Chapter Twenty-Five
The news went out of Moorfield the way heat goes out of an opened oven, at once, in all directions, and nobody afterwards could say who had carried it, because everybody had.
By evening the village had it. By Wednesday morning, when Jane walked down to the vicarage with Charlotte skipping the field-path puddles beside her, the cottages along the lane had developed a sudden universal interest in their own front gardens, and Jane was curtseyed to twice by women who a month ago had studied her through their washing.
“They bob at you now,” Charlotte observed, with the flat interest of a sovereign noting a border change.
“They bob at what I’m to be. It wants getting used to.”
“I bobbed at you the first day.” A puddle was cleared, with commentary. “Behind the baluster. You didn’t see.”
“I saw,” said Jane, and had the rare pleasure of watching Charlotte Moorfield entirely satisfied.
***
Eleanor received the formal announcement of the betrothal in person, as courtesy demanded.
Though the parish had anticipated them by a day in the vicarage garden, her joy was so unreserved, all warm embraces, that Jane needed a moment to discern the shadow beneath it: a fleeting stillness in those bright eyes, quickly mastered, which Jane had learned to read through a month of shared walks.
She forbore to give it a name, as so explicit a declaration suited ill with the delicate etiquette required of her.
She merely remarked, as she gathered the fruit by her side with unstudied ease, her eyes fixed upon the canes.
“You told me once the ruined ones are those who go back to running nowhere. I have since considered that the sermon, in truth, cuts with two edges. There’s a kind of waiting that is only running nowhere standing still. ”
Eleanor’s hands went on picking. “That’s my own text turned on me, Miss Prescott soon-to-be-my-lady, and in my own garden.”
“It’s where the good texts turn.”
And it was then, Jane would keep the timing all her life, filed under Providence’s occasional taste for stagecraft, that the garden gate went, and the physician, Mr Hamish Watson, came through it.
Not by summons, but of his own accord, hatless, his coat wrong-buttoned by one, walking with the terrible directness of a man who had spent the whole distance rehearsing and had finished the rehearsals.
He saw Eleanor by the nets, and stopped, and started again.
Jane took Charlotte’s hand and drew her, wordless, down the path towards the herb beds, out of hearing distance, but not out of sight, because there were things a friend is owed the privilege of bearing witness to.
They walked across the garden. The physician stopped before the vicar’s sister, who went very still among the gooseberries with a full basket on her arm.
His hands, which tended to half a county without a tremor, were visibly unsure of their own hanging.
Then Hamish Watson spoke briefly, but with his whole heart in it.
The basket tilted slowly, spilling gooseberries unregarded into the border like a green rain, while Eleanor stood in her garden, her hands still, her countenance bearing that look which comes when a long account is presented in full and found at last to balance.
Then she said one word, even at that distance it could only have been one, and the physician took the basket from her arm with great care, and set it down in the path, and took both her hands in his.
Charlotte, at Jane’s side, drew breath to shout something joyful, and was gently prevented, and looked up in protest. She read Jane’s face, and understood, the way she understood before anyone, always, that this was the other kind of moment.
The kind you guarded from your own noise.
“Like the curtain,” Charlotte whispered. “When you don’t look, so it can keep happening.”
“Exactly like the curtain.”
Eleanor came running down the path to them a minute later with her cap crooked and her eyes brilliant and wet, and stopped, and tried for composure, and abandoned the attempt as beneath the occasion.
She seized Jane’s hands. “You did this. Don’t preen, you and his lordship between you.
A man watches his friend go down on one knee in a hall full of servants and discovers his own knees work after all.
My brother will want to be told formally.
Hamish is putting his coat to rights for it this minute, which will take him some while, as he’s buttoned like a hasty parcel.
” and then the laughing broke into the other thing entirely, and the two women stood among the herb beds holding on to each other while Charlotte, released at last, went cartwheeling her joy down the vicarage lawn, and the doctor watched them all from beside a spilled basket of gooseberries with the face of a man whose books had closed clean for the first time in three years.
***
Adelaide’s strategy for the county was announced at Thursday’s breakfast in the voice of a commander who has already given the orders and is now informing the infantry.
