Page 7 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“The quarter’s allowance, if you please. There’s an account standing at the stationer’s in the village for primers and copybooks, and Miss Charlotte wants a proper paint-box. The one in the nursery has been mixed to mud.”

“Of course.” He did not move towards the strong-box. “Though I wonder, Miss Prescott, a paint-box, for a child who cannot be got to lessons? The last lady found the allowance more than sufficient, and she kept a full schoolroom timetable. Or believed she did.” A small smile, inviting her to share it. “You have been with us a week. Perhaps the wisdom is to see whether you stay a month before we go furnishing academies. It has not, historically, been a settled post.”

Each word was reasonable. That was the art of it, Jane knew the art, had eaten it for four years at other tables, the slight built entirely of prudence, unanswerable without appearing to be exactly what it implied she was. Temporary, excitable, not worth the outlay. She let the pause sit just long enough to be noticed.

“His lordship engaged me for the year, Mr Winthrop, and the schoolroom allowance is Miss Charlotte’s, not mine. If it wants his lordship’s authority to release his ward’s own funds, I’ll ask him at dinner. He takes an interest in the schoolroom.”

Beneath the man’s polite demeanor, something wavered, a brief, calculating glance, vanished as soon as it appeared. “No need in the world,” he said warmly, and went to the strong-box. “We are all delighted the schoolroom is under such careful management.”

He counted out the money on the desk’s edge and had her sign the receipt book, and it was while she was signing, received, £4, the quarter’s schoolroom allowance, that two things presented themselves to her at once, in the effortless way that figures had always presented themselves to her, as though her father were leaning over her shoulder tapping the page. The first was that the coins under her hand came to three pounds twelve, the difference being explained, smoothly, as “the stationer’s account settled direct from this office, Miss Prescott, to spare you the carrying of it.” The second was the petty-cash book lying open at his elbow, and the column of entries down its page, every one of them carrying two dates in the margin, one against the entry, one small and cramped against the sum.

A clerk who dates a sum twice, Janie, is keeping two calendars, one for the man who pays him and one for the truth. Ask which calendar the money lives in.

She had been twelve, and it had been a game, her father’s finger on a tradesman’s bill by lamplight. It was not a game now. She signed her name without a tremor, thanked Mr Winthrop for sparing her the carrying of eight shillings, and left, and made a point, at the door, of fumbling her reticule, dropping a glove, stooping for it. The clumsy, apologetic exit of a woman who noticed nothing, performed for the man she could feel watching her the whole length of the passage.

That evening she ruled a fresh page at the back of her father’s primer and made the first entry in her own small ledger. Saturday. Schoolroom allowance £4, received £3 12s, stationer’s account claimed as settled direct, verify at the village. Petty-cash book, entries double-dated throughout. She looked at the page a while, then added, beneath it, in the interest of accuracy. He watched me out of the office. First person at Moorfield to find me worth the watching. I would rather it had been almost anyone else.

***

Eleanor Blythe arrived on the Monday with a basket of physic herbs for Mrs Brooks and the general air of a west wind getting into a shut house. Jane, crossing the kitchen garden with Charlotte’s silent shadow drifting along the espaliers ten feet behind her, was hailed over the lavender without ceremony or introduction.

“You’re the new governess, no, don’t tell me, you can’t be anyone else, you have the look of a woman doing six things while appearing to stand still. Eleanor Blythe. My brother has the parish. I’ve been wanting to get a look at you for a week.” She said it with such open good humour that the words carried no impertinence at all, and her handshake was a gardener’s, warm and unceremonious. “The whole village has, if we’re honest. You’re the third this year, you know.”

“So I’ve been told. Twice.”

“Yes, we’re a small place. We make our news last.” Eleanor’s glance went past Jane’s shoulder, touched the small figure stationed among the apple cordons, and came back without lingering, done so lightly, so exactly rightly, that Jane warmed to her on the spot. “And how do you find Moorfield? You may be diplomatic, I’m only the vicar’s sister, and we are bred to discretion.”

