Chapter Eighteen
Stannard came at eleven.
Iris had been told at breakfast that her uncle wished to see her, and had considered the information over a piece of toast with the grave suspicion she ordinarily reserved for medicines and unfamiliar puddings.
“Must I?”
“No,” Gavin said.
She looked at him.
It was still new enough, the asking and the answering, that she sometimes tested both.
“Will he be angry if I do not?”
“Perhaps. That is his difficulty.”
Elizabeth lowered her cup to hide the beginning of a smile.
Iris considered again. “He is Mama’s brother.”
“He is.”
“Does he remember her?”
“Yes,” Gavin said, and the answer altered the room more than he had expected. “Better than I do in some ways. Differently, at least.”
Iris looked down at her toast.
“Then I will see him.”
Stannard was waiting in the morning room when they brought her down. He had dressed for departure and stood by the window with his gloves in one hand. For the first time since Elizabeth had met him, he looked less like a man prosecuting a grievance than one uncertain of his reception.
Iris stopped in the doorway.
She knew him, of course, in the distant way children know adults who come rarely, speak over their heads, and are said to belong to them by blood. He had been Uncle Stannard before he had ever been a person.
Stannard looked at her.
“You have grown,” he said.
Iris frowned. “People do.”
“Yes.” He looked briefly wrong-footed. “So they do.”
Gavin felt Elizabeth’s hand touch his sleeve, not to restrain him, only to remind him that they had agreed the meeting belonged to Iris.
Stannard tried again.
“I should have come sooner.”
Iris looked at Gavin then, because grown people had begun saying difficult things again and she had learnt that she need not stand alone while they did it.
Gavin did not answer for her.
After a moment, she asked, “Why didn’t you?”
Stannard’s gloves tightened in his hand.
“I was angry,” he said at last. “And I thought being angry was the same thing as being right.”
Iris considered this.
“It isn’t.”
“No,” Stannard said. “I am beginning to find that it is not.”
She looked at him a little longer.
“Do you know stories about Mama?”
At that, something in his face gave way.
“Yes,” he said. “A great many.”
Iris went into the room.
***
When Stannard came out nearly an hour later, Iris remained behind with Mrs Anstruther, a miniature of Helena in her lap and three new stories about a girl who had once put a frog in her brother’s bed.
Stannard shut the morning-room door carefully.
“She does not remember Helena.”
“No,” Gavin said.
“She ought to.”
“She was four when Helena died.”
“That is old enough to remember a mother.”
Gavin let that stand.
“She asked whether Helena liked oranges,” Stannard said after a moment.
“Did she?”
“No. She detested them.”
Despite himself, Gavin almost smiled. “Iris will find that a grave defect.”
“She did.”
For a moment, Stannard looked back at the closed door.
“I had forgotten the frog.”
Gavin said nothing.
“I had forgotten half the stories until she asked.” Stannard looked down at the gloves in his hand. “It appears I have spent two years remembering my sister chiefly as a dead duchess.”
The words were not offered as an apology, and Gavin did not take them for one.
“Renwick came to me before breakfast,” Stannard said.
Gavin went still.
“He is concerned about Briggs.”
“Briggs has never pretended he can prove what happened at the river.”
“No. Renwick was very particular on that point.” Stannard looked at him. “He was also very particular that an old corporal with a long memory may prove troublesome in other directions.”
That was nearer the truth.
“What did he want?”
“To know whether I meant to go on.”
“And?”
“I told him I had not decided.”
Gavin looked towards the closed morning-room door.
“You have now.”
Stannard did not answer at once.
“I did not begin this because Renwick asked me to.”
“No,” Gavin said. “He found a grievance already waiting for him.”
Stannard’s mouth tightened. He looked towards the closed morning-room door again.
“I believed Iris was being raised in the same silence Helena had lived in. I believed you had married a woman for convenience and put her in my sister’s place before the house had finished grieving.
