Page 31 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Jasper Winthrop went to Lewes gaol to wait for the assizes, splinted and quiet, and made no trouble. Aldergate’s audit ran through the estate office like clean water through a fouled pipe, and the sums came out, eleven years, one thousand and ninety pounds, smaller, in the end, than the ruin they had purchased. Aldergate observed that this was the invariable proportion in his experience of the trade. Robert paid Peters’s courage in the only coins courage takes. A footman’s wage made a senior footman’s, and his name was spoken plainly at the servants’ dinner as the man whose eyes had saved the house. Of Edmund there came, in the end, nothing at all. Pettigrew wrote drily that Mr Serle, upon reading the county’s news, had returned Mr Moorfield’s papers with a note regretting that the matter no longer presented the features that had first recommended it, and that this, in the language of Lincoln’s Inn, was the sound of a story ending on a desk.

And Diana was heard of once, a paragraph in a Morning Post that Adelaide read aloud at breakfast with terrible serenity. Lady Harrington, gone north, was said to be a great comfort to the Earl of Armstrong’s household in his illness. “A weak chest and eleven thousand a year,” Adelaide observed, folding the paper. “She will nurse him devotedly and bury him grandly, and I hope his relations count the spoons and examine his codicils, and I have written to suggest they do. More tea, Miss Prescott? You are to be wedded in nine days, and you have stopped eating. It is conventional, and I forbid it.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

The house went quiet early, the way houses do on the eve of great days, not sleep but held breath, every room down to its last candle and its list, and Adelaide’s summons came at nine, by her own maid, to the sitting room where the whole campaign had been conducted since May.

The room was orderly to the point of confession. The correspondence answered, the trunks half-packed for her return to town after breakfast, the Bible’s ribbon moved, Jane saw it in one glance and filed it forever, out of Job. Adelaide stood by the small table where a single candle burned, and on the table lay a box of worn red morocco, the size of a walnut, the gilt of its clasp rubbed to brass by a century of thumbs.

“Sit down, Miss Prescott. Tomorrow I must call you something else, and I intend to use tonight’s last hours of plain speaking to their limit.” She did not sit herself. She stood over the little box with her hands folded, and for the first time in their acquaintance she seemed to be assembling an order of words rather than issuing one. “My mother wore this ring forty-one years. Her mother had it before her. It came into the family in ’twenty-six, with a bride the Moorfields thought beneath them. A wool merchant’s daughter, Miss Prescott, since you will enjoy the symmetry, who brought them the money that drained the east meadows and was never once, in her whole life, allowed to forget the wool. I have her letters. She signed herself A. Moorfield, obedient for thirty years, and in the last one, to her sister, she wrote that obedience was a long lease but her grandchildren would hold the freehold.” The old hands opened the clasp. Enclosed within, resting upon velvet faded to the shade of old tea, lay a ring. Set with garnets resembling those of the brooch, it rested within a plain band of red gold, worn fine at the back by a century of constant wear. “My brother’s wife wore it. James’s mother. She was the only person in fifty years who was never afraid of me, until you.” She held the box out, not just the ring, but the entire box, the way one hands over a deed.

“Robert has it in his head to buy you diamonds in town. He may. Husbands must be let to spend or they sicken. But it would be a kindness to an old woman, Miss Prescott, if what goes on your hand tomorrow is this, the wool merchant’s ring, on the hand that read the ledgers, because I have spent a great deal of this spring being wrong, and it would comfort me to end it being exact.” A pause followed, and the candle moved on the worn gold. “For ninety years the women of this family have worn it, and the family has only lately deserved them. I shall say those words again where people can hear them, so you needn’t treasure them privately. I am finished with saying true things quietly. It answers very ill. Well? You are keeping accounts of me again. Enter something.”

Jane took the box. The ring sat in its tea-coloured velvet with its approaching century in it, and her voice, when at length she recovered it, betrayed the very emotion she no longer sought to conceal.

