Chapter Two
The drawing room at Moorfield had survived a siege.
Robert stood in the doorway and took the inventory with a practised eye, because until this winter the wreckage would have been partly his own work.
The card table still dressed in the previous night’s battle, a burgundy stain covered the length of his forearm across the Aubusson.
A chair lay overturned and left where it fell, and one of the tall candles which had burned down into its socket with wax hanging off the mantel resembled something that had tried to escape.
The room smelled of smoke and spilt wine and other people’s enjoyment.
Latymer was breakfasting on it all in his shirtsleeves, boots on the sofa, working through a plate of cold beef with the scandal sheet propped against the coffee pot.
“You’re famous again,” Latymer said, without looking up.
“‘The Wastrel Viscount is lately retired to Sussex, where the hazard tables of London mourn him and the tradesmen of Sussex tremble.’ Tremble, my dear fellow. Vane desires to know whether we shoot today, or if your gamekeeper has given you the slip like his predecessor.”
“Where is Vane?”
“Still abed. So is Rushmere, though not, I think, in the room he started in.” Latymer turned the sheet over and gave him a lazy grin over it. “Sit down, Moorfield, you’re looming. It’s your own house, you might at least enjoy it. We came all this way to rescue you.”
“From what?”
“Respectability. Terrible affliction. Carries off men our age every season.”
Robert crossed to the window instead of the chair, which gave him the lawn, the drive, and a moment to arrange the thing he had decided somewhere in the small hours between his second brandy and his first look at the ledgers.
On the way, he passed the pier glass, which dealt him the brief, unhelpful sight of a man with dark hair, keen hazel eyes, and every appearance of being precisely what the prints proclaimed him.
He had earned the sight honestly. That was the very trouble of it.
There was no injustice anywhere in that paragraph to resent.
He had sat down to those tables and drunk that wine and made himself the object of ridicule in London, with some diligence, over twelve years, because being the family disgrace at least had the merit of being an appointment nobody could take from him.
James had been given everything else. Robert had kept failure for himself, and guarded it with great diligence, and been comfortable there.
Then a curricle had gone over on the Brighton road, and comfort had perished with it.
“Freddie.” He said it to the window. “There was a footman this morning with his eye blacked.”
“Ah. That.” Latymer had the grace to set down his fork. “Rushmere took exception to being put to bed. It’ll be made right, I’ll leave the fellow something handsome, and you know how Rushmere is when he’s…”
“I know how he is. I’ve been how he is.” Robert turned round. “There’s a child in this house.”
“The niece. Yes. Never seen her, mind, is she real, or do you keep her in a cabinet?”
It was said idly, and it landed like a key turning.
Never seen her. Three days these men had filled his house, and in three days not one of them had set eyes on Charlotte, because Charlotte, who was seven, and whose mother and father had gone out one January morning and not come back, had judged the company his friends made and hidden from it, all night, in the cold, somewhere in the east wing, while the house rang below her.
Mrs Brooks had delivered that intelligence at seven o’clock, at his door, in the tone of a woman presenting a man with the bill for his own character.
“You’ll want the carriage brought round by ten,” Robert said. “All three of you.”
Latymer laughed, and then arrived, visibly, at the discovery that no one was jesting with him. It changed his face by degrees, which Robert watched with something that was not quite regret. “You’re turning us out. You. Robert Moorfield is turning men out of a house for high spirits.”
“For frightening a little girl in her own home. The high spirits you may keep.”
“Goodness, it’s true, then.” Latymer stood, and there was a glint of real spite under the drawl then, the kind that only ever shows in a man who has been comfortable at your table.
“The sheet had you to the letter. Retired. Reformed. What comes next, a pew, and a plain wife, and prayers before cards?” He reached for his coat.
“You were better company as a disgrace, Moorfield.”
“I was easier company,” Robert said. “It isn’t the same article, though I grant the two are often confused. Travers will have your things brought down. Give my regards to the hazard tables.”
He held the door. It was, on the whole, a politer eviction than any he had personally been subject to, and he was in a position to compare.
***
The east wing kept its shutters half-closed, which had been James’s economy and was now simply habit, so that walking into it from the morning side of the house was like walking into the house’s memory.
Robert went up with the tread he had been teaching himself, unhurried, audible, nothing that could be mistaken for pursuit, and stopped at the nursery landing.
The room they had made Charlotte’s stood open.
The grate was cold, the bed untouched; upon the table, the bread on the supper tray grew stale beneath its cloth.
Her night-dress remained folded where it had been laid.
Wherever she had passed the night, it had certainly not been in her own bed.
He found her in the old parlour at the wing’s far end, and he found her the only way she was ever found, by the toe of one small shoe, motionless, beneath the hem of the window curtain.
Robert did not approach the curtain. He had made that mistake the first week, and been taught better by the sound of a child pressing herself against a windowpane to be smaller.
Instead he lowered himself to the floor by the cold hearth, an undignified operation for a man in top-boots, and addressed the middle distance.
“The house is quieter this morning. The gentlemen who were making all the noise have gone away, and they will not be coming back. I sent them off before breakfast.” He paused.