“You are nothing of the kind,” said Mrs Brooks, arriving for her basket, and the two of them fell into the easy quarrel of long acquaintance, while Jane stood in the sun and listened to Eleanor talk, about the orphan children at the parish school, mostly, where she spent three days a week teaching sewing and letters to children whom grief had made strange, and whom she discussed neither in the voice of charity nor of complaint but as colleagues in a difficult trade. “The little Ferris boy has started speaking again, did I tell you, Mrs Brooks? Eight months. His sister simply carried on setting his place at table the whole time, and one morning he asked for the salt as though nothing, well.” Her eyes came to Jane, and for the second time in a week Jane had the disconcerting experience of being looked at with attention and no agenda whatever. “But I expect you know all about that kind of waiting, Miss Prescott.”

“I’m learning it.”

“It’s the whole of the work, my brother says, and he’s only wrong in thinking he learned it at Oxford.” Eleanor gathered her shawl. “Come to the vicarage on your half-day. I mean it, Sundays we keep open house, and the physician, Mr Watson generally calls, so you’d have sensible company, or at least company.” The colour that spread across her face at her own sentence was slight, and swiftly governed, and Jane kept it with a private smile among the week’s other discoveries.

It was as Eleanor turned to go that Charlotte came out from the cordons. She came the long way round the bed, at a tangent, in the manner of a small ship tacking against notice, arrived at Jane’s side, and put into her hand, without a word, without looking up, in front of the visitor and the housekeeper and the open windows of the house, one dandelion, stem bent double from clutching. Then she retired three feet to the lavender border and stood inspecting the middle distance, a person with no knowledge of any dandelion.

Nobody remarked on it. Mrs Brooks became occupied with her basket, and Eleanor said something easy about the borders wanting rain. But Jane, closing her hand carefully around the ruined stem, caught the look the two women exchanged over the lavender, and the look, quick and quiet as it was, had the weight of a verdict delivered in a full courtroom. In front of witnesses, she thought, standing very still with her heart absurdly loud, holding a weed. She claimed me in front of witnesses.

From the tail of her eye she saw Eleanor Blythe looking at her, no longer with curiosity, but the way one looks at the answer to a question the whole parish had been asking.

Chapter Five

The half-day was Thursday, and Jane had not taken the first two.

It was the sort of economy nobody noticed and nobody thanked, which was precisely why governesses practised it, but this Thursday she put on her bonnet directly after nursery dinner, and told Mrs Brooks she had errands in the village, and was surprised, the small pleasant surprise of a door opening before the knock, when the housekeeper looked her over and said only, “Take the field path by the church, the lane’s a mire after Tuesday. And you may tell Tindall from me his last packet of pins was a disgrace.”

The field path took her along the hedges in the deep June green, and Moorfield’s village received her the way villages receive a new fact. By pretending not to look while looking entirely. A woman in grey was nobody. A woman in grey walking down from the Manor was the third governess, and the third governess was currency, Jane felt the small change of herself passing from doorway to doorway ahead of her own feet, the baker’s wife finding urgent business with her step, two men at the smithy achieving perfect deafness with their faces aimed her way, and she bore it as she bore all weather, evenly, and thought. A month ago I would have called this being inspected. I am learning the village’s grammar now. This is being read, slowly, by people who mean to know what I am before they decide what to charge me for it.

Tindall’s shop stood between the saddler’s and the bakery, its window a careful argument of ledger-books, sealing-wax, penny prints, and a globe with the Pacific faded white. The bell brought Mr Tindall himself out of the back, a small precise man with ink under one thumbnail and spectacles pushed up into grey hair, who took her in at a glance, arrived at governess, Manor, the new one, and adjusted his manner to a fine calibrated point between shopkeeper and scholar.

“Miss Prescott, I expect. We had heard. What may I assist you with?”

“Primers, Mr Tindall, and copybooks, and drawing-paper, and a paint-box if you keep one that deserves the name. And Mrs Brooks desires me to say your last pins were a disgrace.”

“Mrs Brooks has said so by every mouth leaving that house for thirty years. It is how I know she is well.” He was already assembling the order with the speed of a man who took pride in his stock. “The paint-box I have, a Reeves, the proper article, none of your travelling toys. Shall I put it all to the Manor’s account?”

And there it was, the door, standing open, wanting nothing but to walk through. Jane kept her eyes on the paint-box.

“That raises a small matter of housekeeping. I’m told the schoolroom’s account with you was lately settled from the estate office, I keep the nursery books, and I must set the sum against the right quarter or answer for it. Might I trouble you for the figure, and the date it was paid?”