“Entered, Aunt. Under assets, the oldest column in the book.” She looked up. “I’ll wear the wool merchant’s ring. And if his lordship wants to buy diamonds, he may buy them for Charlotte’s coming-out, eleven years hence, and we will both stand behind her while she prices them.”

For a moment the old face did nothing at all. Then Adelaide Moorfield laughed, once, short, astonished, a sound Jane had never heard from her and would hear perhaps four more times in her life, and turned briskly away to the trunks, the audience over, her voice restored to campaign order and betrayed only at the edges. “Eleven years. Yes. I shall require to be alive for that. Kindly arrange your household accordingly. Good night, Miss Prescott. Sleep, if you are sensible, which you are. It is the last night anyone will call you by that name, and it was a good name, and it did its work.”

***

Eleanor came up after supper, on the fiction of the flowers for the morning, and the two of them sat in Jane’s room, the same narrow room, the fourth window from the oak, one more night hers, with the candle between them and the wedding dress hanging on the press door as a guest arrived early.

They talked as women talk on such evenings, in tides. They discussed the flowers, the breakfast, Hamish’s new coat, nothing, and then, on the turn of the tide, everything. It was Eleanor who steered them there, direct as always by way of sideways. “I’ll be wedded myself by Michaelmas, and I find I’m not frightened of the ceremony at all. It’s the luck I can’t look at straight. For three years I taught myself to want nothing, and it answered. Wanting nothing is wonderfully practical. And now I’ve everything I didn’t want, and I lie awake doing what you do, auditing it. Looking for the error. Because surely, somewhere down the column…” She stopped herself, and laughed at herself, and didn’t finish.

“There is no error,” Jane said. “I’ve looked. I’ve looked every night for a fortnight with my father’s own method, and I’ll tell you what I found instead, and then we’ll neither of us say it again after tonight.” She turned the candle a little, for something for her hands to do. “The books balance, Eleanor. That’s what I can’t look at straight. Four years I kept myself small enough that losing me would inconvenience nobody, that was the whole system of accounts, and it was sound, and I could have run it to my grave. And the error wasn’t in my books at all. It was in thinking small losses are the only kind a person can afford. They’re not. They’re just the only kind you can afford alone.” She looked at the dress on the press door. “Tomorrow I stop being alone, in front of the whole parish, out loud. I am five-and-twenty, and I have done sums since I was eight, and I have no arithmetic for it. That’s my confession. Now pass me the scissors and let’s see to your flowers, or we’ll both be wrecks at the rail.”

They saw to the flowers. And at the door, at the end, Eleanor turned with the greenery in her arms and delivered her goodnight the way she delivered everything, as the truest thing said lightest. “The first day I met you, in the kitchen garden, I told Mrs Brooks you had the look of a woman doing six things while appearing to stand still. I was wrong, you know. You were doing seven. The seventh was hoping.” The candle guttered. Her smile went crooked and bright. “Sleep well, Jane. Tomorrow the whole county watches you stop pretending you weren’t.”

***

The house settled. And Jane, who should have slept, sat instead at her small table in the circle of the candle with the primer open at the last ruled pages, and then, deliberately, closed it, and took out instead a fresh sheet, and did the thing she had been circling for a fortnight as the tongue circles a healed place, testing.

Dear Papa, she wrote.

She had written him nothing in five years. There had been nowhere to send it; that was the practical fact, and behind the practical fact, the truer one, that for five years every sentence she might have written him began you would be sorry to see, and a clerk does not send accounts of losses to the deceased. But the sheet was down now, and the candle steady, and the pen went on without consulting her, the way it had gone on once before in this room, the night she chose the door nobody else would walk through.

