Page 18 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

They carried her up together when the storm had gone off to trouble the coast, he bearing the child, Jane the lamp, the small procession managing the stairs with state secrets’ care, and saw her laid down and watched the ribbon-wound fist settle on the pillow. Then, as neither wing of the house stirred and the lamp was to be restored, they moved by unspoken consent to the library. The door remained ajar to preserve the fiction of propriety, while the hearth was slowly burning down to its final embers.

“She came to my door,” Robert said. He stood by the mantel, looking into the low coals, and his voice had the flatness men use for things too large to inflect. “Past your door, past Mrs Brooks, down a black staircase in a storm, and came to my door. I opened it, and she simply walked against me and held on, and I stood there in the passage like a man who’s been handed the Bank of England and can’t think where to put it.” He turned. “Five months ago I could not have told you the colour of her eyes. That is the man the newspapers had, and they had him fairly. And tonight she…” The sentence went where his sentences did not usually go, which was nowhere, and he let it.

“Children keep better books than we do,” Jane said. “They enter what you do. You have five months of entries now. The rest is only history.”

“History.” He said the word as though testing its edge. “My father used to say, with company present, it was one of his set performances that Providence gives every family a spare, and the Moorfields’ had come without the works inside. I made it my life’s employment to prove him right. It seemed the only post on offer.” The firelight played across his features. He was not looking for pity, she saw. He was doing what she did over a ledger, stating the figures before striking the balance. “James begged to differ, quietly, once a year, the way he did everything. I never let him finish. If I’d let him finish, I’d have had to be somebody, and being nobody was, you may laugh, safe.”

“I shan’t laugh,” said Jane. “Being nobody is the safest country in England. I’ve held its citizenship four years.”

His gaze, painted in rich hazel, settled upon her, and the room went quiet in the particular way it had learned to go quiet around the two of them, and she heard herself go on, not planning it, hearing it, steady, the sums first. “I was one-and-twenty. There was a Mr Cavendish, Henry, and there was an understanding, which is a word people use so that afterwards nobody can be accused of having promised. My father’s ships failed in the same month my father’s heart did. And I learned that a gentleman’s regard can be a lease, my lord, not a freehold that runs with the property, and when the property goes…” she opened one hand, palm up, empty, and closed it, “I watched them carry the furniture out. I watched him not come, and I decided to be nobody, because nobody can be repossessed.”

The coals settled. Outside, far off, the storm muttered over the Downs like a debtor leaving.

“He was a fool,” Robert said. “Of a kind I recognise, because I’ve dined with the breed for years, men who could tell you the price of everything in the room and were bankrupts entire in the only column that pays.” He had come away from the mantel. She had risen when she could not have said. The lamp between them on the table made the whole world a yard wide. “Miss Prescott, Jane. I have it on the best authority that I say things a man oughtn’t when nothing’s settled, so let the record show I know it, and say this anyway. You came to this house as nobody, by your own accounting. And I have watched every soul under this roof, a child who trusts no one, a housekeeper who approves of no one, an aunt who spares no one, every one of them, one by one, do the same arithmetic and arrive at the same total. You are the one entry in this whole cooked ledger of a house that is exactly what it claims to be. And I…” the wit went out of his voice, and left it plain and younger, “I am finished pretending I haven’t checked the sum.”

“My lord…”

“Robert,” he said. “In this room, at this hour, with the storm as witness and nothing on earth settled, Robert.”

And Jane Prescott, who had spent four years as mere background, calculating every expense and holding just four pounds against the world, watched her own hand rise and rest flat against his heart, as if verifying an estimated figure. He fell completely still, awaiting her decision. In a voice unlike her usual tone, she said, “First the calculations, Robert, and only then the desires. It is my whole method, and a ruinous one, for the sums have been complete for weeks.” And Jane Prescott, who had spent four years as mere background, calculating every expense and holding just four pounds against the world, watched her own hand rise and rest flat against his heart, as if verifying an estimated figure. He fell completely still, awaiting her decision. In a voice unlike her usual tone, she said, “First the calculations, Robert, and only then the desires. It is my whole method, and a ruinous one, for the sums have been complete for weeks.”

They kissed, an embrace so swift and silent that neither could recall who had begun it, yet profound in every measure. His hand rose gently to her cheek as though to stay her, while the lamp cast a warm, golden sanctuary around them amidst the hushed silence of the house. When at last they parted, her hand remained over his heart, feeling its steady, rapid beat match her own, two souls, for once, in perfect and reckless accord.

“That,” Robert said, unsteadily, “was not the outermost edge.”

“No.” Her forehead came to rest, one moment, against his collarbone, one moment only, the entire allowance. “That was the principal, and we cannot afford it, and you know every reason better than I can teach them to you.”

