Chapter Twenty #2
“I stood in that doorway and told an innocent woman to be gone before the notice ran.” A pause.
“I gave her my word the character would be true. It is the only thing I said all night that was not your composition, Diana. I find I treasure that single sentence as another woman might cherish a surviving child.” “Oh, Adelaide.” Diana’s mask was off now, not flung, laid aside, the way a professional lays aside a tool between engagements, and what was under it was neither shame nor fury but a bright, tired, working clarity, and it addressed them both as colleagues.
“Spare me the surviving child. You wanted him wedded by quarter-day, and I wanted to be wedded by quarter-day. I merely declined to leave the arrangements to Providence, which has never once come through for a woman pressed for time. The girl was an obstacle placed exactly where obstacles are always placed, and I moved her with the materials to hand. If it consoles you, nothing I used was false, but the letters. His face when she dances is a fact, your fear for the child is a fact, and her pride is a fact. I only organised the facts. It is what I am for.” She drew on one glove, unhurried.
“You’ll not wed me now, and you were never going to enter into matrimony with me, I think, from about the second week, I saw it before you did.
It is my trade to see it, so let us not perform the scene where you renounce me.
Have the carriage brought round, Robert.
I can be in town by evening, and you may tell the county what you please.
The county has never yet believed a plain story over a handsome one, and mine will be handsomer by Tuesday. ”
“Mine will be truer by Thursday,” Robert said, “and it will have exhibits. Travers, Lady Harrington’s carriage, within the hour.
And Diana.” She turned at the door, one brow up, framed there a last time out of pure habit.
“The inquiries a prudent man makes before a betrothal I never made them, eight years ago. I’ve a man of business making them now, about the Harrington affairs, out of ordinary form.
If there is anything you would rather I heard from you, the hour is what it is. ”
And there, in the space of an instant, as brief as a shutter’s shift, that same icy gleam he had glimpsed above the teacups, a movement passed behind her bright, fatigued eyes.
It was not submission, nor apathy, but fear itself, seen for the first time in the years of acquaintance; and instantly the smile descended over it like a lid, and Diana Harrington said, “Good luck with your plain story, Robert. They cost the earth to keep,” and was gone down the hall with her back straight as a mast, her heels unhurried on the marble to the last.
Adelaide stood by the table with the drill-sheets under her flattened hand.
“Write to her,” she said. “Now, this morning. No, go. Go yourself. I will…” and her voice, for the second time in his life, failed of its road and had to find another, “I have a letter of my own to write, and it will be the hardest of my one and seventy years, and I had rather be at it before my courage thinks better of it. Robert.” He stopped at the door.
His aunt was looking at the two forged notes, and her countenance was the selfsame face from the funeral, one that clasped a child’s hand as if it were a balustrade.
“When you bring her back, and you will bring her back. She is the only person in this whole affair who has behaved throughout like a Moorfield. Tell her the character I write her now will want a very different first line.”
***
He could not go until evening, and the day cost him the whole of his new discipline.
The quarter’s rents were due to be attended to eleven with Winthrop across the table, tidy and attentive and watched now from behind Robert’s pleasant face like a specimen.
The singed note bore the name of Diana, the twine that of Jasper, two hands weaving rival intrigues under the selfsame storm.
A gentleman could scarcely take to the field with one fox bagged while the other ran loose in the covert.
Worse still, the magistrates’ dinner at Lewes admitted no excuse; Sir Giles Fenwick presided, and half the county’s gossip would be forged at the very board where he must appear serene, plausible, and unbetrothed.
He returned home at ten o’clock amidst the first scatterings of rain, the wind rising fast from the south-west until the rustling limes sounded for all the world like rushing water; yet upon his threshold, he found the house illuminated most unnaturally.
Every window on the nursery floor was burning.
Doors stood open that were never open. And on the steps, in the wind, Mrs Brooks with a lamp, Mrs Brooks who did not run, running down to meet the horse before it stopped, her cap gone, her voice arriving before her
“She’s not in the house, my lord. Miss Charlotte.
Her bed’s not slept in, the window-seat’s empty, the panel room, we know about the panel room, Betsey found it a month since, and we’ve let it be, empty, all of them empty, every hiding place we know and some we didn’t.
Her cloak is gone off its peg and her boots from the rack.
And my lord…” the lamp shook. The first real gust came round the house like something arriving, “Betsey heard the maids at their supper, talking where the child could hear, about Miss Prescott being gone away to the vicarage. And the nursery casement over the leads was on the latch, and it does not latch itself. She’s gone out, my lord.
She’s gone out in this, to fetch her back, and the storm is coming up the valley faster than a child walks. ”