Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Are you staying forever now?” said Louisa.
She said it at the breakfast table, before the toast had come, in the voice she kept for confirming arrangements she had already settled and wished to put on the record.
“Yes, forever,” said Cecilia.
“Good. I shall tell the fish.” Louisa returned to her porridge, the matter filed.
They had come down together, which announced itself without a word, and Mrs Fenn had been at the foot of the stairs with the coffee, had looked at the arm Cecilia held, and said nothing, only smiled to herself, small and exact, and gone away to her kitchen.
“I dreamed of the horse again,” Louisa announced. “He has two new words. Both of them French.”
“And what were they?” Cecilia asked.
“I could not say. They were in French.”
“A recurring difficulty,” said Gideon, sorting the post into his three piles.
“You could learn French and ask him.”
“I am reliably informed that I have a great many calls upon my time.”
“Rosalind could learn it. Rosalind learns everything.”
“I am learning estate management,” said Rosalind, without looking up from her book. “It is more useful than horses, and it has fewer verbs.”
“French has the most useful verbs of any language. The horse said so.”
“The horse,” said Rosalind, “is not a reliable authority on languages, being imaginary.”
“He is not imaginary. He is asleep. There is a difference, and you of all people ought to respect it.”
Cecilia poured her tea and added her two spoons of sugar, more than was fashionable, a thing she had stopped apologising for in November, and from across the table, without looking up from his letter, Gideon reached over and put a third spoon into her cup and slid it back.
She looked at the cup, and then at him. He had not looked up.
“You always know,” she said.
“I always know.”
Louisa, in the middle of a point about whether the largest fish was a natural leader or an elected one, stopped and studied the pair of them. “You are different.”
“Are we?” asked Gideon.
“You are louder, except you are making no noise at all. It is like the sun coming out after the rain has stopped, not loud, only a different sort of bright.”
“That is a very accurate description,” said Gideon.
“I know. I am very accurate. Tabitha thinks so as well.”
“I do,” said Tabitha, going faintly pink at being cited, and the table held for a moment the particular noise of a house that had forgotten to be careful.
***
Cecilia found her in the corridor afterwards, having come early from her practice.
“It is good that you are staying,” Tabitha said, having crossed and put her arms round Cecilia’s middle and held on. “I wanted to say it out loud.”
“It is good,” Cecilia agreed. “I am glad you said it out loud.”
“Rosalind will not say it. But she thinks it. I can tell because she has stopped watching the door.”
“She watched the door?”
“At dinner. To see who came in. She does not do it anymore.” Tabitha stepped back, the matter settled. “I thought you would want to know.”
Rosalind was harder. She was in the library at eleven, a book open and her eyes not moving across it, which meant she was thinking about a thing and did not wish to discuss it; a habit Cecilia recognised because she had it too. Cecilia sat across from her and said nothing.
“I told him to find out what happened,” Rosalind said to the book after a while.
“I know. He told me. It was sound advice.”
“I did not know whether he would. My father would have. My father noticed things.” The locket was at her collar. “I thought he might be like my father, in time.”
“And is he?”
“Not the same. The same direction.” She looked up, twelve years old, rather than the philosophy of twelve. “Are you happy?”
“Yes, I am,” Cecilia said and held her gaze.
“Then I am glad of it.” From Rosalind, this was a great deal, and she went back to the page she had actually been on. “You may tell him I said so, or not, as you please. He is unbearable when he is right about being needed.”
“He never said he was needed.”
“No. He would not. That is how a person knows it is true.”
***
Gideon was in the study, the pen genuinely moving, the drawings still on the walls.
“Rosalind approves,” Cecilia said, coming in.
“I am given to understand she told me to find out what happened.”
“She did. I have confirmed it was sound advice. Tabitha tells me she has stopped watching the door at dinner.”
He was quiet for a moment at that. “Has she?”
“You did that. Both of you did. I only opened the curtains.”
“You did a good deal more than the curtains, and you know it.” He set the pen down. “The latch, I will grant you, I have not yet managed. I have written to the carpenter this morning. It is at the top of the list.”
“Then I shall hold you to the list.” Crossing the room, she sat and looked at the drawings, the man behind the desk and the room she had once not been allowed to enter and could now walk into like any other. “I find I like this room better with the door open.”
“So do I. I had not known it until recently. It is a draughty arrangement, and I find I prefer it to the alternative.”
“It will let in the cold.”
“I mind the cold a good deal less than I did,” he said, “having lately found out what the warmth was for.”
Below them, at considerable volume, Louisa had resumed the question of the fish to an audience of either Tabitha or Mrs Fenn or both, and the winter light lay across the desk between them.
It was hers, the whole of it, the study, the library, the garden, the man behind the desk and the children below, and she was staying.