Page 10 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

He heard Mrs Brooks’s pause. He heard the keys shift on their ring as she took them up, a small sound, iron and final, like a garrison’s colours changing hands in the dark.

Chapter Seven

Breakfast at Moorfield had been, until that week, a meal a man could take with his letters propped against the coffee pot. Adelaide had reformed it in three days into a session of Parliament. She sat at the foot as though the chair had been left her in a will, dispatched her correspondence in tidy volleys, and governed the toast rack with the same hand she was extending, plate by plate, over the household, and Robert, who had watched Mrs Brooks surrender the menus with the expression of a colonel yielding a bridge. He was under no illusion as to who was intended to be the ultimate conquest.

She opened the campaign on the fourth morning, over the shells of her eggs, with Diana not yet down.

“I have had a letter from Pettigrew,” she said. “You will wish to hear it.”

“I rarely wish to hear Pettigrew. Read it to me anyway.”

“He writes that Edmund has been to see him. In person, if you please, Edmund, who could not be got to town for your brother’s funeral, found a whole day for Chancery Lane.” She laid the letter flat and smoothed it with two fingers, a gesture he had known forty years, which meant the artillery was now loaded. “He asked to see the terms of the guardianship. He was refused, naturally. He then asked Pettigrew, mark this, Robert, whether it was true that Charlotte has been given into the daily charge of a young person from a registry office, and whether her condition since January had been examined by any physician of standing, or only by…” she consulted the page, “‘the local practitioner, who I understand is an intimate of his lordship’s.’”

The coffee went down wrong. Robert set the cup in its saucer with exactness. “Hamish Watson has forgotten more medicine than Edmund’s Harley Street men ever billed for.”

“I do not doubt it. You are missing the shape of the thing, which is Edmund building a nursery tale for a courtroom. The rake, the drinking friend with a brass plate, the hired girl nobody knows, and the little heiress shut up silent in a shuttered house. Every word of it answerable, and every word of it quotable, that is the genius of your cousin. He has no gifts, so he has made a profession of other men’s appearances.” She pushed the letter aside. “There is one door out of this, and I have brought her here, and you sit there stirring your coffee as though the house were not on fire.”

“The house is not on fire, Aunt. The house has a cousin writing letters.”

“Houses have burned from less.” She regarded him down the table’s length, and her voice performed the small drop it made when she moved from commanding to meaning. “Enter into matrimony with Diana, Robert. I do not say you must have an attachment for her. I am one and seventy. I say take her as your wife. Announce it in the Gazette by quarter-day. Edmund’s tale wants a wicked bachelor to stand up in it, and you will have made him a respectable wedded man instead, and there is no play left in his hand. It is arithmetic. You have grown fond of arithmetic lately, by all reports. Do this sum.”

And the deuce of it was, Robert reflected, that the sum was indisputably correct. That was Adelaide entire. Wrong about everything that mattered and correct to the last figure about everything that could be written down. He was still assembling an answer that contained neither surrender nor the word no flung hard enough to close her mind for a fortnight, when the door opened, and Diana came in on a breath of orange-flower water, apologising charmingly for her lateness, and her timing was, as ever, the best-rehearsed thing in the room.

“You are quarrelling,” she said, delighted, taking the chair at Robert’s elbow rather than the one laid for her. “Over me? How restorative. Nobody has quarrelled over me at breakfast since the year eleven.”

“We are discussing the estate,” Robert said.

“Ah,” said Diana, and buttered her toast, and did not believe him, and let him see she did not, all in the small warm privacy of a glance below the table’s public weather, and Adelaide, at the foot, returned to her correspondence with the satisfaction of a general whose two armies have at least agreed to occupy the same field.

***

She ran him to ground in the long gallery that afternoon, where he had gone to be alone with the pictures and the rain on the glass, and she did it well, no rustle of approach, simply Diana at his shoulder before the portrait of James, her voice pitched low for the room’s length.

“He was never fond of me,” she said. “Your brother. He was civil as a bishop about it, but he never had a liking for me, and he was quite right.” A pause, measured. “You stand in front of this one a great deal. The footmen mention it.”

“The footmen are paid to dust, not to mention.”

