Chapter Seven
The footman found Elizabeth on the back stairs in the early light, and put his question to her with a new and careful deference.
“Begging your pardon, Mrs Mercer, but Cook wished to know whether her little ladyship will take the coddled eggs again this morning, or whether you’d sooner something else were set by for her?”
“The coddled eggs, thank you, James. And tell Cook the child ate the whole of them yesterday, which she has not done since I came, and that the credit is Cook’s and not mine.”
“Cook will be glad to hear it, ma’am.” He bowed, an actual bow, and went.
Three days since Iris had said no to her father in the schoolroom, and in three days the house had changed its manners about Elizabeth the way a regiment changes its manners about a junior officer lately seen to dine with the general.
She was deferred to now, consulted, bowed at, and she was not, she had noticed, befriended.
The new deference kept a half step backwards inside it, the careful distance servants hold for a person whose standing they cannot place.
Valuable, the house had decided, which was not at all the same as one of us.
Elizabeth had spent four years living in the gap between the two, and could have measured it to the inch.
Lady Matilda found her on the schoolroom landing before the egg question was well settled.
“She is asking for things now.” Matilda did not trouble with a greeting. “Small things. More milk. A shawl. The fire mended. Not often, and not loudly, but enough.”
“That is good,” Elizabeth said.
“It is more than good, and you know it.” Matilda said it the way a woman pays a debt she would rather not owe.
“I have said a great many doubting things to my nephew on the subject of you, Mrs Mercer, and I find I must unsay a portion of them. I shall not enjoy it, and I do not mean to make a habit of it. The child is better. You have had a hand in that. I am not too proud to set it on the right side of the account.”
“That is very handsome of you, my lady,” she said.
“It is not handsome. It is accurate, which I prefer to handsome and find a great deal rarer.” Matilda’s mouth thinned.
“But I shall be accurate about the rest of it as well. Iris is growing attached to you, and the county has begun to talk, and your name now sits between those two facts. You have made yourself indispensable to a household that may not be able to keep you without cost. Did you mean to?”
“I meant to be useful, my lady,” she returned. “Anything beyond that has happened without consulting me.”
“They are nearly the same thing, viewed from the child’s end of the room.
” Matilda looked towards the schoolroom door.
“She will not part with you easily. His Grace will not willingly distress the child. And the county will not leave either fact alone. There, Mrs Mercer, is the difficulty. I have watched it gather, and I cannot yet see how it ends.”
“Neither can I, my lady. But I have learnt not to mistake a difficulty for an ending.”
“And what do you mistake it for?”
“A thing with a way through it, if one looks closely enough.”
“You are a very strange governess,” said Matilda.
“I am a very experienced widow, my lady,” Elizabeth answered, “which the agency persists in mistaking for the same article.”
“Then mind the snake at Coldenholme, experienced widow. Whatever you are about to do, and I can see plainly that you are about to do something, contrive to do it without setting one foot near that man. He did not take a house three miles off for the partridges.”
“No, my lady,” she said quietly. “I had worked that much out for myself.”
“Then you are not a fool, which is a mercy, the rest of this household being composed of very little else.”
***
Elizabeth found Briggs in the harness room after the child’s lessons, where he kept a deal table and a lamp and, she had learnt, a tin box of his own up on the shelf.
“Mr Briggs, you told me once you were Ninth, and that the Ninth and the 43rd shared a deal of Spain. How much of it did the two of you share in the spring of fourteen?”
“That is a particular spring to come asking after, ma’am.” He looked up from the strap he was working. “Though I suppose I know why.”
“Then I thank you for not insulting me with feigned surprise. I have decided to stop being lied to gently about the manner of it.” She sat down across the deal table without being invited, taking the liberty as though it had been granted to her in writing.
“Several people seem to know more than I do, and not one of them will say it plainly. His Grace gives me half an answer. The major three miles off offers truth as though it were a horse with bad teeth. I am done with the pair of them. You are the only honest man I have met since I came, and you keep your own papers. I have seen the box on the shelf.”
Briggs studied her, unhurried, then reached the tin down and set it on the table between them.
