and steering small persons into useful positions near the fire.
“It is the loudest storm there has ever been,” Louisa announced, burrowing under a blanket and settling in to enjoy it. “Louder than the one in London. That one cracked a window. Do you suppose it will crack a window here?”
“The windows here are a great deal older and crosser,” Cecilia said. “They have weathered a hundred storms out of pure stubbornness and have no intention of giving this one the satisfaction.”
“Like Mrs Fenn.”
“Very like Mrs Fenn. I would not repeat the comparison to her.”
“I shall, though,” said Louisa comfortably, “because she will like it, even if she pretends she does not, which is a thing grown people do a great deal.” She considered the fire, Bartholomew, and the wider question of the night.
“Bartholomew is not frightened of storms. He told me. He is frightened of dogs, of the big spoon and of going in the wash, but not of storms.”
“A rabbit of strong nerve.”
“He has been through worse,” Louisa agreed, with the air of one who had personally seen him through it.
Tabitha said nothing for a while, but she sat close and quiet and looked at the fire with the steady attention of a child learning, by slow degrees, that a fire was a thing one might look at without having to look away.
When the wind threw a fistful of rain at the glass, she startled and gave the smallest jump.
“Will you tell me when the next loud one comes?” she asked, low, so that only Cecilia heard it. “Before it comes. So, it does not surprise me.”
“I cannot hear them coming any better than you can, I am afraid. But I can tell you that the loud ones do not last, and that each one means the storm is using itself up, like a child in a temper. The longer it shouts, the sooner it tires. We are simply waiting for it to tire.”
Tabitha thought about that. “Louisa never tires.”
“Louisa is not a storm. Louisa is a force of nature, which is a different thing and obeys no rules whatsoever.”
That earned the ghost of a smile, and Tabitha sat back a degree, and watched the fire, and when the next gust came, she held a little steadier than the gust before.
Rosalind, meanwhile, had brought the book down from her room, which meant she had foreseen exactly where the evening would end and had come prepared.
“What are you reading?” Cecilia asked her.
“The natural history. The chapter on weather, as it happens.” Rosalind turned a page with great composure.
“It says lightning comes first, and that the thunder is only the sound of it, arriving late because sound is a slow and lazy thing compared to light. So, the storm is already finished being dangerous by the time we hear it complain.”
“There you have it,” said Cecilia to Tabitha. “The book agrees with me, and the book is never sentimental. By the time it is loud, the worst of that particular flash is already over and gone.”
Tabitha looked at Rosalind, who nodded once, gravely, with the full authority of the printed page behind her, and something in the younger girl’s shoulders came down another inch.
Gideon came about twenty minutes later. He gave no knock, and no one had called him.
Hearing had been enough, as it had been on the nightmare night, and he came to the doorway in his shirtsleeves.
Tonight, the cravat was gone altogether, which she had never seen, so that she was aware of the line of his throat and the scarring that ran down from his jaw and went on past where any collar would have stopped it, the full record of the thing, more of it than he had ever let the house see.
He looked at the room, at the three girls, the blankets, the fire and her standing with the milk, like a man taking in a scene and finding it the most natural one he had come upon in years.
“We are waiting out the storm,” Louisa informed him.
“I see.”
“Bartholomew is not frightened. I told him you would be here, and he said in that case he would stay.”
“I am honoured by his confidence,” said Gideon, with perfect gravity, “and shall endeavour to deserve it.”
“You may wait too,” she said, conferring the privilege with great generosity. “There is room. You can have the big chair, which is the best one, although Tabby thinks the small one is, but Tabby is wrong.”
“I do not think the small one is best,” said Tabitha, stung into speech. “I said it was the most comfortable, which is a different thing and true.”
“You see how it is,” Gideon said to the room at large. “I have walked into a dispute of long standing and no possible resolution. I shall take the big chair, since it has been offered, and decline to rule on the comfort of the small one, because a wise man does not come between sisters.”
“That is what Mr Phelps says about the law,” Rosalind observed, not looking up from her book. “That the wise man stays out of other people’s quarrels and charges a fee when he cannot.”
“Mr Phelps and I are in agreement on a great many things, which is why I keep him.”
He looked at Cecilia. She looked back without making the decision for him, having learned not to, and having learned more lately that he generally made the right one himself when left to it.
He came in and took the big chair nearest the fire, and within ten minutes, Louisa, who possessed no notion of spatial courtesy and no wish to acquire one, had transferred herself and Bartholomew into his lap.
He received her with the careful, half-uncertain deliberateness of a man doing a natural thing he was not yet sure he had the right to, his arm coming round her.
Louisa, who noticed none of his uncertainty, settled her back against his chest, arranged the rabbit on his knee and went on watching the fire.
“You are warm,” she said, as a verdict. “Warmer than Cece. Cece is warm too, but you are warmer; it is because you are bigger and there is more of you to be warm with.”
“It is the single advantage of my size, and I am glad it is finally of use to someone.”
Cecilia sat on the settee by the window with Tabitha beside her under the shared blanket while the storm went on.
Rosalind read a while, but then stopped reading, and somewhere in the next hour, without any announcement, stopped sitting apart and was simply sitting near, the stiffness gone out of her shoulders, the way such things go when no one is watching for them.
They looked like a family. The thought arrived without her engineering it, weighty and unhurried, true for a while now and only waiting for the right moment to say so aloud.
Five people the storm had pressed into one warm room, two of whom had married for practical reasons and had been, in the weeks since, quietly becoming something the contract had not specified.
No one had decided it, but it was happening regardless.
She looked at Gideon. He was looking down at Louisa, asleep now against him with Bartholomew clutched to her chin, and the look on his face was the one he turned on his architectural sketches, the inward attention of a man who had spent a great while planning a thing and found himself, without quite meaning to, standing inside it.
His hand lay on the child’s back, light, rising and falling with her breath.
Rosalind fell asleep after midnight; her head tilted against the settee arm with the loose abandon that only sleep gets out of the very composed. Tabitha had gone earlier, curled and trusting to Cecilia’s side.
She and Gideon were awake. He had not moved, Louisa still asleep on him, holding the stillness of a man who had decided that waking a sleeping child was not worth any quantity of his own discomfort.
The fire had burned low. She leaned and set another log on without rising, which wanted some careful reaching, and she was aware that he watched her do it.