“Servants mention. It is what they are instead of the daily prints.” She turned from the portrait to him, and the rain-light did what she had chosen the gallery for it to do, which was to be kind to her and grave at once. “Robert. I am going to say something your aunt did not send me to say, and you will do me the courtesy of not being witty until I have finished. I was nineteen. I chose the money, no, let me say it properly. I chose safety, and it wore Harrington’s face, and I told myself the thing women in my position are issued to tell themselves, that regard is a luxury and I could not afford luxuries. And then I had eight years to sit in forty rooms and watch the bargain sour.” Her chin lifted. The candour was immaculate. He could not find the seam in it, and he had been looking for seams since she crossed the breakfast room. “I never stopped, Robert. Whatever I did at that card party, whatever I said on the terrace, there was one item I never managed to sell. I have brought it back fifty miles in your aunt’s carriage, at the age of seven-and-twenty, which I promise you is not an act a woman performs for arithmetic. Wed me or do not, but do not stand there believing I came for the Gazette notice.”

It was, Robert thought, the best thing he had ever heard her do. Every word plumb, every pause honest-weighted, each laid exactly where true confession would lay it. Years ago the speech would have finished him. Weeks ago it might have. But he had spent the spring learning a particular trade at a desk full of ruled paper, and the trade had ruined him for performances. He no longer heard accounts; he inspected them, and somewhere in the gallery’s grey light the entry would not reconcile, the woman who claimed had never stopped caring for him had not written in January, when the world wrote, but had come only now, in the aunt’s carriage, in the season of Edmund’s letters. She had known to a day when the mourning turned, and the title warmed.

“Diana,” he said, and took her hand, and felt her stillness bloom into triumph one instant before he laid the hand, gently, back at her side. “That was moving. I mean it, I am moved. And if I ever find the man you rehearsed it on, I’ll stand him a dinner.”

The spectators in the gallery held their collective breath. And there, for a beat or two, that beautiful openness hung suspended, as a painted drop-curtain plunged into darkness when the lamps behind it were snuffed, revealing, in the foreground before the canvas, a woman coldly engaged in calculation. Then the laugh came low and flexible, hardly a beat late. “How you have changed,” Diana said, wonder in it, already walking, trailing one glove along the gallery rail. “The Robert I knew wanted so badly to be believed. It made him very easy to talk to.” At the door she turned, framed; she was always framed. Doors valued her, and gave him the truest sentence of the afternoon with a smile of genuine appreciation, one professional to another. “I shall simply have to be more careful, shan’t I?”

Her heels went away down the polished floor, unhurried. Robert stood before his brother’s portrait in the rain-light. After a while he became aware of the tall pier glass at the gallery’s end, which had watched the whole engagement from its wall, and which now showed him at forty feet a small bright figure in its depths, Diana, pausing at the gallery door where she believed herself past all observation, her reflection caught in the act of losing its warmth the way a window loses it at dusk. At first by degrees, and then all at once, until she reached that cool, steady core of purpose lying beneath.

The glass held her one more instant. Then she passed from its frame, and left Robert alone in it, a man in a rainy gallery, on notice at last, watching the empty door in the mirror the way a sentry watches a breached wall.

Chapter Eight

The white ribbon appeared on Jane’s door handle on the second rainy morning, tied in a bow with one end left long, and the long end was new.

She had learned the grammar of the game by then. A ribbon knotted plain meant good morning. A ribbon on the schoolroom table meant come and be read to, and this, the trailing end, deliberate as a beckoning finger, meant something had been decided overnight in the small country behind the curtains, and Jane was being sent for. She put on her shawl and followed where the signs led. A second ribbon hung looped about the newel post at the foot of the east staircase, whilst a third marked the latch of the long corridor bridging the family wing and the guest chambers. In that quiet reach of the house, the carpet gave way to bare boards, and the morning light filtered thin through a single high window at the far end. Charlotte stood halfway down it, waiting. And when Jane came near, the child did something she had never once done in three weeks of ribbons and slates and corrected poems. She reached up and took Jane’s hand, took it first, of her own accord, fingers cold and certain, and led her to the stretch of panelling below the corridor’s high window, and pressed the beading at the third panel’s edge, and stood back.

The panel swung inward on a dark little room the size of a wardrobe laid on its side. It smelled of dust and candle-ends. There was a folded blanket, and a wooden horse with a worn mane that Jane recognised from no nursery shelf she had catalogued, and a tin that had once held biscuits, and a view, she bent to see, through a fretted brass grate low in the opposite wall, into the room beyond.

It was the capital city of the hidden country, and she had just been shown it, freely, by its sovereign.