Chapter Seventeen
“I don’t need company,” Rosalind said from the garden bench.
She didn’t turn round, and the words came in the even, philosophical voice she kept for things that were both true and the opposite of what she needed, her right hand pressed to her chest with something small shut inside it. The crying was quiet, her face angled away, held carefully out of sight.
Cecilia sat down on the bench beside her. “I know you don’t,” she said. “I have come to keep myself company. You may ignore me as it suits you.”
That bought her nothing for a while, which she had expected. The cold came up off the stone wall, and the last of the pale sun reached the bench and went no further.
“You are always out here,” Rosalind said at last. An accusation, very nearly.
“I am. The garden had been let go, and it seemed a pity.” She let a moment pass. “I think better with my hands in the dirt because I had a great deal to think about when I first came.”
“About us?”
“About all of it. You were not the worst of it, if that is any comfort.”
A sound came out of Rosalind that was almost a laugh.
Then she opened her hand. “It’s my parents,” she said, and Cecilia saw it then, a small oval locket, the gold worn soft at the edges.
“I found it at the bottom of the trunk. Tabitha doesn’t know I have it.
I look at it when she isn’t there, because she cries, and then I have to... ”
“Take care of her.”
“Someone has to. She is eight.”
“And there is no one taking care of you.”
The pause that came then had something working in it.
“I’m twelve. I don’t need looking after.”
“You are twelve,” Cecilia agreed, without softness, “and you have been minding your sisters since your mother died. You are very good at it. That is not the same thing as being meant to do it alone.”
Rosalind’s grip on the locket changed from the clutch of a thing guarded to the hold of a thing wanted. “Everyone says it gets easier,” she said. “They say if I am patient, it stops hurting.”
“It doesn’t get easier.”
Rosalind’s head came round sharply.
“They tell you that because they want it to be true, and because the other thing is harder to say.” Cecilia kept her eyes on the dark bed, the rose stakes standing at their careful intervals.
“It does not stop hurting. You will not wake one morning and find you have forgotten to miss them. You only get stronger, which is a different thing, and it is a good deal better than nothing.”
“Stronger how?”
The philosopher had gone out of her voice. The question stood on its own now, direct and unguarded.
“Strong enough to carry it without it carrying you. Not every day but enough days.” Cecilia turned to look at her. “You are doing it already. Badly, on occasion, because everyone does it badly at the start. But you are doing it.”
For a moment, Rosalind said nothing, only turned the locket so the worn gold caught the light.
“They were good,” she said. “My father read to us after dinner, every night, even when he was tired. He did the voices.” Her breath went unsteady and steadied again.
“My mother grew sweet peas. She said they were the most hopeful flowers because they had no business growing where she put them, but they grew anyway. I keep going over them, so I have them right. I am frightened I will start to misremember.”
“You will not lose the measure of them,” Cecilia said. “The voices and the sweet peas, those stay. It is the small things that blur, and the small things were never what told you who they were. You already know who they were. You do not need the rest to be certain of it.”
“Is it the same for you? When it isn’t parents.”
“It is the same for anything you cared about enough to grieve.” She let a minute go by. “I have had practice.”
“At what?”
“At losing things, and going on being myself in the place where they used to be.” She heard how plain it came out and didn’t dress it up. “It is a useful skill. I would not wish the lessons on you, but you are learning them well, all the same.”
“Did somebody die? For you, I mean.”
“My father. And some things that were not people, which is a harder thing to explain and a duller one to listen to. Another year, perhaps, when you are bored and want a long story.” Cecilia almost smiled. “You would tell me it served me right for hoping.”
“I wouldn’t,” Rosalind said, with a quick, affronted dignity that was the most childlike thing she had said all afternoon.
Then she studied Cecilia with the sharp, measuring eyes that had been taking her inventory since the first day, the eyes that had once told her you’re not our mother and meant it for a kind of respect.
Whatever she found this time was different from before.
She didn’t name it, only fastened the locket round her own neck, tucked it beneath her collar, and stood.
“The east bed wants turning before the frost,” she said.
“I had meant to do it tomorrow.”
“I’ll help.” No qualification, none of the careful framing she put round things she was unsure she wished to own.
She said it as though the matter were already arranged, then went up the path toward the house, spine straight, having plainly decided this was a conversation she would keep and never once mention again.
Cecilia stayed a moment, breathing the cold, thinking of sweet peas grown where they had no business growing, and of a girl who had been the eldest so long it had become her way of standing in the world.
They were all of them carrying something here, and the house was turning, slowly, into a place where that was permitted.
At dinner, Rosalind sat beside her.
