Chapter 12 #2
Millie was at the street corner with Betty.
Her coat was buttoned to her chin against the chill, her spectacles at the end of her nose, her notebook pressed to her chest in both hands.
She was looking down the street toward the Bodleian with a fixed, unblinking attention, a woman who had been waiting for something and had not yet determined what expression to have ready for when it arrived.
He held up the portfolio.
The expression that crossed her face was several, arriving in quick succession.
Relief first, clean and total, and then an expression that could only be described as triumph.
The triumph of having executed a task that required skill and having just learned the plan succeeded.
Then an emotion warmer than both of those, for which he had no adequate name.
She looked away quickly, as if she had shown him more than she had intended to show.
He crossed to where she was standing.
“The forgery held,” he said.
“I know,” she said, but he could perceive she was nevertheless gratified to have it confirmed. She studied the portfolio. “It is in there.”
“It is in there.”
She peered at him then, fully, blue eyes and spectacles and scarlet ribbon and golden hair. She said nothing, but that nothing contained more than most sentences he had heard in recent memory.
Betty, beside her, produced a small, entirely self-contained smile and also said nothing.
He turned from the gate, and they fell into step together.
The portfolio was under his arm and the manuscript was inside it, and the afternoon was cold and Oxford conducted its usual business around them.
He found he was smiling too. Not something he had intended, but it happened with the uncomplicated simplicity of a smile that had been waiting for a natural occasion.
The inn off Broad Street was modest and warm and dark in the way of establishments that understood their clientele preferred not to be too visible.
A low-ceilinged room welcomed them with a good fire and corner tables that accommodated customers who had private matters to discuss without an audience.
The landlord brought them ale and a plate of bread and cheese without being asked, the mark of a proprietor who had learned to read what a table needed before the table had worked it out for itself.
Betty took the adjacent table with her sewing, which she extracted from her bag with resignation. She was a retainer for whom invisibility was a skill she had developed to a fine art.
Millie sat across from him with her half glass of what the landlord had described as a mild cider, which had turned out to be considerably less mild than the description suggested, judging by the pink in her cheeks.
Her commentary on the provenance of Arthurian manuscripts, which she had been delivering at a pace suggesting it had been composing itself in her head while she waited in the street, had become even more direct than usual. If such a thing were possible.
He listened. He was getting rather good at listening to Millie on subjects that required the whole of her mind.
Not because he was acting, but because she was genuinely interesting when she was fully locked in to something.
And she was always fully in whatever she was in.
This, he had long since ceased to find surprising and simply found consistently true.
Then she stopped.
She peered at her glass. Then at her hands. Then at the table, and said, “He used to argue with me about everything,” in a voice that had changed its timbre entirely.
Nicholas waited.
“Papa.” She said it in a careful voice, about a serious topic she had decided to speak on.
“He argued about everything. Every interpretation, every source, every translation. He never agreed with me simply because I was his daughter. He required evidence. He required the argument.” She was looking at the table. “I used to find it exhausting.”
She stopped again. She turned her glass once.
“And then he stopped arguing. Not all at once, but in stages. He would agree with something I said, and I would think … he has finally come round, and then I would realize he had agreed because he was not certain enough of his own position to contest mine. The arguments became rarer. And then they stopped.” She studied her hands.
“I would give rather a great deal for him to declare that I am wrong about something … anything.”
Her voice was dull, the emotion pressed out of it by the weight and the time of disappointments, leaving only the fact of it. Clean and hard and true.
Nicholas drummed his fingers briefly, thinking what to say. He did not offer comfort because offered comfort was not what this required. He had spent enough time with Millie to understand that what she required from a difficult subject was accuracy, not mitigation.
“Most people in your position,” he said, “would have hired a nurse, arranged the house, and continued their own lives.”
She blinked at him over the crooked spectacles.
“It is worth saying that you are doing far more than most people would have done,” he said. “It is impressive.”
She held his gaze for a moment, then dropped her gaze to her glass again. An expression shifted across her face, pleased surprise arriving before she could conceal it. “What happened to you,” she said. “Before Grimsfell.”
He had known it was coming. She was a woman who kept accounts, who organized and cross-referenced and did not leave gaps unaddressed when the gaps were large enough to be visible.
He had given her ten days of omissions, and she had been patient with them.
Or at least she had not pressed them, which in Millie’s economy of behavior was a form of patience.
Nicholas told her something true.
Not his identity, not the name, or the title, or the accumulated weight of what the name carried, but something true nonetheless. Something he had not said aloud to anyone since sobering up, arriving from somewhere he had not expected. From deep within his heart.
“My mother,” he said, “was different toward me after my accident. Before, I had been … She had peculiar ideas about what was worth her attention. Afterward, I was not … that.” He said it plainly, without the nonchalant tone he used for deflections he did not mean.
“She was not unkind. She was simply … absent.”
Millie was listening. The full attention. Not the polite variety.
“Your mother,” Millie said quietly. “Is she—”
“She died,” Nicholas said. “Some months ago. The circumstances were … not straightforward. And I found, when it happened, that it did not affect me as I had expected. There was less grief than I had assumed there would be.” He chose the next word scrupulously.
“I have wondered since whether that makes me inhumane. Incapable of the feelings a person ought to have about a parent.”
Millie observed him for a long moment, her expression thoughtful.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you had already grieved her. Before she died. When she rejected who you were.” She said it bluntly, but without the clinical edge that her directness sometimes produced. “The loss happened then. Not when she died. When she stopped seeing you.”
He sat with this.
He had not thought about it in those terms. He had read her poisonous journals last year and sat in the bleak clarity of finally acknowledging what he had spent years refusing to articulate.
He had felt something then. Not grief, exactly.
Something with more anger in it than grief.
More relief than anger. And underneath all of it, a kind of old, tired sadness he had been carrying long enough that he had stopped distinguishing it from his own weight.
Millie had just named it.
Ah.
“I was fortunate to have a brother who did take care of me,” he said, after a moment.
“Simon. He has always …” He stopped. He thought about Simon, who had sat beside his bed and tutored him through the worst years and been the fixed point he had been orbiting without acknowledging it.
Who had coaxed him out of bed, wheedled him into standing for the first time.
“He has always been what I needed, even when I was not what he needed in return. Which has not always been a short list.”