Chapter Seventeen
The house did not settle quickly after the dinner.
Lady Anstey left with Lady Matilda and enough new opinions to occupy the county for a week. Selina went without taking leave of Elizabeth. Stannard was the last to go. He stood a moment in the hall with his gloves in one hand and looked towards the stairs.
“I should like to see Iris before I leave Ravensmere,” he said.
“Tomorrow,” Gavin said. “If she wishes it.”
Stannard’s mouth tightened at the condition, but after a moment he nodded.
“Tomorrow, then.”
It was not peace. It was not even trust. But he left without speaking again of Elizabeth as an intrusion, and Gavin watched his carriage go with the uneasy sense that something had shifted without yet settling into its new place.
It was late when Mrs Anstruther came to the study door with a candle and a face Gavin had not seen her wear in two years.
“She is not in the nursery, Your Grace, nor the schoolroom, nor the still-room. Sally has been to the stables, and I have had Tom round the gardens twice. I have come to you because I have run clean out of rooms, and I will not go on running out of them quietly.”
Gavin was on his feet before she had finished.
“When was she last seen?”
“After dinner. Sally put her to bed and left her sleeping. When she went back, the room was empty and the bed cold. We have been half an hour at it before troubling you.”
“Where is the Duchess?”
“Gone up to the long gallery. Mr Briggs has taken the orchard, and Cook is keeping the kitchen fire up and the door on the latch in case she comes in cold.”
“Good. Send Tom to me.”
He was already at the door when something in the evening returned to him.
“Mrs Anstruther. Was Iris anywhere near the dining room tonight?”
The housekeeper hesitated.
“She came down once, Your Grace. Before the guests left. Sally found her in the passage by the drawing room and took her back upstairs.”
“What could she have heard?”
“I do not know.”
Neither did he. That was the terror of it.
A child who had only lately begun to speak had spent two years learning everything from doors.
Tom came up the corridor at a run, cap in hand.
“Drive’s clear to the gates, Your Grace. Gate’s chained as it should be, and I’ve been the length of the wall both ways. She’s not gone out, not unless she went over a wall a deal taller than she is.”
“She has not gone over a wall. Quarter the house again, but quietly. No shouting her name.”
Tom stared.
“Your Grace?”
“If she wanted to be found, she would have answered already. Look under things and behind them. Look where a child can see without being seen.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
A lantern bobbed up the passage and became Briggs, wet at the shoulders and shaking his head.
“Orchard’s empty. I went to the lamp first, on the notion she might go to a light. But the light’s burning and the bench beneath it’s bare.”
Gavin looked towards the dark windows at the end of the passage.
“She would not go to the light.”
“No?”
“The light is for being found by.”
Briggs’s face changed.
“And she does not want to be found.”
“No.”
The word came from Elizabeth.
She was coming down the gallery stairs with a candle in one hand and the particular composure she put on over fear as other women put on gloves.
“She is not above,” she said. “I have been through the gallery, the old schoolroom and the box room.”
Gavin went to her. “She has not left the house.”
“You cannot know that.”
“The gates are shut. The drive and walls have been searched.”
“The window in the gallery was unlatched.” Her voice remained steady, but only just. “I have had a horror in my chest for ten minutes that she has gone out, and I cannot make it sit down.”
“She has not gone out.”
“You are very certain for a man who did not know she was missing half an hour ago.”
“She’s hiding.” Gavin looked towards the dark windows.
“And I know something of hiding myself,” he said.
“I spent the better part of my boyhood in window seats, watching the drive while other people decided things in rooms I was not invited into. I never went down to ask what had been decided. I only watched to see who left afterwards.”
“And you think she is doing the same.”
“I think she may be.”
“What is she watching for?”
“I do not know.” He made himself say it. “Perhaps Stannard leaving. Perhaps you.”
Elizabeth went still.
“At dinner,” she said slowly, “he asked what I was to her. He called me a hired stranger.”
“And you told him she had chosen you.”
“Yes. But we do not know what a wounded child’s mind might make of any of it. If that is even why she is hiding.”
They looked at one another.
A hired stranger. A settlement with a door in it. A dead mother whose brother had come to ask what place the new woman held.
A six-year-old could make a terrible sum from less.
“She thinks she has kept me here,” Elizabeth said. “Or that I would go if she let me.”
“Perhaps.”
“Gavin…”
He did not know where Iris was. He knew only that if she had made that sum, she would want to see the leaving before it happened.
He turned towards the stairs.
“Where can she watch the drive without being seen from it?”
Elizabeth answered at once. “The music room.”
They went together.
The long west window looked straight down the drive to the gates. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, and one of them hung wrong, bellied at the bottom in a way no draught accounted for.
Gavin stopped in the doorway. This once, he crossed it.
“I am not going to pull the curtain back,” he said to the room.
Nothing moved.
“I am going to sit on the floor, which is an undignified business for a man my size, and tell you a thing. You may come out when you wish. Or not. I shall still tell it.”
He sat.
The floor was cold, and his knees objected. Behind him, Elizabeth lowered herself to the boards as well, near enough that Iris would see them both if she looked, but not so near that the curtain became a trap.
For a moment, Gavin could hear nothing but the clock.
“I do not know what you heard tonight,” he said. “That is the first thing. I should have thought to ask where you were before grown people began saying difficult things downstairs, and I did not.”
The curtain did not move.
“You may have heard pieces. Your uncle’s voice. Elizabeth’s. Mine, perhaps. Words that sound larger from a passage than they were meant to sound at table.”
A small sound came from behind the curtain.
Gavin looked at Elizabeth.
She had heard it too.
“I am not going to guess which pieces,” he said. “But I think some of them frightened you, and I think perhaps they made a shape they were never meant to make.”
