Chapter Eighteen
“You are holding it as though it has offended you,” Cecilia said.
Gideon turned the trowel over, examining it as though it might be persuaded to explain itself. “I am holding it correctly.”
“You are holding it the way one holds a thing one means to set down at the first opportunity. That is a different matter entirely.”
“I am a duke. I do not garden.”
“You are a duke holding a trowel, in a garden, beside a rose that wants planting before the ground freezes. These are the conditions before you. I suggest you come to terms with them.”
“I’ll show you.” This from Louisa, three feet to his left, on her knees in the dirt and serene among the amateurs. “You dig, and you put the rose in, and you push the earth back. It is not difficult. Even Tabby can manage it.”
“You are four.”
“Nearly five.” She demonstrated, with a flourish that flung a quantity of soil across his boot. “Now you. Dig where the stick is. The stick is where the hole goes.”
“I had gathered as much from the stick.”
“Then you ought to be quicker about it.”
“There you are, Your Grace,” Cecilia said. “You are outnumbered by persons of greater experience. You should do as she says.”
He dug and made a tolerable job of it, and the afternoon arranged itself around the work.
The whole of it had been Louisa’s notion, announced rather than proposed, as she announced all her plans.
She had come to breakfast with mud already on her boots and informed the table that the roses were going in today, and everyone was to help.
Everyone in the household but for Mrs Fenn, who had been applied to in the hall and was not long about her answer.
“I have served three dukes and a deal of better men,” the housekeeper had said, “and I never once did it on my knees in a flower bed. You may have the kitchen boy, and welcome.”
“The kitchen boy doesn’t know about roses,” Louisa had informed her.
“Nor do you, miss, but it has never slowed you.”
So, it was Gideon who came down at two o’clock in his estate clothes and stood over the bare-root roses with the narrow, considering look she could read by now, the same one he wore at his desk, only turned outward instead of in.
She had put a trowel in his hand. He had taken it.
And here they all were, on their knees in the December cold, arguing.
“That one wants to go there,” Louisa said. “Against the wall.”
“That is where the climbing rose goes,” Cecilia said. “This one stays low. It will be unhappy against the wall.”
“It will not be unhappy. It will be able to see out.”
“Roses do not see, Louisa.”
“They turn to the sun. For a rose that is seeing enough, and you cannot prove otherwise.”
“She has you there,” Gideon said, not looking up from his trench. “It is the same argument you make for the fish.”
“The fish argument is different,” Louisa said with dignity and did not say how.
“It is always different when it is hers,” Rosalind told Cecilia under her breath.
“That is the privilege of being four. Enjoy it while she has it. She will be insufferable about something else entirely by the spring.”
Rosalind worked the far end of the bed, absorbed and exact, and had at the outset put a question to Gideon about spacing, a practical inquiry that was also, plainly, the choice to speak to him directly.
“How far apart are the roots if they spread the way you said?”
“A hand and a half between them, in this soil. Closer, and they will starve each other by the third summer. You want them to want for nothing and still have to reach a little.”
“That is true of a great many things,” she observed, and went back to her work, and Cecilia caught the corner of Gideon’s mouth doing the thing it did.
“She explains it better than most grown people,” Rosalind told her, not quite quietly enough. “He does not make it simpler than it is, which most of them do.”
“No. He has that particular virtue.”
“You may both leave off discussing me,” Gideon said, “as though I had gone indoors.”
“We will not,” Rosalind said, “while you are within earshot. It would waste the chance.”
Tabitha, at Cecilia’s elbow, pressed each root down with great care, mud to both wrists and a smear of it across one cheek. “Is this one right?”
“That one is well set. You have a steadier hand than the rest of us together.”
“Can I do the next as well?”
“You may do every one you like the look of.”
“All of them?”
“Every last one, if your knees will bear it.”
“My knees are very strong,” Tabitha said, and went back to her rose to prove the point.
Cecilia was reaching for the next bundle when he reached for it at the same moment, and his hand closed over hers on the cold roots, his palm warm from the work. The contact came before either of them had readied a way to manage it, and they both went still.
“You may have it,” she said. Her voice came out level, which pleased her.
“That one wants the deeper trench,” he said, releasing the bundle, though not at once, his fingers grazing the edge of hers as they went. “The roots are longer. I was going to say so.”
“I had noticed.”
“I am aware that you had. I told you regardless.”
“What are you telling her?” Louisa demanded from the next patch of bed.
“That her roots run longer than yours,” Gideon said.
“They do not. Mine are enormous. Mine go halfway to the river.”
“Then I stand corrected,” he said, and the moment passed under cover of the argument that followed, which was extensive, concerned the comparative size of roots, and wanted no help from either of them.
An hour later, the roses were in. Louisa stood back to assess her contribution, several of her placements having wanted gentle revision in the course of the work, which she had accepted once told honestly why the new spot was better.
