Chapter Four #2
“How very devoted. And now you are here.” Selina let it rest a moment. “One does wonder how a house contrives to require a perfect stranger quite so badly, and quite so fast. You may go up, Mrs Mercer. The child wants you. She seems to want you out of all proportion to the time you have given her.”
Elizabeth went with a composure that handed Selina nothing at all to carry off, and the door closed behind her.
Selina waited until her steps had faded completely. Only then did she turn back to Gavin.
“I shall be plain with you, cousin, since the dead make cousins of us all whether we care for the kinship or not.” She took the chair he had not thought to offer her.
“People remember the regiment. They remember Captain Mercer, and a colonel who was hard with him. They will remember still more the moment they learn that the colonel has set the captain’s widow over your motherless child, and dressed her in my late cousin’s authority into the bargain.
I do not say there is anything in it. I say there is no longer the smallest need for there to be. ”
“Iris improves under her care,” said Gavin. “She has begun to draw. That is more than two years of your suitable women managed between the lot of them.”
“Children improve under a great many women, Gavin. It need signify nothing in particular.”
“Not under many women I trust,” he said.
The word was out of him and across the room before he could lay a hand on it, and Selina took it without appearing to move at all.
“Trust.” She turned it over, tasting the shape of it. “What a very interesting word to spend upon a newly appointed servant. I do not believe I once heard you spend it upon Helena in eleven years, and I had a great deal more occasion than this to listen for it.”
“You wrong me, Selina,” he said quietly.
“I have never wronged anyone in my life. I remember people accurately, which the guilty have always confused with being wronged.”
“You will not use the child against me. Not Iris. Whatever else you find to do.”
“I would never dream of using the child. I am telling you that others may, and that you have made it easy for them to begin.” She tilted her head a careful degree.
“Helena’s people have not forgotten her, whatever you prefer to imagine.
Iris is Helena’s daughter too, and they will not sit quiet if they are told she is being reared by a penniless camp widow with no family to vouch for her.
They have watched this house since the funeral, Gavin.
You have handed them, at long last, something to reward the watching. ”
“Iris is mine,” said Gavin, “in every blood and every law there is.”
“Laws may be looked into. Households may be inquired after. The welfare of a child is everybody’s affair, which is the great convenience of children to those who wish a household ill.
” She smoothed one glove flat along her knee.
“You were always so. You build the wall a foot too low, and then stand amazed when the water comes over it. Helena used to say it of you, at the end. She said a great many things at the end that no one thought to set down.”
“Do not speak to me of Helena’s end,” he said quietly.
“Someone ought to. You have made very certain that no one ever does.” She folded her grey gloves in her lap.
“No one would blame you for marrying again, Gavin. You are young enough, and Iris is not an heir. But that is not what this looks like. It looks like a man who has kept his dead wife’s rooms untouched for two years, then suddenly reached back into his old regiment and brought home the widow of a captain he was known to have disliked.
You have set her over Helena’s child, lodged her like a guest, and called her a governess.
I have not invented the danger. You have arranged it, line by line, and it wants only a clear voice to read it aloud in the right drawing rooms.”
“Then it is fortunate no such man is at hand,” he returned.
“Is it?” Selina’s smile thinned. “Pray it stays so.”
A footman came in then with a card upon a salver. Selina lifted it before Gavin’s hand had got halfway across the table, read it, and a satisfaction warmed her face by a degree that took the warmth straight out of the room.
“How beautifully timed. Major Renwick has taken Coldenholme for the season. Three miles distant, no further.” She set the card down face up between them.
“There is your man with the clear voice, Gavin, delivered to your own gate before I had finished describing him. He served under you, did he not? And alongside the late captain. What a great deal the three of you will find to remember together, now that you are neighbours.”
She rose, and drew her gloves on finger by finger, and hurried over none of it.
“I shall call again when I have had a little while to think the matter through. Do give my regards to your practical widow.” At the door she paused, one hand on the wood.
“And to Major Renwick, when he calls upon you. He will call, Gavin. Men of his sort always call the moment they smell a thing worth the calling.”
She went out to her carriage with her grey skirts whispering against the stair, and Gavin stood alone in the cold drawing room.
He had handed Selina March the one round she could not have loaded by herself, the word trust, spent on a hired widow in front of the one woman in England who forgot nothing.
She had not even been put to the trouble of asking for it.
The fire had burnt low while she talked, and he did not ring for it to be built up.