Chapter Ten
The small chair in the Blue Morning Room had gone back to the window.
Lucian noticed it on the Monday evening after the flood, when he came in with the estate book, as he did now most evenings, and found the room as it always was: fire bright, bowl filled, his own chair at its angle by the hearth, and the second chair, which had stood three days near the fire as if the room were expecting somebody, restored to its place by the window with its back to the glass.
No one had mentioned moving it. No one had mentioned moving it the first time either. He stood a moment looking at it, with the feeling of a man handed a letter in a language he almost knew, and then he sat down and opened the estate book, and did not take in a line.
That week, by small degrees, Miss Vane became excellent.
There was no other word for it. The ball was close enough now to be counted in days, and her arrangements were faultless.
The memoranda came up to the estate office in her clear hand: supper, cards, the airing of the state rooms, each question framed so that it could be answered yes or no in the margin and returned by Felton, which saved, as she observed, a great deal of His Grace’s time.
When she came up with the books, she was done in fifty minutes where the work had lately been taking two hours, and the difference was not in the work.
She answered everything he asked. He had learned, at some cost, to ask; he asked her opinion now the way other men consulted their lawyers, deliberately, and she gave it, and it was always sound, and it was always finished, somehow, in a way that opinions between them had not used to be finished.
There used to be a door left open at the end of her sentences.
He could not have told how he knew it was shut, only that he kept arriving at it.
She was not cold. That was what defeated him.
The frost after the letters he had understood; it had been aimed, and he had deserved it, and a man can stand fire that he has earned.
This was nothing like that. She was pleasant, and she was kind to Amabel, and she thanked Patty kindly, and twice that week he heard her laughing—once in the stable yard with the Hockaday boys, who were teaching the underkeeper’s terrier to sit up like a gentleman, and once in the kitchen passage with the eldest Tremlett girl.
Both times, he had been coming towards the sound.
Both times, by the time he reached it, it had folded itself away, and Miss Vane was making some orderly remark about boots or babies, and the laugh was gone so completely that he could almost have believed he had invented it, except that the Hockaday boys were still grinning.
The Tremlett baby came on the Thursday, early and in a borrowed bedroom, and did well, and the mother did well, and Mrs Pendarvis was reported to be carrying on as though she had invented childbirth.
Miss Vane went down to the village with a basket and came back with rain on her cloak and something eased about her mouth, and at dinner Amabel demanded the whole account: the baby’s name, the baby’s weight, whom the baby resembled.
“She is called Grace,” said Miss Vane, “which Mrs Pendarvis considers a compliment to the house of Marcombe, and her father considers a compliment to Providence, and her mother is too sensible to settle the question while the chimney still wants pointing. She resembles a turnip, as they all do, and she has the Tremlett nose, poor lamb, and she will do very well.”
It was the most she had said at dinner in some days.
Lucian laughed before he knew he meant to, and saw her glance up at the sound.
For half a second, the door stood open. Then she asked Lady Seraphina whether the green silk had come for Amabel’s gown, and it was shut again, and he sat the rest of the dinner like a man at cards trying to remember what he had seen before the hand was folded.
***
It was Amabel who brought the thing to a head, because Amabel was seventeen and went at closed doors the way terriers went at rat holes.
“You will dance at my ball,” she announced in the drawing room on Sunday evening.
“I have decided. You told me in October you would be the one nobody was looking at, and you would be looking at me, and that is all very fine, but you can look at me much better from the floor than from behind a door, and I want—” She gathered herself, having evidently prepared the speech.
“I want the person who taught me to be brave at it to be at it.”
There was a silence of the kind that has furniture in it. Lucian, at the table with the newspaper he was not reading, kept his eyes on the page.
“My dear,” said Miss Vane, and her voice was kindness itself, which he was learning to hear as her best armour, “someone must manage the supper, and Mrs Pike cannot. A ball is a battle. The guests are the army, and I am the commissariat, and the commissariat does not dance, and the army does not thank it, and that is the whole nature of the thing. You will be so busy being looked at that you will not have time to notice where I am.”
