Chapter Five
The house was quietest after midnight, which was when Lucian did his best work. The day’s people were abed, the day’s demands had stopped coming, and he could sit with the estate books and the lamp and get through what the daylight never left him room for.
Michaelmas had gone off well. The rents were in, the tenants fed and sent home content, his sister launched and pronounced charming by every matron in the county. He had said something of the kind to his aunt the morning after, over the breakfast neither of them ate much of.
“The house did itself credit,” he had said.
“The house,” said Seraphina, “is a quantity of stone. Miss Vane did you credit. The seating, the wine, the goose for ninety in the barn, and your sister’s nerve into the bargain, which I will tell you plainly was nowhere to be found at six o’clock and was found by somebody before eight.”
“Then she has done what she was engaged to do,” Lucian said, “and done it well,” and he had gone to his study, aware of his aunt’s eyes on his back the whole length of the room, and had written to thank his wine merchant, whose port had been remarked upon, because that at least was a letter he knew how to write.
Four nights after Michaelmas, his sister talked through the better part of dinner.
This was new. Amabel had sat at his table for a twelvemonth like a bird in a strange room, answering when spoken to and otherwise mute, and Lucian, who did not know what to do about it, had done what he did with everything he did not know what to do about: kept the silence company.
Now she talked. She had been down to the village with Miss Vane about flannel for the poor baskets and had opinions on the draper.
She was learning, it appeared, how one contrived goose enough for ninety tenants, on the grounds that it was a deal more interesting than netting purses.
She said the words Miss Vane says perhaps eleven times between the soup and the apples.
“Miss Vane says a house is like a watch. You may wear it on a chain and never once look inside, but somebody must know where the wheels go, or it is only a case with nothing in it.”
“Does she,” said Lucian.
“She is teaching me the linen book. Pike never let me near the linen book. Pike said it would only worrit me.” Amabel speared an apple slice, worrying it not at all.
“I have decided I am not stupid, by the way. I thought I should tell you. Miss Vane says nobody who can carry three sets of figures in her head while a footman drops a tureen is stupid, and only this week I carried four.”
Across the table, Seraphina raised one eyebrow at him, very slightly, over her wine, and said nothing with great precision.
“Then I am glad of it,” Lucian said, and meant it, and could not for his life have produced a sentence more than that. His sister, who had grown up in the same house he had, took it for the whole speech it was, and looked pleased.
***
It was past one in the morning when he went down for the rent ledger he had left in the estate office, and saw the light.
It lay in a thin gold line along the flagstones under the door of the housekeeper’s room, where no light had any business being at such an hour.
He had seen that line under that door on other nights, going up to bed, and had set it down to a servant’s carelessness and passed on.
Tonight, for no reason he troubled to find, he went to it.
Miss Vane was at the table with the household books open and a branch of candles burned low, doing by night the work the day had not let her reach. She had a shawl pulled over her shoulders against the cold of the room.
She did not hear him in the doorway. He stood a moment and watched her work, the way he watched anything of his that was running as it should.
Above her, the bells hung dark in their two rows, the nursery bell mended now and hanging straight among the rest. Nobody rang at such an hour. She was the only thing awake in that end of the house, bent over another family’s accounts beneath the silent bells.
Then he saw the tea.
There was a tray pushed to the edge of the table with the leavings of the household’s evening on it: the cups she had carried round to the upper servants before they went up, a pot long gone cold.
And among them one cup, poured and never touched, a skin formed across the top of it, stone-cold.
Hers. She had made tea for every soul in the house now asleep above her, and had not drunk her own.
He looked at her then, as he had not troubled to look before.
The candles had burned to stubs; she had pushed the shawl up against the cold without seeming to feel it; and she went on writing in the same small, steady hand she must have kept since five the previous morning, and the morning before that, and the morning before that.
“It is late, Miss Vane.”
She looked up, unstartled, and set down her pen. “Your Grace. I did not hear you. Is something wanted?”
“No.” It came out shorter than he had meant it. He had come down for a ledger and found the new lady instead, doing the work the day had been too full to hold, and he did not at once know what to say to that. He came a little into the room. “The house is in good order. Michaelmas did you credit.”
“I am glad it did the house credit, Your Grace.”
