Chapter Twelve
“A village festival,” Adelaide repeated the words at breakfast as though Robert had proposed taking the household to a cockfight. “With the hay-wagons and the fiddles and the entire parish smelling of cider. And you mean to take the child.”
“I mean to take the child, yes. It’s her parish.
They put flowers on the church steps in January.
The whole village is decorated, Mrs Brooks kept me a list of the names, and I intend to start being a man who knows what’s owed.
” Robert buttered his toast with terrible cheerfulness.
“Miss Prescott will come, naturally. Charlotte goes nowhere without her sightline, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a fault in her arrangements rather than the best-engineered thing in this house. ”
“The entire neighbourhood shall witness the establishment assembled upon the public green.”
“The neighbourhood,” Robert said, “has been invited to see the Wastrel Viscount for twelve years. It can stand a Saturday of seeing something duller.” He looked up, and though the tone stayed light, the ground under it did not.
“I am not hiding my brother’s daughter from her own village, Aunt.
That is the end of the discussion, though you’re very welcome to continue having it. ”
Diana, who had watched the exchange over her chocolate with the composure of a woman keeping score in whist, said only.
“I shall stay and keep your aunt company. Fresh air in quantity is like candour, I find, wholesome in principle and ruinous in practice.” And her glance crossed Jane’s, brief and level, on its way elsewhere, noted this outing. Entered, this too.
The green, when they came down to it through the lime-walk at noon, had put on everything it owned.
Bunting between the elms, trestles under the churchyard wall, the fiddler and the pipe already going, a wrestling ring of boys, stalls of gingerbread and ribbons and pears, and noise, the great good-natured roar of a parish off its manners, which hit Charlotte at the stile like weather.
Jane felt the small hand clamp and the whole child go to stone, counting the crowd as she counted rooms, hunting the exits.
It was Eleanor who solved it, because Eleanor had been watching for them from the trestles and arrived talking.
“There you are, no, don’t come in by the band, nobody sensible comes in by the band.
Miss Charlotte, I have a difficulty, and I’m told you’re the person for this very task.
The little ones are gilding walnuts for the harvest-boughs, and not one of them can tie the hanging-knot, and my fingers”, she held them up, dusted gold, “have gone quite numb. It’s done with a loop and a doubling.
The quiet table, by the yew. You’d be doing the parish a service. ”
A loop and a doubling. It was ribbon-work.
It was her work, and the quiet table by the yew had, Jane saw at one glance, its back to the churchyard wall and a clear view of every approach, chosen, past any doubt, by a woman who taught grieving children for her bread.
Charlotte looked up at Jane. Jane looked at nothing in particular and observed that she had always wished to see a walnut gilded.
And the stone went out of the child by degrees, the way frost goes off a pane, until a governess was sitting on the end of a bench in the sun, entirely superfluous, watching Miss Charlotte Moorfield of Moorfield Manor teach the hanging-knot to five village children by demonstration, wordless and absolute, her hands doing the talking and the small fry attending as though knot-craft were the only language anyone needed.
And then the Ferris boy said something, some small boy’s nonsense about a walnut being a head and the ribbon a hat, and Charlotte laughed.
It was out of her before any sentry could stop it.
A real laugh, up from the middle, rusty at the edges with five months’ disuse and running clean at the end, and the village children laughed with her and thought nothing of it, because they did not know they had just witnessed the rarest event in two parishes.
Jane sat superfluously on her bench-end, with her eyes stinging and her face composed, and became aware that she was not the only witness after all.
Robert stood apart by the trestles, a mug of cider forgotten in his hand, as he watched his niece laughing among the walnuts.
Jane observed the sound reach him, striking his heart just as the first word had struck hers in the schoolroom, and watched him reveal the true measure of his character.
He did not go to the child. He turned away, deliberately, and gave his attention to old Hobbs the sexton and the question of the church roof, so that the laugh should not be looked at, and could go on.
You learn, she thought, over the sting. For a man who spent twelve years being watched, you have made yourself a great scholar of looking away.
***
The poetry stall was Robert’s discovery, and he arrived at her elbow with it like a boy with a bird’s nest.
“Widow Cole’s table. She sells off the schoolmaster’s library a shelf at a time.
He has been deceased for ten years, and the shelf never empties.
The village suspects her of restocking it from Lewes and nobody minds.
Come and be scholarly, Miss Prescott, I’ve found something in your line.
” What he had found, held out flat on one palm, was a worn duodecimo with its corners gone soft as cloth.
Songs and country verses, the very cousin of the schoolroom book, and folded into service as a marker at one page, she opened it, the garden poem, the true text of it, plums and all corrected.
“The genuine article,” Robert said gravely. “I thought the schoolroom should have one honest copy on the premises. For reference, you understand, when the authorities dispute a line. The authorities being seven, and implacable.”
“The authorities will be scandalised. Half her power lies in correcting me.”
