Chapter 40
She woke at eleven in the morning, in a bed, for the first time in her life.
That was the first fact she established, lying still with her eyes closed and the entirety of the previous night flashing back in pieces.
The second was that the room was full of light because nobody had come in to draw the curtains, and nobody had come in to draw the curtains because somebody downstairs had ordered it.
The third was that there was a warm weight across her middle and that it was an arm.
She opened her eyes.
Colin was asleep. Properly asleep, flat out on his front, with his face turned toward her and his scar plain in the daylight and his hair disheveled. He did not look thirty. He did not look like anybody the county had ever been frightened of.
Leonora lay there and looked at him for a long while.
Five weeks. Five weeks in this house, and I have never once seen him sleep past six. He has not slept past six in fifteen years.
Then he said, without opening his eye, “You are staring.”
“I am.”
“You have been staring for some time.”
“I have been staring for twenty minutes, and I intend to go on staring for another twenty. You may either submit or get up, but if you get up, I shall be extremely disagreeable.”
Colin opened his eye.
“Good morning, wife,” he croaked.
“Good morning.”
“It is not morning. It is eleven.”
“Then it is a great deal better than morning,” Leonora said, pressed her face into his shoulder, and did not move for a further half hour.
Mrs. Pike knew before either of them came down, which was not a surprise.
Leonora had worked out on the stairs that there was no version of a Tuesday morning in which the household did not know.
The lamps had been on the lawn all night, and somebody had put them out.
His coat had been on the boards of a treehouse under her and had come back into the house over somebody’s arm.
And she had gone up to the treehouse at nine o’clock in a nightgown and a pair of boots and had not come back in until dawn.
She went into the breakfast room with her chin up.
Candles were burning at eleven in the morning, which nobody had ever ordered. There were flowers on the table, badly arranged in a jug. Mrs. Rowe had sent up eggs, kidneys, ham, three types of bread, and a dish of stewed fruit that nobody in the house had eaten in six years.
“Good morning, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike greeted, straight-faced.
“Good morning.”
“There is a great deal of breakfast.”
“So I see.”
“Mrs. Rowe was up at five,” Mrs. Pike revealed. “I could not stop her. I did not try very hard.” And then she walked out before Leonora could get her face in order.
She got through half a cup of hot chocolate before Hobbs came in with the post on a salver, set it at her elbow, and went out again with the face of a man who had seen nothing in his life and did not intend to start.
It was Peg, coming back for the tray, who did not retreat.
“Was there something, Peg?”
“No, Your Grace.” Peg looked up at the ceiling. “Only… Begging your pardon, Your Grace.”
“Go on.”
“About the other night.” The girl had turned crimson to the ears. “When I came in with the candle. Mrs. Pike says I’m to say nothing about it ever, and I shan’t. Only I’ve been so mortified these three weeks, and I’d rather say sorry and be turned off than go on being mortified.”
Leonora set down her cup. “Peg, look at me.”
The girl looked at her.
“You came in because a seven-month-old child had a fever and the housekeeper sent you. You did right, and you did it quickly. If you had knocked and waited, we should have lost four minutes. Nobody in this house is going to say one word about it, and neither am I, except this: thank you.”
Peg burst into tears, said that she was very sorry, and scurried out.
“That,” Mrs. Pike drawled from the doorway, “will be around the kitchen within the hour.”
“Good.”
Colin came down at noon, with sawdust on him, which meant that he had been out to the tree and back before he would consent to be seen at a table.
Leonora watched him walk into the room full of candles and flowers and stewed fruit and understand the whole situation before he took his seat.
“Ah,” he murmured.
“Yes.”
“How many of them know?”
“All of them. Susan told me last night that everybody was glad, which I did not entirely register at the time because I was putting on my boots.”
Colin sat down.
“I find,” he said after a moment, “that I do not mind in the least. I am waiting to mind, but it is not arriving.”
“Don’t wait for it.”
“I have minded being looked at for fifteen years.”
“They are not looking at you,” Leonora countered.
“They are looking at the house. There is a difference, and you have never once had the chance to learn it. When a household is unhappy, it goes quiet, and this one has been quiet since before I was born. Yesterday, it was quiet for the last time, and every soul in it worked that out before we did.” She sat down opposite him.
“There are flowers on the table. Somebody went out to the kitchen garden early this morning to cut them and made an appalling job of it. I would give a great deal to know which of them it was, but I am not going to ask.”
“Tom,” Colin said.
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because I have just come in from the kitchen garden, and there is a bed of pink roses out there that looks as though it has been attacked by a badger.”
Leonora put the coffee down in front of him. “Eat something before Mrs. Rowe comes up, because she will, and then you will have to be gracious for eleven minutes, and neither of us will survive it.”
Mrs. Rowe came up.
She came up at half past twelve with a dish of buttered eggs that nobody had asked for and nobody was going to eat, and stood in the doorway of the breakfast room in her apron with her hands folded.
Colin rose to his feet, which Leonora had never seen him do for anybody in that house. “Mrs. Rowe.”
“Your Grace.”
There was a pause of about four seconds in which nobody could think of one single thing to say.
“The turbot,” Colin said.
“Your Grace?”
“The turbot,” Colin said. “Both of them. The one you sent up the night the Belmonts first dined here, and the one that Thursday. I have eaten your turbot twice this summer and said nothing about it either time, and it is the best thing I have eaten in this house since I was a boy. I should have said so the first time, and I did not, because I have never in my life said such a thing to anybody, and I did not know how to begin.”
Mrs. Rowe turned the color of a brick.
“Well…” She cleared her throat. “Well, I can cook turbot on Friday if you want, Your Grace.”
“I do.”
“Then you’ll have it.” Mrs. Rowe put the eggs down and left.
They heard her walk down the corridor and through the green baize door. About ten seconds after that, somebody in the kitchen let out a shriek, a pan went over, and Tom’s voice said something that was cut off halfway by what could only have been a cloth thrown at his head.
Leonora put her napkin over her face.
“Don’t,” Colin warned.
“I have not said anything.”
“You are going to say something for the next thirty years.”
“I am going to have it engraved,” Leonora said.
She found Mrs. Pike at eleven in the stillroom, doing the accounts she did not need to do.
“May I sit down?”
“It is your stillroom, Your Grace.”
“It is your stillroom, and we both know it.” Leonora sat nonetheless. “I want to say something, and I want to say it before I lose my nerve, because it has been five weeks and it has never been the right moment.”
Mrs. Pike put down the pen.
“You told me in May about the back stairs,” Leonora began.
“You told me that he was nine and that he saw it, that he never said one word about it in twenty-one years and then made you a cane, and I have thought about it every day since. I have never known how to thank you for telling me, because it is the only reason I did not give up on him in the first fortnight.”
The old woman looked down at the accounts. “He would not have wanted it told.”
“I know.”
“I told it anyhow.” Mrs. Pike straightened the corner of the book, which did not need straightening.
“I have spent thirty years watching that boy be careful. His mother was the last person who was ever glad to see him come into a room, and she has been dead for twenty-one years. I made up my mind in May that if there was a chance of another one, I would take it, regardless of what he thought of me for it.”
“There was a chance.”
“Aye.” Mrs. Pike nodded, then picked the pen back up.
Leonora sat quietly in the stillroom for a while and let the old woman have the time she needed, and neither of them mentioned it ever again.