He lifted the lid, took out a page, and smoothed it flat with two fingers.
“You know, Mrs Mercer, I have a wife in the churchyard and no child that lived past its first winter, and a tin box of dead men’s dates.
Most mornings, I feel as though I am the only one on earth who remembers a single one of them.
Folk do not ask soldiers things. They thank us, or they fear us, or they stand us a pint to hear about the cannon, and they never once ask what it cost to stand where we stood. But you asked.”
“Then I shall go on asking, Mr Briggs, for as long as you will go on answering, and the two of us shall be the only people in this county who say the dead men’s names aloud.”
“I should like that, ma’am. I find I should, very much.”
They bent to the pages together by the lamp, his blunt finger moving down the dates, and Elizabeth found she could read a campaign the way she read a household ledger, hunting the one entry that would not balance against the others.
“What did you see of that spring yourself?” she asked.
“Hard marching, short rations, and a deal of rain, ma’am, the same as every spring out there.
” He turned a leaf. “The 43rd was forward of us the most of it. I saw your captain twice that I knew his face for certain. Once at a river ford in March, getting his company over with the water up to their chests and himself laughing about it like a boy at a fair. And once in April, the week before… well. At a crossroads where two columns had snarled. He was having words with a staff officer. A major.”
“A major,” Elizabeth said.
“I had not a name to put to it then. I have a guess at it now, ma’am, and I will own I do not much care for my own guess.”
“Renwick.”
“I said I did not care for my guess.” He did not deny it, which served as well as a yes, and they let it sit between them.
“Now here.” His finger stopped. “April. There was an action at a river crossing. A small one, the sort that never earns a name on any map. The 43rd were in it. After, there was a notice in the London Gazette, the official sheet, where dispatches are printed for the country to read over its breakfast. Your captain was named in it. Named for gallantry, which is the word they keep ready for the dead ones.”
He looked at her steadily.
“You may have had a copy sent you, folded in with the effects.”
“I had a great many papers sent with the effects. I could not read most of them for a year, and when at last I could, I read only the ones in his own hand and left the printed ones in the box.” Her hands had gone cold on the deal table, and she pressed them flat.
“A dispatch would carry the date of the action. And the name of the officer who wrote it.”
“It would, ma’am. A dispatch is signed. That is the purpose of the thing, that a man sets his name to it and answers after for every word.”
“And whose name would stand at the foot of a dispatch from the 43rd, in the spring of fourteen?”
Briggs was quiet a moment, and when he spoke, he was as gentle as he was with a startled horse. “The colonel’s, ma’am. Lieutenant-Colonel Harrow’s. If it was his regiment, it would most likely have gone out under his hand.”
So the one official account that her husband had died well, carried four years folded unread among the effects, might have been set down in the hand of the man whose roof she now slept beneath.
He might have told her how Thomas died over his own signature, four years gone, and she had filed it away because she could not bear printed grief stacked on the other kind.
She sat back hard against the chair, and the strap-oil and lamp smoke of the harness room seemed all at once very loud in her nose.
“I have it still,” she said. “The Gazette. In the deal box in my own room. I have owned it four years and never once read past the first line.”
“Then perhaps you have been nearer your answer than you knew,” Briggs said. He did not close the tin yet.
“Tell me about the crossroads,” she said. “The quarrel with the major. What did you truly see of it?”
“Not a great deal, ma’am, and I will not swell the not-much into more than it was, for that is how lies get themselves born.
Two columns tangled, tempers high, the rain coming down on the lot of us.
Your captain and the major off to the side of the road, having it out about something.
I was forty yards distant with a lame mule and troubles of my own.
I saw the captain’s colour come up. And I saw the major smiling, which was the worse of the two, for that one only smiles when he is winning, and your captain was never a man who could bear to be smiled at while he was losing. ”
“What were they quarrelling over?” She leant over the lamplit pages.
“Orders, like as not. It is always orders. Or it was got up to look like orders.” Briggs frowned down at the page.
“A week after, ma’am, your captain went forward at that river crossing when, by every account I ever heard, he had been told plain to hold his ground.
