Page 6 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“…though if the boy would only ask the lamplighter,” Miss Prescott was saying to the page, “he’d find posting a much better trade than piracy, and his mother would be spared a deal of worry. But nobody in these poems ever asks the person who knows.”

The curtain-wrapped ambassador watched her with an expression Robert had not seen above stairs in three weeks: interest. There was no sign of a flinch, nor the sentry’s stony posture. Instead, there was an intent, leaning forward air of possession. A child listening to her own book mishandled by an amateur who would clearly be lost without supervision.

He glanced at the fire and made his decision the length of one indrawn breath.

“There you are, Miss Prescott,” he said, at exactly conversational pitch, crossing to the shelf as though the window contained nothing but weather. “I must beg your pardon, as we have to deal with household matters. You have found the poetry from my mother’s collection. Some of the volumes are older than I am and every one of them is better company.” He drew one down at random and turned it in his hands. “You were saying, before we were interrupted. About being an answer worth asking.”

“I was about to say, my lord, that it can’t be hurried, and that I would rather promise you patience than progress.” She closed the book on her finger, easy, unhurried. “Progress belongs to Miss Charlotte. It will go at her pace or it won’t go at all, and whosoever should attempt to persuade you to the contrary is assuredly seeking to turn a profit.” And there it was again, that level grey look that had sat through the wreck of his interview manners without once flattering him, and hadn’t flattered him now. Robert had spent twelve years in rooms where every sentence aimed at him required something, and had grown as fluent in the dialect as any man in London. This was not the dialect. This was a woman staking her professional word on the slowest possible answer, in the interview of a post she badly needed, in the full presence of the child, whose attention was entirely captured. The curtain had fallen quite still, possessed of that eager, clinging stillness so natural to youthful curiosity.

Three weeks, he thought. Three weeks he had crept and coaxed and left biscuits like offerings at a shrine, and earned one eye at a curtain’s edge for it, and counted himself a diplomatist. This woman had been in his house half a morning. She had not approached, had not coaxed, had done nothing whatever but sit down and be worth watching, Charlotte had come out of the curtain to the length of her own two feet and stood in the open window, holding her ground, for a stranger.

Not for a stranger. For the one person under this roof who had made no attempt on her.

“You’re engaged, Miss Prescott,” Robert said. “From this morning. Mrs Brooks will see you settled.” He restored his mother’s book to the shelf, and allowed himself, at the door, one look back at the pair of them, the governess reading, the curtain’s small garrison standing down by inches, and found, with an odd sensation somewhere under his waistcoat, that of the two of them it was not his niece he had been looking at first.

Chapter Four

By the end of her first week, Jane had learned the geography of a household that did not appear on any floor plan. There was the Moorfield the servants used, and the Moorfield his lordship paced over his rents, and then there was the third estate, the important one, which was Charlotte’s. The linen press with the loose panel, the gap behind the morning-room curtains, the half-landing with its view of both doors, the space beneath the schoolroom window seat where a folded child fit exactly. Jane mapped it the way her father had taught her to read a ledger, not by demanding entry, but by noticing what the totals declined to mention, and she was careful never once to look directly at any of it.

The schoolroom kept its own treaty. Jane arrived each morning at nine and read aloud for an hour to an apparently empty room, working through the verse book with a serene disregard for accuracy that would have scandalised its publisher. Lessons, such as they were, she did aloud to herself, sums on the slate with one error in the working, geography with the rivers of England running through the wrong counties, and marked her own mistakes with a frown when she caught them, and missed one in three.

The window seat corrected her sums by leaving the slate, re-chalked in a small fierce hand, where she would find it after nursery dinner.

On the fifth morning she had left a length of blue hair-ribbon on the schoolroom table, the twin of the one that had been knotted round her door handle her first night, for the ribbon game, she had discovered, ran in both directions, and was the closest thing to conversation the small country would yet permit. On the sixth morning the ribbon was gone from the table, and a white one lay in its place.

