Chapter Sixteen
Two days before the ball, Mrs Pike came downstairs.
She came on the nurse’s arm, very slowly, one step and then the other foot brought down to meet it, the way the very old and the very ill descend a stair.
She would not be taken back up until she had seen her own room and her own stillroom and satisfied herself that the house had not fallen into the sea while she lay above it.
Elowen heard of it from Patty and went to her. It was Mrs Pike’s household, whatever the keys on Elowen’s belt might say, and a woman holding another’s place for a season did not let her return to find things altered without warning.
She found her in the housekeeper’s room, seated in the chair by the fire and looking about her at the shelves.
“You have changed the stillroom labels,” Mrs Pike said by way of greeting.
“I have written them larger. Patty could not read the old hand and was near to giving His Grace the wrong syrup.” Elowen took the chair opposite her. “I can change them back. It is your stillroom.”
“Leave them.” Mrs Pike’s good hand moved on the chair arm; the other lay curled and motionless in her lap. “Larger is sensible. I am not such a fool as to mind a sensible thing because another woman thought of it.”
She turned her head and considered Elowen with the frankness she had not possessed the strength for upstairs.
“I minded you, you know. When you came. A stranger walks into the house off a cart, and inside a fortnight she has the whole of it running sweeter than I ran it in near forty years. The girls, the master, her ladyship—they all looked relieved, and I lay upstairs thinking they must have decided I had made a great labour of something any clever woman might do standing on her head.”
She made a small sound that was nearly a laugh.
“It is a poor use of a sickbed, minding. But there is not a great deal else to do in one.”
“You did not run the house for near forty years standing on your head,” Elowen said. “You ran it with a body. I have only had to do it for a season. You did it long enough to wear the body out.”
Something in the old woman’s face gave way, small and sudden, like a stitch slipping.
“That is the first true thing anyone has said to me since I came down off my feet.” Mrs Pike looked towards the fire. “They are all very kind. They tell me I shall be up and about by spring. I shall not, and they know I shall not, and I know it, and we are all very kind to one another about it.”
She looked down at the curled hand in her lap.
“I was the quickest pair of hands in three parishes, Miss Vane. I could lay a table for forty, have the flowers done, and be upstairs over the linen before the family rang. I was never once found wanting when a bell went. Ask anyone. Ask the bells.”
Her mouth went wry.
“I can still tell every one of them by its voice. I lie awake in the dark, and one sounds somewhere in the house, and I have the name of it before I am properly awake. Library. Blue Morning Room. Lady Amabel. They are rung into me like the marks in a measuring jug.”
The fire settled. Somewhere far above them, a bell sounded once, thin and distant. Mrs Pike’s good hand started against the chair arm, her body answering before her mind could remind it that there was another woman now to go.
“There was a man,” she said into the quiet.
She did not speak as though it followed from anything. She kept her eyes on the fire.
“You will think it odd that I should tell you. I had not thought of him properly in years. But a body that can do nothing has a great deal of time for remembering, and he has come back to me upstairs along with the bells.”
Elowen waited.
“Daniel Coad. He kept the saddler’s shop in town. A widower, steady and kind, with two grown girls who wanted a woman in the house. He asked me to marry him when I was four-and-thirty.”
Her good hand smoothed the arm of the chair, slowly, as though it were something that required comforting.
“The old duchess was poorly that winter, and I was the only one who could manage her. I told Daniel, not this year. Ask me in spring. He was a patient man, and he waited. In spring, her ladyship was worse, and I said it again. Not this year.” Mrs Pike’s fingers stopped. “He did not ask a third time.”
She sat for a moment without speaking.
“He married a woman from Combe. I told myself I had the better bargain. I should have been wasted in a saddler’s house, I said. I have a good position here, a warm room, and the care of a great family. I am needed every hour of every day.”
She lifted her eyes to Elowen’s.
“And now I cannot fasten my own buttons, and there is no one in the world whose afternoon is altered by it.”
Elowen said nothing. There seemed nothing she could offer that would not be either a lie or an insult.
“The master sends very civil to ask how I do,” Mrs Pike continued. “He is a good master. But you come yourself, Miss Vane. You bring me the news of the house and ask what I know, and you have known me only a few months. That is the whole sum of who there is.”
Elowen looked at the curled hand in Mrs Pike’s lap, at the shelves she herself now kept, and at the narrow bed in the adjoining room, where the lamp had once burned late because there was always one more account to finish.
Above the door hung the bells in their rows, each on its coiled spring beneath its little ivory name.
Without meaning to, she looked down at her own hands.
They were quick and capable. They did the work of the house every day and were thanked for it, very civilly. They waved away their own tea so as not to trouble anybody. They had not yet begun to fail her.
“You are not to mind me,” Mrs Pike said, brisker now, ashamed of having said so much. “It is the sitting still that does it. A working woman should never be made to sit still. It lets all the years catch up with her at once. You will go and see to your ball and forget every word.”
She put her good hand flat on the chair arm, the gesture of a woman about to rise and take up her keys. Then she remembered that she could do neither, and let the hand rest.
“It is a fine thing to be needed, Miss Vane. I would not have you think I am saying otherwise.” A pause. “But it is not the same thing as being cared for. A woman may spend her whole life mistaking one for the other, and not discover the difference until she has no use left to offer.”
Elowen fetched the nurse and saw Mrs Pike back upstairs by the slow way she had come down. She settled her, built up the fire, and returned to the long gallery, where the candles waited and the great cold house stood in the midst of its preparations for the ball.
She did not go to the stillroom.
She went out through the garden door into the iron evening and stood on the gravel with her arms wrapped round herself. For once, she allowed herself to follow a thought all the way to its end.
She thought of a gig coming down a hill in the early afternoon, the pony finding its own way. Of a man who did not fill the silence. Of a warm, crowded parlour where the rule was that the person who carried the box did not also pour.
She had been calling it surrender. A coming down in the world. A quieter life chosen because the brighter thing could not be hers.
But Mr Pelham had not looked like surrender. Mrs Carne’s parlour had not felt like less. There had been work there, certainly, and need enough; but there had also been a chair cleared for her, tea kept hot, and an offer she had been free to refuse.
Elowen stood in the cold and looked up at the dark front of Marcombe. One window glowed blue on the ground floor, while the others went gold one by one as the maids carried the tapers round for the ball.
She did not yet know what name to give the life she had glimpsed at Larkwell.
But she no longer called it surrender.