Page 1 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Chapter One

The summons came while Jane was correcting Miss Amelia’s French composition, and it was Sarah the under-housemaid who brought it, which told Jane everything before a word was spoken. Good news in the Hargrove household travelled by the butler. Bad news was given to whoever happened to be passing the stairs.

“Her ladyship wishes to see you, miss. In the morning room.”

“Thank you, Sarah.”

Jane set down her quill, squared the composition against the edge of the desk, and took stock of herself in the schoolroom’s small mirror. Her dress was a quiet grey, the cuffs impeccably clean, and her chestnut hair pinned back with such severe precision that not one tendril had escaped by eleven o’clock, a small daily victory nobody had ever remarked upon. Beneath that neat, dark crown, her cool grey eyes surveyed the schoolroom, sharp and composed, missing very little.

Lady Hargrove was at her writing table when Jane entered, and she did not look up at once. She finished her sentence, read it over, and appeared to find it satisfactory. Jane waited in the middle of the carpet, at the precise distance she had learned in her first month. Near enough to be addressed, far enough that her ladyship need not tilt her head.

“Ah. Miss Prescott.” Lady Hargrove set down her quill and smiled at a point slightly to the left of Jane’s shoulder. “You will be pleased for us, I know. Sir William has accepted the appointment in Calcutta. We sail in September.”

“That is a great honour for Sir William, my lady.”

“It is, though I am sure I shall find the climate a trial. Everyone says the society there is quite tolerable now, and of course the girls will come with us.” She turned over a letter on the table, aligning it with its fellows. “Which brings me to you. We shall not require you after the end of the month. The girls will have a native ayah for the voyage, and afterwards, as well. Amelia is nearly sixteen. Everyone remarks on how beautifully I have brought her along, and I begin to think there is very little left for a governess to do.”

Jane had taught Amelia her French, her Italian, her globes, her sums, and, in the third year, patiently, after two masters had given her up, how to hold her temper at the pianoforte long enough to learn it. She said none of this.

“I understand, my lady.”

“I knew you would be sensible. You are always so sensible, Miss Prescott. I have often said it is your best quality.” Lady Hargrove drew a folded paper from the little drawer and held it out. “Your character. I wrote it myself this morning.”

Jane took it. The seal was already pressed, but her ladyship had left it unfastened, in the manner of employers who wish their generosity to be read before it is delivered. Jane did not open it. She had a fair notion of what it contained, because she had heard Lady Hargrove compose such letters aloud before, diligent, respectable, most useful. Useful. In four years she had come to understand the word thoroughly. It meant invisible, with duties.

“You are very kind, my lady.”

“Yes.” Lady Hargrove was already reaching for her quill. “The month’s wages will be made up to you, naturally, and Simmons will see about your box being corded when the day comes. Do close the door as you go. There is a draught from the stairs.”

Jane closed the door softly behind her. On the landing she passed the long glass that hung opposite the window, and it offered her, as it always did, a woman in grey whom the house looked through rather than at. She had ceased to argue with the glass years ago.

In the schoolroom, Miss Amelia had abandoned the composition and was trimming a bonnet.

“Mama says we are going to India,” she said, without looking up. “I shall ride an elephant. Fanny Herries will be sick with envy.”

“I am sure she will. You have neglected your accents off élève again.”

“It hardly matters now, does it?” Amelia held the bonnet at arm’s length and turned it. “Miss Prescott, do you think blue ribbon, or the cherry?”

“The blue. Cherry will quarrel with your complexion in a hot climate.”

“You see, that is what you are good for,” Amelia said, pleased, and reached for the scissors. It was, Jane reflected that it stood very nearly as an epitaph. Four years had elapsed, and the child had spoken with greater truth than her mother. That was what she was good for, and when the ribbon was chosen, the choice as forgotten.

She picked up the composition and marked the accents in, one by one, because the work was hers whether or not anyone would ever look at it.

The last evening, the house forgot her early. There was packing above stairs and the mention of India in every conversation. The fire in the grate had burnt down to a pile of grey ash as it had been neglected. Jane sat patiently in the cold room amongst her corded trunk. She had finished with a household which had forgotten her very existence through the entire week when the door opened slowly and Sarah, the under-housemaid, entered, carrying a tea tray that nobody had rung for.

“Cook sent it up, miss. And she says…” Sarah set it down with the concentration of a girl repeating a lesson, “she says you’re to eat the seed-cake now, while it’s warm, and there’s a parcel under the cloth that’s for the coach tomorrow and not for sharing, and if anyone asks, the seed-cake was burned and thrown out.”

Under the cloth, wrapped in paper she found a cold fowl, bread, more cake, and a twist of tea, a servant’s fortune, which had been assembled in a kitchen where every raisin was counted by the housekeeper and entered against the month.

“Sarah. This will be missed.”

“It will not, miss, for Cook will see to what is lacking.” The girl stood a moment, working her apron hem, and then delivered the rest in haste, the way below stairs delivered its verdicts, all at once or never. “Cook says four years and never once did you ring twice for anything, or blame the young miss for the schoolroom fire, or carry tales down of what was said up. She says them upstairs won’t know what they had till the next one, and the next one will teach them. And I’m to say…” the apron hem suffered, “the morning Miss Amelia locked me in the linen room for a game and forgot me, and you heard, and came, and never told her ladyship it was Miss Amelia, on account of I’d have been the one turned off for it. You never even said you’d done anything. Cook says that’s the trouble with you, miss, begging your pardon. You do things so quiet that only the quiet people see them.”

She bobbed and was gone before Jane could assemble an answer, which was as well, because Jane had none that would have kept its shape. She sat in the school room which was growing colder, with a stolen supper and the discovery, turning it the way she turned all unexpected figures, twice, looking for the error, that she had been keeping her accounts in the wrong room for four years. Above stairs, nothing had been entered. She had checked the total often enough, and it was nil, and she had called that the whole ledger. But below, in the kitchen, in the linen room, in rooms she had never thought inspected her at all, a second set of books had been kept the whole time, small entries, in her favour, by the only people in the house whose attention cost them something to spend.

The quiet people see them. She ate the seed-cake while it was warm, as instructed, and entered the evening where she entered things that would not balance, and took the parcel down to the coach in the morning, and it was Sarah, of all that household, who stood at the area railing in the grey early light to watch her go.