Page 25 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Up behind the stable lad with the rain driving level and her hood torn back, Jane rode through the roaring dark and did the only thing left to do, which was her trade. Panic was a spending of attention, and attention was the whole of her capital, and she gathered it in from every corner where grief had scattered it and set it, all of it, on one small person in the dark. Think. Think as she thinks, you kept the maps, you know the law of every border. She goes out the casement, over the leads; she has done it before, then, and never told even me, well, sovereigns keep some secrets. She makes for the vicarage road because the maids said the vicarage. But the vicarage road runs past the lodge, all open, all wind, and her first law, always, everywhere, is walls at her back and a sight of the door. She will not cross open ground in a storm. Storms are the thing that came for her parents. She’ll go along cover. The limes, the wall, the…

The horse laboured at the hill and the house came up out of the dark ahead, every window burning, lanterns strung through the gardens like a fleet riding out weather at anchor, and Jane, arriving into the lit chaos of the hall with the rain sheeting off her, stood one instant on the threshold she had left forever at dawn, the same flags, the same stair, the hall that had watched her accused and walled and ruined, and found that the room had no power over her at all tonight, none. It had been repossessed in its turn, entirely, by one small absence.

Mrs Brooks saw her first and said only, “Thank goodness,” which from Mrs Brooks was an oration.

And then the garden doors went, wind and wet and lantern-light together, and Robert came in with the storm still on him, hatless, soaked black to the shoulders, a lantern in his fist, and stopped short.

The hall held its breath around them, servants frozen mid-errand, and for the space of one long look everything that lay between the two of them stood in the room in plain sight of the entire household. The tableau, the flight, the forged hand, the resignation weighted with a book of poems, every unspent word of it, and none of it, Jane found, weighed so much as a grain against the single question, and she asked the question, and her voice came out level, and it came out hers.

“Where has she been searched for, and where not?”

Something went over his face; afterwards she would name it, and keep the naming private, because it had looked like a man being handed back his whole fortune in the middle of a fire, and Robert Moorfield answered his governess the way a second-in-command answers, fast and clean, no preamble. “The house entire, twice, Betsey had her list, every place on it empty. The gardens within the ha-ha. The yard, the barns, the lodge road. The lake path I rode myself as far as the mill lane.” and then he stopped. Jane went white and still, her grey eyes turning up to his with the arrested look of a clerk who discovers, in a single line, the ruin of a year’s ledger. “The lake path,” she said. “You rode past the water. Nobody has searched at the water.” Her hand was already dragging the soaked primer-page from her bodice, unfolding it, rain-blistered, the small map of one child’s courage, and her finger came down on the last entry, the one written in the schoolroom sunlight a lifetime ago on Thursday morning, and she read it aloud to him and to the listening hall with the storm hammering the long windows

“The boat-house is lost to us until the paths dry. Mourned daily.” She looked up. “She mourned it daily, Robert. It is walls, and water, and a sight of the door, and it is hers, and tonight every path in Sussex is wet, and nobody told her kingdom the rule was still in force.”

He was already moving. He took a dry lantern from the table with one hand, and, before the entire watching household, with everything between them still unsaid and standing in the room, held out the other to her, palm up, exactly as he had once held it out across a rolled-back drawing-room floor.

“Then we go to the boat-house,” Robert said. “Together, this time. Everything else after.”

Jane put her hand in his, and the hall doors went back before them, and the storm took them both.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The lake path lay submerged in stretches, the lanterns of the distant searchers had been reduced to small, scattered sparks behind them, and Robert held Jane’s hand firmly in his own the entire way, impelled to do so by necessity rather than mere gallantry. The ground had given way to treacherous mud, yielding beneath their feet; thus, they proceeded together, like some singular, four-footed creature pressing through the deafening roar of the storm. The boat-house stood at the water’s edge beneath its sagging roof, a silhouette of deepest black against the shadow of the night. Except that it was not black. At the shutter’s seam, low, where no light should be, there glimmered a slender thread of yellow light.

Jane felt it go through him, through their joined hands, the same instant it went through her. He drew her off the path, in under the dripping alders, and put his mouth to her ear. “That’s an oil lamp. She’d have no lamp.” A breath. “Someone is in there with her.”

They came the last yards off the path, on the grass, silent, and Robert eased along the wall to the streaming window, with Jane, at his shoulder, looked through the gap in the shutter into the little lit room and stopped breathing.

Charlotte was sitting on the old bench against the far wall, wrapped in a boat-cover, small and white and alive, and across the room, between the child and the door, Jasper Winthrop was cording a travelling-trunk by lamplight. A valise stood by. His coat was on. And he was talking, the low, ceaseless, reasonable talking of a man who had been explaining himself to a silent child for an hour because it was easier than silence.

“…and it will look very bad, do you see, that is the whole difficulty,” the voice came thin through the shutter. “Not the money. The money could always be explained. Money can be anything. But a man who leaves on the night a child is lost, that cannot be explained. So we must think, Miss Charlotte. We must think what is to be done with you.”

Robert’s hand found the door.

Jane caught his wrist. One instant, enough. She put her eyes to the gap again and read the room the only way she knew, sums first. The trunk half-corded, he is not ready. The lamp is on the shelf by the window, away from the door. Charlotte dry, wrapped, unhurt; he covered her. Whatever he is, he is not yet that. And she is watching him. Not with the flat sentry blankness. Watching the way she watched a poem being read in the wrong manner, waiting for her moment. She has her feet under her, under the cover. She is already playing her own game.

“The door will be barred,” Jane breathed. “She’ll bolt to a corner if it’s forced, away from us, towards the water. Talk him to the window first. Let her see me.”

Robert looked at her one heartbeat. Then he stepped to the door and knocked, knocked, civilly, like a caller, and spoke through the rain in the pleasant, carrying voice of a man arriving at a card table.

“Winthrop. It’s Moorfield. Open the door, there’s a good fellow. Half the county is out with lanterns, and you have the one thing everybody’s looking for.”

Inside, the talking stopped.

The light shifted within. Footsteps resounded upon the timber. And the voice, when at last it spoke, had shed all its accustomed professional composure, grown thin and drawn taut, as an iron wire strained nigh to its breaking point. “My lord. This is, I found her, my lord. On the path. I brought her in out of the wet weather, and that is the whole of it. I was going to bring her up to the house directly.”

“With your trunk corded and your coat on. Yes.” Robert’s tone stayed easy. Almost kind. “Open the door, Jasper. I’ve stood at tables with men holding worse hands than yours, and I’ll tell you what I told them. The only money left in the game is in how you play the losing.”

A profound silence reigned within, broken only by the relentless drumming of the rain upon the roof above, and under it the lake, risen and shouldering the pilings, and the whole old building working in the wind like a ship.

Then the bar scraped, and the door came open on the lamp-lit room, and they went in out of the storm.

***

Jasper had backed to the middle of the floor. He stood between the trunk and the bench, and his hands were empty, and his tidy face had come apart into its pieces, the deference, the fright, and the arithmetic, all of them showing at once with nothing left to order them.

Jane crept along the wall, not directly towards Charlotte, but veering indirectly in the manner of a timid child seeking concealment, her eyes steadily averted. She felt the cold, blue gaze fasten upon her and hold. Beneath the boat-cloth, the small figure drew itself together, subtly tensing for action.