Chapter Seven
The key turned stiff in the lock, the way keys do when a door has been shut so long the house has stopped expecting it to open.
Elowen had been given the Blue Morning Room for Amabel’s lessons.
She stood in the doorway with the key still in her hand and saw at once why it was a waste and a shame: it was the prettiest room in the house, and nobody used it.
South-facing, so that even in November the morning came into it gold.
Papered in a faded blue like a duck’s egg.
A worn Turkey carpet, a writing table, two deep chairs drawn up to a grate that had not been lit in living memory.
She did a good deal more than ready it. The house was so cold in its bones, and the room asked so little to be made lovely, and there was no one to tell her not to.
She had the chimney swept and a fire laid and lit.
She beat the curtains and brought the gold back out of them.
She set a bowl on the writing table and filled it, against the season, with the last of the year from the kitchen garden: rose hips, a few late asters, a branch of bright haws.
By the third day, the room held the warmth of its own fire and smelled of woodsmoke and the cold-sweet of the haws, and was, for the first time in years, a room a person might want to sit in.
When it was finished, she stood in the doorway, and the wanting came up in her before she could shut the door on it.
For the space of one breath, she let herself want to sit in it.
Not to lay the fire for somebody else, or carry a tray through.
To sit in one of the deep chairs of an evening with the fire going and her hands empty, in a room that was warm because she had made it warm, in a house where she belonged.
Then she stopped herself from finishing the thought.
She was a thing that had been lent. When Amabel was launched, and the house ran smoothly, and Mrs Pike was on her feet again, she would be sent home the way a borrowed chair is sent home, with thanks, and this room would be shut up cold behind her.
To love it now would only make the leaving cost more.
She did not sit down. She straightened a cushion that did not want straightening and went to find Amabel.
Amabel was in the schoolroom, not practising.
“I have decided about the Twelfth Night ball,” she announced before Elowen was through the door. “I have decided I shall dance, and not die of it. But only if you help me dress, and only if you are standing where I can see you. You will, won’t you?”
“We shall see.”
“You always say that.” Amabel made a face at the pianoforte. “You said we shall see about the new step, and then you taught me the new step. You said we shall see about the linen book, and now I keep the linen book. We shall see means yes. Everybody in this house knows it by now.”
“Then everybody in this house knows more than I do. Scales, if you please.”
“In a moment.” The girl turned round on the stool, and her face had gone from teasing to something younger. “You will be here at Christmas, though. Truly. You are not going home before Christmas.” And then, when Elowen did not answer fast enough: “You cannot. You are practically one of us now.”
One of us went through Elowen, quick and sharp, and the shame came up close behind it, as it always did, because she had no claim on one of us.
She was a borrowed thing in a fine house; Amabel was a girl who would forget her by her second season; and to feel what she had just felt was foolishness of the most expensive kind.
“Scales,” she said again, gently, “or there will be no ball to dress for,” and the girl laughed and turned back to the keys, and the noise of the scales covered what wanted covering.
***
Lady Seraphina caught her on the stairs that afternoon, between one errand and the next, which was the only place anyone ever caught her.
“Sit with me a quarter of an hour.”
It was not quite an order; her ladyship did not give orders to a gentlewoman. But it was not quite a request either, and Elowen, who knew how to refuse a request, did not know how to refuse the other thing. She sat.
Seraphina’s little sitting room was hot as ever, the fire heaped against a chill no one else could feel. She poured the tea herself and set the cup directly into Elowen’s hands, as though Elowen had come there for no purpose but to drink it.
“Drink it while it is hot,” she said. “I have nothing to ask of you, and nothing for you to fetch. You may put both hands round the cup.”
Elowen drank it. It was easier than explaining why she could not, and she had no explanation that was not the whole of her life.
“Amabel tells me you are to see her through the Twelfth Night ball,” Seraphina said.
“Lady Amabel runs ahead of me, my lady. I have promised nothing.”
“No. You never do promise, I notice. You only stay until you are sent away, and call that honesty.” She said it without unkindness, watching Elowen over her own cup. “You have done a great deal for this house, Miss Vane.”
“It is what I am here for.”
“Yes. You say that exactly the way I used to say it.” Seraphina set her cup down. “You are a gentlewoman. You have sense, education, good birth, and more capability than most men I have known. Yet you speak of yourself as though your whole value lies in what may be got out of you.”
Elowen looked down at the tea in her hands. “I do not think I said that, my lady.”
“No. That is why I am saying it.”
She smoothed her skirt with one dry old hand.
“I kept this house for my nephew when he was a boy who had no notion how. Before that, I kept my husband’s house, and before that, my father’s. I was very good at being necessary, Miss Vane. So good that I mistook it for having a life of my own.”
Elowen said nothing.
“A happy life requires tending too. That is the part nobody tells women like us. We are taught to labour for everyone else’s comfort and to suppose our own will somehow grow up by the wayside, like a wildflower, with no hand put to it.
” Seraphina’s voice softened. “It will not. You must put some work towards your own happiness while there is still time to know what it is.”
The words went into Elowen more quietly than a warning would have done.
“I would not know where to begin,” she said.
“No,” Seraphina said. “I rather think that is why you ought to begin.”
For a little while, sitting in the warmth with the emptied cup in her hands and an old woman’s kindness on her, Elowen let herself feel almost safe.
It was the most dangerous thing she had let herself feel in years, and she knew it, and she sat in it anyway, the way one holds one’s hands to a fire one knows one must leave.
***
That evening, the Duke found the Blue Morning Room.
Elowen was passing the door with an armful of Amabel’s mending when she saw him standing inside it, still in his greatcoat, just come in from the estate. He was looking about him at the fire and the flowers and the beaten curtains like a man who had walked into the wrong house.
He did not see her in the dark of the passage. She watched him cross to the writing table and stand over the bowl, and put out one finger, slowly, and touch a haw, as if he had not seen such a thing indoors since he was a boy.
He stood there a long moment, his back to the door, his hand on the edge of the table. He did not look like a duke surveying a room. He looked like a man standing in a warmth he had no idea what to do with.
The wanting rose in Elowen again, worse than it had in the morning, and this time it had his shape in it, and that frightened her more than the room had.
She had no business feeling any such thing, standing in a borrowed house with another woman’s mending in her arms, wanting from a doorway like a child at a lit window.
She went on down the passage before he could turn and find her there. She put the mending away, and saw to the lamps, and did not let herself go back to the Blue Morning Room that night.
She went in early the next morning to open the shutters before the family was down, and stopped just inside the door.
The fire she had left banked was burned through to soft grey ash.
One of the deep chairs had been pulled from its place by the hearth, turned a little, as a man turns a chair when he means to sit a while with his feet to the fire.
On the small table at its elbow stood a glass, empty, and one of the estate books, closed, with a paper marking the place.
He had sat there. In the room she had warmed, half the evening by the look of the ash, while she had been putting away mending and keeping herself carefully on the far side of the house.
Elowen stood in the golden morning light with her hand on the shutter bar and made herself breathe ordinarily. It meant nothing. The room was his; every room was his. A man might sit by any fire in his own house, and it said nothing at all about whose hands had built it.
She put the glass on the tray for the kitchen. She set the estate book square on the table, the marker undisturbed. Then she took hold of the chair to put it back in its proper place by the hearth, as a room should be left.
She left it where he had placed it instead.
And she went out to the rest of the morning with her heart going like a girl’s, and was angry with it the whole way down the stairs, and could not make it stop.