Chapter 28
She told him at the second milestone.
She had not meant to. She had climbed down the theater steps and through the crush of linkboys and lamps determined to keep it to herself, on the grounds that it was not her story to tell and that a woman who had asked to be left alone was owed exactly that.
Then the carriage turned out of Haymarket, and Colin remarked, “You have been pale since the interval,” and the whole of it came out of her in one piece.
He did not interrupt. He did not once ask whether she was certain, which she had braced for. He sat opposite her in the dark with his hat on his knee and let her get to the end of it.
When she had finished, there was only the rumble of wheels for a while.
“Gray gown,” he said at last. “Fair. Five-and-twenty or thereabouts. Very still about the hands.”
“You know her?”
“I have never met her in my life, but I have read four of her letters.” He turned his hat over. “They are in a box in my study. I could have picked her out of that corridor in a moment, but I did not know she would be in the theater tonight. She was three feet from me, and I never saw her.”
“She did not want you to.”
“No.”
“She was seeking me. She waited for me to come out.” Leonora swallowed. “She stood in the cold end of a corridor during the first act on the chance that I might walk down it.”
Colin was quiet for a moment.
“Then she is braver than I am,” he declared. “Which I did not expect to say tonight.”
“What will you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Colin”
“There is nothing to do.” He said it without any coldness, which was worse.
“You have given me her Christian name and a village in Shropshire, and that is precisely enough to find her and not nearly enough to be careful with her. If I write to Shropshire, somebody opens the letter. If I send a man, he asks in an alehouse. A duke making inquiries about a widow is not a normal thing, and she has a wedding in front of her and a husband of sixty who does not know.” He turned the hat over.
“I could ruin that woman by Michaelmas simply by wanting to be generous to her.”
Leonora sat with that.
“There is one thing,” she spoke up.
“Go on.”
“Katherine is not in the marriage contract,” Leonora said. “She cannot be. That paper covers the children of this marriage and she is not one of them, which means every penny she will ever have has to be put there by you, on purpose, in a separate instrument.”
“It is drawn already. Fenwick had it in March, before I had ever heard your name.”
“Then let there be a second sum,” Leonora suggested. “Small. Paid through a solicitor in a town she has no connection to, to a woman he need never name to anybody, arriving twice a year without a letter. Nobody would have to know where it came from. Only she would know.”
Colin was silent for a moment.
“You have thought about that since the interval.”
“I have thought about nothing else since the interval.”
“It can be done.” He turned the hat over. “It will be done on Monday. And it will not be small.”
“Colin.”
“What did she ask you for?”
“Nothing. That is the extraordinary part. She asked me for nothing at all. She asked whether Katherine was well, and I told her about the tooth, and the crawling, and that she will not eat unless somebody sings to her.” Leonora’s eyes had filled again, and she let them, because it was dark.
“And I told her that she laughed at you first.”
She heard him breathe out.
“You should not have told her that.”
“Why?”
“Because it was mine,” Colin said. “I would have given it to her, and now I cannot.”
He turned his face to the window, and Leonora understood, with a small cold shock, that her husband was very close to weeping and had turned to the glass pane so she would not have to sit opposite it.
She did not reach for him. That was the hardest thing she had done in a fortnight. Her hands were in her lap; it would have taken nothing to reach across the eighteen inches between them. Instead, she sat on both of them, looked at the window, and counted milestones.
If I touch him now, he will remember what he thinks he is. He will put his hand over mine and be grateful, and then he will be somewhere else by Friday. I would rather have him weeping at a window than gone.
“She asked me to tell Katherine whatever I found kindest,” she said. “When she is grown. She said she would rather the child thought her dead than believed she was not wanted, and she left it to me, to a woman she had never spoken to before tonight.”
“And what will you tell her?”
“The truth. When she is old enough to bear it.” Leonora wiped her face. “That she was loved by three people before she could speak, that one of them gave her up in the dark because it was the only way to keep her, and that it cost her everything and she has never once stopped paying for it.”
The carriage rumbled on for a long while.
“Leonora.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you,” Colin rasped.
Leonora waited all the way past Hounslow for him to say something else, but he never did.
Katherine crawled across the drawing room carpet on Tuesday.
She had been threatening it since Sunday.
She had gotten on her hands and knees, rocked, and hitched.
Once, she had tumbled backward under a table and been furious about it.
And then, on Tuesday morning, without warning, she put out one hand and then the other, and crawled across four feet of Turkish carpet in pursuit of an orange cat, and everybody in the room lost their minds.
“She’s off!”
“Mind the fire poker, Bess.”
“Oh, look at her crawl! Look at her, the wicked thing.”
Mercutio, who had spent nine years being a menace to the county, took one look at what was coming toward him and leapt up onto the sofa’s back, where he sat with his tail wrapped round his hind legs in an attitude of profound betrayal.
Katherine sat down on the carpet and squealed.
“He’ll come back,” Leonora said, scooping her up. “He always comes back; he cannot help himself. It is the great tragedy of his life. Again. Go on. From the beginning.”
They did it nine more times before luncheon.
“You are the ruin of that cat,” Mrs. Pike said from the doorway, holding a pile of mending in her arms.
“He adores it.”
“That animal has bitten every soul in this house at least once, and he is sitting on the back of that sofa at this moment waiting for her to come at him again. He will let her get within a foot, and then he will move ten inches and no further.” Mrs. Pike sat down.
“He’s doing it on purpose. He is teaching her to crawl. ”
“He is not.”
“Watch him.”
Leonora watched him. Mercutio waited until the baby was within a foot, then moved away ten inches and sat down again.
“Oh,” she murmured.
“There’s a great deal of that in this house if you know where to look for it,” Mrs. Pike said, threading her needle.
By Wednesday, the baby could cross the room. By Thursday, she had discovered the door.
Later in the afternoon, coming in from the garden with grass on her hem and the baby under one arm, Leonora glanced up at the house and saw her husband standing at the gallery window. He did not move away.
That was new.
He stood there without moving and let her see him.
Leonora stopped on the grass and watched him, and after a moment, she went indoors.
“You should be out there,” Mrs. Pike urged.
“So you have said.”
“I shall go on saying it.” She put the tray down. “She’s been on the lawn for three hours, Your Grace. The child has crawled the length of it twice, and you have stood at this window for the better part of both.”
Colin did not answer.
“You could go down.”
“If I went down, they would not be so happy.”
Mrs. Pike was quiet for so long that he turned around.
She had set the tray down on the window seat at some point without his hearing it, and she was standing in the middle of the gallery with her hands empty at her sides, and she was crying. He had only seen her cry twice in thirty years, and both of those times there had been a coffin in the house.
“Mrs. Pike.”
“That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard a man say, and I nursed your father.”
“Don’t.”
“I shall say it, and then I shall go, and you may ring if you want anything.” Her chin wobbled.
“That child laughed for the first time at you. Not at her. At you, in a drawing room, with a spoon in your mouth. I was in the passage with the linen and I heard it through a closed door, and I stood there and cried like a fool, and I have carried it around with me ever since, and it has been the great comfort of my old age. Now, you are standing at the window, telling me that the two of them do better without you in the room.”
“They do.”
“They are waiting for you,” Mrs. Pike stressed. “Both of them. One of them is too young to know it, and the other is too proud to say it. And one day soon, they will stop.”
She went out.
Colin stood at the gallery window in the long light, with sixty Walford ancestors at his back and a canvas eleven feet wide under a black Holland cover behind him, and watched his wife carry his niece into the house.