Chapter Twenty-One #2
The hope vanished as a candle vanishes: not dramatically, only suddenly, between one breath and the next, leaving the faint smell of smoke behind.
She did not say, You did not ask me. She had said it once, and he had heard it, and understood it, and done it again, and there was nothing left in the saying of it.
“That is very generously thought of, Your Grace,” she said.
“Miss Vane—”
“No. It is. I mean it. There is not one woman in a hundred in my position who would not bless you for it, and I am sensible of the whole of it: the settlement, the freedom, the great kindness of your having thought it through so thoroughly that there is nothing left for me to do but be grateful.”
She smoothed her skirt with one hand, a small and ordinary motion, and was pleased to find the hand steady.
“You have always been thorough,” she said. “It is the first thing I admired in you.”
Something crossed his face that she would not look closely enough to read. Reading it could not help her now, and might unmake her, and she had still some distance to go before she could be alone.
“You are angry,” he said quietly.
“I am not in the least angry. I have told you. It is generously done.”
He took a step towards her.
“Then tell me what it is. You have gone somewhere in this last minute that I cannot follow, and I find I would sooner have you angry than wherever that is.”
“Would you.”
It was not quite a question.
“You would sooner I were angry, Your Grace, so that you might be sorry, and we should both have something to do with our hands. But anger is a thing one spends upon a person from whom one still expects something. I have given that up, and it is a great deal more restful. I have told you before what it is to have one’s life arranged by another person.
You listened better than anyone has ever listened to me.
I have been thinking, this past hour, how very well you listen. ”
“Elowen…”
“Miss Vane.” She said it gently, and it stopped him as surely as a hand laid flat against his chest. “Miss Vane will do. It is what you will call the woman who comes from Exeter, and you had better keep your hand in.”
She moved towards the door. The room was too warm, too much his. She could not remain in it another moment.
At the threshold, she paused. There was one true thing she would allow herself to give him, the final entry in a ledger she had no intention of keeping open.
“I hope she suits you, the new housekeeper. Tell her about the chimney in the upper passage. It smokes when the wind is in the east, and she will want the window cracked against it. She had better know before the first cold night rather than after. It is the sort of thing a house does not think to tell you. One finds it out the hard way.”
Then she went.
She did not slam the door. Slamming it would have been a way of asking him to follow, and she was done with asking.
She did not go down to the stillroom.
She climbed three flights to the cold room beneath the roof, with its cracked window and grudging fire, and drew her trunk from beneath the bed. It had stood there through all the months of her stay, unpacked in fact and repacked a hundred times in her mind against this day.
She lifted the lid and stood looking into the dark emptiness of it.
Amabel found her an hour later.
She had come up in defiance of every household rule, wearing her dressing gown and carrying a candle in both hands, her head full of plans.
“There you are. I have looked everywhere. Lucian is being odd and Aunt is being odd, and I cannot get a sensible word from either of them, so I have come to you, because you are the only person in this house who ever tells me the truth.”
She stopped when she saw the trunk.
“Why is your trunk out?”
“I am sorting my linen,” Elowen said. “Sit down, if you mean to stay, and mind the candle.”
Amabel sat upon the end of the bed. She did not notice that no linen was being sorted, because she was seventeen and full of her own bright future and had come to share it.
“I have had the most marvellous idea, and you are to tell me whether it will do. In the spring, when the weather is fit, I think we should turn out the whole west garden, you and I, and make it grow properly again. Lucian said something strange about your having the freedom of it, and if we two had the ordering of it, we might make it the prettiest place in the county by midsummer.”
Her candle flame jumped as she leaned forward.
“And when I begin going to more assemblies, you shall teach me the practical things no one ever thinks to explain properly: how to judge the books, how to know when a servant is frightened instead of idle, and how to tell when a house is beginning to go wrong before anyone admits it. Then, when I have a house of my own, I shall not be taken in by every smooth account put before me. We shall go on exactly as we are, only better, for ever.”
She beamed, the whole golden structure complete in her mind.
“Say it will do. You always say we shall see, and we shall see means yes. Say it will do.”
Elowen looked at the girl she had taught to read a column of figures, to be brave in a green gown, and to believe, against the evidence of her short life, that she was neither stupid nor forgettable.
Amabel had built a future upon the simple assumption that the one person who had never failed her would continue to be there, as the warm rooms continued, and the laid fires, and the answered bells: quietly, reliably, on no one’s order.
“We shall see,” Elowen said.
“That means yes.”
Satisfied, Amabel talked a little longer of the garden, the assemblies and a bonnet she had seen. Then she yawned enormously and allowed herself to be sent back to bed with the candle and a kiss upon the temple.
She went without knowing that anything in the world had changed.
It was the last kindness Elowen found she could manage that night: to let the girl keep the evening whole.
When Amabel had gone, Elowen knelt beside the open trunk.
She did not begin to pack. Not yet.
There was something to be done first.
It was the thing she always did, the thing so deeply set in her that she no longer needed to decide upon it.
She carried the candle down to the stillroom, took out the household books, the stillroom book and a quire of fair paper, and began, in her small clear hand, to write everything cleanly for the woman who would come from Exeter: which chimneys smoked in an east wind; which bells were apt to be mistaken for one another; where the spare wheels were kept; how the linen was best turned; which ovens ran slow; which servants required watching and which only kindness; and the hundred other small truths that no inventory ever recorded and every good housekeeper paid dearly to learn.
She would leave it all in order.
She would leave nothing undone and nothing by which they might be forced to miss her. Her departure would cost the house as little as she could contrive.
It was the only form of going she knew how to manage.
And if she was to be set down at last, after a life in which no one had carried her far, she would at least choose the hour herself and walk out upon her own two feet. She would not wait, smiling, to be lifted.
A cup of tea stood at her elbow where Patty had left it, full and cooling beside her work.
Tonight, Elowen did not even pretend she might drink it.
She let it stand.
She had a great deal of writing to do, and the days, as she had always said, were full, and there was no time, there had never once been time, for the cup that was poured for her own self and drunk by nobody.