Chapter Thirteen
The carrier set her down at the foot of Larkwell hill, and for the length of the walk up to the church, no one in the world knew where Elowen Vane was.
She had not planned it as an escape. There was a crate of Amabel’s borrowed books to go back to Mrs Carne, who kept the parish library out of the rectory parlour now that her husband was three years dead and the new rector lodged at Combe.
The books had to go back before the ball or they would not go back at all.
And the Duke had arranged her week so that she need not go down to the mill row, and had said nothing whatever about Larkwell St Anne, three miles the other way, where the relief did not reach and her name was not known.
So she had taken the crate and the carrier’s cart, told Patty she would be back by dark, and gone.
It was a still grey day with no rain in it, only the smell of rain. The lane up to the church was deep in beech leaves, and she walked it with the crate against her hip and met no one.
No bells could reach her here. No cup of cooling tea waited to reproach her.
For the space of a morning she was not the Duke’s housekeeper, nor Silas’s sister, nor the useful woman lent for the season.
She was a woman walking up a hill with a box of books, and the relief of it was so great that halfway up she had to stop beneath the bare trees and simply breathe, the way one breathes when a tight lacing is loosened.
Mrs Carne’s parlour was small and crowded and warm.
Books stood on shelves the late rector had built and on planks laid over barrels where the shelves gave out.
The room smelled of paper and apples and woodsmoke, and three children from the charity school sat at the table copying their letters under the window while Mrs Carne, a round, brown, comfortable woman, mended a quill and kept half an eye on them.
“Miss Vane, from Marcombe. Bless you, you have carried the whole crate yourself.” Mrs Carne cleared a chair of a cat and a workbasket.
“Sit, sit. You are grey as the day. I shall wet the tea. And do not so much as look at the pot, my dear. I keep the parlour, and in my parlour the person who carries the box does not also pour.”
So Elowen sat, which she had not meant to do, and was given tea she had not made, in a thick cup with a chip in the rim.
It was hot. No one wanted anything of her.
One of the schoolchildren, a small grave girl with her tongue between her teeth, came to show Elowen her copybook and her crooked row of E’s.
Elowen showed her how to make the spine of the letter in one stroke and the bars in three.
The child went away pleased, and that was the whole of what was asked of her in the room.
It undid something in Elowen that the conservatory had only begun to loosen.
She had to be careful over the tea.
She was still being careful over it when the door let in the cold and a man’s voice, and Mrs Carne said, “Mr Pelham, you are in good time. The new primers are come.”
Elowen looked up.
He was a man of perhaps forty, plainly and well dressed, with a weathered, pleasant face and the unhurried way of moving of someone with nowhere he dreaded being.
There was something settled about him, as though whatever great unhappiness life had meant to give him had come some years ago, and he had made his peace with what remained.
He took off his hat to Mrs Carne and then, seeing Elowen, to her, with no particular interest.
That, in itself, was a kind of rest. She had grown used to being looked at as a problem to be placed: her brother’s sister, the woman who kept the Duke’s house, somebody belonging always to somebody else. Mr Pelham looked at her mildly, without appearing to wonder what she was for.
“Mr Pelham gives the school its books,” Mrs Carne said, “and its coals, and pretends it is nothing, and would leave the room if I thanked him, so I never do. Mr Peregrine Pelham, of Larkwell Cleave. Miss Vane, who keeps house for the Duke of Marcombe and has carried three miles of primers up my hill.”
“Then you have done the parish’s work for it, Miss Vane, and you must let me drive you back, for I will not have it said that the parish let you walk down again.
” He said it easily, already turning towards the crate, not pressing the offer; a thing laid down for her to take up or not.
“But that is for later. Mrs Carne, where is the boy who could not get his sevens?”
He sat down among the children and their copybooks. He did not take off his coat or turn the morning into a lesson. He simply leaned towards the boy nearest him, who was glaring at a slate as though it had insulted his family.
“Sevens again, is it, Tom?”
“They won’t come right, sir.” The boy was near tears and furious about it. “Six sevens. I get a different one every time.”
“So do I, to this day. I shall tell you the secret my own master told me, and he was a great fortune-teller of sevens.” Mr Pelham put a finger on the slate.
“You do not need the sevens. You need the fives and the twos, which any fool has, and you add them. Six fives is thirty; you have that one in your sleep. Six twos is twelve; you have that buying apples. Thirty and twelve.”
The boy’s lips moved. “Forty-two.”
“Six sevens.”
“Forty-two,” said the boy, with the wild relief of a drowning man finding the bottom beneath his feet. He bent over the slate to try another by the new method and forgot to say thank you, which Mr Pelham appeared to count a success.
He did three more children after that, and a knot in a girl’s sampler, and the question of whether a whale was a fish, on which he came down wrongly and was corrected by Sukey, the grave little girl with the E’s. He conceded the point handsomely.
“You taught Sukey her letters,” he said to Elowen, not looking up from the knot he was loosening. “She has been making her E’s like a row of broken gates since Michaelmas, and I had privately given them up. The spine in one stroke and the bars in three, she informs me. You have a gift for it.”
“I have a gift for being shown a thing once and finding the shortest way through it. It is not the same as teaching.”
“No,” he agreed. “Perhaps not.” He freed the knot and set the sampler straight. “But it is a useful gift to have in a room full of difficulties.”
He set the sampler straight and handed it back to its owner. “There. Good as your grandmother’s.”
He had not looked at Elowen while he said it. There was no one in the room he was performing for. Elowen knew the difference; she had spent her life watching men be kind where kindness would be noticed, and this was not that.
This was a man who came on a grey morning to a borrowed parlour and taught sevens to a sawyer’s son because the boy could not do his sevens. He would have done precisely the same had the room been empty of every soul but the boy.
