Chapter Three
“You need not speak today,” Elizabeth said. “I promise I shall not ask it of you.”
The schoolroom had warmed by mid-morning, and Elizabeth had drawn two chairs to the table and taken the nearer of them.
The child sat across the schoolroom table with a slate untouched at her elbow and both hands folded in her lap, waiting to find out where the trick lay.
“Some people talk a great deal and say very little,” Elizabeth went on.
“I have known gentlemen talk from breakfast to supper and leave a room no wiser than they found it.” She laid the slate between them and set the slate pencil beside it, pushing neither one closer.
“So we shall not trouble ourselves with talking. We may draw, or we may not draw. Both will do.”
Iris looked at the slate and did not touch it.
“You may draw anything you like,” Elizabeth said. “And I shall not ask what it is unless you wish to tell me.” Her voice softened. “You need not give me anything today. Not words. Not pictures. Not even a look, if you are tired of giving those too.”
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Iris drew the slate pencil to her, set its edge to the slate, and filled in a square, blacking it corner to corner until no white showed through anywhere. She pushed it across the table without raising her eyes from her own hands.
Elizabeth looked at it for a long moment, the way she had once looked at a wound before deciding whether it wanted cleaning or only covering.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Some days feel like that.”
She left the black square where it lay.
“May I draw one beside it?” Elizabeth asked.
Iris did not answer, but she did not pull the slate away.
Elizabeth took up the slate pencil and drew, beside the black square, another of the same shape, only outlined, the middle left empty. “There. Mine is a square too. I have not decided what goes inside it yet.”
Iris considered the empty square. Then she set one finger upon it, light as a moth landing, and looked up.
“You may keep it,” Elizabeth said. “I can always draw another.”
The child did not smile, but she did not push the square away either, and Elizabeth counted that the better bargain of the two by a wide margin.
The tea came up at eleven, and it came up wrong.
A senior maid in good print carried it rather than an under-housemaid, and it was China tea, the sort kept under lock, with sugar already spooned into the bowl.
Elizabeth had run a household on requisitioned flour and weighed sugar against the length of a hard winter, and a tray of such quality in a motherless child’s schoolroom set her counting before she could stop herself.
“That is very fine tea for a nursery,” she said.
“His Grace’s standing order, ma’am.” The girl set the tray down and bobbed, young enough yet to keep talking once she had begun.
“For Lady Iris?”
“Yes, ma’am. Best China for the schoolroom, the fire kept up the same as the family rooms, and her little ladyship’s tray carried up by one of the upper servants. He had the whole of it written out for Mrs Anstruther two years gone, and it has not changed by so much as a coal since.”
“Two years gone,” Elizabeth said.
“When the late duchess passed, ma’am.” The girl glanced at the door and dropped her voice to the pitch servants keep for the things they most enjoy reporting.
“That is when most of it started. He had the pianoforte tuned not a month back, and there is not a soul in the house plays it. The tuner comes twice in the year, regular as the quarter rent, on His Grace’s own order. Cook does say—”
“Sally.” Mrs Anstruther stood in the doorway. “The landing linen wants you.”
The girl went the colour of her own print and fled.
“You will not get the household out of that one now,” Elizabeth said pleasantly, “having frightened her clean out of her tongue.”
“You will get it out of none of mine, Mrs Mercer, while I have the managing of them.” The housekeeper came in and squared the tray the girl had set down crooked.
“Whatever sum you are working in that head of yours, you will oblige me by working it in silence. This is a good house. It is not a comfortable one. The two are not always the same house, and you would do well to learn the difference before you go drawing up totals.”
Elizabeth looked again at the tray, the careful fire, the room kept ready around a child who seemed scarcely able to notice any of it. “I meant no offence, Mrs Anstruther. It is only that a great deal appears to have been kept exactly as it was.”
“Nothing that need trouble your sleep,” the housekeeper said shortly.
“No,” Elizabeth said. “I suppose not.”
“Then spend your waking hours upon the child, which is the thing you are paid for, and leave the rest of the house to keep its own counsel.” Mrs Anstruther paused at the door.
