Chapter Twenty-Two
“You are hiding again,” said Louisa.
“I am not hiding. I am working.”
“Your pen is not moving.”
He looked at his pen. It had not moved in some forty minutes, which was a fairly comprehensive refutation of the working hypothesis. “I am thinking.”
“That is what you said last time.” She climbed onto the chair across the desk, uninvited, as she had been uninvited at every entrance she had ever made into this room. “Cece says when the pen is not moving it is not working; it is hiding. Are you hiding from Cece?”
He looked at her. The honest answer took longer to find than the question deserved. “No, of course not,” he said, and the words came a little slower than they ought.
“That is what I thought,” said Louisa, in the tone of a person who had thought no such thing, and reached for the paperweight.
“Put that down. It is older than your grandmother.”
“Then it has had a great deal of practice at sitting still, which is more than can be said for some in this house.”
It had been three days since the library.
He had told himself the thing was a product of conditions, the firelight and the proximity, and by morning, he believed none of it.
He had fled, which was the accurate word, and had taken his meals in the study since, which was precisely the conduct a person not yet five would name, and had named, as hiding.
Vane’s letter came with the afternoon post. He read it twice, set it down, and went to find Mrs Fenn, since it named her in every line but the signature.
She was in the still-room with the household keys and an air of advanced innocence that answered the question before he put it.
“Lord Vane writes,” he said, “that I have dined in my study three days running while my wife sits alone in the library at the hours it is not usually occupied by one person. He is remarkably well informed about the arrangement of my meals.”
“Is he, Your Grace?”
“He writes that I am flinching from myself. That it is the last thing left in me that is my father’s and not my own. He instructs me to come out of my study.”
“Then his lordship and I are of one mind, which you may find alarming, Your Grace, given how rarely we manage it.”
“You have been corresponding with him.”
“Gentlemen do correspond. It is a comfort to his lordship to hear how the house goes on, being so fond of it and so far away.” She set the keys down.
“I have kept the confidences of this family for many years, and I shall keep yours the day you have any worth the keeping. What I will not do is stand in a still-room and watch a good woman eat her dinner alone three nights together while the master broods at a cold desk, and call that discretion. If telling Lord Vane as much is a hanging offence, send for the magistrate. He will want feeding when he comes, and it will have to be in the dining room.”
“You have made your position tolerably clear.”
“I have made it as clear as I can without painting it on the wall, and I have neither the time for painting nor you the spare wall, what with all the drawings.” She took the keys up again, which was her way of ending an audience, and he let her end it.
***
Louisa came back before the light went out. She climbed into the chair, examined the paperweight, and he waited, with three months of practice, for the real business to arrive.
“Cece is sad,” she said to the paperweight.
He went still.
“Not loudly. Quietly. The way she was at the beginning, when she thought we were not watching. We were watching.” She set the weight down.
“She goes to the library, and you are not there, and she reads; only she does not read. She looks at the page and never turns it. That is what you do, also. You look at the page, and you do not turn it.”
“How do you know what she does in the library?”
“I check.”
“Of course you do.”
“Do not hide from Cece. She does not like it, I can tell, and I have a great deal else to see to without managing the two of you between meals.” Then she took the paperweight up again. “Move the pen.”
She was not, he was fairly sure, referring to the correspondence.
When she had gone, he took the blank sheet from the drawer, the one he had put back twice, and held the pen above it a moment longer than the paper required. Then it moved. He wrote little but struck out half of it and left it unfinished, since it could not be finished on paper.
He came to dinner without a note or a preamble. Louisa regarded him with frank satisfaction, an orders-obeyed sort of look that was faintly alarming on a person of her years. Tabitha glanced up, and her face stayed exactly as it was, which was, in itself, progress.
At the far end of the table, Cecilia was looking at her plate. He reached for the bread, drifted back toward her end while he had been away, and passed the basket down without a word. She looked up when it reached her, and their eyes met for a second, no more.
“The fish in the fountain have names now,” Louisa announced. “I decided.”
“You decided without a committee,” said Rosalind, who had been losing this argument for some days and meant to keep losing it at volume.
“I am the committee.”
“A committee has more than one person in it. That is the entire point of a committee.”
“Then I am the chairman; the rest of you failed to attend, and the motion is carried.”
“What motion?”
“The fish,” said Louisa, with the patience of the much misunderstood. “Do keep up.”
“I withdraw from the committee,” said Rosalind. “It is poorly chaired.”
“You cannot withdraw. There is no one to accept your resignation but me, and I decline it.”
***
The library had two people in it again that evening. She was at the settee with the third volume when he came in, and she kept her eyes on the page, which he understood and had earned.
“You came back to dinner,” she said to the page.
“I did.”
“And to the library.”
“I find the study overrated. The company is poor and the one man in it even worse.”
“He has his moments, I am told.”
“Rarely. I have it on the authority of a person of nearly five, who checks.”
That nearly reached her mouth before she put it down, and she turned a page she had plainly not finished. He went to the desk and to a report he had no intention of reading, and for the length of a breath, neither of them said anything.
“Read to me,” he said.
“You never listen. You read your own correspondence and leave me to talk to the fire.”
“I have always listened,” he said. “It seemed wiser not to mention it.”