Chapter Twenty-Four
The London mail brought two letters, and Robert read them both in the study with the door open; everything in the house stood open today. It had become that kind of house overnight, and then he sent, not for Jane, but for his aunt.
“You will want to hear this before I use it,” he said, and read Pettigrew’s answer aloud.
The solicitor had taken the nine-drafted question exactly as it had been put to him, and answered in kind, dry, unupholstered, at the hearing of a petition.
You ask the effect upon the guardianship of your matrimony to a gentlewoman of proven character, sound education, and no fortune.
Setting aside all sentiment, as instructed.
The effect is decisive, and it is favourable.
Chancery does not weigh a wife’s portion; it weighs the settled character of the household.
A guardian wedded to a woman of demonstrated probity, the more demonstrated, I may say, the better, presents no purchase whatever for such matter as Mr Serle deals in.
If the lady’s character has been publicly tried and publicly vindicated, then I will speak plainly past my office.
You could not construct a better answer to a petition if you retained me ten years to build one.
The law’s answer, since you require it, wed her.
Adelaide sat a moment with her hands folded.
“He was always a sounder man than his letters,” she said at last. “Very well. You have the law. You have the family. I settled that yesterday by the early post. What you do not yet have is the lady, and I will tell you one thing before you go and do this in whatever theatrical fashion you are plainly contemplating.” She rose, and looked at him, and the look had the funeral in it, and James’s wedding, and fifty years of London, all at once.
“She will refuse you once. Not from coyness, she has none. It is her chief social defect and her chief virtue. She will refuse you because she has spent four years learning that what she wants gets carried out of the house, and she will do you the arithmetic of the scandal, and it will be correct arithmetic, Robert, as far as it goes. Do not argue the feeling. She will place no faith in sentiment. Sentiment is what brought her to grief. Let us dispute the account books.” A pause.
“And do it where the house can see. She was ruined in public, nephew. A private mending leaves the public wound open.”
“Aunt,” Robert said, “I begin to suspect you of having been, this whole time, on the side of the angels.”
“I have been on the side of this family,” said Adelaide, “and have only lately learned they were the same side. Go along. I shall be listening from the gallery with everyone else, and I shall deny it to my grave.”
***
He found her in the schoolroom, mid-morning, with the sun on the table and the maps out, the real ones, England and its counties, for Charlotte was at lessons again, and the lessons that day were wherever Jane was.
Jane was teaching rivers to a child who interrupted every third minute to narrate some further instalment of the storm, and being interrupted was the best work Jane had ever had.
Robert stood in the doorway until she looked up.
“Miss Prescott. There is a matter of business below that wants your judgement. In the hall.” And then, because her eyes went wary in the old way, the clerk in her already pricing it. “Bring Charlotte. It concerns the whole firm.”
The hall was full.
Not assembled, full, in the manner of a household that has heard something is towards and has discovered urgent errands.
Maids on the stairs with linen that needed no carrying, footmen at doors that needed no holding, Mrs Brooks by the green baize door with her keys and her arms folded, Travers stationed like a monument, Peters scarlet at his post, the cook in the kitchen passage with the door propped, and above, along the gallery rail, Adelaide in her morning black, listening to no one’s grave.
The same hall. The same rank of witnesses.
The flags Jane had stood on with her character in pieces and forty eyes arriving together.
She stopped three steps in, and understood, and her heart went to a pace no arithmetic governed.
“You once stood here,” Robert said. He said it to her, but he pitched it as he had pitched the defence, to carry, to the kitchen passage and the back stairs and every listening door, and the hall went still to its rafters.
“You stood on these stones and were accused before this household of taking what was never yours, and you said, once, clearly, that you had never in your life touched what was not yours, and then you stopped, because everything after that was begging, and you would not beg. I have thought about that every day since. It was the finest thing I ever saw done in this house.” He came towards her, unhurried, and stopped at the distance of a bow.
“So the household is here again, Miss Prescott, every soul of it that bore witness, because what was done to you in public will be answered in public, or it is not answered at all.”
