Chapter 1 #2
Catherine was already sitting straighter, the book forgotten. She looked at Jane.
“We should go,” she said.
“We would be expected to go,” Jane said.
“Jane.” Catherine said it with warning in her voice. “It would be good for you.”
“I am perfectly well.”
“You have been at the school every morning since February without a single day elsewhere. You came home today and dealt with the sweep and the apothecary’s bill before you sat down. You need—”
“I don’t require a house party to recover from an apothecary’s bill.”
Leonora set her cup down. She had watched the exchange in silence, thinking it over before speaking, as she usually did.
“The Ashworths keep a good house,” she said. “The grounds are pleasant. There will be music in the evenings and the company will be tolerable, or at least interestingly intolerable.” She met Jane’s eyes. “I would prefer not to go without you.”
Jane recognised the weight of that at once. Leonora rarely asked for anything. That she asked now mattered.
Jane turned to the window. The afternoon light lay long across the garden. The school was in order. Mary could manage it for a fortnight. Nothing stood in the way except reluctance, and reluctance alone was a thin excuse.
“I’ll write to Mrs Ashworth,” she said.
Catherine made a strangled sound of triumph.
“One sentence,” Jane said. “No more of that until we arrive.”
“I make no promises,” Catherine said, reaching for a pastry.
Leonora said nothing. She drank her tea and watched Jane a moment over the rim of the cup, attentive and unreadable, before turning back to the garden.
* * *
The house was quiet by nine. Her father had taken his candle up at eight without appearing at dinner, which meant he had forgotten dinner, which meant someone had left a tray outside his library door and he had taken it in without noticing who had brought it.
Jane had checked at half past seven. The tray was gone.
She sat at her dressing table in her nightgown with her hair down and the brush in her hand and did not brush it. The candle was the only light. Outside the window the night was dark, moonless, with wind moving through the elms and, somewhere near the home wood, an owl.
The letter from Hutchins was on her writing desk, folded and set squarely in the corner. She had not shown it to her father. There was no need. He had told Hutchins to write it.
William Kensley.
Earlier she had tried to piece him together from what she knew.
The Kensley estate was in the north of the county, well-regarded and well-kept.
The family was old. The father had died some years back.
William Kensley was the eldest son and now ran the property.
Five-and-twenty, perhaps. She had heard nothing against him.
She had heard almost nothing at all, which could mean there was little to say, or that what there was to say was spoken quietly.
She had met him once.
The thought came and she let it stay. Refusing a thought had never made it smaller.
She had been six years old. He had been eight, or near it, older enough then to seem far older.
The Kensley family had come to Claverton Park on business between their fathers, business that had kept the adults shut in the library all afternoon.
Jane had been sent out to amuse herself.
She had gone to the paddock, as she always did.
There was a grey pony there, docile enough, but large to a six-year-old with a lead rein and no clear plan.
She had been trying to mount for some time when the gate clicked behind her.
He came to stand beside her and looked at the pony, considering it for a moment.
“You’re holding it wrong,” he said.
She had wanted to tell him she was not. She had been holding the rein for ten minutes and felt obliged to defend it.
But he showed her anyway. He did not take it from her.
He laid his hand over hers and shifted her grip, matter-of-fact, as if correcting the rein was no more than setting a thing properly.
Then he told her where to put her weight, where to look, what to do with her hands.
She listened because he spoke to her plainly, expecting her to understand.
She had got up. The pony shifted sideways and she gripped hard.
“It doesn’t know what you want yet,” he said quietly. “Tell it.”
She could not now remember how long they had stayed in the paddock.
Long enough for her to circle it twice on the pony, back straight, hands set where he had shown her, the fear still there but changed into something she could sit above.
When they were called back to the house, he went in without waiting for thanks.
At the door he held it open for her. That was all.
She had not spoken to him since. The years had covered it over.
The candle guttered. She steadied it with her hand and looked at herself in the dark mirror of the dressing table: two-and-twenty, hair loose, the letter in the corner of the room waiting like a fact she had not yet touched.
It was a child’s memory, nothing more. A boy kind to a girl in a paddock told her little about the man he had become.
She picked up the brush and worked through her hair, starting at the ends, as her mother had taught her.
Outside, the wind moved through the elms. The owl called once, nearer now, and then stopped.
She finished her hair, braided it, tied it, and pinched out the candle.
In the dark she lay on her back and looked at the ceiling. She turned her mind to the school instead: Thomas Fletcher’s reading, Margaret Tomkins’s arithmetic, the primer pages that needed replacing before the end of term.
She was asleep before the moon rose.