Page 17 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Pettigrew’s hand was that of a clerk, small, dry, and cramped. Robert read the sheet standing. The first page was all preamble and apology; the second was the blade.…must inform you that Mr Edmund Moorfield has now retained Mr Serle of Lincoln’s Inn, who is known for Chancery work of exactly this character… a petition respecting the guardianship and the management of the ward’s fortune is, I am given to understand, in preparation, wanting only what Mr Serle calls “matter” to lay before the court… and I regret extremely to add that among the matter now spoken of is the assertion, I give it as it was given to me, of an unsuitable intimacy between his lordship and a young person lately engaged from a London registry, said to be conducted before witnesses in the public view of the parish…

The paper was very steady in his hands. That surprised him distantly, like news of a stranger.

“Before witnesses,” Robert said. “In the public view of the parish. That letter was written Friday, Aunt. The festival was Saturday.”

“Then you have been matter since before you danced, and Saturday you were kind enough to provide the illustrations.” Adelaide’s voice did not rise. It settled, which was worse. “That woman came this morning to see whether the story would hold when she carried it. You watched her weigh it. By Thursday it will be in every drawing room from here to Chichester, and by Michaelmas it will be set down in an affidavit, formally framed, sworn, and dated. Do you comprehend the nature of Serle’s business, Robert? It is not proof. Chancery requires no proof for such a matter. It requires only a story a judge may repeat to himself as he sets his hand to the paper. The rake. The parish-register girl. The silent little heiress and her forty thousand pounds. And the family that did nothing.”

“The story is false.”

“The narrative is compelling, and before a judge, that is a vastly different and infinitely stronger matter.” She sat, at last, and for the first time in his life Robert watched his aunt’s hands, folding the letter, miss the crease. “I have buried a husband and two brothers, one of them your father, whom I did not like but mourned anyway, and I have never once in my one and seventy years asked a member of this family to hear me as though I might be right. I am asking now. Enter into matrimony with Diana. This week. Let the notice run in the Gazette before quarter-day, and Serle’s petition expires on his desk, because his story ends there is no rake in it any more, only a settled wedded man of rank, and no judge in England takes a child from that.” Her eyes came up. “Or keep on as you are, and gamble Charlotte on the difference between what is true and what is repeatable.”

The fire subsided into a gentle, rhythmic ticking as the embers settled in the grate. Somewhere above them, faint through the floors, a pianoforte was working at a country dance, patient, hands separately and then together, the schoolroom, the afternoon lesson, the ordinary sound of the two people under discussion going on with their day in the sunlight, not knowing they had become matter.

“You have not asked me,” Robert said at last, “whether the assertion is true.”

“I have not,” said Adelaide, “because it is beneath both of us, and because I watched you on that landing three weeks ago make that child a promise with your whole face, and I know what I saw.” A breath. “I will say this once, and then never again, because it is not a thing our family says. Miss Prescott’s character is not in question. I have watched her a month with every intention of finding fault, and I have found a woman who does her work, holds her tongue, and cherishes that child with better judgement than the rest of us have shown together. If she were a squire’s daughter I would be planning the wedding myself and taking the credit.” The letter went back into the box, the box locked with a small brutal click. “But she is not a squire’s daughter, Robert. She is the registry girl in Serle’s story, through no fault of her own and no virtue of yours, and her character is not the question. Yours is. Twelve years of yours, printed, witnessed, and waiting in a solicitor’s drawer for exactly this use. You made yourself quotable, and now the bill has come in, and it is made out in Charlotte’s name.” She rose. “Wed Diana, and the account is settled by Friday. That is all I came to say a fortnight ago. I am sorry it has taken a Fenwick to make me say it plainly.”

***

He did not go down to dinner.

He sat in the study instead while the light went, with the ledgers shut for once and the two futures open on the desk in their place, and did the sum honestly, which was the discipline the spring had taught him and the cruellest thing it had taught him. Item by item, without the least faltering, that was the calamity of it; he heard everything in her voice then, the sums first, my lord, and the wanting after.

Item. Serle was real, the letter was real, and the story was good.

Item. Wedded to Diana by quarter-day, the story expired. Charlotte kept her home, her uncle, her schoolroom, her sightline, for a season

Item. And the governess goes wherever such persons go.