“Robert.” It came out of her half a whisper, the wrong name for the room, and the room heard it, and not one face changed, and that, absurdly, was the thing that nearly undid her.
“The books first,” he said. “You’d have it no other way.
” He took the letter from his breast and put it in her hand.
“Pettigrew. The law’s answer to a question I asked him a fortnight ago.
What a matrimony to a gentlewoman of proven character, sound education, and no fortune does to the guardianship of my niece.
Read the last line aloud or keep it private, as you like, but you will note it is not sentiment.
I paid six-and-eight pence for it, which makes it the genuine article. ”
She read it. The hall waited. She read it twice, and her hand was not steady, and the last line sat there in a solicitor’s dry hand refusing to be anything but what it was, wed her.
“The arithmetic, then.” Robert’s voice stayed level, and he took her objections up one by one, before she could raise them, in her own coin, the whole hall his witness.
“You will say the scandal follows me. It does not. The scandal perished in the boat-house, signed in duplicate. You will say the county will talk. The county talks in whatever direction Lady Fenwick faces, and Lady Fenwick has been facing our way, glowing, since her husband bowed to you in my library. You will say you have no fortune. Madam, I have inspected this house. Its fortune walked in off the Lewes coach in a grey dress with nine pounds and a book of accounts, and every solvent thing in it since, the child speaking, the thief taken, the family whole, is entered in your hand.” He paused, and the wit went out of his voice, and what was left was the library at midnight.
The plain voice, the young one. “And last you will say, because it is the true one, under all the others, that a gentleman’s regard is a lease, not a freehold.
That it runs with the property, and when the property goes, it goes.
You told me that by lamplight, and I have been carrying it since, waiting for daylight and an open door.
” He glanced up at the gallery, the stairs, the doors, and back to her.
“Every door in this house is open, Jane. Count them.”
And then, on the flags where she had stood accused, before the household, before the child, before his aunt on the gallery, Robert Moorfield went down on one knee.
“I am not offering you a lease. I am offering you the freehold, the whole estate of me, encumbrances declared. A spent reputation, a mended family, a niece who comes with the property and outranks us both. We make our own family. I learned that on a landing in this house from a person of seven. Jane Prescott, become my wife. Enter into a matrimony with me, because the sums have been done for weeks, you said so yourself, and there is no honest entry left in either of our books but this one.”
The hall did not breathe. Above, at the rail, Adelaide’s hand had gone to the collar where a garnet brooch was pinned again in its old place.
And Jane stood on the stones of her ruin with the law in one hand, and looked down at the man who had learned from a hiding child how to hold still and let the wild thing decide, and heard the last of the old country go under, the safe one, the nobody one, the citizenship she had held four years, and let it go.
“The sums have been done for weeks,” she said, and her voice carried to the rafters without her willing it, clear as a bell over water. “And the wanting after. Yes, Robert. Enter it, yes.”
What the hall did then, the county would embroider for a decade, Mrs Brooks was known to have wept into her keys, and Peters to have begun a cheer that Travers’s eyebrow arrested at half-mast, as the cook’s voice carried clear up the kitchen passage announcing that she had said so from the first week, but Jane heard almost none of it, because Robert had risen and taken her face in both hands, and before every witness the house could hold, kissed her.
The second kiss, the daylight one, brief and entirely unhurried, a man signing his name in front of the assembled shareholders.
And the window curtain at the hall’s long window burst apart, and the small sovereign of the hidden country, who had been stationed behind it the whole time, hiding in plain sight at the centre of everything, the game’s last and finest move, shot out across the flags and arrived against them at speed, one hand seizing Jane’s skirts and the other Robert’s coat, and announced, upward, in a voice cracked and rusty and carrying to the gallery, the ratification of the whole treaty.
“Found you. Found you both.”
“You always do,” Jane said, and went down and gathered her in, and the three of them stood on the stones where the worst thing had happened, in the middle of the applauding house, holding on, and Charlotte stood with one hand in each of theirs, refusing to release either, and nobody in that hall, not the governess, not the viscount, and not one soul of the household that had watched the whole account from its first entry, asked her to.