“You are quicker than the last four. I have not yet settled with myself whether that is to the good of anyone. Drink your fine tea before it goes cold, since His Grace took the trouble to order it for you.”
***
He came as far as the schoolroom threshold near dusk, a footman trailing at his heel with a question half out of his mouth.
“Not now. After.”
Two words, flat, given without a glance, and the footman folded the rest of his sentence away and carried it back down the stairs.
Thomas used to come into their billet wearing that voice at second hand, the colonel’s voice, after the colonel had corrected him before the whole company over some small matter of drill.
A gentleman by birth and a tyrant by practice, Thomas would say, dragging his boots off by the fire, and the man keeps ice where the rest of us were issued blood.
She had believed him, the way a wife believes a husband, and a cold officer who never raised his voice made an easy enough figure to dislike across a battlefield and a grave.
The voice on the landing just now had been the very same voice, and yet it had cut off the footman’s question without cruelty.
She had been certain, for years, that she knew the man it belonged to.
The footman’s tread faded below, and Gavin lingered on the threshold with his hat still in his hand, not yet crossing the sill.
“You may come in, Your Grace. It is your schoolroom,” Elizabeth said. “I only borrow it by the hour.”
“Iris has torn something.” He looked at the workbox open at her side, not at her.
“Her doll. The arm came away clean at the shoulder. I am putting it back on.” She threaded the needle without looking down at it. “Did you require me, or did you climb two flights of stairs to watch a woman sew?”
He was quiet a moment. “I am told Iris has settled with you.”
“She has allowed me to sit near her without objection. I should not call that settled, precisely, but it is a beginning.”
His eyes moved, briefly, to Iris.
The child had gone still at the table, her gaze passing between the two grown people the way she watched a door she was not sure would stay shut. Elizabeth bent her head to the doll and spoke to the child rather than the Duke.
“Hold her steady for me there. That is it. If we make the stitches small and close, the arm will hold better.” The needle went in and out. “When a thing tears, we mend it where it has torn. We do not pretend the tear was never there. We only make it strong again.”
“Is that a governess’s philosophy,” Gavin said, “or a soldier’s wife’s?”
“It is a seamstress’s, Your Grace. I have been all three, and the seamstress has been by far the most use to me.” She drew the thread tight. “The other two only taught me what tears, and in what order it goes.”
“And what does a seamstress make of this house?” he asked.
“That it has been mended in a great many places, Your Grace, and that every seam of it has been hidden carefully away.” She did not glance up. “Hidden seams fail first. They take the strain where no one thinks to check them, until the day the whole garment gives at once.”
He said nothing to that, which was an answer in its own right. He crossed the sill then, at last, and came near enough to watch her hands work the calico. She kept her eyes on the needle and felt him there at the edge of the light.
“There.” She knotted the thread, bit it close, and stood the doll upright, both arms restored to their proper places. “Good as she was. Better, in the one place that counts.”
“Better in the place that counts.” He said it low, and not, she thought, of the doll at all.
She looked up, which she ought not to have done.
For the length of a single breath, neither of them moved. The fire ticked in the grate. Iris looked from one face to the other and back, and whatever she found written there settled some braced thing in her shoulders. She reached out and gathered the mended doll into her arms.
“Thank you,” Gavin said, “for her arm.” He set his hat back on his head. “I will keep you from your work no longer, Mrs Mercer.”
He was gone down the stairs before she had decided whether she was sorry to see the back of him.
She took Iris out for an airing before the last of the light failed, down past the walled kitchen garden to the stable yard, where a child might stand and watch the horses brought in without one living soul requiring her to be charming about it.
The under-steward was bent over a gelding’s near fore when they came into the yard, a square-built man of perhaps fifty with a soldier’s way of standing even at his ease. He straightened and held his look on her a beat longer than a stranger had any call to.
“You’ll be the new one, for the little lady.” He touched his forehead. “Briggs, ma’am. Samuel Briggs.”
“Elizabeth Mercer,” she said.
“Mercer.” He turned the name over the way a man turns a coin he half believes he knows. “Not Captain Mercer’s lady. Of the 43rd.”
“His widow. You knew him?”