Chapter Fourteen
The storm swept up the valley past midnight, intent upon the house.
Jane woke to the initial thunderclap already upon her feet, for a month in the north wing had taught her to distinguish a mere gale from weather that heralded trouble.
Thunder cracked near at hand, and rain lashed mercilessly against the glass.
Beneath the tempest, Jane’s vigilant ear caught the distinctive sigh of the nursery door, followed by an abrupt silence, which proved far more alarming than any weeping.
She took up her candle and hastened down the passage, where flashes of lightning illuminated the open nursery door.
The bed lay empty, its bedclothes cast aside in haste, and the night-light floated extinguished in its saucer.
Think. Not the window seat; the schoolroom faced the storm.
Not the panel, too far, too dark, and the high window of the corridor would be illuminated by repeated flashes of lightning.
She stood in the flickering passage doing the geography of a frightened small country, and heard her own voice from a month ago.
A child who watches is asking a question, and understood, all at once with a jolt that had nothing to do with thunder, where a question would run on a night when the sky sounded like the thing that had taken everything the last time. Not to a hiding place at all.
To the promise.
The study door stood ajar on lamplight. Jane stopped at the threshold, her candle shielded, and looked in on the answer.
Robert Moorfield was on the floor with his back against the desk’s side, coatless, one leg stretched out, and Charlotte a small storm-refugee against his chest with her face hidden in his shirt and both fists wound into it His hand was moving on her back with the slow, unhurried patience of a man who had been told, once, how one sits with a hiding child, and had learned the lesson for life.
He was talking. Low, steady, not soothing so much as narrating, the storm explained as weather, the thunder as air and nothing else, the house as old and stout and stormed-on a hundred years before anyone present was born, the voice of a man laying facts down like sandbags.
Over the small head his eyes came up and found Jane in the doorway.
Neither of them spoke. He looked from Jane to the child, his countenance betraying an unguarded mixture of relief, helplessness, and wonder.
He held the expression of a man entrusted with far greater joy than he had ever dared expect.
Jane entered softly and knelt beside them; Charlotte’s small hand released his shirt, sought Jane’s sleeve, and grasped it with quiet possession, moving no further.
The storm raged above the house as the lamp burned steadily.
Held fast between them, the child’s trembling gradually subsided; her fists relaxed, and her breathing grew deep and even, until she sank into the sudden, profound slumber of utter exhaustion, leaving neither of them bold enough to stir.
“There’s a shawl on the chair,” Robert said, hardly aloud.
“If we move her she’ll wake. If we don’t move her, we are both of us here till morning, Miss Prescott, and my aunt’s household will have opinions. ”
“Then the household may have them of a sleeping child, my lord. I’ll not gamble the first night she’s run towards something.”
“No.” His head went back against the desk, and he looked at the ceiling, and laughed once, silently, at nothing she could see. “Towards. You heard that too.”
***
They carried her up together when the storm had gone off to trouble the coast, he bearing the child, Jane the lamp, the small procession managing the stairs with state secrets’ care, and saw her laid down and watched the ribbon-wound fist settle on the pillow.
Then, as neither wing of the house stirred and the lamp was to be restored, they moved by unspoken consent to the library.
The door remained ajar to preserve the fiction of propriety, while the hearth was slowly burning down to its final embers.
“She came to my door,” Robert said. He stood by the mantel, looking into the low coals, and his voice had the flatness men use for things too large to inflect.
“Past your door, past Mrs Brooks, down a black staircase in a storm, and came to my door. I opened it, and she simply walked against me and held on, and I stood there in the passage like a man who’s been handed the Bank of England and can’t think where to put it.
” He turned. “Five months ago I could not have told you the colour of her eyes. That is the man the newspapers had, and they had him fairly. And tonight she…” The sentence went where his sentences did not usually go, which was nowhere, and he let it.
“Children keep better books than we do,” Jane said. “They enter what you do. You have five months of entries now. The rest is only history.”
“History.” He said the word as though testing its edge.
“My father used to say, with company present, it was one of his set performances that Providence gives every family a spare, and the Moorfields’ had come without the works inside.
I made it my life’s employment to prove him right.
It seemed the only post on offer.” The firelight played across his features.
He was not looking for pity, she saw. He was doing what she did over a ledger, stating the figures before striking the balance.
“James begged to differ, quietly, once a year, the way he did everything. I never let him finish. If I’d let him finish, I’d have had to be somebody, and being nobody was, you may laugh, safe. ”
“I shan’t laugh,” said Jane. “Being nobody is the safest country in England. I’ve held its citizenship four years.”