“Then the supper can…”
“Amabel,” said Lady Seraphina mildly, and the girl pressed her lips together.
Lucian put down the newspaper. He had got as far as “Miss Vane will…” and the rest of the sentence was already in his mouth: …attend, it is settled, I will engage a woman from Exeter for the supper.
The whole arrangement was complete in his head between one breath and the next, every difficulty provided for, nothing left for anyone to do but be grateful.
He heard it coming. He stopped it. The effort was nearly physical, like checking a horse at a fence already half jumped.
“Do you wish to attend, Miss Vane?” he said. “As a guest. The supper can be provided for.”
He asked it plainly. He asked it, he thought, exactly as one ought, and he waited, and the room waited, Amabel leaning forward, his aunt’s needle stopped over her work.
Miss Vane looked at him across the drawing room, and her face was perfectly pleasant, and there was nothing in it to read at all.
“No, Your Grace,” she said. “Thank you. I had rather be of use.”
And that, since he had asked, and she had answered, was the end of it. Asking was the lesson he had learned, paid for in a fortnight of fire screens, and asking had been performed, and an answer had been received, and a man could only act on the answers he was given.
Amabel looked at her brother as though he had dropped the only egg.
Lady Seraphina’s needle resumed. Lucian took up the newspaper again and read the same paragraph about the price of wheat four times, with the sensation, which he could not account for and disliked extremely, of having been handed the correct change for the wrong purchase.
***
He took the question to his aunt the next morning, sideways, as he took all such questions, over the estate correspondence in her sitting room.
“Miss Vane seems…” he said, and stopped, having no end for the sentence.
“Yes,” said Seraphina, “she does.”
“She is not unhappy. The work is in order. She laughs, the staff are devoted to her, Amabel quotes her like an authority. I have no complaint to make. I have asked her wishes where they touch her, and she gives them, and they are always reasonable.” He frowned at a bill for wax candles as though it owed him money.
“And the sum of it is wrong, and I cannot find the error.”
His aunt looked at him for a long moment over her spectacles, with an expression he remembered from boyhood, the one that meant she was deciding how much arithmetic he could survive.
“She has remembered what the ball means,” she said at last.
“That Amabel is launched.”
“That Miss Vane’s chief reason for being here is nearly accomplished.”
“The arrangement runs to Lady Day.”
“Yes,” she said. “And you may extend it, renew it, make it permanent in some form or other. You are a rich man, Lucian. You may go on purchasing Miss Vane’s presence by the quarter for years, and she will be punctual, and excellent, and you will never once in your life find the error you are looking for, because it is not in the accounts. ”
She took up her pen. “That is all the arithmetic I have for you. The candles are dear because the chandler knows you do not check the bills. Check the bills.”
He went down to his study and drafted a memorandum.
It was a good memorandum; his memoranda were always good.
It proposed, in fair-copy terms, a permanent establishment for Miss Vane at Marcombe upon the expiry of the present arrangement, housekeeper in form or in title as she preferred, terms generous, her position made independent of her brother forever, the whole of it sound, sensible, unanswerable, a roof built over her against all weather.
He read it through twice. Somewhere in the second reading, he heard it, faintly, as she would hear it: the price fixed, the parcel relabelled, the right of way renewed on fresh terms, and he sat for a while with the paper in front of him and the pen dry in his hand.
He did not tear it up. It was sound, and some part of him still could not part with a sound thing.
He put it in the drawer, under the rent ledgers, unsigned, and turned the key, and was aware as he did it that he had learned something in the autumn after all, though it was a poor, lopsided sort of learning that told a man what not to do and then fell silent on every other point.
That evening, he sat late in the Blue Morning Room. The house was quiet; the fire burned down; the bowl on the table had been filled that day with holly, very bright against the blue, which meant she still came into the room, at some hour when he was not in it, and tended it, and went away.
Before he took his candle up, he crossed the room and moved the small chair from the window to the hearth, setting it where it had stood before—not too near his own, near enough—and stood a moment looking at the arrangement like a man posting a letter with no direction on it.
In the morning, the chair was back at the window.
He let it be.