Chapter Sixteen
“You are not working,” said Louisa.
“I am working,” said Gideon.
“Your pen is not moving.”
He looked at his pen. It was resting in his hand at the angle of a pen that had been in motion recently and had stopped for reasons its holder had not yet admitted to.
The page before him held three lines of estate correspondence and a great deal of space he had been meaning to fill for the better part of an hour.
“I am thinking.”
“Cece says thinking and working are the same thing, but only if the thinking is about the work.” She climbed onto the chair across the desk with the complete absence of invitation that marked all her arrivals. “Is the thinking about the work?”
“No, it is not,” he said, having discovered in the months of her residence that lying to Louisa was both ineffective and somehow the worse course of the two.
“That is what I thought.” She reached for the paperweight and turned it over to examine its underside. “Is it Cece you are thinking about?”
“You are four years old.”
“Nearly five. Nearly five is a great deal cleverer than four, everyone says so, though mostly people who are nearly five.” She held the paperweight up to the light.
“You look at her the way Tabby looks at a door she is deciding about. As though you would like to go through it and are not certain you are allowed.”
He found he had no answer that a child of four ought to have been able to require of him.
“I shall tell her you said nothing,” Louisa offered, with great generosity. “Which is what you said. So, it will even be true.”
It had been four days since the storm. He had told himself, immediately after, that the conversation in the drawing room had been a product of the hour, the firelight and the night’s ordinary defences being temporarily inconvenient.
He had told himself this with unwavering conviction; things he needed to believe were true.
But this time, he hadn’t believed a word of it.
For more than twenty years, he kept silent about the fire, his father’s face, and the word that lingered.
He only spoke when she asked, because she listened without the usual reflexive compassion that felt like management, or the retreat that always followed when his father’s face appeared.
She told him, flatly, that his father was wrong about him, and for the first time, those words found a place they never had before.
He had also, in the four days since, taken to consulting her on matters he did not need to consult anyone about.
The letter from the village tenants was the latest of the pretexts.
“You wish my opinion,” she said, when he brought it to the library, “on a dispute about drainage, which you have settled a dozen of without troubling me once. I am beginning to suspect, Your Grace, that you are inventing occasions.”
“I am reliably informed my judgment improves in company.”
“By whom?”
“By myself, just now. It is recent intelligence, and I find it persuasive.”
Her mouth did something she would not quite let become a smile.
She read the letter, asked two questions he had not thought to ask himself, and gave an assessment a good deal more thorough than he had looked for.
Then he spent the half hour after she had gone thinking about the quality of her attention and nothing whatever about the tenants.
He had begun, too, to walk the gardens on the weekday afternoons when she would be in them, which was the hardest of it to account for, the garden having been for ten years a place he entered only to survey its decline. He walked where she was and declined, with some firmness, to ask himself why.
On Thursday, he made her laugh and had not entirely meant to. He had been reading the agricultural report Phelps had forwarded with the legal papers, and she had been on the settee with the second volume of her natural history.
“Listen to this,” he said. “Phelps’s land agent writes that the south field is at present ‘in a condition of persistent reluctance.’ I have employed the man for four years and discovered only now that he is a poet.”
“It is the truest description of that field I have ever met. It has been persistently reluctant since the day I came. I had begun to think it personal.”
“It is personal. It reserves the reluctance, I am told, for people who expect things of it.”
She laughed. Not the small controlled laugh of the library’s drier exchanges but the full one, the kind that came before she could manage it, her head going back and her hand coming up too late to be of any use.
He had been cataloguing that laugh since the first time it happened, unconsciously and then, he admitted to himself, with deliberate care.
He thought, with a clarity that appalled him, that he would lay waste to entire kingdoms to make her do that again.
He was horrified the instant he thought it. The feeling was not new. It had plainly been there a good while, and he had only now named it precisely, and found that the naming had made it irrevocable.
She recovered and looked at him with the clear grey eyes that had not flinched from anything, ever, and he looked back a moment, but then he looked at his report, because the alternative was no longer safe.
He was, he understood, terrified, which was a sensation he had little recent practice at.
He had spent all these years arranging his life around the avoidance of the few things that frightened him, and the arrangement had been functional, quiet and predictable, and had made no allowance for the possibility that wanting something might prove its own category of terrible.
Wanting made hope, and hope was the worst of it, for feeling asked nothing of anyone, but hope asked a world willing to meet it.
There was the matter, besides, of the study. He had left the door ajar one afternoon and had caught sight of her face. She had been looking at the drawings on the walls.
He took a blank sheet from the drawer, stared at it a long while, and put it back. Some things were not ready to be written. He was certain only that there was, for the first time in many years, a thing he wished to say.
Mrs Fenn came up with a dinner tray he had not asked for, set it at the corner of the desk, and did not at once go.
“You are not eating again.”
“I am aware of it.”
“You always are. It is the being aware of it that does no one the smallest good.” She straightened the cloth on the tray. “You have the look of a man standing at the edge of a cold lake, Your Grace, working out whether he means to go in.”
“And if I have?”
“Then I shall tell you what I told you when you were a boy and would not go down to the water at all. The longer a man stands at the edge of it deciding, the harder it gets, and the more of the afternoon he loses to the standing. It is the same temperature whether he goes in at noon or at four. Only the day is shorter for the waiting.”
“That is a great deal of philosophy to attach to a dinner tray.”
“There is a great deal of dinner on the tray, and you will eat it.” She paused at the door, as she always paused at the door.
“She does not flinch, that one. You will have marked it by now. I should not let the marking of it go to waste, were I you, and I have had a good deal longer than you to learn what is worth wasting.”
She went and left him with the tray, and he found he was a fraction nearer than he had been before she came into the room.
He sat a long time in the lamplight and thought about kingdoms, and about a laugh that came before its owner could govern it.
He thought about what it meant that the house had stood dark for a decade, and he had noticed, only lately, that dark was a different thing from light.