“We call at the Grange this morning. Ourselves, you and I, Miss Prescott, and no one else.” She quelled Robert’s raised eyebrow with a look.
“Not you. A man in these matters is baggage. Attend to me. The county is at this moment deciding what story it will tell about this matrimony, and counties, like juries, are settled by whoever addresses them first. Augusta Fenwick is the county’s ear.
We do not wait to be called upon and inspected.
We call, first, promptly, as though inspection had never once occurred to us, and we present you, not as a governess elevated, which is their story, but as the family’s own choice, arrived in state, which is mine. Wear the grey silk.”
“I own no grey silk, only grey wool.”
“You own it as of this morning. It is on your bed, and we will discuss the liberty never. Come along.”
***
The Grange’s drawing room held, by the fortunes of a Thursday, exactly the audience the exercise required.
Lady Fenwick presiding, the marchioness’s widowed cousin still down for the summer, and one of the squires’ wives from the dinner, the sister-of-the-turned-off-governess one, caught mid-call with her teacup at half-mast. The room performed its small seismic adjustment as they were announced.
Mrs Adelaide Moorfield, and Miss Prescott.
Devoid of official title, stripped of any explanatory preamble, a solitary name, presenting itself unheralded.
Lady Fenwick rose, which she did not do for governesses, and came forward with both hands out, and adjusted her demeanour with the swift, the seamless composure of a woman who had survived fifty years of county weather by always knowing which way it was about to blow.
“My dear Miss Prescott. My dear Mrs Adelaide. You will forgive the household its flutter. We had the news Tuesday, and I have spoken of nothing else since. I said to Sir Giles that very evening, I have seen this coming since the festival, since the dinner, indeed. I fancy I saw it before anyone in the county.”
“You saw it across your own dinner table, Augusta,” said Adelaide, settling into the best chair as into a gun emplacement.
“I recall your lorgnette getting a deal of exercise. How fortunate that what it found was a matrimony of affection with the family’s blessing.
It might have found something so much less creditable to repeat. ”
It was beautifully done, absolution and warning fused in one sentence, the past re-invoiced and marked paid, and Lady Fenwick, no simpleton, took the settlement at speed and moved to secure her own position in the new order, which was, transparently, first friend of the future viscountess.
The tea came, the visit assembled itself, and only once did the old weather attempt a return, when the marchioness’s cousin, stranded outside the new found feelings, composed the third person one last time, “and shall Miss Prescott continue with the dear child’s lessons, one wonders, after, that is, it must be so awkward, the, arrangement… ” and the room held its small breath.
Jane set down her cup and answered for herself, before Adelaide’s artillery could traverse.
“Miss Charlotte’s education continues under my direction, ma’am, wedded or maiden.
It was the first term of the settlement and his lordship conceded it before the ring.
” She said it pleasantly, plainly, in her own voice at its own level.
“As for awkward. I have dined at the foot of tables four years, and I am persuaded the head of one will prove no harder to survive. The seating is better, and the mutton arrives warmer.”
The pause lasted one heartbeat. Then came Lady Fenwick’s laugh, spontaneous and unmastered, and the company surrendered to it.
The marchioness’s cousin sought refuge in her teacup, leaving her lorgnette, as Jane remarked, resting quietly by her saucer throughout the visit: an instrument of war set aside in a time of truce.
***
In the carriage home, Adelaide looked out at the hedges with the stillness of deep satisfaction.
“The mutton arrives warmer,” she said at last, to the window.
“Forty years I have wanted the roof of that woman’s drawing room to come off, and a merchant’s daughter has done it with a joint of mutton.
” She turned. “You’ll do, Lady Moorfield.
I have said so before, I believe. I find the entry bears repeating. ”
***
Charlotte was waiting on the front steps when the carriage came up the drive, had been waiting, by the evidence of the abandoned hoop and the gravel-marks of patrol, and she took Jane’s hand before Jane’s feet had fairly found the ground, and said, with the crackless gravity she kept for affairs of state.
“There is a matter. It wants you and Uncle Robert both. In the east corridor.”