Chapter Four
The frost still lay on the cobbles when Gavin came down to the stables the next morning and found Briggs in the tack room, oiling a bridle by the one high window.
“What did she want with you?”
He heard his own voice come out wrong before the question had fully left him.
“And did you give her what she wanted?” Gavin asked.
“I gave her that the captain was brave and well thought of, which is true, and that I do not know the manner of his dying, which is true as well.” Briggs hung the bridle on its peg.
“And I told her you have a conscience, Your Grace, and that the conscience is the size of the fires you keep. It is what a man tells a grieving woman so she may sleep of a night. You will not begrudge her that.”
“You presume to know her, on a couple of days’ acquaintance,” he said.
“I presume to know the breed of her, after thirty years of the army.” Briggs reached down the next bridle.
“I have served under the loud ones and the quiet ones and the cruel ones, and two or three that were worth the powder it took to bury them. Your governess reads ground. She reads men. She is reading this house like a campaign map, Your Grace, and she will have the whole of it by heart come Sunday.”
“That is a great deal of opinion from a man with a rag in his hand,” said Gavin.
“It is a free rag.” Briggs set it down. “What I cannot make out is why a duke stands in my tack room of a morning, asking after a governess as though I had waved a deserter through the lines myself.”
“Mind your tongue, Briggs,” he said sharply.
“I do, Your Grace. It is a full day’s labour on its own.
” He squared the bridle on its peg and turned round.
“I will say it once, and then I am done, and you may dismiss me for it if it suits you. I knew the regiment. I know what the captain used to say of you, for he was not a quiet man about his grievances, and I know not all of it was fair. A hard officer and a cruel one are two different beasts, whatever a sore captain tells the mess over his wine. You were hard. I never once heard you were cruel, and there are men walking about England on their own legs who might not be, had you been softer. Your conscience I would know on sight, sir. I have watched it run this house for years.” He let that sit.
“Whatever has hold of you about that lady, it is not only conscience.”
“And what is it?”
“You will know that better than a steward does, Your Grace. I mend tack. I do not mend men, and I have never claimed to.”
“One thing more, Briggs.”
“Your Grace.”
“Renwick. Lionel Renwick, of the staff. Have you heard the name spoken anywhere in this county?”
Briggs went still over the leather, the way an old soldier goes still at a name he had hoped to have done with. “Not in this county, Your Grace. Not yet. Why would I have?”
“Mrs Mercer spoke it to you yesterday, in the yard. You changed your face on it.”
“I change my face at a deal of names, sir. That one I would cross a road to be quit of, if you will have the truth. A man who never did me a wrong I could put a date to, and whom I would not turn my back on for a pension and a pat on the head. If that one ever comes here, Your Grace, he will not have come for the country air.”
Gavin had broken men for less liberty than Briggs had taken with him inside a single conversation. Yet he left the steward to his pegs and leather and walked out into the cold of the yard.
Thomas Mercer had named him a tyrant by practice in a dozen messes from Lisbon to the border. Briggs had stood in his own tack room and called the naming unjust, only to say in the next breath that what gnawed at Gavin now had little to do with conscience.
Gavin crossed the yard with Briggs’s last words following him, and wished he had not believed them so readily.
***
The long parlour off the schoolroom stood with its door ajar when he passed it.
The pianoforte was open, the lid raised, a sheet of music propped on the rest that had not been touched in two years, and the sight of it stopped him in the corridor with his hand half lifted towards a door he had no reason on earth to open.
The sight carried him back to the only time he had ever heard her play: a convent the army had taken for a hospital outside Vitoria, where the wounded lay in rows on the cold tile and a pianoforte had come through the war in the chapel by some accident no one had troubled to explain.
Elizabeth Mercer had sat to it in the evenings and played for the men who were dying and the men who were only afraid of it.
Nothing grand. Only the small, worn tunes a person carried out of childhood into war.
He had stood in the chapel doorway in the dark and listened until a weeping boy went quiet, and then gone away before she turned her head. He had no right to the comfort of it. He had been another woman’s husband by then, and her own husband’s colonel besides.