Went forward, and did not come back, and earned his line in the Gazette for the going.
And I have spent four years with a thing sat crossways in me that will not lie flat, which is this.
A brave man goes forward because forward is where the fighting is.
But a proud man may go forward because somebody has contrived to make holding back feel like cowardice. ”
Elizabeth sat very still. “You think someone goaded him to it.”
“I am telling you what I saw, and what I have wondered since. I am not telling you it is so. I do not know that it is so.” Briggs closed the tin at last. “But I will say one thing more and then no more. If a man wished another man dead and never to hang for the wishing, ma’am, he would not reach for a pistol.
He would reach for the man’s own pride, and a week, and a river to put at the end of it. ”
The harness-room door opened, and the Duke stood in it.
He took in the lamp, the deal table, the closed tin between them, Elizabeth’s head bent near the under-steward’s, and whatever crossed his face folded itself away into nothing at all.
“Mr Briggs has work,” the Duke said.
“So have I,” said Elizabeth.
“Not here.”
“Your Grace?”
“Not here.” He had not raised his voice, and the harness room had gone small and close around the three of them. “Briggs. The grey has thrown the heel of its near shoe. See to it before the light goes.”
Briggs rose unhurriedly, gathered his tin from the table, and contrived not to look at either of them in a manner that took them both fully in. “Your Grace.” He touched his forehead to Elizabeth. “Ma’am.”
And he went out to a grey that did not, she was reasonably certain, want anything of the kind.
Elizabeth did not rise from the deal table.
“You may tell me to keep to the schoolroom, Your Grace. It is your schoolroom. You may tell me where to take the child, and when, and how warmly to dress her against the wind. You engaged me, I took your wage, and the wage has its terms. I have not disputed them.” She laid her hand flat on the table where the tin had stood.
“But you may not tell me whose company to keep in the single half hour of the day that belongs to me, nor which honest man may answer a question you have decided I am not to be trusted with.”
“Briggs does not know what he is meddling in,” he said sharply.
“Briggs meddles in a great deal less than he knows, Your Grace, which is the precise reverse of yourself, if you will forgive my saying so.”
“You think I keep things from you to wound you?”
“I think you keep things from me and call the keeping kindness, and that the calling-it-kindness is the part that does the wounding.” She did not rise yet.
“A wound I can dress. A kindness I am expected to thank a man for. You have given me a great many kindnesses and not one plain word, and I am learning the rate of exchange between the two. I find it runs hard against me.”
“If I told you the truth, you would not stay.”
The words were out of him before his guard came down on them, and they both heard the shape of what he had let slip.
“Then the truth is worse than I have been guessing,” she said quietly, “and you have just told me that much.”
She watched him recognise his own mistake and have no way to gather it back.
“Do you see how easily it is done, Your Grace? One true sentence slips out, and the whole locked room behind it lights for a moment. I felt the draught from it just now.”
Something moved in his face that he would not put a name to, and she named it guilt, as she had named it since the stable yard, because guilt was the safe name to carry.
A guilty man could not bear to watch a woman dig where his conscience lay buried.
He stood guard over the grave he had helped to fill, and his temper at her questions made a tidy, bearable sense of the whole.
She had no notion she was looking at something with a far older name and a far longer fuse.
“Briggs is a good man,” Gavin said at last. “And I have just used my rank poorly.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “You have.”
The plainness of it struck the room more sharply than temper would have done.
“He should not have been drawn into this,” Gavin said.
“Nor should I, perhaps. Yet here we both are.” She rose now. “You cannot afford another paragraph. Neither can I. And still you walked into a harness room and sent away the only man willing to answer a plain question.”
“Briggs cannot give you the answer you want.”
“No. But he gives me the part he has, which is more than anyone else under this roof has done.”
He said nothing.
“And if that is all I can have,” she went on, gathering her shawl from the back of the chair, “then I shall take it where I find it.”
“Mrs Mercer.”
She paused at the door.
“If you mean to ask questions, do not ask Renwick.”
“Then give me another name, Your Grace.”
He had none he could give her. Or none he would.
She read the answer in his silence and inclined her head.
“Then we understand one another.”