His gaze, painted in rich hazel, settled upon her, and the room went quiet in the particular way it had learned to go quiet around the two of them, and she heard herself go on, not planning it, hearing it, steady, the sums first. “I was one-and-twenty. There was a Mr Cavendish, Henry, and there was an understanding, which is a word people use so that afterwards nobody can be accused of having promised. My father’s ships failed in the same month my father’s heart did.
And I learned that a gentleman’s regard can be a lease, my lord, not a freehold that runs with the property, and when the property goes…
” she opened one hand, palm up, empty, and closed it, “I watched them carry the furniture out. I watched him not come, and I decided to be nobody, because nobody can be repossessed.”
The coals settled. Outside, far off, the storm muttered over the Downs like a debtor leaving.
“He was a fool,” Robert said. “Of a kind I recognise, because I’ve dined with the breed for years, men who could tell you the price of everything in the room and were bankrupts entire in the only column that pays.
” He had come away from the mantel. She had risen when she could not have said.
The lamp between them on the table made the whole world a yard wide.
“Miss Prescott, Jane. I have it on the best authority that I say things a man oughtn’t when nothing’s settled, so let the record show I know it, and say this anyway.
You came to this house as nobody, by your own accounting.
And I have watched every soul under this roof, a child who trusts no one, a housekeeper who approves of no one, an aunt who spares no one, every one of them, one by one, do the same arithmetic and arrive at the same total.
You are the one entry in this whole cooked ledger of a house that is exactly what it claims to be.
And I…” the wit went out of his voice, and left it plain and younger, “I am finished pretending I haven’t checked the sum. ”
“My lord…”
“Robert,” he said. “In this room, at this hour, with the storm as witness and nothing on earth settled, Robert.”
And Jane Prescott, who had spent four years as mere background, calculating every expense and holding just four pounds against the world, watched her own hand rise and rest flat against his heart, as if verifying an estimated figure.
He fell completely still, awaiting her decision.
In a voice unlike her usual tone, she said, “First the calculations, Robert, and only then the desires. It is my whole method, and a ruinous one, for the sums have been complete for weeks.” And Jane Prescott, who had spent four years as mere background, calculating every expense and holding just four pounds against the world, watched her own hand rise and rest flat against his heart, as if verifying an estimated figure.
He fell completely still, awaiting her decision.
In a voice unlike her usual tone, she said, “First the calculations, Robert, and only then the desires. It is my whole method, and a ruinous one, for the sums have been complete for weeks.”
They kissed, an embrace so swift and silent that neither could recall who had begun it, yet profound in every measure.
His hand rose gently to her cheek as though to stay her, while the lamp cast a warm, golden sanctuary around them amidst the hushed silence of the house.
When at last they parted, her hand remained over his heart, feeling its steady, rapid beat match her own, two souls, for once, in perfect and reckless accord.
“That,” Robert said, unsteadily, “was not the outermost edge.”
“No.” Her forehead came to rest, one moment, against his collarbone, one moment only, the entire allowance. “That was the principal, and we cannot afford it, and you know every reason better than I can teach them to you.”
“I know the reasons.” His hand had not left her face.
“I am going to answer every one of them, Jane. Not tonight, tonight I’d promise anything, and you’d be right not to bank it.
But there is a letter coming, and a man of law, and a story going round that wants a better story to destroy it, and I am building one, and when it stands, I will come and say the whole sentence, in daylight, with the door open.
Until then,” he stepped back. It cost him visibly.
He made himself do it, and she cherished him for the step more than for the kiss, and entered that, too, in the book there was no closing now, “until then, the outermost edge. You have my word. And you’ve heard what I keep. ”
She took up her candle. At the door she looked back once, a woman printing a room onto memory, the lamp, and the dying fire, the man standing where she had left him with his hand still half-raised, and went out into the passage.
The passage was not empty.
At its far end, where the great stair took the last of the storm-light, a figure stood in a dressing-gown of dark silk with a candle of her own, unlit, in her hand, and Jane’s heart went through one full beat of pure cold before the lightning came again, obliging, and showed her the face.
It was not the rustle of rose silk, nor the scent of orange-flower water adrift upon the air.
It was Adelaide. How long she had stood there the darkness declined to say.
Her face, in the white flash, was set like a woman reading a letter she had expected and hoped never to receive, and she did not speak.
She looked at Jane down the whole grey length of the passage, looked at the candle, at the library door ajar behind her, at the hour, and then Mrs Adelaide Moorfield turned, gathered her gown, and withdrew up the stair into the dark, soundless, taking the knowledge with her like a magistrate carrying the evidence home.
Jane stood alone in the passage until her candle steadied.
Entered, she thought, with the calm of a woman watching the reckoning walk upstairs in slippers. Dated. And due, no doubt, at breakfast.