Dear Papa, the accounts are as follows, and you will want the dates, because you always said the dates turn evidence. In May I came to a house with nine pounds and your book. Tomorrow I am to be wedded from it. Between those dates. I read a rogue’s ledger by your method, and he has been brought to justice. I taught a silent child by your patience; you did not know it was in the book, but it was, on every page, in how you ruled the lines slowly so I could follow, and she speaks, Papa, she speaks all day, and a man looked at my hands doing your arithmetic and saw a fortune. You were wrong about one thing only. You said a lady who can read a ledger will never be deceived twice. I was deceived twice. The second time nearly answered. But I caught it, not by the sums. By the dates, and by a letter’s tail that better eyes than mine had learned from yours, so I have decided the maxim stands, amended. I shall never be deceived again and believe it. The rest of what I feel does not fit in a column, and for the first time in my life I am glad of a thing that doesn’t. Your Janie. Paid in full. The account never closes.

She did not read it over. Reading over was for letters that had somewhere to go. She folded it small, and rose, and took from the workbasket the flat tin where a pressed flower had lain wrapped these five years, the garden that belonged to nobody she knew, and laid the letter under the flower, and shut the tin, and it was as she set it back that she saw the ribbon on the sill.

Not white. Blue, the first ribbon, the original, the one that had been knotted round her door handle her first night at Moorfield when the whole grammar was one word long, and threaded onto it, a small paper, folded, with her name on it in a fierce careful copybook hand. Jane opened it by the candle.

It is the blue one from the beginning. You have to wear it tomorrow where it doesn’t show. Mrs Brooks says brides wear something given. This is the most given thing I have. C.M.

P.S. I know about the room over the porch at the vicarage. Aunt Eleanor told me you slept there the bad night. When I am wedded I will wear something of yours where it doesn’t show, and then it will be even.

Jane stood at the window a long time with the ribbon in her hand. Across the dark lawn the nursery night-light burned its steady watch, and below it, on the sill, she could just make out the answering pale line where a white ribbon lay along the stone, the treaty, both flags flying, on the last night it would ever be needed and the first night it was purely, entirely, for joy.

She threaded the blue ribbon through the lace at the wedding dress’s inner hem, where it wouldn’t show, and set three stitches to hold it, her father’s daughter to the last. The most valuable entries are the ones nobody sees. Then she blew out the candle and lay down in the narrow bed in the fourth room from the oak, Jane Prescott one more night, with the house holding its breath around her and every account in it, at last, in order, and slept, in fact, immediately, and did not dream at all, the way the books sleep when they balance.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

They were wedded on the last Thursday of July, at ten in the morning, with the church so full the late-comers stood in the porch, and the porch’s overflow stood among the graves in the sun.

It was not a grand wedding. That was the deliberate architecture of it: Robert had proposed London and a bishop, once, with a straight face, purely for the pleasure of watching Jane weigh the suggestion and decline it, and what they built instead was this, the parish church, and the vicar. The village that had clapped them down the middle of its own green now packed into its own pews. Hamish standing up with Robert, and Eleanor with Jane, the second couple’s banns already twice-read and the whole church enjoying the symmetry, Adelaide in the front pew in dove-grey silk, not black, and the county noted it, with the garnet brooch at her collar, Mrs Brooks beside her, promoted to the family pew by an argument she had lost with great satisfaction, and Miss Charlotte Moorfield, in white with a blue sash, performing the office of flower girl with the gravity of a coronation herald and a wicker basket clutched in both hands.

Jane came up the aisle on no one’s arm; she had no one, and had said so plainly when the question arose, and had been ambushed entirely by the answer the household assembled without consulting her. Travers, in his best blacks, offering his arm at the church door with a bow that had thirty years of the family in it. “If you would do the house the honour, miss,” was the whole of his speech, and Jane, who had walked into Moorfield alone off a carrier’s cart, walked up the aisle of its church on the arm of its butler, past the pews of its village, and was given away, the register would say by the household of Moorfield Manor. The vicar, possessing a character both gentle and artful, set it down in his own hand.