Chapter Ten
The dancing was Adelaide’s idea, and like all Adelaide’s ideas it arrived as a completed fact at breakfast.
“The child moves like a ghost and stands like a fence-post, and she is nearly eight. She should have begun at six. Lady Harrington has offered to instruct her.” Diana inclined her head, all gracious surprise, as though the offer had not been rehearsed between them over the candles, “and we shall make a beginning this afternoon in the drawing room. Miss Prescott, you play, I presume? All governesses play.”
“Well enough for country dances, my lady.”
“Then you will play. Three o’clock.”
So it was that Jane found herself at the pianoforte with the carpet rolled back to the skirting, watching the lesson assemble itself in the long gold light.
Adelaide established on the sofa with the air of a magistrate at assizes, Diana in the room’s centre, lovely in sprigged muslin, her patience already arranged, and Charlotte delivered to the middle of the bare floor like a prisoner to the bar, her eyes going first, always first, to the bench where Jane sat, measuring the distance to her, before anything else in the room was permitted to exist.
I’m here, Jane thought at her, steadily, over the music stand. Sightline unbroken. Go on.
“Now then, Charlotte.” Diana’s voice was honey warmed for company. “We shall learn to make a curtsey that would do for a duchess, and then the first figures. Watch me, dearest, so. The foot slides behind.”
It went as any observer of the past fortnight could have predicted, which was to say the child performed each movement with the wooden exactness of a little automaton, one beat behind the instruction, her whole living attention elsewhere, and Diana’s patience, being cut for an audience rather than for use, began to show its seams in small ways Jane cataloged from the bench, the smile renewed a fraction too often, the dearest acquiring an edge fine as paper’s.
Adelaide beat time on her knee and issued corrections that corrected nothing.
Charlotte turned when turned, stopped when released, and stood.
“She wants an example,” Adelaide pronounced at last. “Robert!” for he had appeared in the doorway some minutes since, drawn by the music, and had been leaning there watching in a silence Jane was careful not to examine, “Make yourself useful. Stand up with Lady Harrington and let the child see the figures danced as they are meant to be danced. You were good for little at twenty, but at least you were good for that.”
“How the years improve one’s references,” Robert said, and came in.
Jane played. She played a steady, serviceable line and kept her eyes on the music she did not need, because what was assembling on the floor did not require her opinion.
Diana took her place opposite Robert with the ease of a woman resuming a property, the turn of her head exactly judged, her hand settling into his at the first figure as though eight years were a fiction someone else had invented.
They danced well together. That was merely true, and Jane set it down as true, the sums first, her father’s rule, and did not look up.
The gold light and the music did their gracious work, and so she heard rather than saw the small determined feet cross the floor.
She only raised her eyes when the music stumbled under her fingers because Charlotte had arrived at Robert’s side and was pulling his sleeve down to her mouth.
The whisper was for him alone. Even Adelaide’s ears, which missed little, could have caught nothing of it. But every eye in the room watched him receive it, bent low, gravely, a privy councillor with his sovereign, and watched him straighten with something suppressed and glittering about the mouth.
“I am corrected,” Robert announced to the company.
“Miss Charlotte informs me that she cannot see the figures properly from where she stands, and that they would go better…” the pause was pure mischief, and aimed, Jane realised one instant too late, directly at the pianoforte, “if Miss Prescott danced them. She is, I am told, the person who does things so that Charlotte can follow them. I find her reasoning sound and her authority absolute. Lady Harrington, would you be as good as to take the instrument?”
The silence had texture. Adelaide’s certainly not, and Diana’s laugh arrived at the same moment and cancelled each other, and into the gap Robert simply extended his hand towards the bench, palm up, and waited.
Jane sat one full bar of unplayed music with the whole architecture of the room reversed around her.
The governess summoned from the margin to the centre, the beauty dispatched from the centre to the bench, the child standing in the middle of it all like a small engineer watching her bridge take weight.
Decline, said four years of service.
The sightline, said Charlotte’s eyes, which had gone wide and fierce with something between hope and instruction.
Jane rose, and came round the pianoforte, and put her hand in his.
“The Boulangère,” Diana said from the bench, sweetly, settling her skirts. “Since we are teaching.” And she struck up the tune a shade too fast, which was its own small entry in its own small ledger, and Jane stood up with Robert Moorfield in the rolled-back drawing room and danced.
She had not stood up to dance in five years. Yet her form recalled the steps instantly in the first figure, as smooth ice yields to a skater’s stride; and what she had never before been called upon to perform, her feet acquired in the space of eight bars.
That there was a difference, wide as a county, between dancing with a man and dancing with a man who attended.
He did not perform the figures at her. He danced them with her, adjusting to her step within three measures and then, having learned it.
They moved in such perfect accord that the figure seemed to originate from both at once.
