Chapter Two #2
“I would have you keep the woman’s duties plain, her hours full, and her person where the household can plainly see it.
No private conferences, no unnecessary attentions, and no giving the servants any corridor tale to carry below stairs.
” She let that strike and left it where it fell.
“I am old, Gavin. I am not blind, and I am not the only creature under this roof who is neither.”
“You would have me watched.”
“I would have you careful. There is a difference, though you have never much liked it.” Matilda’s gaze did not soften. “From what I have seen of Mrs Mercer, she knows very well how to conduct herself. I am asking whether you do.”
“She came here for honest work and a character to carry away with her.” His voice came out lower and surer than he meant to let it. “She did not come to be watched along the corridors like contraband, nor to have her name handled by Selina March for the parish’s amusement. I will not have it.”
“Then be as careful of her name as you are suddenly eager to be of her comfort.” Matilda’s look sharpened on him, and something in it shifted, as though a long suspicion had at last found a fact to stand upon.
“A man does not defend an hour’s governess in that voice.
He defends a woman he has already decided matters. ”
He had said too much. The lamp smoked on, and neither of them reached to trim it.
“She is under my protection,” he said. “That is all.”
“Of course it is.” Matilda did not believe him, and did not trouble herself to pretend she did.
She crossed back towards the desk. “I will tell you what I am afraid of, Gavin, since you will not tell me what you are. I am afraid you have seen a woman in need and mistaken provision for absolution. It is an old Harrow failing.”
“You make me sound calculating.”
“I make you sound your father’s son.” She watched the words go home.
“He provided too. There was never a roof out of repair nor a debt left standing in the whole of his life, and your mother went to her grave still wondering whether the man had ever once looked at her on purpose. I buried them both. I should not care to see you mistake a full storehouse for a full heart.”
“Then it is as well I have engaged a governess and not taken a wife,” he returned.
“It is as well if you remember she is one.” Matilda gathered her shawl once more at her throat. “Mrs Mercer will not be put in Helena’s rooms, I suppose.”
“She will not,” said Gavin shortly.
“Good. She will be under Helena’s roof, in authority over Helena’s child, and that is enough resemblance for idle tongues without your adding to it.
Selina will not trouble herself over which corridor the woman sleeps in, if there is mischief to be made of the matter.
” Matilda’s voice came down a degree, which from her bordered upon alarming.
“Be careful. Do not let kindness look like concealment, and do not let pity put the woman in a position she cannot defend.”
“She has done nothing that wants defending.”
“No. And that is precisely why you must not give anyone occasion to make her appear as though she has.”
She reached the door and stopped there, her hand laid flat upon the wood.
“You wear too much upon your face tonight, Gavin.”
“I have nothing written upon me that wants reading.”
“No?” She did not turn round. “Then you have improved a very great deal since we left the drawing room.”
And she went out, drawing the door to behind her as softly as she had first brought it open.
***
Alone with the smoking lamp, he let the second name come up at last, the one Matilda had not spoken and did not know enough to dread.
A house full of old soldiers dragged old soldiers’ acquaintance behind it like a baggage train, and somewhere down that train, if the world meant him real harm, rode Major Lionel Renwick.
The man had made an art in Spain of setting himself between two officers and putting a quiet light to each in turn.
He had watched Gavin watch Elizabeth Mercer across a dozen mess tables and said not one word of it at the time, which was how his sort kept a thing against the day it would pay.
Should Renwick learn that the captain’s widow now slept beneath the captain’s colonel’s roof, he would have no need of a lie.
The plain truth would arm him well enough.
A knock came at the door, and Mrs Anstruther put her head round it to ask where Mrs Mercer was to be lodged for the night, the room above the schoolroom having stood damp since October and needing three days of fire before it would be fit for anyone to sleep in.
“Put her in the east room,” Gavin said.
“Your Grace, that is a guest chamber.”
“Then it has a bed, and a fire already laid, which is more than the schoolroom can offer her tonight.”
Mrs Anstruther hesitated. “It is not where we usually put a governess.”
“No,” he said. “But tonight it is where we shall put this one. The schoolroom chamber can be made ready properly tomorrow.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
The door closed upon whatever she had thought better of saying, which would be repeated below stairs before the candles were trimmed and reach Matilda before the breakfast china.
He should have stayed at the desk with the accounts that still wanted his hand. Instead, he climbed to the nursery.
The door stood half open, and the lamp within threw a long wedge of light across the corridor boards. He stopped at the edge of it, in the dark the light did not reach, and did not go in.
Elizabeth sat upon the low nursing chair beside the cold hearth, with Iris folded on the floor against her knee and a slate and a worn stub of chalk between them on the boards.
She was not setting the child to write. With the chalk she drew slowly, a single line at a time, naming none of it, and laying the chalk back upon the slate after each shape, so that Iris might take it up if the wish came to her.
The child did not take it up. She watched Mrs Mercer’s hand the way she watched the whole world, from a careful distance, her own hands tucked under her knees.
Then Elizabeth set the chalk down once more and did not reach after it, and waited, and went on waiting past the point where any of the four before her would have prompted, or sighed, or rung the bell for supper.
Iris picked up the chalk.
She did not draw with it. She only held the stub, turning it between her small fingers, and Elizabeth bowed her head over the slate as if a great deal had just been said between them. When she answered, her words were too low for him to catch from the dark of the passage.
A gentleman governed himself. Whatever else a man might be at the end of a long day, he did not stand in an unlit corridor watching his daughter’s governess because the sight of her had stirred something he had spent years teaching himself to leave untouched.
Mrs Mercer had not yet passed a night beneath his roof, and already she had found a language for Iris that none of them had thought to learn.
He stepped back without a sound, the way the army teaches a man to give up a position he has no force to hold. The wedge of lamplight thinned to a thread as he went, and he carried the old disturbance down the stairs with him into the dark.