She drank her tea, which stayed hot because Mrs Carne filled it twice without being asked, and was very careful indeed over the second cup.
It was past noon before she rose to go. Mr Pelham rose too.
“You will let me drive you, Miss Vane. Before you are gracious about it, consider that I am going past the Marcombe gates to my own door, the pony does not care how many it pulls, and you will otherwise wait two hours for a carrier who may not come. Mrs Carne will give you no peace if she thinks you went down that hill in the cold for want of my asking twice.”
He reached for his hat.
“There. I have made refusal inconvenient. It is the only way I know to offer a thing to a person determined not to take it.”
He fetched the gig himself and handed up the empty crate. They drove down the hill into the early afternoon with a rug over their knees and the pony finding its own way.
He did not fill the silence.
That was the first thing she liked in him without reserve.
He let the lane go by and the rooks go up. Somewhere near the bottom, he said, conversationally, looking at the road and not at her, “You are very tired, Miss Vane.”
“It is the time of year. A great house at the turn of the year is all hospitality and accounts.”
“I daresay.”
He let the pony pick its way round a fallen branch.
“My wife kept a much smaller house, and it tired her past mending. She had no duke over her, only me, and I was no weight at all to carry.” His mouth moved a little. “Or so I thought at the time.”
Elowen said nothing.
“I have wondered since whether I ought to have seen it sooner. One does not always see a tired woman. One sees the things she does, and because they are done, one forgets they cost anything.” He seemed to hear himself then.
“Forgive me. I am told I say whatever is in my head. The habit went out of fashion with my wife and has not yet come back.”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
They went a little farther. Then he glanced at the empty crate behind them.
“You carried that box up yourself when the Duke of the county has, I should think, a wagon and four men idle in his yard this minute.”
Elowen looked at him.
“I do not mean anything by it,” he said. “Only that I have known people who would sooner carry a thing themselves than discover whether anyone else would take the other handle.”
The hedges went by.
“I have been one of them,” he added. “It is a respectable way to live. A little cold, perhaps.”
He glanced at her then, briefly and kindly, and back to the road.
“That is all. I can see I have said enough.”
She did not answer. Her eyes stung once. She mastered it, and he had the grace to be looking elsewhere while she did.
He talked of easy things after that: the school, the primers, the absurdity of the new rector, who would not come out from Combe in the wet. He asked nothing further and offered nothing in words.
Yet the whole gig seemed to hold the possibility he had left between them: that there were lives in which one person did not always carry the box alone.
At the Marcombe gates, he drew up. A duke’s housekeeper did not arrive at the great door in a strange gentleman’s gig, and they both knew it without its being said.
He came round and handed her down. His hand was steady, and his eyes were kind. He held hers only long enough to make certain of her footing.
“There is generally something wanting carrying at Larkwell, Miss Vane. You would be doing the parish a service to come and carry it.” He smiled. “And the parish would pour the tea. Good evening to you.”
And that was where the Duke of Marcombe, riding up the avenue from the lower lodge in the half-dark, came upon them.
***
Lucian had been out since noon over the timber for the spring rebuilding and had stayed too long arguing with the sawyer. He was coming up the avenue cold and out of temper when he saw the gig at his gates and recognised, after a moment, Mr Pelham of Larkwell Cleave handing Miss Vane down from it.
He reined in beneath the trees, where the dusk lay thick, and did not ride forward at once.
He could not afterwards have said what kept him there. Pelham was only handing her down. He held her hand while she found her footing, no longer than courtesy required, and she had the empty crate balanced against her other hip. He said something. She answered.
There was nothing in it.
But she stood in a way Lucian had never seen her stand: easily, with her weight settled into the ground and the careful straightness gone out of her shoulders. She said something more, and Pelham laughed, and she did not glance towards the house to see who might be watching.
Lucian sat his horse in the dark and watched Miss Vane be a woman he had never once seen across his own table.
The gig turned and went off down the lane. She remained at the gate for a moment, looking after it with the crate against her hip, before starting up the drive on foot.
Lucian put his heels to the horse and came through the last of the avenue at a walk, so that they met beside the lodge as though he had only just arrived.
“Miss Vane. You are abroad rather late.”
“I took Lady Amabel’s books back to Larkwell, Your Grace. I am sorry if I was wanted; I told Patty where I had gone.”
“You were not wanted.”
It came out shorter than he intended.
“That is… the house managed perfectly well. Mr Pelham drove you back?”
“He was good enough to bring me as far as the gates. He gives the charity school its books.”
Her free hand came up to steady the crate. Her face had already gone smooth and pleasant, the careful arrangement drawn over it again like a curtain.
“It is a cold evening to keep your horse standing, Your Grace. I ought to go in. Patty will be waiting, and there is the supper to see to.”
“Of course.”
He let her go.
He sat beside the lodge and watched her walk up the avenue, the crate against her hip and her step quick and even on the gravel.
He did not call after her. He could think of nothing to say that would not be an instruction, and he had just watched her stand at ease with another man in a way she had never once stood at his gate, in his hall, or across his table.
The horse stamped, wanting its stable.
Ahead, the windows of the house came alight one by one as the maids went round with their tapers. On the ground floor, a single window glowed blue: the room where no order had ever been given to keep a fire, but where one burned each evening all the same.
It would burn until Miss Vane came up from seeing to the supper, banked it for the night, and went alone to her narrow room at the top of the house.
Lucian remained beneath the trees a moment longer.
Then he gave the horse its head and let it carry him up to the stables. He handed it over to the boy and went in by the side door.
He did not go to the Blue Morning Room. He did not go to the estate office.
He ate his supper alone at the long table, with his aunt’s chair empty at the foot of it, and said nothing to anyone about the man at the gate.