Chapter 1
The morning light came in flat and white through the schoolroom windows, falling across the uneven rows of children’s heads.
Jane moved between the benches with a slate in her hand, stopping where she was needed.
At the front, the older children were reading.
At the back, the younger ones were making letters, chalk squeaking, small tongues pressed between their teeth.
“Again,” Jane said, and Thomas Fletcher, seven years old and deeply unwilling, read the sentence again. He read it better the second time. She said nothing about the improvement and moved on, which was praise enough.
Mary was at the far end of the room with the youngest group, four children who had arrived in September not knowing their letters and now knew most of them.
She was patient with this age, and it sat easily on her.
When a child’s mind wandered, she caught it at once and drew it back before frustration could set in.
Jane heard her quiet voice from across the room: start here, not there, this one first. Pointing.
Steady. One of the children laughed, and the sound ran through the room.
“Eyes on your own work,” Jane said, without looking up from Thomas Fletcher’s slate.
She had built the school herself, or near enough.
Four years ago the room had been a disused outbuilding on the Claverton Estate, one end crowded with broken furniture, the other wet with damp.
She had argued her father into the repairs, found the slates and the chalk and the primers, written twice to a charitable society for books and once more, pointedly, when no reply came.
Mary had arrived the following year, the clergyman’s daughter from Ashton, educated enough and wanting useful occupation.
The school ran on what Jane raised and what Mr Claverton forgot to withdraw.
She had made it from almost nothing, and that made it hers.
She stopped at a bench halfway down and looked at a girl’s arithmetic. Margaret Tomkins, nine, neat and exact. Jane marked it without comment and moved on. Behind her, Margaret let out a breath she had clearly been holding.
Outside the windows the April fields were pale green and the sky was thin and clear with morning light.
There were eighteen children in the room today, which was a good day.
In harvest season the numbers halved. In winter they fell further, when children were needed at home, or sick, or both.
Jane had spent three winters building the habit of attendance, calling on families who kept their children back, never scolding, only returning the next week and taking up the matter again.
“Miss Claverton.” A hand.
“Yes.”
“William Fitch says—”
“William Fitch says nothing during reading,” Jane said. “Nor do you.”
The hand went down. William Fitch bent over his book with the injured solemnity of a boy convinced he had been wronged.
Mary caught Jane’s eye across the room and looked away again.
They had done this work side by side long enough to know the satisfaction of it: a room full of occupied children, each bent over something useful, the school holding together because they had held it together.
Jane did not smile. She did not need to.
She walked to the window and looked out.
The lane beyond the field was empty at this hour.
She could see a stretch of Claverton Park’s stone wall in the distance, and above it the elms, new-leafed and pale in the morning light.
Her home, just there. Her school, here. Between them lay the twenty-minute walk she made every morning, part of her day now, fixed as habit.
“Begin the next page,” she said, and turned back to the room.
* * *
Jane came home through the kitchen garden, where the gooseberry bushes were putting out their first small leaves and someone had left a trug of tools propped against the wall.
She noted it without stopping. She would mention it to Dawes later, or bring it in herself tomorrow, whichever proved simpler.
She stepped into the back hall. It was cool after the spring air and smelled of yesterday’s fire and floor polish.
Somewhere upstairs, something heavy was being carried from one room to another.
Claverton Park was a handsome house. It was also a house that required constant, quiet management to remain handsome, and Mr Claverton managed none of it.
He was in his library by nine o’clock and remained there until dinner, emerging occasionally to ask where a letter had been put, then returning with it unopened.
The letter would be answered, if it was answered, a week later or not at all.
Jane took off her bonnet in the hall, set it on the table, and went through to check with Mrs Hartley about the afternoon.
There were provisions to be ordered. The chimney in the east bedroom had been smoking again and the sweep needed sending for.
A note had arrived from the Ashton apothecary about an account that was apparently overdue, which meant it had been due in February and her father had set it aside somewhere.
She dealt with these things in the half hour before the housemaid brought in the tea.
