Page 20 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“Could be a flaw in the iron-work seating,” Dowsett said, to the axle, not to them. “Could be a shake in the timber that polished itself in the running. I’ve seen both.” A long pause, while he turned the thing over in his slow arms and did not look up. “Never seen either sit just there, under the grease, where a man’d have to be looking to find it. I’ll not swear to more, my lord, and I’ll thank you not to carry my name up the hill with whatever you do swear to. I’ve my custom to think of.”

“You’ve told me what the axle would tell any honest man who asked it,” Robert said. “The name stays in this yard.”

They rode back up in the long evening light, and for a mile neither spoke. It was Hamish who broke it, in the voice he used for telling families the truth. “You know what you’re saying, if you say it. Louth was expected Thursday. Louth’s direction was known, to the Swan, where the room was bespoke, to the bank, and to your own estate office, because you told him yourself. A man doesn’t halfway-saw the axle of a stranger’s hired chaise on speculation, Robert. He does it against a date, on a road he knows the length of, because something is coming that he cannot survive the arrival of.” The horses walked on. “And if that’s the man we both haven’t named, then he’s no longer a fellow cooking entries in a quiet office. He’s shown you what he’ll spend. The next question a prudent man asks is what else he thinks he’s buying.”

“I’ve been asking it since the yard,” Robert said. “And the answer keeps coming back, every time. He spent all that to buy ten days, perhaps twenty, and a man who pays that price for so small a parcel of time isn’t hoping to escape in it. He’s hoping to finish something in it.” The house had come into view above its lawns, gold-faced, innocent, keeping all its doors. “So we take the time back. Here is what I want, Hamish, and I want it done from your house, not mine, in your hand, under your seal. Write tonight to Grey’s the bankers. Louth’s people will give you a second name. Every examining man in Lothbury knows every other. Engage whoever they’ll warrant. Double the fee for the speed and say nothing of the reason. And when he comes, he doesn’t lodge at the Swan, and he doesn’t write to Moorfield. He comes to you, as your guest, a medical acquaintance, a naturalist, I don’t care what coat you put on him, and not a line of it passes through my estate office. Not the date, not the name, not the existence.”

“You’ll starve the fox of the one thing he’s poached till now,” Hamish said slowly. “Knowledge.”

“I’ll do better than starve him.” They had come to the gates, and Robert reined in, and his face in the low sun had the pleasant, unhurried look that a certain kind of man in London had learned, expensively, to dread across a card table. “I’ll feed him. Tomorrow I tell him Louth is delayed and mending, and the examination merely postponed, all true, every word. I’ve grown scrupulous. He’ll have his ten days in his hand and no date under them. And a man who has paid everything for time, and cannot see the clock,” Robert turned in through his own gates, “makes his next move in the dark, Hamish. And moves made in the dark are loud.”

***

He chose the estate office at its tidiest hour, mid-morning, the rents squared, the quills wiped, and delivered the news standing, hat in hand, in the tone of a man sharing a vexation with a colleague.

“You’ll have heard about Mr Louth. The whole village has it, variously fatal.” Robert turned his hat brim through his fingers, rueful, open. “The truth is kinder, a broken leg and a season’s mending, and my examination postponed with it, which is a nuisance and no more. These things keep. I tell you before the village improves the tale further, you’ve a right to hear estate matters from the estate and not the fishmonger.”

“Your lordship is very good.” Winthrop had risen. His face did its work handsomely, concern, relief, the deferential shake of the head at the state of the roads. “A shocking thing. That descent past the mill lane is smoother than the Steyne. I have driven it a hundred times myself. One hardly knows what to trust.” He aligned the corner of a ledger with the desk’s edge, a small habitual perfection. “Shall I write to Mr Louth’s chambers regarding a revised date, my lord? It would be no trouble to keep the matter warm.”

“No trouble at all and no need at all,” Robert said, easily. “Watson has charge of the poor devil’s mending, so Watson may have charge of the calendar, but the physician always wins those arguments. You’ve rents enough to think of, quarter-day upon us. I’d not load you further.” He settled his hat. “The books will keep, Winthrop. Good books always do.”

He was observed out of the office. He had grown used to that, had come to walk differently under it, the unhurried gait of a man carrying nothing. And it was later, from the study window with the afternoon going long across the lawns, that the day paid out its true intelligence, for below, at the gravel’s edge where the yard gave onto the grass, the estate manager stood in his decent black with his letters undelivered under his arm, motionless, and Robert, following the line of that stillness like a keeper sighting along a poacher’s gun, found at the end of it the two figures crossing the lawn towards the lime-walk. The governess with her workbasket, and the child orbiting her in wide, singing loops, gold head flashing, a kite on an unbreakable string.