“They look well,” she announced.
“They do,” Cecilia agreed.
“Mine are the best ones.”
“They are all equally well planted.”
“Mine especially, though.”
Gideon, brushing the earth from his hands, made a low sound that might have been a laugh if he had let it finish.
“You are pleased with us,” she said.
“I am reserving judgement until the spring. If they come up, I shall allow the method had something to recommend it.”
“And if they do not?”
“Then we shall agree never to speak of this afternoon again.”
“Louisa will speak of it for years.”
“Louisa is the chief danger to all of us in that regard,” he said, and Louisa, hearing her name and approving of its prominence, beamed at him without the smallest notion why.
“It is too cold to admire them properly,” Cecilia said, getting to her feet. “Trowels and gloves to me, all of you. Louisa, the sacking is not a hat.”
“It is a very good hat.”
“It is very good sacking, and we want it for the spare stakes. Rosalind, would you take the basket? Tabitha has the little fork.”
“I can carry the heavy spade,” Rosalind said.
“You can carry the basket, and let the duke be useful. He has had a single rose to plant and a great deal of supervising to do over the rest of us.”
“I planted four,” Gideon said.
“You planted one and were assisted with three. I kept the count.” She put the spade into his hands. “Inside, all of you, before the light goes altogether.”
They went in with the mud, the stakes, the sacking and a quantity of strong opinions, Louisa relating to Tabitha the entire history of the afternoon as though Tabitha had not been present for the whole of it.
Cecilia hung back and kept from looking at the thing squarely until the hall had emptied, and she stood in it alone, her coat still on and the gloves muddy in her hand.
The arrangement was not the heart of it, and had not been for a while.
Under all of it, plainer than the rest, was the man who drew conservatories on south walls for no one in particular and had looked at her, once, over a rose bed, as though she were the most ordinary and necessary thing in his sight.
There was no smaller word for it, and she gave up hunting one.
The fear came a beat behind, as it always did.
She had built something with nothing practical left in it, an end sitting inside it from the first, and what stood after the guardianship was settled, she could not govern.
Who else would have you? Lady Foskett’s voice came, but she put it away and went to wash the garden from her hands.
***
In the library that evening, she had a natural history open on her knee and had not read a word of it.
“You have held that page a long while,” Gideon said.
“It is a very good page.”
“You have not turned it once since I sat down.”
“I am savouring it. Some pages reward a slow reader.”
“And what is on the page that it holds you so?”
“The winter habits of the dormouse. Riveting. They sleep for months and wake thinner and a great deal crosser than they went to sleep.”
“You have invented that.”
“I have invented none of it. You may read it yourself when I am done, in a year or two, if I am quick.”
He let that stand. He believed none of it, plainly, but chose not to press, which was its own form of attention. For a while, there was only the small business of the room, his pen, the settling coals, the wind working at the bare beeches beyond the glass.
“They worked well together today,” he said at last. “The three of them. I had not expected Rosalind to take instruction from anyone.”
“She takes it from you because you do not condescend to her. She has had a great deal of condescension and very little instruction. She knows the difference.”
“She is like her father in that. Arthur could not abide being managed either.” He turned a sheet of his report and did not read it. “Tabitha spoke to me twice today without being spoken to first. That is new.”
“She is deciding the table is safe. It takes her a while to decide a thing, and then she does not undecide it.”
“And the youngest decides everything in under a second and is wrong half the time and never the least troubled by it.”
“Louisa will rule a county one day,” Cecilia said, “and the county will never notice it happening.”
“Heaven help the county.” He set the pen down.
“You like them,” she said. “You did not expect to, but you do.”
“I expected to do my duty by them. I had thought that was the most I had in me to offer.” He turned the pen over once in his fingers. “The accounting has come out otherwise.”
“They like you as well. You may as well know, since no one in this house will say a kind thing to your face if they can avoid it.”
“You are saying one now.”
“I am the single exception, and I do not mean to make a habit of it.”
“You will ruin my reputation.”
“You have no reputation in this house for kindness. Your reputation is for being right about drains and saying so at considerable length. It is quite safe for me.”
“That is a relief,” he said. “A man ought to be known for something he can depend upon.”
He looked at her across the fire a moment longer than the remark had earned, then let it go, and neither of them said the larger thing that had been in the room since the garden.
He took the report up again. “If the low rose by the wall takes, the whole bed will want rethinking by next autumn. You will have opinions about it.”
“I expect I shall have a great many.”
“Good. I had counted on it.”
And there it was, the thing she could not have asked him for and now could not give back: a next autumn handed across the hearth without ceremony, as though, of course, she would be standing in that garden a year on, arguing about roses, as though the matter were long settled and had only wanted saying aloud.