Chapter Fourteen
Elizabeth came down to the estate office before the lamp was lit and stood until Briggs put down his pen. “I have decided to read it at last, Mr Briggs, and I find I cannot do it alone, which is a humbling thing to learn about oneself at one and thirty.”
Elizabeth set the folded paper on the desk between them, the dispatch she had carried out of Spain and across four years and never once unfolded past the line that named her husband dead.
Briggs put down his pen and looked at the paper and not at her, which was a courtesy and a brave one.
“You have had that in your keeping a long while, Your Grace,” Briggs said.
“I have kept it the way one keeps a tooth the surgeon has drawn. In a drawer, wrapped in linen, never looked at and never thrown away. I told myself I left it folded because I had read it too often already.” She pushed it an inch towards him.
“I begin to think I left it folded because Thomas’s last experiences had become a room I could not enter without finding him gone again.
Read it to me. I would rather hear it in your voice than my own. Yours has not once lied to me.”
Briggs took it up, and unfolded it with the care of a man handling another man’s death, and read it out in the flat, clear voice he kept for the things that mattered.
Captain Thomas Mercer, of the 43rd, is fallen.
He died at the river crossing, at the head of his company, having led his men forward under heavy fire with a steadiness and courage worthy of the highest notice.
I have the honour to commend his conduct to the Commander of the Forces, and to ask that his name be remembered among those officers who did not turn back.
He set it down. Outside the one window, the afternoon was going down into grey, and no one had yet thought the lamp worth the lighting. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“That is a very handsome notice,” Elizabeth said quietly.
“It is a great deal handsomer than most men get, Your Grace, who did at a river crossing exactly what your husband did at that one.” Briggs folded the paper along its old creases.
“I will say that much, and not a word past it, because the past it is the Duke’s to tell and not mine, and I will not steal a man’s confession out from under him however long he takes over the telling.
But you asked me to read, and I have read, and I will answer the one question you have not put yet. ”
“Then answer it,” Elizabeth said.
“That is not the notice a man writes only to have the duty done,” Briggs said. “It gives the captain honour, but it gives someone else comfort. His Grace chose every word as though he knew it would be read in a quiet room, long after the noise had ended.”
“You are telling me the dispatch was written for me,” Elizabeth said.
“I am telling you the captain was past the reading of it. You may work out who was left.”
“There are stories going round,” she said. “Major Renwick’s stories, I suppose, though no one does me the courtesy of naming him while they repeat them. They say His Grace noticed me in Spain. More than he should have done.”
Briggs was quiet a moment.
“He noticed you,” he said at last. “That much is true.”
Elizabeth’s hand tightened on the paper.
“And you knew it?”
“I saw enough to wonder. Not what the major tells. Nothing untoward. And not one word out of place.” Briggs held her gaze.
“What I saw was a colonel who left a room whenever you entered it. Every time. Four years ago, I thought it dislike, or pride, or some officer’s quarrel with the captain carried over onto the wife.
I have had cause since to think a man may quit a room for the opposite reason, and that from the doorway the two departures look much the same. ”
“So the major did not invent it.”
“No. That is why the lie travels. He did not invent the wanting. He only stripped it of the restraint that made it honourable, and sent the rest into the county undressed.”
Briggs was silent for a moment.
“If you want the rest of it,” he said at last, “ask the Duke. I can tell you what I saw. I cannot tell you what he named it to himself, or whether he ever named it at all.”
“And if I ask him,” Elizabeth said quietly, “and the answer alters everything?”
“Then it alters it.” Briggs folded the dispatch with careful hands. “The truth generally does. I cannot promise you comfort. Only that you have gone four years without the truth already, and it has not made either of you much happier.”
“Yes.” She set her hand flat on the folded dispatch. “I have run clean out of ways to make the whole of it read as debt. Thomas’s letter, Renwick’s stories, your memory, this dispatch. They will not arrange themselves into debt any longer, however I shuffle them.”
“Then go up the stairs,” Briggs said, not unkindly, “and stop coming down to an old corporal for courage. You have always had more of it than I do. You only spend it on other people.”
***
She went up the back way, the dispatch folded small in her fist, past the nursery where Iris slept and along the corridor she had measured too many times. She found Gavin in the library, where the lamp was lit and the fire was not, standing at the shelves with a book he was not reading.
She shut the door behind her.
“I have read the dispatch. The one you signed,” she said quietly. “I carried it four years and never opened it, and I read it this afternoon in Briggs’s voice because I could not trust my own to get through it.”
“Then you know how your husband died,” Gavin said. “He died well. I told you so from the first day.”
“I know how you wrote that he died, which I am learning is not always the same thing. A man does not take such pains over an officer he commanded coldly. Nor does he do it from guilt alone.”
She came a step into the room.
“I have decided to believe the under-steward ahead of the duke, since the under-steward has by far the better record with me.”
He had not moved from the shelves. The lamp put half his face in light and gave the other half to the dark. She had spent their marriage, and too much of what came before it, reading him by half-light and calling the guesses certainty.
He set the book down on the shelf, spine inward, wrong.
“Elizabeth.”
“I have assembled it,” she said. “Thomas’s letter. Briggs’s memory. Renwick’s lies, which travel because they carry one true thing inside them. The dispatch you wrote with more care than duty required. And a question my husband asked me once, on a hot afternoon, and never asked again.”
He stood very still.
“They will not arrange themselves into debt any longer,” she said. “However often I shuffle them. They arrange into one other thing.”
“There are things about the river crossing you do not know.”
“Then tell me tomorrow. Today I am not asking about Thomas.”
“Elizabeth…”
“No. Not the river. Not the major. Not the county. You.” She came one step nearer. “Were you trying to keep away from me?”
His hand closed on the shelf.
“Yes.”
The answer was so plain, and so long in coming, that for a moment neither of them moved.
“Why?”
He looked down. “You know why.”
“I have guessed why. I have had guesses enough from you to furnish a house. Say it.”
“You wrote a clause against this very question.”
“I wrote it because I was afraid of the answer. I am still afraid of it.” Her voice softened, and that softness cost more than anger would have done. “But I am asking you now. In this room. With the door shut. No court, no newspaper, no major to make a weapon of it.”
He opened his mouth. She watched him reach for the word.
“When you came into the hall that first day,” he said, “and turned, and the candle caught you, I…”
The sentence stopped.
She waited.
“There is a word for what I have carried since Spain,” he said at last. “A short one. A plain one. I have heard you use it about smaller things without a tremor, and I cannot get my mouth round it. The last time it mattered, it was not mine to feel, so I made a discipline of not feeling it. The discipline held too well.”
“Try,” she said.
He tried.
She saw it rise in him and fail. His hand tightened on the shelf. His face changed with the effort of it, stripped of every defence she had spent weeks reading by half-light, and still the word did not come.
So she gave him the smaller door.
“Did you want me,” she asked, very gently, “while Thomas lived?”
He did not answer.
He did not need to. The whole of it stood plain on his face, plainer than any candle had ever shown it.
“I see,” Elizabeth said.
He flinched then, though she had not raised her voice.
“I think your silence has been answering me since the first evening,” she said. “I only wanted, the once, to hear it manage the words.”
She turned for the door, then stopped with her hand on it.
“I would have stayed for the yes, Gavin. I do not know yet whether I can go on staying for the silence.”
Then she went out, and left him among the shelves with the wrong-shelved book and the word he had not been able to give her.