The curtain shifted.
A small voice came through it, thick with crying held too long.
“Papa does not talk.”
It went into him like a blade. He took it without flinching, because it was true, and she had the right to say it.
“No,” Gavin said. “Papa did not talk. Not properly. Not for a long while.”
The curtain stayed still.
“After your mother died, I forgot how to say most of the things that mattered. And because I was quiet, this house grew quiet round me. That was not fair to you.”
A wet sniff came from behind the curtain.
“You stood in the door.”
“Yes.” He kept his voice level. “I did.”
“You did not come in.”
“No.”
“Because you did not want me.”
The words were small and terrible.
“No, Iris.” His hand closed once on his knee, then opened again.
“Because I was a fool. Because I was sad, and frightened, and I thought if I stood in the doorway I was doing less harm than if I came in and did the wrong thing. I was wrong. I should have come in. I should have held you. I should have let you know I wanted you from the first.”
The curtain shifted.
“I am trying to come in now,” he said. “That is why I am on the floor talking to a curtain like a man with no dignity left at all.”
A small hand appeared first, gripping the edge of the curtain. Then Iris’s face showed in the gap, blotched and furious and six years old.
“Is she going to leave?” Iris asked, not looking at him now but past him, to Elizabeth. “I heard. There is a paper. It says she can go.”
Gavin did not turn to answer for her.
“There is a paper,” Elizabeth said quietly. “And it does say I may go.”
Iris’s mouth trembled.
“I asked for that paper when I was frightened,” Elizabeth said, coming forward on her knees until Iris could see both their faces. “Grown people do that sometimes. They build doors because they are afraid of being locked in.”
“Are you going to use it?”
“No.”
The answer came at once.
“No, my darling. I am not going to use it.”
“But you were hired.”
“I was.”
“To mind me.”
“Yes.”
“People who are hired go away when they finish.”
“Some do.” Elizabeth’s voice softened. “But somewhere in the middle of minding you, I stopped being hired and started being yours. That is a different post entirely. There is no wage for it, and no notice, and no carriage at the end.”
Iris looked from her to Gavin, still not quite trusting it.
“Did I make you stay?”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “You gave me a reason to want to.”
“That is different?”
“Very different.”
Iris thought about this, working at it with all the solemn labour of her small face.
“Did I make Papa marry you?”
This time, Gavin answered.
“No. You helped me be brave enough to do what I already wanted to do. That is not the same as making me.”
“But everyone stays because of me.”
There it was.
The whole frightened sum.
Elizabeth drew in a careful breath.
“Some people stay because they love you,” she said. “That is not being trapped.”
“How?”
“Being trapped means wanting to go and not being allowed. Loving someone means being free to go, and finding you would rather stay.”
Iris looked down at the floor between them.
“But Nurse went.”
“Yes.”
“And Mama.”
Gavin closed his eyes once.
When he opened them, the child was looking at him.
“Your mother did not leave because she wanted to,” he said. “And Nurse left because her work here was finished. Neither of those things happened because you failed to keep them.”
“I didn’t?”
“No.”
“Did I keep you?”
The question undid him more neatly than any accusation could have done.
“For a long while,” Gavin said, “I was in this house without properly being in it. You did not keep me here. You waited for me to come back.”
Iris stared at him.
“I am sorry it took me so long.”
The curtain opened farther.
“And her?” Iris asked.
Gavin looked at Elizabeth, and did not answer for her.
“You did not keep me here either,” Elizabeth said. “You gave me a reason to come. There is a difference.”
“And now?”
“Now I have reasons of my own.”
“What reasons?”
Elizabeth looked first at Iris, then at Gavin.
“A little girl who asks very difficult questions from behind curtains. A house I have spent too much trouble putting in order to abandon to your father. And your father.”
Iris considered him.
“Just Papa?”
“Not just Papa.”
The curtain opened all the way. Iris did not come out at once.
“Can I still be the reason sometimes?” she asked.
Elizabeth’s face changed.
“Yes,” she said. “You may be a reason. You must never think you are a chain.”
Iris thought about this.
Then she held out one hand.
Elizabeth took it.
After a moment, the other hand came out towards Gavin.
He took that one too.
For a little while, none of them moved. Then Iris looked down at the two hands holding hers.
“I am cold,” she said.
It was so ordinary a complaint that Gavin nearly laughed.
“You have been sitting behind a curtain with one slipper for quite some time,” Elizabeth said. “Cold was the likeliest conclusion.”
“I lost the other one.”
“I had gathered as much.”
“Will you find it?”
“In the morning.”
Iris considered this, then nodded.
“I want to go to bed.”
Gavin got to his feet first and discovered that sitting on a cold floor at his age had consequences no amount of ducal dignity could disguise. Elizabeth saw his face and looked away with suspicious speed.
“Not a word,” he said.
“I said nothing.”
“You were about to.”
“I was saving it for the stairs.”
Iris went first to Elizabeth, because that was still the easier direction, but after a moment she looked at Gavin.
“Will you carry me?”
The question stopped him more thoroughly than the cold floor had.
“If you like.”
“I do.”
He bent and lifted her. She came into his arms without ceremony, warm and slight and heavier than he remembered a six-year-old being, though he had very little to remember it against. For one awkward second he did not know where to put his hands.
Then Iris settled the matter by laying her head against his shoulder.
Elizabeth rose beside them.
They went upstairs together.
By the first landing, Iris’s eyes were closing. By the second, one small hand had curled against Gavin’s coat.
At the nursery door, he stopped.
He felt the old pause before he understood what it was.
The threshold.
Elizabeth felt it too. She looked at him and said nothing.
Iris stirred against his shoulder.
“All the way,” she murmured.
Gavin went in.