The corridor at Ravensmere was very quiet. The music sheet lifted and settled in a draught from the window, and he took his hand down from the door he had not opened.
Elizabeth was waiting at the top of the schoolroom stairs when he came up, a sheet of paper held in her hand, and she did not trouble to pretend she had not been waiting for him.
“Lady Iris drew this afternoon. Three figures this time, which is new.” She held the page out to him. “I thought you ought to see it before I pinned it up.”
He took it. Three figures stood across the child’s careful drawing.
Two of them stood near a square that was meant for a house, a tall one and a small one with their hands very nearly touching.
The third stood at the far edge of the paper, alone, with a long blank reach of nothing laid between him and the other two.
“She gave the far one your grey coat,” Elizabeth said. “So there should be no mistaking who he is meant to be.”
“I see it.”
“May I put something to you, Your Grace? You are free to leave it unanswered.” She did not take the page back. “The man at the edge. Is he there because he is leaving, do you think? Or because no one has shown him the way nearer?”
He looked at the careful inch of white the child had left all around the man in the grey coat, the distance she had drawn without a soul ever teaching her how, and he did not answer at once.
“Children draw what is in front of them,” he said.
“Sometimes. They also draw what they have learnt to expect.” She kept her eyes on him and not on the page. “She did not set you at the edge by accident.”
“And if I were to close the distance?” he asked.
“Then you might frighten her the first time, because she would not believe in it.” Elizabeth took the page back at last, gently, the way she had taken the doll’s torn arm the day before.
“A child who has learnt to expect a man at the edge of the room does not trust him at once when he crosses it. She waits for him to go back. You would have to cross it more than once, Your Grace, and mean the crossing every time.”
“You speak as though you have watched it done.”
“I have watched grown men try it. They are not so different from children, once they have learnt to keep themselves out of reach.” She looked down at the figures. “The cure is the same at six as it is at six and thirty. You cross the room. And then, if you are permitted, you cross it again.”
“And if the man at the edge has no right to cross?”
“Then he must find out whether that is truth or fear speaking.” She pinned the drawing to the schoolroom wall, the gap and all.
“But that is a great deal of weight to hang on a sixpenny box of slate pencil, Your Grace. You must forgive a governess her sermons. They are most of what the post pays in.”
He had no answer that was not the whole of the truth, so he gave her none. She turned back to the slates and let him keep his silence, and the letting was worse than any answer she might have pressed from him.
***
Selina March came on the Thursday, in the half-mourning grey she had no further obligation to wear, with the unhurried walk of a woman who had decided some years ago that the house was hers to move through as it pleased her.
She had Elizabeth brought down to the small drawing room and looked her over the way one might have looked over a length of cloth she suspected of being measured short.
“So you are the soldier’s widow.” Selina did not invite her to sit. “How fortunate Iris is, to have someone so very practical set over her. Soldiers’ widows so often are.”
“Practicality is often what is left to a woman, Mrs March.” Elizabeth stood steady under the inspection. “I have found it wears tolerably well.”
“You have a tongue on you,” said Selina coolly.
“I hope I have not used it improperly.”
“Impropriety is seldom so obliging as to name itself.” Selina smiled. “Where are your people, Mrs Mercer?”
“Dead, in the main. My father held a living in Kent. My husband served in Spain. Neither is in a position to write one a character.”
“No family. No connection. No one in the world to speak for you.”
“His Grace found my qualifications sufficient without them.”
“And had you met His Grace before you came into his house? In Spain, perhaps?”
“I had seen him. A colonel is seen by a great many people he never troubles to speak a word to. I should be astonished if he marked me at all.”
“Should you? How odd, then, that he marked you so very quickly at the interview. Inside the hour, the servants would have it.”
“Servants see a great deal, Mrs March, and remember it generously.”
“His Grace is finding a remarkable number of things sufficient of late. And how do you find the east room, Mrs Mercer? You will know it is the room I take when I come to my cousin’s house.”
“I find it warm, and quiet. After several years of having little of either, I am disinclined to quarrel with it on the question of whose it usually is.”
“Several years.” Something behind Selina’s eyes sharpened. “You were in the field all that time?”
“Where my husband was, I was.”