Chapter Fifteen
Adelaide’s summons arrived with Jane’s morning tea, which was not how the schoolroom’s tea arrived, and it came by Adelaide’s own maid, who told Jane the rest. Mrs Moorfield’s sitting room, at your convenience, miss, and at your convenience, in the dialect of great houses, meant before the tea cooled.
The sitting room had been claimed as Adelaide’s for a month and looked it.
Correspondence lay arranged in neat stacks alongside a Bible, its ribbon marking the Book of Job.
Upon a side table, the household accounts, Mrs Brooks’s surrendered dominion, stood squared like prisoners of war held in decent captivity.
Adelaide sat with her back to the window, the oldest artifice of a magistrate, and offered no chair, establishing her advantage before immediately discarding it.
“Please take a seat, Miss Prescott,” she said.
“I cannot conduct this interview while you stand as a servant, for I cannot, for the life of me, frame it as a servant’s affair.
You will take a chair and do me the courtesy of hearing me as one intelligent woman hears another, since Providence has not seen fit to try me with anything more foolish. ”
Jane sat. The tea in her hand was, she noted distantly, her own, carried up the stairs behind her like evidence of the household’s new confusion about what she was.
“I was in the passage last night,” Adelaide said, without preamble, because preamble was for people uncertain of their ground.
“You know it, I saw the truth in your face. I shall tell you what I observed, so that neither of us wastes breath upon useless denials. I saw a storm, and a frightened child taken up two flights between you with more sense than her own family has shown her in five months. And I saw my nephew’s face when you left that library, which I have not seen on a Moorfield man since his brother stood up at his own wedding.
” She let that sit precisely one beat. “I am not going to insult you with the word designs. I have observed designing women for fifty years in London, and I know the walk. You have not got it. That, Miss Prescott, is the whole difficulty. A designing woman I could buy or break by Friday. What sits in front of me instead is worse, an honest one.”
“You have a question, I think.”
“I have a request. I ask you to consider leaving Moorfield.” The words came level, unhurried, laid out like coin.
“Not creeping off, I’d not ask that of you, and he’d not permit it.
A month’s grace, a character from my own hand that would open any schoolroom in England, and a place found before you go.
You would leave rich in everything a woman in your position can carry.
” She leaned forward slightly, and the morning light found her face, and what was in it was not triumph and not malice, and was therefore much harder to sit before.
“And I will tell you why, and I will tell you the truth, which is more than this house has been dealing in lately. There is a story being built in a solicitor’s chambers in London with you in it, Miss Prescott.
Not the truth of you, the use of you. The registry girl.
Serle’s matter. Every day you remain under this roof, you are a brick in Edmund’s courtroom, through no fault of your own and past any remedy of your virtue, and if that petition is heard, the person who pays the judgement is asleep upstairs with a ribbon round her fist. I saw you both this morning, through the nursery door.
” Her hands, for one moment, were not still.
“I am one and seventy years old, and I am asking a governess to save my family, because I have run out of people to ask who would do it for the right reason.”
The tea had gone cold in Jane’s hands. Outside, a wood pigeon droned on with its solitary, repetitive note upon the morning, and Jane looked at the old woman with her back no longer quite to the light, and gave the request the honour it was owed, which was arithmetic and not haste.
“May I answer plainly?”
“I am counting on it.”
“Then. No, and here is the sum, so that you may check my working.” Jane set the cup down.
“If I go now, quietly, richly, with a character in your hand, the story does not end. It concludes. The registry girl was got rid of, paid off and shipped, and every drawing room from here to Chichester will finish Serle’s chapter for him better than he could write it.
My going proves the story the way a settlement proves a claim.
” She watched Adelaide’s face do the working alongside her, and saw the exact moment the figures came out the same, and pressed on while the ground held.
“And there is a second column. Miss Charlotte ran towards something in that storm, the first time in five months. If the person she runs to is removed for the family’s convenience, you will teach her, at seven, the lesson it took me until one-and-twenty to learn.
That everything she anchors to can be carried out of the house.
She will stop running towards. I have seen where children live who stop.
I share a schoolroom with the country’s border.
I will not be made the lesson, not even by a woman asking for the right reason. ”
The modest ticking of the mantelpiece clock was the sole interruption to the profound stillness.
“You would have made a formidable ally in London,” Adelaide said at last. There was no warmth added to it.
It came out the way she said everything, as a finding of fact.
“Very well. We are waiting on events, then, Miss Prescott, and I warn you, events in Chancery do not wait on anybody’s heart.
” She took up her quill, the audience closing.
“The tea will have gone cold. Ring for fresh on your way down. And Miss Prescott,” Jane turned at the door.
The old face was bent to its letters, and did not look up, and said, to the correspondence, “What I told you I saw on my nephew’s face.
I saw its match in the passage. You need not confirm it.
Women like us confirm nothing. But do not stand in my sitting room and pretend the second half of that offer was written entirely for the child. ”
Jane went out with her cold tea and her face in order, and stood a moment on the landing, and confirmed nothing, at length, to the empty stair.
***
Sunday kept the vicarage’s open house, and the vicarage garden kept its June extravagance. Eleanor Blythe kept her counsel exactly as long as it took to get Jane alone among the gooseberry nets.
