Chapter Nine #2
It came out with more edge than she intended, all the old edge, and she heard it land, and would have given a quarter’s salary to have it back. He straightened. The lamp ticked. Somewhere below them, a child cried briefly and was hushed.
“No,” he said at last. “You could not have known that. The precedents were against you.”
Which was, from him, such an extraordinary sentence, so nearly an apology and so exactly an accounting, that Elowen looked up before she could stop herself, and found him looking at her.
For a moment, the whole ruinous business stood in the room with them: the letters, the brother, the squared-up paper on this very table, all of it acknowledged and none of it spoken, because they were neither of them people who could say sorry easily, but they were both people who could keep books, and the entry had been made.
“Mrs Pendarvis will want her chimney looked at if she is to keep a fire in those back rooms,” was what Elowen said.
“Felton will see to it Monday.”
And the work took them back, the way deep water takes a swimmer.
For an hour, there was nothing in the estate office but the lists, the families, the fodder spoiled and the fodder saved, Coker’s drains, the timber for the spring rebuilding, her pen and his pacing, her memory and his purse, the two of them passing the night’s business back and forth across the table with the old quickness, each finishing what the other began, until somewhere in the middle of the question of lime for the flooded cottage walls Elowen heard herself say “we shall want it slaked by February” and did not notice the word until it was out, and he did not correct it.
It was near four when the lists were done.
She was gathering her papers, and her hands had got slow and stupid with the hour, and the cold of the dying fire had come into the room without her noticing, the way it does at the bottom of the night.
He had gone to the side table where Patty’s tray stood, the pot long cold, and she heard him ring, and heard him say to the sleepy footman who came: “Hot water and the small kettle. And two cups.”
“Your Grace, I am going up directly, there is no need…”
“There is a need,” he said. “You have been on your feet since nine o’clock, and you are the colour of the third attic. Sit down, Miss Vane.”
She was too tired to fight and too honest to pretend she wanted to. She sat.
He stood by the fire and put the last log on it himself. Dukes did not put logs on fires.
When the kettle came, he sent the footman to bed and made the tea himself. Dukes did not make tea.
He measured the leaves with a frowning exactness that suggested a man performing surgery from a manual.
He let it stand. He poured it. He crossed the room and put the cup into her hands—not on the table at her elbow, but into her hands, hot, the heat of it going up through her cold fingers like the answer to a question—and then he took his own cup and sat down across the table in his usual place, and drank his own tea, and did not watch her drink hers, which was the only thing that made it possible to drink it.
It was strong enough to trot a mouse across. It was the best cup of tea she had ever had in her life.
“Coker asked after you,” he said, to the fire. “Tonight, in the middle of it, up to his knees. He wished Miss Vane to know the drains had answered.”
“I shall write to him.”
“I told him Miss Vane was generally right, and that I had learned to proceed accordingly.” He turned the cup once in its saucer. “It got a laugh out of him, which I will admit was wanted, at that point in the evening.”
“Then I am glad to have been useful,” said Elowen, and heard, too late, which words she had picked up, the old dreary coin of her whole life, and was about to let them lie when he said, still to the fire, quite evenly:
“You were not useful tonight, Miss Vane. Useful is what a rope is. You were the other half of the thing.”
The fire spat. Elowen looked into her cup.
There were perhaps four things she could have said, and three of them were dangerous, and the fourth was nothing at all, and she was saved from the choice by the clock, which struck the half-hour with the self-importance of all clocks and let them both pretend the night was over.
She rose. He rose.
At the door, she turned, because there was one entry still open in the ledger and she found she did not want to carry it upstairs.
“Good night, Your Grace.”
“Good night, Miss Vane.”
And it was only that, no more than courtesy required, but it came across the room like a treaty.
Elowen went up the stairs holding her candle and her papers and the warmth of the cup still in her right hand, and was glad the stairs were dark.
She did not go directly to her room. At the turn of the passage, the Blue Morning Room door stood ajar, firelight moving inside it, the fire that was laid every day on nobody’s order, and on an impulse she had no intention of examining, she went in to bank it safe for what was left of the night.
The room was warm. The bowl on the table wanted fresh haws; she would see to it. His chair stood by the hearth where it always stood, at its angle, and the sight of it did to her what it always did, and this time she let it.
She banked the fire, and set the guard, and on her way out she paused, and moved the second chair, the small one from the window, a little nearer the hearth than it had any business being, and left it there, and went to bed.