Winthrop watched them the whole width of the lawn. There was nothing in his attitude a witness could have sworn to, a servant pausing, an idle minute, the weather remarked, but Robert stood above with his hand flat on the cold sill and read the stillness as he had learned that spring to read everything, by what it declined to mention. The letters forgotten under the arm, the head turning, slow, keeping station on the smaller figure, the deliberation of it, the arithmetic of it, a man at a desk of his own, entering sums.

Jane’s voice carried up faintly, one bright unworried syllable, the child’s name, and the two of them passed into the limes and were gone, and still the black figure stood a moment at the gravel’s edge, looking at the green space where they had been.

Then Winthrop settled his letters, and turned, and went back into the office with his tidy tread, and Robert remained at the window with the sill cold under his hand and the whole golden ordinary afternoon gone glass-brittle below him, understanding, with a clarity that arrived like ice-water and stayed like a vow, that he had made an error somewhere in his clever arithmetic of foxes and clocks, that time was not the only thing a cornered man might spend his darkness buying, and that whatever the man in black had been totalling at the gravel’s edge just now, the figures in it had gold hair and a grey dress.

Louth’s man cannot come fast enough, he thought, and went down to give the one order that could be given without showing his hand. The daily excursions of the schoolroom party should extend no further than the gardens within the ha-ha, the outer grounds being pronounced altogether too sodden from the recent tempest.

The falsehood was trivial and domestic, yet he abhorred it far more than any he had uttered in the past years of deceit.

Chapter Seventeen

The morning began in the schoolroom with cartography, because the ha-ha decree had redrawn a kingdom and the kingdom’s clerk was obliged to keep up.

The far walks being forbidden, too wet, the household said, in the bland voice houses use when they have agreed not to explain something, Charlotte had spent two days resettling her territories like a small displaced government, and Jane, at the schoolroom table while her sovereign arranged walnuts into fortifications, ruled a fresh page at the back of her father’s primer and brought the survey up to date. She kept it in her own shorthand, a column of entries no one else could have read for what it was. The yew arbour (sight of both gates). The succession-house, third stage, behind the orange tubs. The laundry loft when the coppers are cold. The boat-house is lost to us until the paths dry, mourned daily. She looked at the page when it was done, the neat map of one child’s courage, and thought, as she dated it. My father charted money, and I chart hiding places, and of the two of us I keep the accounts of the greater treasury.

By eleven the house had ended the peace of the morning.

It came as houses announce disaster below stairs, not a cry but a change of pitch. The hasty opening of doors was followed by a servant’s tread where propriety forbade all haste, and presently Mrs Brooks’s voice carried from the stair head, heavy with the restraint of remaining calm. Jane went out to the gallery rail. In the hall below, the household was gathering in the involuntary way of iron filings, and at the centre of it stood Adelaide, upright, grey, one hand at her collar where something ought to have been pinned and was not.

The garnet brooch, her husband’s gift, worn daily for thirty years, was gone from her dressing-case. So, counted twice in Mrs Brooks’s presence, were twelve pounds from the household strong-drawer, to which three people in the house held keys.

“It will doubtlessly be found in some exceedingly foolish place,” Adelaide said, to the hall in general, in the voice of a woman informing fate how matters were to fall out. “Things are always placed in the most foolish places. It will be found by dinner.”

It was found by three o’clock.

***

In the long years that followed, turning the memory over in the stillness of the night with her customary patience, Jane could mark the precise moment the gears of fate were set in motion; and it was not at the discovery. It was Diana, in the drawing room at noon, laying down her untouched needlework and saying, with gentle reluctance, into the wretched pause

“Adelaide, forgive me, it is a hateful thing to say and someone must, nothing walks out of a locked drawer. If it is not found by dinner there will be a fog in this house by tomorrow, over every servant in it, and fog is crueller than any search. The kind thing is to look everywhere at once, now, fairly, and clear everyone. All the rooms. Ours first, naturally, mine first of all, I insist. Then nobody carries suspicion so much as an hour.”

It was faultless. It was even, Jane would grant her later, very likely improvised; a woman of Diana’s economy wasted nothing, and a mislaid brooch was raw material like any other. The rooms of the ladies were searched first with great ceremony and much apology, then the men-servants’, then the maids’, Mrs Brooks conducting throughout with Adelaide’s own maid as witness, her countenance betraying nothing, and Jane stood in the schoolroom doorway with Charlotte’s hand creeping into hers, listening to the search come along the north wing like weather, and was ashamed, she recorded it honestly, of how steady her own heart kept. You have nothing in that room but grey dresses and four pounds and your father’s book. There has never been less to find in any room in England.

They were in her room a quarter-hour, which was ten minutes too long for a room with so little in it.