“That is not what I said.”
“No.” She folded her hands over the open ledger. “But it is the proper answer.”
He looked at the books open in front of her: the household accounts, the stillroom book, a list in her own hand that ran the length of the page and turned over onto the back. “How long have you been at this?”
“Long enough that I ought not to count it, Your Grace. The days are full. The books must be fitted in where they can.”
“And you?”
She looked at him.
“Where are you fitted in?”
For once, she had no answer ready. Her eyes went briefly to the books, then to the cold cup on the tray.
“I am generally somewhere between one thing and the next.”
He ought to have said good night and left her to it. The hour asked nothing further of him.
“Leave the books,” he said instead.
She looked up.
“They will keep. You have been on your feet for a long time.”
“Your Grace. The butcher’s account is wanted Friday. And tomorrow is full to—”
“Miss Vane. I am not in the habit of saying a thing twice.”
He heard it land wrong the moment it left him: the duke’s voice, the voice that moved servants, brought out and set down on a tired gentlewoman at one in the morning because he did not own another one. Her face closed over, smooth and immediate, like water over a dropped stone.
“As you wish, Your Grace.”
“That is not…” He stopped. He was not in the habit of explaining himself; he could not at once locate how it was done. “It was not meant as an order. It was meant…”
The sentence ran out. He tried the only other thing in his pockets.
“My aunt tells me you helped my sister find her courage, the night of the dinner, when it had gone missing. I had not thanked you for it.”
It was a graceless way to put a thing, stiff and belated, as though thanks were an entry to be carried into a ledger and ruled off.
He knew it was graceless even as he said it; gracelessness of that kind was the family trade.
But it did something the order had not done.
The closed look opened, a little, not to warmth; he could not have named to what, and she stood a moment looking at him as though he were a column that had unexpectedly come out two shillings to the good, and was not to be trusted until it had been added over again.
“She found it herself,” Elowen said at last. “I only sat with her while she looked.”
“That is not my aunt’s account of it.”
“Lady Seraphina sees a great deal, Your Grace. It must make the house a difficult place in which to hide.” It was dry, and it was tired, and it was the second time since he had entered the room that she had said a thing no servant would have said to him; and he found that he had moved out of the doorway to let her pass not because the conversation was finished, but because he could not, on the spot, manufacture a reason to extend it.
She gathered the books, and her shawl, and the tray with its dead cups, because the clearing of it was hers to do as well. At the door, she paused.
“Good night, Your Grace. I hope I have not spoiled your reading.”
“You have not.”
And she went off down the dark passage with the tray of cold cups, and he was left standing in the cold room with the stub of candle she had been too burdened to put out.
He put it out. He went up without the rent ledger, and discovered as much only at his own door.
He did not go back for it.
***
In the morning, he sent for Felton.
“Miss Vane is to have one of the younger maids told off to her. To fetch and carry, and spare her the worst of the running.”
Felton wrote it down. “Very good, Your Grace. Out of the house wages, or—”
“Out of mine. And the household books are to be brought up to me weekly. I wish to see how the house is kept.”
The pen stopped. Felton looked at him for a moment with the expression of a man who had served a family long enough to be surprised by it only rarely, and was surprised now. His Grace had never once in his life asked how the house was kept. Only that it was.
“Weekly,” Felton said, and wrote that down too, and wisely made no remark.
Lucian rode out to the east farms after breakfast and was about the estate the whole day.
He did not think of the matter again, or told himself he did not, until evening, when he came in by the housekeeper’s passage and saw, through the open door, the new young maid set a fresh pot of tea down at Miss Vane’s elbow, proud as a herald with it.
Miss Vane, bent over the books, waved it away without looking up.
The maid hesitated. Miss Vane turned a page, already elsewhere.
Lucian went on up the stairs.
The next day, he told Felton it was to be made the maid’s standing duty: the pot, at that hour, every evening, set down at the same elbow, whether Miss Vane thought to drink it or not.
Felton wrote it down. If he wondered what His Grace expected to come of pouring tea daily for someone who would not pause long enough to lift the cup, he kept the wondering to himself; and His Grace did not explain, and could not in any case have explained it, having taken some care not to ask himself the question.