Chapter Nine
The quarterly nursery accounts went up to his lordship’s study on the last Friday of the month, and it was Mrs Brooks who mentioned, neutrally, that the governess might carry them herself this quarter, his lordship having asked twice who kept them so well.
Jane understood the sentence for what it was.
Below stairs, favour travelled the same roads as news, and the housekeeper had just walked her a little distance down one.
She found the study door open and the room in a state of siege more orderly than the drawing room’s had ever been.
The great desk cleared to bare wood along one edge, and down the rest of it the estate books lay open in ranks, the home farm, the rents, the timber, the household, with paper slips standing up out of their pages like little white flags on a battlefield where someone was losing.
Robert was in his shirtsleeves at the middle of it, and he did not hear her at first, which gave Jane three seconds she had no right to and used anyway. She had seen gentlemen at accounts before. They did it the way they took medicine, at arm’s length, with the face already arranged for the taste.
This man bore a quill behind his ear and ink-stains to his second knuckle, marked by the fixed, furious patience of a hunter tracking quarry through terrain it knew far better than he.
In that moment, the shelf of scandalous prints the public papers had built around him fell utterly silent in her mind, leaving her to ponder the truth, not for the first time, and with no small irritation at herself for doing so.
The print is very small, and whole orchards get past everyone.
“The nursery accounts, my lord.”
“Miss Prescott.” He straightened, and took the book she offered, and did not put it down on the pile, which she noticed. “Mrs Brooks says you keep these yourself. They balance to the penny, which puts them in select company in this room.” He turned two pages, and she watched him
actually read them, the dates, the carried figures, the small economies, not perform the reading. “Where does a governess learn double entry?”
The question was the door, and Jane stood in front of it for a breath, because both of her answers were true and only one of them was safe. At home was safe. She heard herself take the other one.
“From a merchant, my lord. My father. Prescott and Sons, general goods, off Cheapside. He had no sons, so the name was hope and I was the bookkeeping.” She kept her voice level, a woman laying a fact on a table, not a confession.
“I grew up on ledgers. He used to set me the tradesmen’s bills the way other fathers set their daughters sums.”
“Did he?” Robert looked at her a moment, and there was nothing in his face of the small cooling she had braced for, that well-bred pause in which a gentleman quietly re-adjusts his estimation of a lady.
Instead, something opened in it, quick and almost unseemly, like relief.
He turned to the ranked books, and back, and made his decision with the same speed she had watched him throw pride out of a doorway on her first morning.
“Then I am going to do something my aunt would call unpardonable, Miss Prescott, and ask you to look at something. Not as the governess. As Prescott and Sons.”
“My lord.”
“I am aware of what I’m asking.” His voice stayed level, but the drawl had gone out of it entirely, and what was left was plainer than she had ever heard him.
“I have spent three months labouring over these account-books. I can feel the leakage by the draught it creates, yet I cannot discover the hole itself. Watson can prescribe for a fever, and my aunt can direct a household, but there is not a soul in this county I could set at this desk without it becoming common gossip by Tuesday. Yet you balance every reckoning to the penny, having been bred at a merchant’s elbow, and I find I would rather commit an unpardonable breach than be robbed.
” He stopped. “And if the asking is unwelcome, it is withdrawn, and the nursery accounts are excellent, and I am obliged to you.”
The rain had come back against the windows, soft, and the fire crackled in the grate, whilst Jane surveyed the orderly row of ledgers with their little white flags and felt the exact dimensions of the moment settle over her.
For a governess to meddle in the estate ledgers was mere presumption if she succeeded, and ruin if she failed.
In either event, it invited Sussex’s keen scrutiny.
Every year of service she had endured was marked by steady decline.
She thought of eight shillings, and two calendars, and a man’s eyes following her down a passage.
“The household book first,” Jane said, and drew off her gloves. “Small sums are where confidence lives, my lord. Nobody watches them.”
***
They worked on until the lamp grew dim for want of trimming.
She had not meant it to become that; she had meant to look, and indicate, and withdraw, but the books took her the way figures had always taken her, by the wrists, and somewhere in the first hour she stopped saying my lord at the end of every sentence and he stopped pretending not to watch how she read.
She read fast, muttering, one finger walking the columns, and she asked for things a governess had no business asking for, the bank’s letters, the timber contracts, last Michaelmas’s receipts, and he fetched them like a junior clerk and stood at her shoulder learning her method aloud.
It was the strangest hour she had spent in a gentleman’s house, and she understood, somewhere in the middle of it, why he was not humouring her.
She had been humoured before, by employers who asked her opinion the way one asks a clever child to recite, already smiling at the answer they had decided to find charming.
This was not that. When she said a thing he did not follow, he did not nod and move past it to spare them both.
He stopped her, and made her say it again, and turned it over until he had it, and once, over a query of hers about the timber accounts, said, “No, wait, go back. I had that wrong, not you,” and corrected himself, aloud, to a governess, without any apparent sense that the ground had moved.
It had moved. Jane could feel it moving under the whole hour, quiet and enormous, like a tide coming in over flat sand while you look at something else.
For four years she had made herself legible only in the register a governess was allowed, the soft voice, the deferred opinion, the competence kept small enough not to alarm.
And here was a man handing her the timber contracts and waiting, with the frank impatience of a colleague, for her to be as quick as she actually was.
She found she had forgotten the pleasure of it.
Not being admired, she had never much cared for that; it cost too much to maintain, but being used, at her true weight, by someone who had a use for the whole of her and not the polite third of her that fit a schoolroom.
“You’re staring at me, my lord, instead of the ledger,” she said, without looking up. “The ledger is where the thief is.”
“I’m learning the method,” Robert said. “You do a thing with your left hand. You cover the sum and read the date first. Every time. My brother read the sum first. I watched him do it a hundred times. That’s the whole difference between you, I think, and I should like to understand it before the candle goes. ”
“The sum is what a man wants you to see. He built it, he’s proud of it, it’s dressed for company.
” She did look up then, briefly, and found the plain attention on her that she was not yet used to and had no filing for.
“The date is what happened. Gentlemen utter falsehoods in their calculations from morning till night, yet deem it no deceit at all, believing the total to be a mere matter of opinion. But a date is a fact with a witness. The calendar saw it. So you read the fact first, and then you read the opinion, and where they disagree, my lord, is where the money went.” She returned to the page, and her voice came down to its working murmur.
“My father taught me that before I was ten. He said the sum is the face a house shows the street, and the date is what the house does after dark.”
“There.” Jane laid the household book flat and set her finger on a rent-day entry, then walked it back across four others.
“And there, and there. Look at the dates, not the sums. The sums are perfect, that’s the first thing to notice.
Honest books have mistakes in them, my lord, shillings dropped and found again, a man’s Tuesday arithmetic worse than his Friday.
These have none. These have been made, as a laundered shirt is made smooth.
” She turned the page back. “Now the margins. Every entry in this hand carries its date twice, once where it should be, and once small, against the sum. That is a working note. A man keeps a working note when the date he writes and the date the money moved are not the same, and he must remember, privately, which is which.”
“Two calendars,” Robert said slowly.
“Two calendars. My father called it the oldest music in the trade. Money that leaves on the first and is entered on the tenth has been somewhere for nine days, and it does not go there to rest.” She sat back, and only then heard how far past itself her voice had gone, quick, certain, the schoolroom softness dropped clean off it, and found him looking at her, not the page.
“Continue,” Robert said.