Item, and here the sum stopped being arithmetic, because there was an entry in him now that would not sit in any column, that had walked out of a lime-walk three days ago and taken up freehold, item. There was one woman under this roof whose presence had begun to mend his family, and every road his aunt called safe ran over her.

The decanter stood at his elbow where Travers left it nightly, a decade’s habit outliving its master. Robert looked at it a long while, the old door, the easy dark, twelve years of not being asked to be anyone, and then he took it up, crossed to the hearth, and poured it out upon the fire. The flame went up blue and gaudy and brief, a conjuror’s trick, gone, the room smelled of hot sugar and burned years, and he set the empty decanter on the mantel with the care a man gives a retired adversary.

“Not this time,” he told it.

Then he crossed to the window. The house lay dark along its wings, but two lights burned in the north front, one above the other. The schoolroom lamp, where the accounts of a small kingdom were kept, and higher, fainter, the nursery night-light standing its watch. Robert stood with his hands on the cold sill, looking up at the two windows he was being invoiced for, and did what he had once spent whole seasons of his life avoiding. He stayed with the difficulty, in the dark, sober, and let it look back at him.

The story is good, his aunt had said.

Then I’ll want a better one, he thought, and somewhere under the cold arithmetic, patient as a second calendar, the beginning of one turned over.

Chapter Fourteen

The storm swept up the valley past midnight, intent upon the house. Jane woke to the initial thunderclap already upon her feet, for a month in the north wing had taught her to distinguish a mere gale from weather that heralded trouble. Thunder cracked near at hand, and rain lashed mercilessly against the glass. Beneath the tempest, Jane’s vigilant ear caught the distinctive sigh of the nursery door, followed by an abrupt silence, which proved far more alarming than any weeping. She took up her candle and hastened down the passage, where flashes of lightning illuminated the open nursery door. The bed lay empty, its bedclothes cast aside in haste, and the night-light floated extinguished in its saucer.

Think. Not the window seat; the schoolroom faced the storm. Not the panel, too far, too dark, and the high window of the corridor would be illuminated by repeated flashes of lightning. She stood in the flickering passage doing the geography of a frightened small country, and heard her own voice from a month ago. A child who watches is asking a question, and understood, all at once with a jolt that had nothing to do with thunder, where a question would run on a night when the sky sounded like the thing that had taken everything the last time. Not to a hiding place at all.

To the promise.

The study door stood ajar on lamplight. Jane stopped at the threshold, her candle shielded, and looked in on the answer. Robert Moorfield was on the floor with his back against the desk’s side, coatless, one leg stretched out, and Charlotte a small storm-refugee against his chest with her face hidden in his shirt and both fists wound into it His hand was moving on her back with the slow, unhurried patience of a man who had been told, once, how one sits with a hiding child, and had learned the lesson for life. He was talking. Low, steady, not soothing so much as narrating, the storm explained as weather, the thunder as air and nothing else, the house as old and stout and stormed-on a hundred years before anyone present was born, the voice of a man laying facts down like sandbags. Over the small head his eyes came up and found Jane in the doorway.

Neither of them spoke. He looked from Jane to the child, his countenance betraying an unguarded mixture of relief, helplessness, and wonder. He held the expression of a man entrusted with far greater joy than he had ever dared expect. Jane entered softly and knelt beside them; Charlotte’s small hand released his shirt, sought Jane’s sleeve, and grasped it with quiet possession, moving no further. The storm raged above the house as the lamp burned steadily. Held fast between them, the child’s trembling gradually subsided; her fists relaxed, and her breathing grew deep and even, until she sank into the sudden, profound slumber of utter exhaustion, leaving neither of them bold enough to stir. “There’s a shawl on the chair,” Robert said, hardly aloud. “If we move her she’ll wake. If we don’t move her, we are both of us here till morning, Miss Prescott, and my aunt’s household will have opinions.”

“Then the household may have them of a sleeping child, my lord. I’ll not gamble the first night she’s run towards something.”

“No.” His head went back against the desk, and he looked at the ceiling, and laughed once, silently, at nothing she could see. “Towards. You heard that too.”

***