“You’ve the look,” Eleanor said, “of a woman doing sums in church. You had it all through my brother’s sermon, which I’ll allow was long, but not that long. Hold the basket and tell me what’s happened, or don’t tell me and I’ll be obliged to guess, and my guesses are famously vulgar.”
So Jane, holding the basket, told her what could be told, the storm, the child running towards, the passage, the summons, the refusal, and found the editing harder than the telling, because Eleanor picked fruit and said nothing and let the gaps stand open in the sun where both of them could see their shape.
When it was done she straightened, drew a gooseberry-thorn from her thumb, and delivered her verdict with her eyes on the nets.
“I’ll not tell you to be careful. You’ve been careful your whole life.
Careful is your mother tongue, and look how the careful years have paid.
” A blackbird alighted, observed them with brief hesitation, and, deeming it prudent, took wing once more.
“And I’ll not tell you to hope, either, because hope without open eyes is just carelessness in its Sunday clothes.
I’ll tell you the one thing I know from my own trade.
Grief teaches children that affection is losing, and the whole work, you said it yourself, is proving otherwise by staying.
Well. It teaches the grown the same lesson, my dear, and we are harder pupils, because we can argue.
” She took the basket back, and her look was suddenly all clear brown warmth.
“You have taught that child to run towards. Mind the teacher learns her own lesson, that’s all, whichever way it falls out.
To run towards something, even if it’s only the London coach with her chin up.
The ones who are ruined aren’t the ones who lose, Jane.
They’re the ones who go back to running nowhere. ”
From the house came the rumble of male conversation arriving at the garden door, the vicar, and the physician, Mr Watson, and a taller figure the sight of whom performed its now-customary rearrangement of Jane’s pulse. Eleanor followed her glance, and her mouth curved.
“There’s the physician,” she said, entirely failing to mean her brother’s guest in general, “come to no one’s surprise at all.
We must find the men some occupation before they settle to being clever.
” And the colour went across her face, brief and governed as ever, and Jane, watching Hamish Watson cross the lawn with his eyes finding Eleanor’s a full ten feet before his bow did, thought.
There is one account in this parish, at least, that wants nothing but the courage to be presented.
***
Robert got Hamish to himself at the garden’s end, by the wall where the vicar grew his wall-fruit and his privacy, and laid the whole of it out, the letter, Serle, the ultimatum, the storm, and the rest of it, which he did not name and did not need to.
Hamish listened to him, with his hands behind his back, examining the espaliered pears with the sharp scrutiny of a physician examining a patient’s chest. “You know what I am going to say.”
“You’re going to say I risk a scandal and she risks the whole of her life, and that wanting her and ruining her are the same act in different coats, and that a decent man would put the sea between them,” Robert said it fast, the taste of it evidently familiar.
“I’ve had the sermon from my own head every night this week.
It ends the same place every time. With her on a coach with a warm character, teaching some countess’s daughters, safe, provided for, and extinguished, and Charlotte learning that people who are run towards get removed.
You have been a physician in this county twenty years, Hamish.
Tell me the treatment that cures the fever by stopping the heart, and I’ll take it. ”
“Well, now.” Hamish studied the pears a while longer.
“I’ll not preach what I don’t practise, you may have noticed I’ve spent three years failing to say six words to a vicar’s sister on the identical arithmetic, so my sermon’s a poor pulpit.
” His mouth twitched, and then didn’t. “But I’ll say the true thing, as you pay me in claret to do.
It can’t be managed, Robert. That’s your vice, man, you’ve discovered competence at two-and-thirty, and now you think everything’s an estate to be administered.
Her risk can’t be administered down. It can only be answered, publicly, on paper, in the sight of the county, or it can be declined.
Whole. There’s no clever middle where you keep her near and keep her safe and wait for a better wind.
The middle is where governesses are ruined. ”
“I know it.” Robert looked back up the garden, to where the two women stood among the nets with their heads together in the sun.
“That’s why I’m not hunting a middle. I’m hunting a question, the one nobody in this whole business has thought to ask, because my aunt and Serle and Lady Fenwick all stand in the same church and argue from the same book.
They all preach that she’s the danger to the guardianship.
” He said it slowly, turning it, a man holding a key up to the light.
“Nobody has yet asked the law itself what she is.”
***
He rode to the receiving office himself that evening, with the letter to Pettigrew franked and sealed in his breast pocket, three lines of instruction and one question, the question drafted nine times, until it stood plain enough that even a solicitor could not upholster it.
Setting aside all sentiment and answering as at the hearing of a petition, what would be the effect upon the guardianship of my matrimony to a gentlewoman of proven character, sound education, and no fortune, and I require the law’s answer, not the answer of the drawing-room.
The mail came through at dusk. He watched the bag go up, and the guard’s horn sound, and the coach take the London road with his question aboard, lamps lit, small and dwindling, and found himself smiling in the empty inn-yard at something a governess had said to an empty library the first morning of her life at Moorfield, before she had ever been told what the house was for.
Nobody in these poems ever asks the person who knows.
“We’re asking now,” Robert said to the London road, and turned his horse for home.