On the seventh, Jane ruined the garden poem again.

She accomplished it at her ease during the quiet hours of the morning, the room warm and heavy with sunshine. She knew the window seat was occupied merely by the quality of the stillness, a silence that possessed a distinct texture whenever Charlotte was present, akin to a breath suspended two rooms away. “And no one there may weep or frown,” she read, “for I have locked the little gate, and lost the key among the…”

“Roses.”

The word came from inside the window seat, muffled by the cushion and furious with correction, and it was out in the world before its owner could call it back.

Jane’s heart performed something complicated and painful against her ribs. She did not lift her eyes from the page.

“Roses,” she agreed, as though the cushion had every right to an opinion and frequently offered one. “So it is. I had it wrong the whole week, and you have been very patient with me.” She turned the page and read on, voice level, hands steady, while behind her the window seat settled by one careful inch, and the morning went on as mornings do, except that somewhere in the room a door that had been locked since January now stood open the width of one word, both of them were pretending not to look at it, for fear it should shut.

She wrote to no one about it. There was no one to write to, which she noted that evening with less bitterness than usual, because for the first time in some years the fact had an advantage. The word was hers. The first in months, and the child had spent it on her.

***

By the second week, the household had begun deciding about her; Jane could read the deliberations the way she read any slow-moving account, in small entries. The schoolroom fire was laid earlier. Her washing came back folded in the manner of the family’s rather than the staff’s, a distinction invisible to anyone who had not spent four years on the staff. And on the Friday, Mrs Brooks appeared in the schoolroom doorway at eleven with her mending basket and an expression that forbade the drawing of conclusions.

“The light’s better in here of a morning than anywhere in my own quarters,” she said, to the room at large, and established herself in the window’s far corner with a pillowcase, and mended.

She said nothing further for the whole of the hour. Jane, who understood perfectly that the light in the housekeeper’s south-facing parlour was the best in the house, went on with the morning as it stood. Read aloud to the apparently empty room, worked her sums on the slate with the day’s planted error, frowned over the rivers of England, and was aware, throughout, of being observed at work by a professional, which was an examination no governess mistook for company. The window seat held its breath and its counsel. The small country did not care to perform before magistrates.

At the hour’s end Mrs Brooks folded the pillowcase, rose, and delivered her findings at the door, in the manner of a woman leaving a remark behind rather than addressing anyone with it.

“The last one did lessons at her. Talked at her, read at her, pulled her out of places and stood her in the middle of the carpet like a mat wanted beating.” A momentary pause ensued, as she shifted the weight of the basket to her hip. “You leave the middle of the carpet empty. I’ve watched you do it a week, everything you do in this room leaves a space beside it the size of a child, and you never once look at the space.” The housekeeper’s eyes went, briefly, to the window seat, and away, with a tact that thirty years of great houses had ground fine. “My sister’s boy came back from the sea after the Amphion blew up in harbor with all his mates aboard, and he’d not speak either, the first year. Everyone shouted at him kindly. It was the blacksmith who cured him, gave him the bellows to work and stood beside him at the forge every day for a month with his mouth shut.” She was through the door before the last of it came back over her shoulder, flat as a delivered invoice. “The fire’ll be laid at seven from tomorrow. Growing minds want a warm room. It’s in no one’s accounts, so no one need be thanked for it.”

Jane sat a moment when she had gone, and then wrote nothing down at all, which was its own kind of entry. Some households told you their verdicts. This one laid fires.

***

The estate office stood at the service end of the house, past the gun room, and it received Jane on the Saturday with a smell of ink and tallow and a man rising from behind account books with unimpeachable courtesy.

“Miss Prescott. The new governess. I had heard you were settling in famously.” Mr Winthrop was perhaps five-and-forty, dressed one degree better than his station, and his desk was the tidiest surface she had seen at Moorfield, squared papers, clean quills, everything at right angles, the desk of a man whose accounts closed to the penny because he had decided in advance what the pennies would be. “What may I do for the schoolroom?”