Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I am,” said Lord Everett Vane, from the armchair he had appropriated within thirty seconds of entering the drawing room, “extraordinarily pleased with myself.”
“I know,” said Gideon.
“You might express some gratitude.”
“I might.”
“You were going to spend the rest of your natural life in that study, alone, with your drawings. I prevented it single-handed.”
“You introduced me to a woman I then had to work out how to deserve. The credit is a good deal less simple than you are making it.”
“The credit is entirely mine. The work was yours. The two are perfectly compatible positions, and I hold both.” He looked at him for a while. You are smiling,” Vane observed.
“I am not.”
“You are doing the thing with the corner of your mouth that you believe is not smiling. I have fifteen years of data on the subject. It is smiling.”
“It is a draught,” said Gideon. “The window does not seal.”
“It is not a draught. It is happiness, and it is the most extraordinary thing I have witnessed in a decade, and I intend to describe it to everyone of consequence in London.”
Vane had come on a Tuesday with four pieces of luggage for a visit of three days, Gideon having warned her, dry as ever, that Vane travelled as though the length of any stay were open to revision upward.
The letter came on the second day, and Cecilia knew the hand before she turned it over, eight years of it, none received in the five months since.
Lady Foskett wanted several things she said had been overlooked in the departure: a set of charitable-disbursement accounts, a book of household receipts that was in fact Cecilia’s own, and a small, pearl hair comb, of no great value, which she described as a family item of sentimental significance.
The comb was Cecilia’s. It had been her mother’s, and she had worn it at her own wedding.
She read the letter twice, took out her own quill pen, the one she preferred because she had a preference and it was hers to have, wrote two sentences, sealed, addressed them, and set them on the outgoing tray.
Then she went to find Gideon and ask where the receipt book was kept, because she had an amendment to make to it.
She found Vane in the corridor outside the study, doing nothing in particular, simply present, as he was present everywhere, corridors being to him only rooms that had been left short of chairs.
“You have the look of a woman who has just written something satisfying,” he said.
“I have, rather.”
“Splendid. Gideon is within. He will pretend not to be glad to see me, being constitutionally unable to express gladness without a great deal of preliminary. Has he told you about the time at Cambridge when he informed the Master of Balliol that his paper on Aristotle contained a categorical error, being nineteen and entirely correct?”
“He has not. I should very much like to hear it.”
“He will tell you. It is the kind of story that improves him, and I have told it consistently for fifteen years, which means it works a good deal better coming from him.” He stepped aside to let her pass, and then did not quite. “I am glad you are here. In the house. In general.”
She looked at him.
“He was going to be alone forever,” Vane said, without drama, only as a fact. “Not entirely from choice. From a failure of evidence. He wanted someone with better evidence than his own about what he was worth.” He smiled, unembarrassed by it. “You had better evidence.”
“He had the evidence,” she said. “He had simply never been given enough chance to believe it.”
Vane considered her. “Yes. That is more accurate. I shall take full credit regardless.”
“Partial credit at the very most,” she said.
He put a hand to his heart. “You and Rosalind are going to get along extremely well,” he said, and went off down the corridor, well satisfied with the conversation.
She knocked, went in and held up the sealed letter. “From Lady Foskett. She wanted certain things returned. I have answered her.”
He set down his pen. “What did she want?”
She told him plainly, in the register she kept for clear accounting, the disbursement records, the receipt book, the comb that had been her mother’s. Something shifted in his face at the comb, the controlled precursor to a position being taken, and he said: “Would you like me to see to it?”
“No, I have handled it.”
“What did you say?”
“Two sentences.” She allowed herself the small pleasure of repeating them.
“The first informed her that the disbursement records are filed under H in the estate accounts, which she would have known had she attended to the system I described to her in my second year. The second told her that everything else she named belongs to me, and that if she requires confirmation, my husband’s solicitor is Mr Phelps of Grey’s Inn, is available on Tuesdays. ”
A pause.
“Mr Phelps is available on Tuesdays?” said Gideon.
“I have not the faintest idea. It sounded definitive.”
He laughed. “It is the sort of detail that improves a letter immeasurably,” he said. “I shall have to remember it the next time I wish to bring a correspondence to a close.”
“I did not need you to handle it. I want you to know that.”
“I know, but I wanted to, anyway.”
“I know,” she said, and it had the quality of an exchange made before and to be made again, the small back-and-forth of two people well used to each other’s rhythms.
Then she came and sat in the chair beside his desk, beside it rather than across, and looked at the east garden below the window, which looked, in the January light, like a place that someone loved.
“It needed someone who wanted to be here,” he said, looking at the garden.
“Yes. So did the house.”
“The garden will be extraordinary in April, when the roses come in.”
“I know,” he said, in the voice he kept for things he had been turning over a long while. “I have been planning for April for ten years.”
“Ten years?”
“The roses,” he said, with the faint quality of a man caught at his planning and not, precisely, ashamed of it.
“Of course. The roses.” She reached for the spare pen and drew the receipt book toward her. “You may go on pretending it was the roses, if it is easier. I shall pretend to believe you.”
“That is the most generous offer I have had all winter,” he said, and went back to his correspondence, and the January garden lay below the window, prepared and resting, the bare beds holding their mulch over the things that were going to come.