Epilogue
Moorfield reserved its finest weather for October that year, as though the estate itself had acquired a taste for extravagance.
A long amber afternoon bathed the grounds, the lime trees had turned to glittering gold, and the lawns retained sufficient green for a hunt, which was even then in full cry.
Jane sat on the terrace in the low sun with the estate’s letters at her elbow and watched her kingdom being governed below.
Charlotte, eight now and taller, possessed of a voice she spent like a girl who remembered saving, was directing the game with the whole-lawn authority of a field officer.
Eleanor and Hamish Watson, three months wedded and entirely biddable, had been stationed behind unsatisfactory shrubbery and were being re-hidden to a higher standard.
The vicar’s spaniel had been appointed to the hunt and kept resigning, and the rules, Jane noted, had grown a whole new statute book since summer.
Nobody hid alone any more. That was Charlotte’s own amendment, announced one evening with legislative finality.
Pairs, always, and if she knew what she had written into her little law, she gave no sign, and Jane, who knew exactly, had ratified it without comment.
The letters at her elbow were the quarter’s ordinary weather, and the ordinariness was the wealth of them.
Aldergate’s neat abstract. The estate’s accounts closed clean for the first time in eleven years, the home farm ahead of its rents, the boat-house, rebuilt over the summer, new-roofed, its old bones kept, listed under improvements.
A line from Pettigrew, dry as ever, confirming what the Sussex papers had said in August. Jasper Winthrop, convicted at the summer assizes on his own signed confession, transported for fourteen years, and one line more.
Jane had read it several times. The prisoner had asked, before the ship sailed, that a sum of thirty pounds still standing in his name be sent to a sister in Kent.
His lordship had let it go, and added twenty to it quietly, and Pettigrew, in the driest hand in Lincoln’s Inn, had permitted himself the single observation that the family’s manner of closing accounts had become unfashionable, and he hoped it might catch.
And under those, in the growing pile that was its own small history, Adelaide’s weekly letter from London.
They had warmed by degrees all autumn, those letters, in the manner of a formal garden going gently to wildflower, still commanding, still correcting the fish, but signed now your affectionate aunt, and carrying, this week, two sentences Jane had not yet shown Robert because she was keeping them the way she had once kept a pressed flower.
Lady Fenwick asks what Moorfield does for Christmas, by which she means she wishes to be asked.
Ask her, my dears, a converted gossip is the best artillery a family can keep, and besides, I find I am impatient to sit at your table again.
Your table. Jane looked at the words, and then at the house behind her, every window catching the low sun, every one of them a place someone had hidden and been found, and set the letter down, and did the other sum.
The one she had been carrying and verifying for six weeks now.
The one Hamish had confirmed on Tuesday with a handshake and a face that could not stop being a friend’s long enough to be a physician’s.
The one written nowhere yet except in her own certainty. Some things one presents in person.
Robert came up from the lawn at the hunt’s next armistice, flushed with October and defeat; he had been found four times running.
He maintained this was strategic generosity, and everyone else knew it for a man too happy to hide well, and dropped onto the bench beside her and surveyed his estate.
The shrieking lawn, the gold limes, the letters and his wife.
“Aldergate says we’re solvent,” he said. “Pettigrew says we’re respectable. My aunt, I have no doubt, says we’re negligent in some particular she will name at Christmas. Lady Moorfield’s report?”
“Lady Moorfield’s report.” Jane looked out over the lawn a moment, at the small general re-hiding a physician behind better cover, and found that her trade, after all, had the words, had always had them.
They had only wanted the occasion. “The books are better than solvent, my lord. There is a new entry.” She took his hand, the old grammar, palm up, and laid it flat, and held it there.
“Opened in the spring. Payable…” her voice did not quite make the level she had planned, and she let it not, “payable in April.”
She watched it arrive in him the way everything true arrived in him now, read first, then believed, then felt, the whole man moving through it in order, and his other arm came round her, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.
There had never, in the whole history of double entry, been a column for this.
It was, of course, the moment the hunt found them.
Charlotte came round the terrace urn at speed, seeker triumphant, one arm flung up to cry the capture, then stopped and looked at the two of them, at the four hands folded together over the front of Jane’s gown, with the fast unfooled attention that had once counted a hall’s exits and now missed nothing on any lawn in Sussex, and something moved over her face, quick and grave and arriving somewhere golden.
“Found you,” she said, softly, for once, the call reduced to its true meaning, and then, advancing one step, with the careful precision of a sovereign confirming a treaty enlargement. “Found, everyone?”
“Everyone,” Robert said. “One of them small, and in no hurry. You’ll teach the rules, I imagine.”
Charlotte considered this, the lawn behind her shrieking on unheeded, the low sun in the limes, the whole amended statute book of her small country visibly reorganising itself around a new citizen, and delivered the ruling with total assurance, climbing up between them onto the bench to seal it
“Pairs, always,” she said. “Nobody hides alone.”
And Moorfield stood gold above them, every window lit with borrowed evening, keeping the account.
The End
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