She made nothing of it, only came to a chair that was not the one she had taken for six weeks, unfolded her napkin, and put it to Gideon whether the east bed’s clay turned better under a spade or a fork.
He answered after a pause, Cecilia suspected, holding surprise. “A fork in that soil. A spade packs the clay against the blade, and you fight it the whole length of the bed. A fork lets the water through. Have it done before a hard frost comes, or the ground will make the decision for you.”
“That is what I said,” Louisa told the table, which had said nothing of the kind, and pressed straight on to the matter of the fountain fish, which had grown in recent weeks into a considerable enterprise with its own classifications and at least two disputes she regarded as open.
“The big pale one is called Admiral now. He used to be Spot. Spot was a baby name.”
“He has the same spot,” Rosalind said.
“He has grown into a different sort of fish about it.”
“A fish does not need a name in order to thrive,” Gideon said, passing the bread to Cecilia before she had asked for it. “Men have argued the point both ways.”
“They would know,” Louisa said, as though the matter were closed, “if no one ever called them anything at all.”
“That is precisely the part I am unable to prove.”
“Then it is settled, and Admiral keeps his name.”
“Tabby thinks the small striped one should be Beech, because it has stripes like the bark.”
“Does it indeed? Do you think so?” asked Gideon.
“I do,” Tabitha said, and went faintly pink at having spoken, and then, when he inclined his head as though the proposal had genuine merit, found a little more courage. “The bare trees are nicer than the green ones. You can see the shape of them now.”
“You can,” he agreed. “A bare tree tells you more of itself than a tree in leaf. It has nothing left to hide behind.”
“That is a strange thing to like a tree for,” Rosalind said.
“I am a strange man. Your aunt will confirm it.”
“I shall do no such thing,” Cecilia said, “at my own table,” and Louisa laughed without entirely understanding why, which set Tabitha laughing, and for a moment the dining room held the particular noise of a house that had forgotten to be careful.
Tabitha looked quietly delighted to have been agreed with by the duke, and Cecilia, watching her, missed the moment he glanced up.
She didn’t miss what she found when she looked back.
His eyes were on her across the candles, and whatever passed between them did not trouble to find a name for itself.
It was not the table-nod nor the shared glance over a document or a child’s welfare, and it required no common purpose to excuse it.
They looked at each other, and the plates, the candles and Louisa’s taxonomy were briefly beside the point.
She looked away first. Her face was warm in a way the fire had no hand in, and to her left, Rosalind was taking note of it and electing, for the present, to say nothing, which was kindly done of her, and very like her of late.
She took Tabitha up herself after.
“Is Rosalind sad?” Tabitha asked on the stairs. “She was quiet at dinner.”
“A little. She is allowed to be sad now and again, the same as you are.”
“She doesn’t, though. Not where you can see.”
“No. She minds being seen.” Cecilia turned down the lamp by the bed. “You might let her think she manages it, all the same. It is a kindness to let a person keep their composure.”
Tabitha weighed this with the whole of her attention. “Like not telling Gideon when his face does the almost-smiling.”
“Very like that,” Cecilia said, and came within a breath of laughing, but did not.
“I see it, though,” Tabitha said, settling down under the blanket. “When his face does it. I only don’t say.”
“That is the whole of the trick. You are kinder than you let yourself be.”
“So is Rosalind. She is kind where no one is looking, which she thinks is the same as not being kind at all.”
On the landing, Mrs Fenn was banking the lamps for the night.
“The eldest came in from the garden with her eyes red and her chin up,” the housekeeper observed, not turning round, “and went straight off to lay out her gardening boots for the morning.”
“She is turning the east bed with me tomorrow.”
“Is she now?” Mrs Fenn settled the wick. “Three months ago, that child would not have given you the time of day. You have a way of getting in at the side door, Your Grace, where the front one is barred and bolted.”
“I had a good deal of practice at side doors, once. One learns the use of them, or one does not eat.”
“Aye, well.” The housekeeper’s voice did a small thing it did not often do. “The master has marked it too, if you were wondering, which I don’t suppose you were.”
“Goodnight, Mrs Fenn.”
“Goodnight, Your Grace. Mind you, sleep. One of you wandering the passages during the night is sufficient for any house.”
She carried her lamp off down the passage, and Cecilia stood a while at her own window, the curtains she had thrown open on her first night still standing wide.
The step came along the corridor in time, back and forth, the familiar cadence, the familiar creak at the far end.
For three months, she had been hearing the man she had married for sensible reasons awake at midnight and walking off whatever would not let him sleep.
Tonight, the sound did something it had never done before.
The step came nearer. It slowed near her door, as if a thought had caught hold of him there, and for the length of one breath it stopped. Then it went on, and the creak came at the far end of the passage, and the house was quiet again.