Chapter 8
“One need not attend to every detail. In fact, it is often advantageous not to.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on realizing that between her and the footman, Roderick, they may have inadvertently caused her husband’s death.
* * *
Mr. Edwin Cresswell from the Bodleian arrived at half past ten with his hat held in both hands.
Millie had been at the breakfast table when Pike announced him.
She had come to the drawing room to find that Nick had arrived there before her, which she had not expected.
He was standing at the window with his tea.
Unhurried. He turned when she entered, with the expression she was beginning to recognize.
The one that meant he was paying attention but had decided not to show it yet.
Cresswell was tall and narrow-framed, long-faced, with a prominent nose.
His hair thinning at the temples, carefully styled.
His pale gray eyes moved over the room with a muted attentiveness; he was a man who had learned to assess without appearing to assess.
His fingers were long and thin. He handled his hat with the fastidious care of someone for whom objects represented investments, turning it once in his hands before setting it on the table beside him with careful placement as if to declare to the other occupants in the room that he did not intend to forget it was there.
He smelled faintly of starch and sealing wax.
“Miss Metcalfe.” He inclined his head with the synthetic warmth of a man whose warmth was a professional instrument, calibrated and deployed. “I hope I do not intrude. I was passing and thought I would call to inquire after your father.”
“Not at all,” Millie said. “Please sit down.”
He sat and accepted tea.
Pike appeared in the doorway.
He did not come in. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, his bald scalp catching the morning light.
His face arranged into an expression that implied he had made a decision about Cresswell and was not going to revise it on the basis of any further information.
Millie had learned, in the two years since she had promoted him from coachman to butler over the vocal objections of several members of the household, to pay attention when Pike looked at a person that way.
She had not promoted him on a whim. She had promoted him because he had been the one to find Papa wandering.
Two years ago. In the January cold. At half past five in the morning.
Six streets from the house in his dressing gown with a volume under his arm, and no clear recollection of how he had come to be there.
Pike had been returning from some errand of his own.
He had simply brought Papa home, made him tea, and sat with him until the household rose, without making anything of it.
When she had come downstairs at six o’clock and found them both at the kitchen table, Pike had looked up and said only that Papa had been for an early walk.
Had perhaps overdone it … and had left it at that.
He was like that. He was gentle with Papa, as if he had encountered considerably worse problems than confusion.
An old soldier who had been to battle, he did not find it alarming or pitiable or inconvenient when Papa was difficult.
When he was unreachable. When he wandered the familiar rooms of his own house with the eyes of a man who did not recognize them.
Pike would say, in his thick South London accent, that Papa’s foibles amounted to little compared to artillery fire and gun smoke, and would simply get on with his day.
He was never impatient. He was never curt.
When Papa grew agitated, Pike would place a firm hand on his shoulder and say, “Easy now, sir. Oi’ve got you,” and that would be the end of it.
She had found she could trust him completely.
Oxford disapproved of Pike. He could not quote Latin. He could not navigate university etiquette or exchange the subtle pleasantries that visiting dons expected of a butler. He was five feet exactly. Completely bald. Built through the shoulders that showed he had done physical work all his life.
His South London accent had not softened by a syllable in twenty years of Oxford service. The previous butler had known visiting dons by name and understood precedence at table and managed social expectations with the smooth pragmatism of long practice.
Pike ran accounts and kept the house quiet and protected Papa from embarrassment and turned away intrusive callers.
Oxford society saw this as a kind of decline.
Millie saw it as necessary. When scholars like Cresswell curled their lips at the commoner answering the door, she found their expectations did not matter to her if it kept her father safe and happy.
Which was why, when Pike looked at a person the way he was currently looking at Cresswell, she took his judgment into account.
Nick, at the window, raised a single eyebrow.
It was not a dramatic gesture. It was a very small, very definite gesture.
The raising of one dark brow a fraction of an inch above its habitual position.
It communicated a complete and fully formed judgment, making his speculations felt without stating them.
He sipped his tea. He watched Cresswell with an expression of mild distaste.
Millie looked at Cresswell.
She looked at him with the attention she had not, she now recognized, been fully applying to these visits since January. Once a fortnight. Regular as invoices. Since the new year.
She had been polite. She had offered tea.
She had answered his inquiries about Papa.
His careful questions about the management of the house, the state of the library, the research materials.
She had not, until this moment, with Pike in the doorway and Nick’s single eyebrow still at its elevated position, examined why Cresswell was visiting.
He was currently talking about Papa. He had been talking about Papa since he sat down.
Papa was in his chair by the fire with one of his books open on his knee.
Six feet away. And Cresswell had not looked at him once.
He spoke about Papa in the third person as though Papa were a file on a desk rather than a man in the room.
As though the chair by the fire were simply occupied by a condition rather than a person.
He speaks about him as though he is not here.
She had suspected she did not much like him, but she had not been sure why.
She had not seen the specificity of it before.
She saw it now with a clarifying discomfort, realizing she had been looking at it from the wrong angle for a long time and had just turned it slightly and found the spider hiding underneath.
“Aubrey’s work represents a significant body of scholarship,” Cresswell was saying, in the soft, tight voice he affected.
Never raising it. Never sharpening it. Keeping it always at the same careful pitch that implied reason and goodwill and the disinterested pursuit of the appropriate outcome.
“And it would be a great loss if the materials were to become dispersed or inaccessible. For the good of the college, and to preserve your father’s legacy, it seems to those of us with a long acquaintance of his work that some arrangement ought to be considered.
Some appropriate stewardship. The college is well placed to offer exactly that, and for the good of the college and for Aubrey’s peace of mind, I would strongly encourage—”
“Mr. Metcalfe.” Nick’s voice came from the window. Smooth, addressing Papa with the comfortable ease of continuing a conversation he had left off briefly rather than beginning a new one.
Papa raised his head from the Latin text, startled and slack-jawed.
“You were telling me this morning,” Nick said, moving from the window to the chair beside Papa’s with his careful, dragging gait, setting his cane against the side table, “about the Geoffrey passage. The one you said was the most instructive lie in the whole of twelfth-century historiography.”
Papa’s face changed.
It was the change she knew. The surfacing. The return of the eyes to full presence. The full attention that he exhibited when something sought him through the murk and found him. Actually found him.
“Geoffrey,” Papa said, with the crisp authority of a man fully knowledgeable about a subject he had spent forty years studying, “is a magnificent liar. He constructs a narrative with the confidence of an eyewitness and an accuracy that implies he was at the event. Brilliant, naturally. Indispensable. But a liar of the first order.”
“You said this morning that it was what he chose to lie about that was interesting,” Nick said.
“Just so.” Papa leaned forward. The Latin text slid from his knee to the floor and he did not notice, and neither did Nick.
“If a man invents a detail, you do not ask whether he invented it. You ask why that detail. What does he gain by it. Geoffrey gains a unified British history with a single heroic line of kings descending to Arthur. That is not scholarship. That is politics in scholarly dress, and rather well-dressed, which is the most dangerous kind.”
“And the Welsh sources he set aside to construct that line,” Nick said.
“Set aside or simply did not read, which amounts to the same situation in practice.” Papa sat back, his expression indicating he had had this argument many times and found it consistently satisfying.
Like a piece of machinery that worked reliably and gave him pleasure in its working.
“His Latin was excellent. His Welsh, less so, which I have always considered either a great oversight or a great convenience, depending on one’s view of his intentions.
I lean toward convenience. A man of his abilities does not fail to acquire Welsh by accident, if Welsh is required to understand. ”
“He chose his ignorance,” Nick said.