Chapter 36
Leonora got back at half past eight, in the dark, expecting nothing at all.
That was the state she had arranged herself into on the road. She had spent twenty-two miles making a list of what she would say and when she would say it, and the list ended with the words in the morning, because there was no possible version of this that could be done tonight.
She had made the list at Hounslow and gone over it twice by Slough.
In the morning, not tonight. Tonight I shall go up and sleep, because I have not slept properly since Sunday and there is nothing in the world so certain to make a woman say the wrong thing.
In the morning, I shall ask him to sit down, and I shall tell him that I am going to stay at my mother’s for two months, that I should like to take Katherine, and that I shall come back at Michaelmas. And he will say yes.
That is the issue. He will say yes before I have finished speaking. He will arrange the carriage himself and be kind about it, and I shall have to sit in a room and watch him be kind.
And then I will have done it. Nineteen days will become two months, and two months will become the way we live.
She was so absorbed in the list that she was halfway across the hall before she registered the light spilling out of the drawing room. Then she heard the singing.
She stopped with her bonnet half untied.
Somebody in that room was singing the verse about the cat and the fishing boat. Badly. In an accent that came from no county in England.
She walked down the corridor without breathing and stopped in the doorway.
The furniture had been pushed back against the walls, and every candle in the room was burning.
Katherine was sitting upright in her chair with a cloth round her neck and her mouth slightly open, and walking around her chair in a wide stamping circle, with a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, was Colin.
He was the gull. He had one arm out, and he was wheeling.
Leonora put both hands over her mouth.
He mimicked the sea, which involved considerably less skirt than her version and was the worse for it. He arrived at the mast in four enormous strides and delivered the spoon, and Katherine took it without appearing to notice.
“That is the fourth. There are two more, and then I shall be permitted to stop,” he declared in the voice of a man reading out a total.
Then he turned around and saw her.
They looked at each other across the candlelit room for a moment.
“How was the pall-mall?” he asked, out of breath.
“I lost.” Leonora’s voice came out almost steady. “Nobody else in that family is remotely keen on letting me win.”
“No.”
“Alexander lost eleven shillings and blamed a cloud.”
“That sounds correct.”
He put the bowl down on the armrest.
Leonora stepped into the room, and the two of them stood on the carpet with the baby between them and about four feet of air. Neither of them spoke for long enough that Katherine got bored and shouted at them.
“She has had five spoonfuls,” Colin said. “I have kept count.”
“Of the pap?”
“Of the pap. Mrs. Ellis had her at four and she fed well enough, so we are not talking about a child going hungry. We are talking about the spoon, which she has refused from every person in this house since Sunday, and she has taken five of them from me this evening.”
“Five is a great many.”
“I know. I asked.” He wiped his hands on a cloth that had plainly been doing that job for some time.
“Mrs. Pike had her at noon and got two into her. At four, she got none at all. At six, she came and told me so in a voice that I have been hearing since I was four years old and have never once been able to ignore.”
“So you sang.”
“I did not sing at first. I attempted to reason with her.”
“With Katherine.”
“For eleven minutes.” He looked at the baby. “She is unmovable. She has her grandfather’s temperament, and I do not mean mine.”
Leonora had to look at the ceiling for a moment. Then she looked at him. His hair was mussed, and there was pear smeared down his front. He had been doing this alone at half past eight at night, for a child who could not have told anybody about it.
He did not know I would come home tonight.
“When she is asleep,” Colin said, “I am going to the treehouse.”
Something in Leonora went very quiet and very still.
“Of course,” she uttered. “Goodnight, then.”
“Leonora.”
“Yes?”
“I would like you to join me.”
She did not move.
“What?”
“I would like you to join me,” Colin repeated. “At the treehouse. When she is down.”
“You have never once let anybody up that ladder except me, and I forced you,” Leonora reminded him. “You were extremely rude about it.”
“I am aware of what I have never done.”
There was a silence in which she could hear her own pulse in her ears.
“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll come.”
He went out at nine.
She stood at the window of the blue room and watched him cross the lawn with a lamp. Then she watched him do something she did not understand at all. He stopped at the yew walk and put the lamp down, lit another with it, set that one on the grass, and went on.
By the time he reached the beech, there were six of them burning in a line across the dark lawn, and there was light in the treehouse itself, more of it than a working lamp would give.
Leonora stood at the window with her hand flat against the glass pane.
He has lit a path. He has gone out into the dark and lit a path so that I can find my way to the beech, and he has done it without saying anything about it, because he has never in his life been able to say anything about it.
She stayed at the window a long while after the last lamp was lit.
I could stay here. That is an option. I could send Susan down with a message that I have a headache and go to bed, and in the morning, I would say what I planned to say at Hounslow. It would end cleanly, and I would be at my mother’s by Friday.
He has never once asked me for anything in five weeks. Not one thing. He has given me a house and a name and a child and a ditch and four nightgowns, and he has not asked me for a single thing. But tonight, he has asked, and he has asked by lighting lamps because he cannot do it in words.
And if I do not go up that ladder, he will never ask again. He will decide that he was right about himself, and he will be extremely kind to me for forty years.
She went to the nursery, which she had not intended to do. Katherine was flat on her back, with both arms over her head in the manner of a child who had fought a battle and won. Mrs. Pike was sitting in the chair by the fire with the mending she never did.
“She went down twenty minutes ago,” the old woman said, “and it took the pair of you to do it. He sang at her for the better part of an hour and got almost six spoonfuls into her, and then you came in and she would not settle until she had shouted at you both from the doorway.”
“He told me it was five.”
“It was five and a half. I have made him a liar by half a spoonful, and he may live with it.” Mrs. Pike did not look up. “You’ll want your coat, Your Grace. It’s cold out, and that ladder’s damp at this hour.”
Leonora stood in the doorway. “Mrs. Pike.”
“I have said nothing at all.”
“There are six lamps burning between this house and that tree.”
“His Grace lit them. I only fetched them out of the stillroom because he could not find them. I did not ask him what they were for, and he did not tell me.” Mrs. Pike bit off a thread. “Thirty-one years, Your Grace. I have never once seen that man ask anybody for anything. Go up the ladder.”
Leonora went up and got it out of the press herself.
It was at the bottom, under everything, where it had been since May, and she had not put it on since the night she wore it to a wedding-night quarrel.
She stood with it over her arm for a moment and thought about that, and then she took the pins out of her hair and put it on, and she was steadier about all of it than she had expected to be.
Then she rang.
“My coat,” she said, when Susan came. “And my boots.”
“Your boots, Your Grace?”
“My boots. I am going out on the grass and I have no intention of doing it in slippers again.”
Susan fetched them and knelt and laced them without one word about the hour, or the coat, or what was underneath it. She was seventeen years old and she managed the whole thing with the discretion of a woman of fifty, and it was only at the door that she gave herself away.
“Your Grace? Begging your pardon. But everybody’s ever so glad.”
Leonora stopped. “Everybody?”
“The kitchen,” Susan said. “Mrs. Pike. Tom’s been at the window since supper.”
And then she stepped out and closed the door behind her.