And I believed Helena’s family had been shut out while a stranger took the place we ought to have had. ”
Gavin held his gaze.
“And Renwick?” Elizabeth asked.
Stannard gave a short, humourless laugh.
“Renwick was very willing to help me recover what he agreed had been denied me. He knew the right people, the right rumours, the right questions to ask. He asked remarkably little for himself.”
“At first,” Gavin said.
Stannard’s face altered by a degree. “Yes.”
Gavin understood then. Renwick had not needed to invent Stannard’s grievance. He had only found it, fed it, and offered it a respectable coat.
The danger had begun the moment word got out that Thomas Mercer’s widow had come to Ravensmere as a governess.
For four years the past had been safely divided. Briggs had his observations and his tin box, but little standing. Gavin had seen the river and kept silent. Elizabeth had Thomas’s letters and knew none of what lay behind them. Separately, they were no great danger to Renwick.
Then Elizabeth came to Ravensmere.
A widowed duke already estranged from his late wife’s family.
A brother who believed himself pushed from a place he ought to have kept.
A governess whose presence could be made improper before anyone thought to ask why Thomas Mercer’s widow had come to live under her former colonel’s roof.
Renwick had needed only to put his hand to the existing cracks and press.
If he could make Elizabeth’s position impossible, she would leave.
If he could make Gavin’s attachment to her look guilty, then anything Gavin later said about the river would sound like a desperate man rewriting the past to protect the woman he had wanted.
And if Ravensmere remained occupied with its own scandal and family quarrels, so much the better.
Briggs alone was an old corporal with a long memory. Gavin alone was a silent duke with reasons to keep silent. But Gavin and Briggs standing together, with Thomas Mercer’s widow close enough to begin asking the questions neither man had answered for four years, were another matter.
Renwick had not come to Ravensmere because the house was weak.
He had come because, for the first time, the people in it might put the past together.
“He was always trying to ensure his own safety,” Gavin said.
“Yes,” Stannard said. “And found in me a man already willing to mistake his own advantage for family feeling.”
The admission cost him.
Elizabeth let the silence after it stand.
“And now?” she asked.
Stannard looked at her.
“Now I have met the hired stranger. And she is an honourable one.”
It was not an apology. She had not expected one.
Stannard went on. “I still think Ravensmere was a poor husband to my sister.”
“I was,” Gavin said.
“I still think Helena deserved better than she had here.”
“She did.”
“And I do not like that it took another woman to make this house fit for Helena’s child.”
“No,” Gavin said. “Neither do I.”
Stannard had plainly come prepared to strike resistance and found nothing to put his weight against.
After a moment, he said, “I shall do what I can to set right the harm my talk has done your house.”
The words were quieter than Elizabeth had expected.
Gavin nodded imperceptibly. “Thank you.”
The morning-room door opened behind him then, and Iris stood there holding the miniature.
“Uncle, Mrs Anstruther says you are going.”
“I am.”
“Will you come again?”
Stannard glanced once at Gavin.
“If you wish me to.”
Iris thought.
“You can come and tell the frog story again. You did it too quickly.”
“I shall practise.”
She went back into the morning room with the miniature.
Stannard stood. He turned to Gavin again.
“She is safe here,” he said. “And loved.”
Gavin drew a breath. “She is.”
Stannard gave him a long look. Then, unexpectedly, the corner of his mouth moved.
“I had forgotten what an intolerable man you are once you begin speaking.”
“I am newly returned to the practice.”
“So I have observed.”
He left Ravensmere before noon.
It was not peace. Stannard still had two years of anger to put somewhere, and Gavin had six years of failure towards Helena that one dinner and one honest morning could not repair.
But the quarrel had lost its purpose, and Iris remained in the morning room with her mother’s miniature and a story about a frog.
By luncheon, a boy came over from Coldenholme with the news that Major Renwick had given up his rooms, paid his reckoning, and taken the south road.
He left no message for Gavin and no other word for Stannard. Briggs, when told, received the news without satisfaction.