Page 2 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

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Mrs Wilkins’s registry office stood in a narrow street off Holborn, up a stair that smelled of dust and tallow, and its waiting room was furnished with one bench and eleven women. Jane arrived early and was still the ninth to be seen. She spent the interval studying the room, since the room declined to study her. Genteel poverty had a uniform, and every woman on the bench wore it. Gloves darned at the fingertips, hems turned once, backs held straight by the last thing that could not be pawned. Not one of them looked at another. To look was to see one’s own reflection, and none of them could afford the sight.

***

“Miss Prescott.” Mrs Wilkins pronounced names like items in an inventory. “Sit down.”

Jane sat. Mrs Wilkins read the Hargrove character through small spectacles, in silence, twice.

“Four years in one situation. That speaks well. Why did they not take you to India? Families generally prefer to keep a governess who knows the children.”

“Her ladyship felt the girls’ education was complete.”

Mrs Wilkins looked at her over the spectacles. She was a square, dry woman who had spent thirty years hearing what employers felt, and translating it. “Complete. Just so.” She laid the letter down. “Well. You have references, you have experience, and you have no family to make difficulties, which some houses count a virtue. What I do not have, Miss Prescott, is a situation for you. The season is against us. Nobody engages a governess in the last week of May. They go down to the country and remember their children want teaching in October.” She paused as though considering carefully what she ought to say before giving it voice. “There is one place. It has been on my books for three weeks, which for the salary offered is a curiosity in itself. A hundred pounds a year.”

Jane kept her countenance composed, which cost her something. Forty was the common figure. Sixty was generous. “The family?”

“Lord Moorfield. Sussex. A viscount, recently come into the title.” Mrs Wilkins took off her spectacles and polished them, which Jane suspected was what the woman did instead of choosing her words in view of a client. “The child is his niece. His late brother’s daughter, seven years old, orphaned by a carriage accident this winter past. The particular difficulty is that the little girl has not spoken since. Not a word, I am told, to anyone. She hides about the house and cannot be got to lessons at all. Two governesses have been and gone inside a month apiece.”

“And the other difficulty?”

Mrs Wilkins set the spectacles down. “You read the papers, I believe.”

“I read what is left in schoolrooms.”

“Then you will have met his lordship already, after a fashion. They had a name for him before the title found him. The Wastrel Viscount, one of the sheets called him, this spring, cards, and worse company, and money going through his hands like water through a sieve. Three candidates I sent to that house refused the situation on his reputation alone, and one refused it on the doorstep, or so she claims.” She folded her hands. “I will be plain with you, Miss Prescott, because you strike me as a woman who prefers it. It is a great deal of money, and there is generally a reason when a great deal of money cannot fill a respectable post. A young person under that roof will be observed by every tittle -tattle in Sussex, waiting for her to put a foot wrong. If a foot is put wrong, it will not be his lordship who pays for it.”

The office was quiet. Below in the street a knife-grinder was crying his trade, and eleven women were waiting their turn on the bench outside the door.

Jane looked at her own gloved hands, and did the arithmetic she had already done twice that morning by way of prayer. Nine pounds and some shillings stood between her and the street. Two months, if she ate little, ten weeks if she ate less. She had made such calculations before. She had been one-and-twenty the last time the ground opened, standing in her father’s drawing room while men in aprons carried the furniture past her; she had counted the pieces going, because counting was the only occupation left to her, and the last thing down the steps had been Papa’s portrait, face turned to the carrier’s shoulder as if he could not meet her eye. Henry had not come that day. Henry had written instead, a graceful letter, full of esteem and regret and his mother’s views, and she had understood at last that his attachment had been to Prescott & Sons, general merchants, and that the firm being sold, the betrothal had been sold with it. He had entered into matrimony with Miss Rowley with six thousand pounds the following spring. Jane had read of it in a newspaper somebody left in a schoolroom.

That was what charm was, in her experience. It was the light a man shone on you while he was reading your ledger.

“The child,” Jane said. “Has any physician attended to her?”

Mrs Wilkins blinked, as though a candidate had never yet begun at that end of the question. “There is mention of a local man. Why?”

“Because a child who has stopped speaking is not being willful. She is keeping the only thing she still governs. I had a pupil once who did not speak for a season after her brother had passed away. She wanted patience, not discipline, and everyone about her wanted her scolded into conversation.” Jane drew off her gloves, finger by finger, and folded them in her lap. “I will take the situation, Mrs Wilkins.”

“On account of the hundred pounds.”

“On account of the hundred pounds,” Jane agreed, “and the child. His lordship’s reputation is his own concern. I have been four years in service, and in four years I have found that gentlemen of fashion do not look at governesses at all. I expect to be perfectly safe from his notice, and he from mine.”

Mrs Wilkins regarded her through a silence that had judgement in it, and then, unexpectedly, the judgement warmed by a degree. It was the first time all morning that anyone had looked at Jane directly, not at her references, not at her darned gloves, at her, and she registered the novelty of it with a small, dry astonishment, filed where she filed such things.

“You will do, I think,” Mrs Wilkins said. “Or you will be back on that bench by Michaelmas, but I find I would not wager on it. The terms ask for the earliest possible date. Can you travel Thursday?”

“I can travel Wednesday.”

“Thursday. Arriving on the day you were not expected serves nobody but the housemaids’ tongues.” Mrs Wilkins was writing already. “You will take the Brighton coach from the Golden Cross, and a hired chaise from Lewes. The estate will bear the charge. Moorfield Manor, Miss Prescott. Ask for the housekeeper, Mrs Brooks, and do not expect to be welcomed. Houses in disorder never welcome the person sent to mend them.”

She was still writing as Jane rose, and did not look up again, but at the door Jane felt the spectacles lift and follow her out, which was one more glance than London had spared her all year.

***

Her room in Cheapside was let by the week, and it took Jane until the candle was half gone to pack a life into one corded box and a valise. It was quickly done because there was little of it, the grey dresses, and the workbasket. A pressed flower from a garden that no longer belonged to anybody she knew, and, wrapped in flannel at the bottom, a small book bound in scuffed calf. P. Prescott, Private Instruction in Accounts, for Jane. Her father had ruled every line of it himself, the year she was twelve. A lady who can read a ledger, Janie, will never be deceived twice.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the little book open on her knee and the candle leaning its light over her shoulder, and she permitted herself, briefly, the luxury of being nobody at all. Not sensible, not useful, not respectable. A woman going fifty miles to a silent child and a man the newspapers laughed at, because those were the only two doors left open, and because, she could be honest at this hour, in this room, where there was no one to arrange her face for, some contrary corner of her heart preferred the door nobody else would walk through.