Catherine was in the drawing room, curled into the corner of the sofa with a book in both hands and her feet tucked beneath her, though she had been corrected for sitting that way since she was twelve.
She looked up the instant Jane entered and gave her whole attention at once. Catherine never did anything by halves.
“You’re early,” Catherine said.
“I’m exactly on time.”
“You’re never exactly on time. You’re always either early or staying longer than you meant to.” Catherine set the book face-down on the cushion beside her. “Was it a good morning?”
“Thomas Fletcher read a complete sentence without stopping in the middle to sigh.”
“A triumph.”
“He did sigh at the end.”
Catherine smiled. She had Jane’s dark colouring but none of her stillness, the same features made softer, more open.
She was two years younger and often seemed ten years less burdened by the world.
Jane sat down across from her and poured the tea.
They sat quietly, easy in each other’s company from years of sharing the same rooms.
The letter was on the table beside the pot. Jane had not put it there. Mrs Hartley, perhaps, or the housemaid. Someone had left it where Jane would find it without needing to search.
It was from Hutchins, their father’s solicitor in town. She recognised the hand on the direction. She broke the seal and read while Catherine watched.
It was brief. Mr Hutchins wrote, on behalf of their father, to say that preliminary discussions with the Kensley family had resumed and were proceeding satisfactorily. Further details would follow in due course. He remained, et cetera.
Jane folded it along its original creases and set it on the table.
She poured her tea. She drank it.
“Jane,” Catherine said.
“It’s nothing urgent.”
“I didn’t ask if it was urgent.”
Jane looked at the window. The garden beyond it was April-pale, the roses not yet out, the lawn still flattened from winter.
She had been twelve when her mother died and had been managing this house, in one form or another, since she was fifteen.
She knew every room of it, every floorboard outside her father’s library that creaked underfoot, the exact week in June when the wisteria on the south wall had to be cut back or it would press against the windows.
William Kensley had settled in her mind much the same way: a name kept at the edges, waiting its turn.
“It’s from Hutchins,” she said. “The Kensley matter.”
Catherine was silent a moment. Then she said, “And?”
“And nothing, at present. Further particulars will follow.”
She picked up her cup again. Catherine did not press. The question stayed there anyway, between them, unspoken. Jane ignored it and drank her tea, and they sat together while the fire settled in the grate.
* * *
Leonora arrived at three o’clock, as she always did.
She had a carriage and used it even for short distances, not from laziness but because she thought arriving on foot suggested idleness.
She was four-and-thirty, widowed at twenty-nine, and had arranged her life to suit herself since then.
Experience had taught her exactly what she would and would not accept.
Jane heard the carriage on the gravel and went to meet her in the hall.
“You look tired,” Leonora said, removing her gloves.
“Good afternoon, Leonora.”
“It wasn’t a criticism.” She handed her gloves to the housemaid and glanced around the hall, noting the things she always noticed and choosing, as usual, which of them to mention. “Where is Catherine?”
“Still in the drawing room.”
“Good. I have something to tell her that will make her unbearable for a week and I’d rather have done with it.”
She had brought pastries from the bakehouse in the village, wrapped in cloth and set in a basket she passed to Jane without ceremony. Leonora rarely said affectionate things. She fed people instead.
Mary was not there. She had left before noon to return to her father’s house. Leonora sat in Mary’s usual chair without hesitation, as if chairs were chairs and nothing more. Catherine looked up from the sofa, where she had not moved since morning.
“You said something to make me unbearable,” Catherine said. “What is it?”
“The Ashworths are giving a house party.”
A pause.
“When?” said Catherine.
“The last week of April into May. Ten days, perhaps a fortnight.” Leonora accepted the cup Jane poured for her. ‘Mrs Ashworth wrote this morning. They have gathered a full party already, apparently: neighbours, some people from town, a cousin visiting from abroad.”
“Which cousin?”
“I have no idea. A French one, I believe.”
“How many people?”
“More than that house comfortably holds, knowing the Ashworths.” Leonora drank her tea. “The invitation extends to all of us, naturally. Mary included, I assume, since Mrs Ashworth is fond of her.”