“Then hide it,” he said, “and be corrected for years,” and their eyes met over the little book and both of them were laughing without much sound, and Jane took it from his palm and their gloved fingers arranged the transfer with more diplomacy than the object strictly wanted, and Widow Cole, who missed nothing across her trestle, was paid tuppence and looked as if she had witnessed a transaction worth considerably more.
That was when the fiddler, who had been resting his elbow in cider, stood up on the wagon-bed and called the Roger de Coverley, and the green began to sort itself into a long double line, gentry-and-all, because it was that kind of festival and had been since before anybody’s grandfather, and Charlotte materialised out of the walnut party with gold dust on her knuckles, seized her uncle’s sleeve, and pointed.
At the lines, at Jane, at the lines again, with the imperious economy of a field marshal disposing troops.
“You see how it is,” Robert said to Jane over the child’s head.
His face was open and unhurried and the afternoon sun was in it.
“I am under orders. I’d not dream of asking for myself, a man daren’t, twice in one week, but Miss Charlotte’s requisitions have the force of law, and it would go hard with the parish to see them flouted.
” And there was one clear beat, between the fiddle’s warning chords, in which what he was actually asking, and what she would actually be answering, stood in the air between them plain as print for anyone with eyes.
And Jane, who had spent four years being nobody on the edges of rooms, walked out with him into the middle of the green, into the middle of the parish, into the long line under the elms, and took her place.
The Roger de Coverley is no intimate measure; it is a spirited romp. It belongs to the whole parish, drawing you down a corridor of clapping neighbours and leaving you delightfully breathless. Yet one figure remains at its heart: the top couple advancing alone down the centre of the set.
When their turn arrived, and the lines fell back to yield the aisle, Jane proceeded down that sunlit, cheering length with her hand in Mr Robert Moorfield’s.
There, as the late sun cast long shadows over the churchyard wall, she understood with brilliant clarity amid the din that she stood, for the very first time, at the absolute centre of every eye.
The blacksmith, the walnut children, Eleanor turning at the set’s foot with the physician, Mr Watson, and, at the green’s edge, arrested midway between her carriage and the gingerbread, a tall dame in dove-grey silk with lorgnette raised, whom Jane did not know and would learn soon enough to be Lady Fenwick, taking in the viscount and the governess going down the middle hand in hand with the whole parish clapping the time.
The lorgnette held. The dance did not care.
Charlotte wheeled at the bottom of the set between Eleanor’s hands, laughing again, gold-knuckled, the sound quite drowned and completely visible, and Robert turned Jane at the lane’s end with both hands and said, under the fiddle, wholly unwitty for once.
“There’s not a picture in that house I would exchange for this one”, and the lines closed over them, and the parish roared on, and whatever prudence had governed Jane Prescott’s life to that hour went down the set with everything else, clapping.
***
They walked up the lime-walk at dusk with the fiddle still faint behind them, Charlotte between them and gone suddenly, comprehensively, to sleep on her feet in the way of spent children, so that Robert swung her up and she settled against his shoulder without waking, one gold-dusted fist closing on his collar in ancient proprietary trust.
Under the limes the light was down to its last honey, and the moment arranged itself without anyone’s permission.
The sleeping child, the hush after the noise, the two of them fallen into step.
Jane carried the little book against her ribs and was cataloguing the day for safekeeping, the laugh, the knot-lesson, the lane of clapping, with the diligence of a woman who expected to live on the interest of it for some years, and was therefore ambushed entirely when Robert stopped walking.
“Miss Prescott.” The teasing was gone. Even the certainty was gone, or rather it had gone down somewhere older and less comfortable.
“I find I’m in danger of saying something a man oughtn’t to say with his niece asleep on his shoulder and no,” he sought the word, and his voice came quieter, “no arrangements made, nothing settled that would give the saying any right to exist. So I’ll say only the outermost edge of it.
Today, on that green, that was the first afternoon since January that I have felt this family might truly thrive.
And you are not incidental to that, and I am not able to go on pretending I think you are. ”
The lime-walk held still. Jane stood with the book pressed to her ribs and her whole careful economy in ruins, and her own body, the one thing about her that had never betrayed her, that was the whole trouble with it, knew the fact she had been refusing for a fortnight.
And neither are you incidental, my lord, and I have known it since the library, and I am a woman with four pounds in the world standing in a lord’s lime-walk wanting what governesses are broken for wanting.
What she said, when her voice came, was level and it cost her the whole day’s happiness to make it so
“Then we had better walk on, my lord. The dew is falling, and she’ll take cold.”
“Yes,” Robert said. And then, not moving, with the last light through the limes on his face and something in it that was almost, absurdly, hope. “You didn’t say I was mistaken.” “No,” said Jane, already walking. “I didn’t.”
He caught her up in three strides, and they went on to the house through the failing gold without another word, but at the turn of the walk she felt his glance come sideways once, and did not meet it, and carried it anyway, the whole way up the gravel, like a coal in a chafing-dish, and from the first-floor window of the rose room, behind glass the dusk had turned to mirror, a figure that had been standing there some while watched the three of them come home together out of the limes, the man, the sleeping child, the governess, and let the curtain fall.