Page 26 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“Stay there,” Jasper said. His voice cracked upward. “Stay, everyone will stay, if you please, and we will arrange this like sensible people. My lord. You’ve been fair to me. Ten years, and you were fair to me even this spring, even when…” He stopped. Wiped his mouth. “I saw it, you know. At the rents this morning. You looked at me the way your brother never learned to. He checked the books. You checked me. And I sat there adding the same column four times, and I thought, he knows. Whatever he can prove, he knows. And a man can’t sit still under knowing. It isn’t in nature.”

“So you ran,” Robert said. “And found her on the path.”

“On the lawn edge, in the dark, going like a little ghost for the lake, she’d have walked into it, my lord. The bank’s gone under, she’d have…” His breath heaved. “I brought her in. I did that much. Whatever else, I did that.”

“You did.” Robert had not moved from the door. His voice stayed level, and he laid the next card face up, gently, the way Jane had watched him lay a letter on a blotter. “And then you barred the door and corded your trunk and sat an hour telling a seven-year-old child that something must be done with her. I heard it through the shutter, Jasper. So we’re past whatever else. Louth’s chaise. The axle. Was that yours?”

The rain filled the pause. Jasper’s eyes went to the window, to the door, to the water-sound, the exits, all of them spent, and Jane watched the last of the office fall off him, and what was underneath was not a villain. It was worse. It was a clerk, drowning, reaching for the one thing drowning men reach for, which is to be understood.

“You don’t know how it starts.” It came out low, and then it came out in spate. “It starts as a loan. That’s the truth, my lord, the first was a loan, eleven years ago, your brother’s time, forty pounds against my sister’s husband’s debts, and I paid it back. Paid it back, every shilling, and no one ever knew, and that…” a sound that was almost a laugh. “That was the ruin of me, because then I knew it could be done. And your brother was so easy to keep books for. A gentleman’s eye runs down a column like a gentleman’s carriage down a good road. It looks for the jolts. Give it no jolts, and it arrives happy. Ten years I gave that family a smooth road.” His hands opened, empty, pleading the craft of it. “And then he passed away, and you came, the Wastrel, the card-player, and it occurred to me, easier yet by far. And you sat down at that desk, and you didn’t read the books like a gentleman. You read them like a creditor. And,” the voice went thinner, “then the governess.”

Jane stood still against the wall. Three feet from the bench now. Charlotte’s eyes had never left her.

“Her.” Jasper did not look at Jane. He looked at Robert, and his face worked. “You brought her the schoolroom money, and she signed the book, and I watched her eyes go down my petty column like a bailiff’s. Twice-dated. She saw it, I watched her see it and pretend she hadn’t, and drop her glove at the door like a girl, and I thought. That is the most dangerous person in this house. A governess who reads ledgers. Who’d believe it? And then Louth. Louth I could, the axle, yes. Yes. You want it said, I’ll say it, it is past mattering, I sawed it Tuesday sennight in the Swan’s own yard at four in the morning, and I was sick after, if that’s worth anything, and it bought me nothing, because you only smiled and hid the next man’s very name from me.” His breath went ragged. “So there was only her left. The brooch was to hand, Mrs Moorfield’s case stands open half the morning, and the twine was in my own stores, and I sewed it in her lining on the Tuesday while the house was at its dinner, and moved her little book to do it, and, forgive me, she stood in that hall straighter than any of us, and I let her…”

“Say it plainly.” Robert’s voice had gone quiet as a held knife. “Miss Prescott took nothing.”

“Miss Prescott took nothing.” It broke out of him almost with relief, the sound of a beam finally letting go. “She never touched a shilling of anything. She found me. She was the only honest person. I put it there. I, Jasper Winthrop, with my own needle. Write it down. Someone write it down, I’ll sign it, I’ll sign anything, only tell me what happens to my sister when…”

The storm answered before anyone else could.

It came as one long shouldering gust off the lake, and the old building took it wrong, a crack overhead like the world’s own knuckle, and the roof’s lake-end let go. A slide of rotten thatch and one black beam swinging down out of the dark, and the lamp jumped from the shelf, and the light pitched sideways and went to a mad tilting shadow-play, and Jasper lunged, for the door, for flight, for nothing rational. He was a body spending its last coin.

It was then that Charlotte moved.

She went out from under the boat-cover the way she had gone from under every hand that ever reached for her, boneless, twisting, practised, seven years old and undefeated at the only game she had ever needed, out of the path of the falling dark, under Jasper’s flailing arm, across the bucking light towards the wall where Jane was, and halfway there, in the middle of the wreck and the roar, her voice tore its way home.

“Jane!”

Full. Enormous. Five months of it, arriving all at once.

“Jane! Uncle Robert!”

Jane had her before the second cry finished, took her out of the air, went down over her against the wall, made her own back the roof, and felt the small arms clamp round her neck and the small voice, unstopped now, sobbing words, actual words, into her collar, “you came back, you came back”, while the beam met the floor where the bench had been and the thatch came down after it in sodden ruin, and the rain stood in the open wound of the roof like a silver wall.

Robert reached them in two strides; she felt his arms come round them both, felt him make himself the outer wall, and past his shoulder, through the streaming lamplight, Jane saw the end of it. Jasper Winthrop face down and howling by the door, his leg pinned under the beam’s foot, held for the law by the house he had robbed to its rafters.

Then lanterns illuminated the doorway, revealing Peters, drenched and wild-eyed, with several men at his back, as Hamish’s voice cut sharp above the din. “Hold the light, hold it steady”, already down at the pinned leg, already working, the physician arriving into ruin the way he arrived everywhere, as though expected.

Charlotte would not let go, and no one asked her to. She had Jane by the neck and Robert by three fingers, and she talked, cracked, rusty, unstoppable, the vault door off its hinges, a stream of it, half sense and half weeping. You came back. I looked for you. The window was dark. I kept the ribbon. I was going to bring you home myself.

“You found me,” Jane said, into the wet gold hair. Her own voice was not steady, and she let it not be. “You always find me. You’re the best there has ever been at this game.”

Above the wrecked roof the storm was moving off east, spending its last over the Downs. Hamish had the beam levered, and the leg splinted with Jasper, grey, docile, weeping, telling his confession over again, unasked, to Peters, to the lantern, to anyone, as though he could not now stop the ledger from reading itself aloud.

And Robert knelt on the ruined floor with his family in his arms, and looked at Jane over the small talking head between them, and said only, quietly, under the child’s voice, in the tone of a man entering the one sum that had ever mattered

“Everything else now.”

***

They came up from the lake in procession, through the last of the rain.

Robert carried Charlotte the whole way, wrapped in his own coat over the boat-cover, her cheek on his shoulder and her hand, this was the arrangement, negotiated wordlessly and absolute, knotted in Jane’s sleeve beside him, so that the three of them went up the sodden lawn as a single slow procession, and the lanterns of the search fell in behind and around them without being ordered, and nobody spoke above the rain. Somewhere back along the path, Hamish’s voice was managing the beam and the hurdle they had made of the boat-house door and the groaning burden on it; that procession would come after, at the law’s pace. This one came first, for the family’s safety.

Charlotte talked most of the way, a small worn thread of voice, winding down, spending its five months in farthings now. The roof, the cold, the lamp, you came, I called and you came, and then, between one step and the next, stopped mid-word, asleep, entirely, her whole weight arriving onto Robert’s shoulder at once in the old sudden vertical way, and Jane felt the small fist in her sleeve go loose, and covered it with her own hand, and kept it there, and walked on watching the lit house grow.

For the house seemed to observe their approach, its windows fixed upon them like vigilant eyes.