“Cook is making lemon biscuits. She says they are for Sunday, but she has made a spare dozen and put them where I could see them, which in my experience of Cook is a form of instruction.”
The curtain hem did not move. He had not expected it to. He looked at the shoe, and the shoe stayed where it was, which he had learned to count as its own kind of answer. She was listening, or at least she was not fleeing, and with Charlotte the distance between those two things was where he lived.
“I hid in this room once,” he said. “Behind that same curtain, I think, though I was eight, and taller than you, so it did a worse job of it. My mother had passed away in the spring, and the house was full of aunts, and every one of them wanted to tell me how I ought to be feeling about it. So I stopped coming downstairs.” He turned his hat over in his hands, examining the brim as though it interested him.
“Nobody found me for a whole afternoon. I remember being pleased about that, and also, this is the strange part, furious. Both at once. Pleased that the hiding worked, and furious that nobody was better at looking.”
The curtain moved.
Not much. The hem shifted, and at its edge appeared four small fingers, parting the fabric just enough to admit the passage of a single eye. Behind the gap, in the shuttered light, a sliver of blue. His brother’s exact blue, aimed at him down the length of the quiet room, steady as a sentry.
She had never once looked at him. Three weeks of trays and doorways and the backs of curtains, and this was the first time his brother’s daughter had spent her attention on him deliberately, and Robert found he was holding perfectly still under it, the way one holds still for a wild thing deciding about one’s hand, and that his chest hurt.
He inclined his head to the gap in the curtain, gravely, as he would to a duchess.
“I’ll leave the biscuits on the schoolroom table,” he said, and rose, and did not offer his hand, and did not look back from the door, though it cost him something, because being watched out of a room was the most she had ever given anyone, and he did not intend to spend it all at once.
***
Hamish Watson came at dusk, as he did most Thursdays, on the fiction that a physician ought to keep an eye on the household and the fact that he was the last man in Sussex who had liked Robert before January.
He heard the account of the morning with his boots to the library fire and his glass untouched, which was his way when he was listening properly.
“Turned out Latymer,” he said at last. “There’s a sentence I’d have wagered the practice against, this time last year. You know it’ll be all over Town by Friday. Reformed is the one thing they’ll never forgive you.”
“They forgave me everything else. It seems only fair to leave them something.” Robert leaned forward.
“She looked at me, Hamish. This morning, behind the curtain, she held it open and she looked at me. Three weeks have passed, and only now does she yield. I must know the truth of it, whether something within her is healing at last, or if I have simply startled her into it.” “What did you do when she looked?”
“Nothing at all! I simply bowed, placed the biscuits on the school room desk and left the room.” “Then it’s mending,” Hamish said, “or beginning to think about it. You did the one thing nobody’s done, my dear friend you made looking safe.
Everyone else who’s found that child has crowed about the finding.
The last governess used to pull the curtain back, did you know that?
Straight back, brisk as stripping a bed.
To teach her hiding was nonsense.” He turned his glass by the stem, not drinking.
“A child doesn’t go silent from stubbornness, Robert.
Grief that size, in a body that small, the words are the one door she can still lock.
She’ll unlock it for somebody. But it will be somebody who can be trusted not to come charging through, and, I’ll say this plainly, because you pay me to be plain… ”
“I don’t pay you at all. You drink my claret.”
“Because I’m owed. Plainly, then. It can’t be you alone, and it can’t be Mrs Brooks, who is a good woman with the patience of a struck flint.
That child needs someone whose whole employment is the noticing of her.
Someone who’ll sit outside the locked door for a month without rattling the handle.
” He paused, and something crossed his face that was not about Charlotte at all, a softening Robert marked and filed, because it arrived in the same breath as.
“Miss Blythe does something of the kind with the orphan children at the parish. Eleanor, Miss Blythe, the vicar’s sister.
She says the trick of it isn’t getting them to talk.
It’s proving you’ll still be there while they don’t. ”
“Does she,” Robert said gravely, and had the pleasure of watching the physician discover the fire needed his whole attention.
But the phrase stayed with him after Hamish had gone, the way a burr stays.
Whose whole employment is the noticing of her?
He carried it up to the study with the last candle, past the ruined drawing room, which could wait, and the ledgers, which could not, but would, and sat, and mended a quill, and wrote to a registry office in Holborn whose direction Hamish had left on the back of a visiting card.
The wording gave him trouble. What he wanted did not fit the form.
Wanted, a governess, but it wasn’t lessons the post required, and any candidate frightened of a newspaper would be worse than none.
He wrote the salary first, and made it a figure that would oblige even a sensible woman to sit down, and then, after the requirements of the schoolroom, he added a line he suspected no registry had received before, and signed his ruined name under it.
The child does not speak. Applicants unwilling to be patient of silence, or of being watched from behind the furniture by a person of seven who has buried both her parents, need not present themselves.
He sealed it, and set it on the salver for the morning post, and sat a while with the candle between himself and the dark window, where the glass, doing what glass does at night, showed him a man at a desk, looking for all the world like somebody’s responsible father.
“Early days,” he told the reflection, and left it burning for the letter’s sake.