Chapter One #2
Mrs Anstruther found her voice. “The duties are the whole of her care. Lessons, such as she will take them. Her meals, her airing, her hours. The last governess kept to the schoolroom and rang for everything that crossed her mind, and His Grace did not care for it.”
“His Grace concerns himself with the schoolroom?”
“His Grace concerns himself with everything and remarks upon almost none of it.” The housekeeper flushed, as though she had handed over a coin she had meant to keep in her own pocket. “You would do better to learn that today than at your own cost a month from now.”
“And does His Grace ask after the child?” Elizabeth asked.
“Every morning of his life, ma’am. He is told she is the same as yesterday, and he says nothing to it, and goes about his day.
” Mrs Anstruther’s voice gentled in spite of her.
“He has not been inside the nursery above twice since the funeral. He stands at the door of it of an evening, when he believes the house is not attending. He does not go in.”
“Why does he not go in?” Elizabeth asked quietly.
“That is a question above my place, Mrs Mercer, and a good way above yours, and you will oblige the whole household by not asking it anywhere it might be overheard.”
“I shall add it to the list, which is already a long one, and I have been under this roof scarcely an hour.” Elizabeth let her gaze travel once over the high fire and the good furniture and the costly quiet of the room, then set it back upon the old woman.
“Ravensmere is not a camp, Mrs Mercer.”
“No, my lady. A camp is generally noisier.”
The fire cracked and settled, and from beneath the long body of the pianoforte against the far wall, a slipper scraped the boards and went still.
Elizabeth held her head where it was a moment longer.
Three campaigns had taught her to finish a step before she searched the ground for the snake.
Then she let her eyes travel, mild as weather, to the shadow beneath the instrument, where a child sat folded into the smallest shape a child could make, both thin arms locked about her knees.
Lady Matilda had drawn breath to begin again. Elizabeth lowered herself instead to the floor in front of the chair, skirts and dignity and the last of her good wool together, until she was no taller than the dark space beneath the piano.
“You have found the best seat in the room,” she said into that dark. “The fire cannot reach you so far back, and you can watch every door at once without turning your head. I chose the same, in tents, whenever there was a corner to be had. I am not going to ask you to come out.”
The shadow did not move. Then two eyes, very pale in the dimness, found hers and held to them without a blink.
“My name is Mrs Mercer. You need not tell me yours unless you wish to. I expect many people ask you questions and then wait for an answer, and that can be a noisy sort of quiet.” Elizabeth folded her hands in her lap and made of herself a fixed and patient thing on the floor.
“I am going to stay just here a while. You may look at me as long as you like. Looking first is sensible. I would look at me for a good long while too, before I decided whether I believed me.”
A door on the far side of the room opened, the one Elizabeth had marked for the servants’ use.
“Anstruther said the agency woman had come, so I…” Gavin Harrow stopped on the threshold of his own drawing room.
Elizabeth came to her feet before she had decided to, her knees answering an old instinct she despised even as it lifted her from the floor.
Four years had greyed him a little at the temples and done nothing to the rest. The stillness was the same he had worn at the graveside, hat in both hands, while the chaplain ran the words on ahead of the rain.
This was the man who had written the letter that made her a widow, the one she had read a hundred times by a failing candle until the creases went soft.
He had sent her Thomas’s sword, and his ring, and his debts.
He had never once sent her the manner of his dying.
“Mrs Mercer,” he said.
“Your Grace.”
“You are acquainted.” Lady Matilda’s look went between them and missed nothing, the way a quartermaster misses nothing in a list of stores.
“His Grace was my husband’s commanding officer,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes.” He said it and nothing more, a man closing a door on the rest of the sentence.
Lady Matilda rose from the best chair. “Then the matter is settled. We cannot have a woman in this house who comes to it with such a connection already formed. I am obliged to you for the journey, Mrs Mercer. Mrs Anstruther will see you down to—”
“No,” Gavin said.
The fire was the loudest thing in the room.
“No?” Lady Matilda turned upon her nephew with the worn patience of a woman who had known him since he was in leading-strings and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.