“I know the reasons.” His hand had not left her face. “I am going to answer every one of them, Jane. Not tonight, tonight I’d promise anything, and you’d be right not to bank it. But there is a letter coming, and a man of law, and a story going round that wants a better story to destroy it, and I am building one, and when it stands, I will come and say the whole sentence, in daylight, with the door open. Until then,” he stepped back. It cost him visibly. He made himself do it, and she cherished him for the step more than for the kiss, and entered that, too, in the book there was no closing now, “until then, the outermost edge. You have my word. And you’ve heard what I keep.”

She took up her candle. At the door she looked back once, a woman printing a room onto memory, the lamp, and the dying fire, the man standing where she had left him with his hand still half-raised, and went out into the passage.

The passage was not empty.

At its far end, where the great stair took the last of the storm-light, a figure stood in a dressing-gown of dark silk with a candle of her own, unlit, in her hand, and Jane’s heart went through one full beat of pure cold before the lightning came again, obliging, and showed her the face. It was not the rustle of rose silk, nor the scent of orange-flower water adrift upon the air. It was Adelaide. How long she had stood there the darkness declined to say. Her face, in the white flash, was set like a woman reading a letter she had expected and hoped never to receive, and she did not speak. She looked at Jane down the whole grey length of the passage, looked at the candle, at the library door ajar behind her, at the hour, and then Mrs Adelaide Moorfield turned, gathered her gown, and withdrew up the stair into the dark, soundless, taking the knowledge with her like a magistrate carrying the evidence home.

Jane stood alone in the passage until her candle steadied.

Entered, she thought, with the calm of a woman watching the reckoning walk upstairs in slippers. Dated. And due, no doubt, at breakfast.

Chapter Fifteen

Adelaide’s summons arrived with Jane’s morning tea, which was not how the schoolroom’s tea arrived, and it came by Adelaide’s own maid, who told Jane the rest. Mrs Moorfield’s sitting room, at your convenience, miss, and at your convenience, in the dialect of great houses, meant before the tea cooled.

The sitting room had been claimed as Adelaide’s for a month and looked it. Correspondence lay arranged in neat stacks alongside a Bible, its ribbon marking the Book of Job. Upon a side table, the household accounts, Mrs Brooks’s surrendered dominion, stood squared like prisoners of war held in decent captivity. Adelaide sat with her back to the window, the oldest artifice of a magistrate, and offered no chair, establishing her advantage before immediately discarding it.

“Please take a seat, Miss Prescott,” she said. “I cannot conduct this interview while you stand as a servant, for I cannot, for the life of me, frame it as a servant’s affair. You will take a chair and do me the courtesy of hearing me as one intelligent woman hears another, since Providence has not seen fit to try me with anything more foolish.”

Jane sat. The tea in her hand was, she noted distantly, her own, carried up the stairs behind her like evidence of the household’s new confusion about what she was.

“I was in the passage last night,” Adelaide said, without preamble, because preamble was for people uncertain of their ground. “You know it, I saw the truth in your face. I shall tell you what I observed, so that neither of us wastes breath upon useless denials. I saw a storm, and a frightened child taken up two flights between you with more sense than her own family has shown her in five months. And I saw my nephew’s face when you left that library, which I have not seen on a Moorfield man since his brother stood up at his own wedding.” She let that sit precisely one beat. “I am not going to insult you with the word designs. I have observed designing women for fifty years in London, and I know the walk. You have not got it. That, Miss Prescott, is the whole difficulty. A designing woman I could buy or break by Friday. What sits in front of me instead is worse, an honest one.”

“You have a question, I think.”

“I have a request. I ask you to consider leaving Moorfield.” The words came level, unhurried, laid out like coin. “Not creeping off, I’d not ask that of you, and he’d not permit it. A month’s grace, a character from my own hand that would open any schoolroom in England, and a place found before you go. You would leave rich in everything a woman in your position can carry.” She leaned forward slightly, and the morning light found her face, and what was in it was not triumph and not malice, and was therefore much harder to sit before. “And I will tell you why, and I will tell you the truth, which is more than this house has been dealing in lately. There is a story being built in a solicitor’s chambers in London with you in it, Miss Prescott. Not the truth of you, the use of you. The registry girl. Serle’s matter. Every day you remain under this roof, you are a brick in Edmund’s courtroom, through no fault of your own and past any remedy of your virtue, and if that petition is heard, the person who pays the judgement is asleep upstairs with a ribbon round her fist. I saw you both this morning, through the nursery door.” Her hands, for one moment, were not still. “I am one and seventy years old, and I am asking a governess to save my family, because I have run out of people to ask who would do it for the right reason.”

The tea had gone cold in Jane’s hands. Outside, a wood pigeon droned on with its solitary, repetitive note upon the morning, and Jane looked at the old woman with her back no longer quite to the light, and gave the request the honour it was owed, which was arithmetic and not haste.

“May I answer plainly?”