Page 3 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

The child hid, Mrs Wilkins had said. Hid about the house, and would not speak.

Sensible girl, Jane thought. I should do the same.

She wrapped the book in its flannel, laid it under the grey dresses where soft things were safest, and blew out the candle on the last night anyone would pay her no attention in London.

Chapter Two

The drawing room at Moorfield had survived a siege. Robert stood in the doorway and took the inventory with a practised eye, because until this winter the wreckage would have been partly his own work. The card table still dressed in the previous night’s battle, a burgundy stain covered the length of his forearm across the Aubusson. A chair lay overturned and left where it fell, and one of the tall candles which had burned down into its socket with wax hanging off the mantel resembled something that had tried to escape. The room smelled of smoke and spilt wine and other people’s enjoyment.

Latymer was breakfasting on it all in his shirtsleeves, boots on the sofa, working through a plate of cold beef with the scandal sheet propped against the coffee pot.

“You’re famous again,” Latymer said, without looking up. “‘The Wastrel Viscount is lately retired to Sussex, where the hazard tables of London mourn him and the tradesmen of Sussex tremble.’ Tremble, my dear fellow. Vane desires to know whether we shoot today, or if your gamekeeper has given you the slip like his predecessor.”

“Where is Vane?”

“Still abed. So is Rushmere, though not, I think, in the room he started in.” Latymer turned the sheet over and gave him a lazy grin over it. “Sit down, Moorfield, you’re looming. It’s your own house, you might at least enjoy it. We came all this way to rescue you.”

“From what?”

“Respectability. Terrible affliction. Carries off men our age every season.”

Robert crossed to the window instead of the chair, which gave him the lawn, the drive, and a moment to arrange the thing he had decided somewhere in the small hours between his second brandy and his first look at the ledgers. On the way, he passed the pier glass, which dealt him the brief, unhelpful sight of a man with dark hair, keen hazel eyes, and every appearance of being precisely what the prints proclaimed him.

He had earned the sight honestly. That was the very trouble of it. There was no injustice anywhere in that paragraph to resent. He had sat down to those tables and drunk that wine and made himself the object of ridicule in London, with some diligence, over twelve years, because being the family disgrace at least had the merit of being an appointment nobody could take from him. James had been given everything else. Robert had kept failure for himself, and guarded it with great diligence, and been comfortable there.

Then a curricle had gone over on the Brighton road, and comfort had perished with it.

“Freddie.” He said it to the window. “There was a footman this morning with his eye blacked.”

“Ah. That.” Latymer had the grace to set down his fork. “Rushmere took exception to being put to bed. It’ll be made right, I’ll leave the fellow something handsome, and you know how Rushmere is when he’s…”

“I know how he is. I’ve been how he is.” Robert turned round. “There’s a child in this house.”

“The niece. Yes. Never seen her, mind, is she real, or do you keep her in a cabinet?”

It was said idly, and it landed like a key turning. Never seen her. Three days these men had filled his house, and in three days not one of them had set eyes on Charlotte, because Charlotte, who was seven, and whose mother and father had gone out one January morning and not come back, had judged the company his friends made and hidden from it, all night, in the cold, somewhere in the east wing, while the house rang below her.

Mrs Brooks had delivered that intelligence at seven o’clock, at his door, in the tone of a woman presenting a man with the bill for his own character.

“You’ll want the carriage brought round by ten,” Robert said. “All three of you.”

Latymer laughed, and then arrived, visibly, at the discovery that no one was jesting with him. It changed his face by degrees, which Robert watched with something that was not quite regret. “You’re turning us out. You. Robert Moorfield is turning men out of a house for high spirits.”

“For frightening a little girl in her own home. The high spirits you may keep.”

“Goodness, it’s true, then.” Latymer stood, and there was a glint of real spite under the drawl then, the kind that only ever shows in a man who has been comfortable at your table. “The sheet had you to the letter. Retired. Reformed. What comes next, a pew, and a plain wife, and prayers before cards?” He reached for his coat. “You were better company as a disgrace, Moorfield.”

“I was easier company,” Robert said. “It isn’t the same article, though I grant the two are often confused. Travers will have your things brought down. Give my regards to the hazard tables.”

He held the door. It was, on the whole, a politer eviction than any he had personally been subject to, and he was in a position to compare.

***

The east wing kept its shutters half-closed, which had been James’s economy and was now simply habit, so that walking into it from the morning side of the house was like walking into the house’s memory. Robert went up with the tread he had been teaching himself, unhurried, audible, nothing that could be mistaken for pursuit, and stopped at the nursery landing.

The room they had made Charlotte’s stood open. The grate was cold, the bed untouched; upon the table, the bread on the supper tray grew stale beneath its cloth. Her night-dress remained folded where it had been laid. Wherever she had passed the night, it had certainly not been in her own bed. He found her in the old parlour at the wing’s far end, and he found her the only way she was ever found, by the toe of one small shoe, motionless, beneath the hem of the window curtain.

Robert did not approach the curtain. He had made that mistake the first week, and been taught better by the sound of a child pressing herself against a windowpane to be smaller. Instead he lowered himself to the floor by the cold hearth, an undignified operation for a man in top-boots, and addressed the middle distance.