Whenever the turn brought them hand to hand, his eyes met hers before her own could reach his face, every time, as though her countenance were the very page upon which the dance was inscribed.
No partner had ever favoured Jane Prescott with his attention during a dance.
Gentlemen were accustomed to look over her shoulder towards the greater fortunes seated by the wall; but this man made her countenance his sole guide.
Charlotte solved the last of it. Midway through the second figure she planted herself beside them, arms lifted, and was absorbed without a word into the set, Robert handing her round in miniature, Jane bending to turn her, so that the dance reassembled itself around three, unequal and complete, the child laughing aloud now, actually laughing, a sound with rust and daylight in it, wheeling between them down the length of the gold room.
Jane caught one glimpse of the audience in the turn.
Adelaide sat very upright, beating time no longer.
And at the pianoforte, playing her too-quick tune with flawless hands, Diana Harrington watched the three of them go down the room, the man, the child, the governess, revolving in the afternoon light like something that had always existed, and for once in her handsome life, nobody in the room was watching her at all.
She saw it happen. That was the thing Jane took away from the whole shining unwise hour and turned over that night for longer than she liked.
Not the dance, though the dance kept arriving in her mind’s eye unbidden, hand to hand, but the moment Lady Harrington understood that the room’s attention had gone elsewhere and would not be whistled back, and the way the music never faltered, not by a quaver.
Her face remained quietly closed, like a house shutting up for a long absence.
***
The corridor took its toll on the way up to dress for dinner.
Diana was waiting at the turn by the long window, where the afternoon had gone grey, and she was alone, and she had brought no charm with her at all.
It was, in its way, a compliment. Jane understood that even as her spine set.
The performance was for people who mattered to the performance, and she was about to be spoken to as what she was.
“That was prettily done,” Diana said. “The whisper, the little set of three. Did you teach her the trick of it, or is she clever all on her own? No, don’t answer, it’s the same either way.
” She turned the rings on one finger, unhurried, examining Jane with the frank thoroughness of a woman pricing a rival’s gown.
“I am going to do you a kindness, Miss Prescott, because no one else in this house will. You are new to this country, so you cannot know how it goes, but I have watched it from the beginning of the world. A gentleman is charming to a governess. The governess, sensible, plain-living, no fool at all, begins, against every intention, to construe. The household notices before she does. The neighbourhood notices before the household. And then one morning the thing has a name in every servants’ hall in the county, and the gentleman is very sorry, and weds as he was always going to wed, and the governess is on the London coach with a character too warm in one particular to be shown anywhere respectable.
” She let it sit. “It is not wickedness. It is only weather. I am telling you which way it blows.”
“You are kind, my lady.”
“I am practical, which outlasts kind.” Diana’s eyes were perfectly level, and there was no anger anywhere in them, which was somehow worse.
Only assessment, and a first faint shadow of something Jane had never expected to see there and could not immediately name.
“There are agencies in town that answer to me. Say the word before quarter-day, and you would go to a countess’s schoolroom with a character to make Mrs Wilkins weep, better than anything you’ll carry out of this house later, and later, Miss Prescott, is coming. I pay my debts in advance. Ask anyone.”
“And Miss Charlotte?”
“Is a child, and will be sensibly educated, and in a year will remember you as children remember governesses, which is warmly and not at all.” The rings stopped turning.
“That distresses you. How interesting. You’ve let it become real, then, the little kingdom, the ribbons on the door handles.
Oh yes, I notice things too. It is the one habit Mrs Moorfield and I share.
” She stepped closer, and her voice came down to its working register, quiet and entirely without theatre.
“Hear the whole of the kindness. I have a widow’s settlements and the patience of the grave, and I have been poor, which you would never guess, and I will deny.
I know to the shilling what your position is worth and to the day how long positions last. You cannot afford this house, Miss Prescott.
I could not have afforded it at your age either. That is not a threat. It is a costing.”
“Then we may deal plainly at last, my lady, for costing is my trade too.” Jane’s voice came out the way it had over the ledgers, quick and level, before she could school it, and she watched the flicker of surprise land, and did not regret it.
“You have priced everything in this house but one item. The kingdom, as you call it, is not mine and never was. It is Miss Charlotte’s, and it does not transfer with the property. Good evening.”
She curtseyed, precisely, to the exact depth owed a baron’s widow by a merchant’s daughter, and walked on down the corridor at an unhurried pace, her heart going like a smith’s hammer.
It was Diana, this time, who stood at the window and watched another woman the whole length of a passage, and Jane, counting her own steps to keep them slow, carried the knowledge of it between her shoulder blades like a hand of cards she had no intention of showing.
Now I am worth watching to two of them. My father would say the price of a thing is what the buyers bid, and the bidding, Janie, has begun.