Page 8 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Mr Tindall’s hands stopped among the copybooks.

It was a small stop, and he covered it well, but she had spent a month watching hands, pressed hands, folded hands, hands that squared papers, and his had gone, for one instant, perfectly honest. He looked at her over the spectacles. He took the spectacles down and polished them, which she had learned from Mrs Wilkins was what careful people did instead of speaking, and then he made his decision, went into the back, and returned with a ledger bound in mottled board, which he opened on the counter and turned, deliberately, to face her.

“There is the Manor schoolroom’s page, Miss Prescott. You keep books. Read it yourself, for I’d sooner you read it than I said it.”

She read it. The page went back four years in Tindall’s upright hand, primers, slates, paper, a French grammar, the small honest sediment of two governesses’ brief reigns, and against the entries, payments. Regular to the penny through the old lord’s time, quarter by quarter. Then, from midsummer of last year, nothing. Item after item carried forward, the column of debt stepping down the page in patient increments, carried… carried… carried, to a standing total, ruled and re-ruled at each quarter’s foot, of four pounds sixteen shillings and eight pence. The last entry of all was dated three weeks past, to act rendered Mr Winthrop, per carrier, no reply.

No payment had been made that month. No payment had been made for a year. The account had not been settled from the estate office. The account had been starved by it, and eight shillings of Charlotte’s own pin-money, deducted before Jane’s eyes with a smooth explanation and a smoother smile, had gone the way of every carried entry on this ledger. It was a space belonging neither to last year’s calender, nor to this.

“You will understand,” Tindall said, quietly, to the ledger rather than to her, “why I’d not speak the sum aloud to a Manor lady in my own shop. The old lord paid to the day. Since…” a small motion of the head that stood for January, for the whole year of it, “I render the account each quarter to the estate office, as I’m instructed, and the carrier brings back civility. I’ll not press a house in mourning. I said so to Mrs Tindall and, I say it to you. But I’ve a boy at school in Lewes off this shop, Miss Prescott, and civility doesn’t pay his master.” He resettled the spectacles, and his look, over them, was the shrewd mild look of a man who had kept a village’s paper for thirty years and read most of what passed across it. “You went white at the page’s foot, if you’ll pardon my noticing. Not at the sum. At the last line. Now, I sell paper, it’s no business of mine what’s written on anyone else’s. But if a young lady who keeps books wished to copy that page for her own records, I’d step into the back for the wrapping-paper, and be some minutes finding it.”

Jane looked at him. The shop was quiet, the globe’s faded Pacific caught the window light. Somewhere in the back a kettle was working towards its opinion.

“You are a good man, Mr Tindall.”

“I’m a tradesman with a bad debt and a sound eye, which does duty for goodness most weekdays.” He was already turning. “The pencil’s by the inkstand. Mind, copy the dates. In my experience of accounts, is that the accounts lie quiet enough, but the dates turn King’s evidence.”

She copied the page entire, dates and all, in her smallest hand, on the back of a sheet of his drawing-paper, while the kettle came to its conclusion in the back room. When he returned with the paper, the linen had been folded and the morning’s business concluded. “The schoolroom’s new order goes to the Manor’s account as usual, that is proper, and it will be attended to now, I promise you. But the standing debt is another matter.” She counted it onto the counter from her own reticule, four pounds sixteen and eight, a week’s pause in her mind at the counting, nine pounds shrinking towards four, and set her finger on the coins. “Paid by the schoolroom’s keeper, entered as paid, and Mr Tindall, not spoken of. To anyone. Not the settling, and not the page, and not my asking. If the estate office should ever pay the rendered account after all, you’ll return this to me and no one wiser. Can your sound eye stretch to a blind week or two?”

Tindall looked at the coins, and at her, a long moment, and then swept them into the drawer with a tradesman’s clean finality and wrote Received in full in his upright hand, and dated it.

“My eye can go blind by the quarter together, when a debt’s paid and the payer asks it,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do that you didn’t ask. That page stays as it stands, copied, not torn out, not amended, the carried entries and the rendered-and-no-reply all standing in their dates. Because if ever anyone comes asking after the Manor’s paper…” the spectacles glinted, “a book that’s been kept honest is the best friend an honest woman has. You taught me that just now, miss, by the way you read it. Good day to you, and the paint-box is in the parcel, and there’s a shilling’s worth of coloured chalks in there that nobody paid for and nobody will, for the little Miss up at the house, who used to stand at that window by the hour looking at the globe, before January, holding her mama’s hand.”

***

She walked back the long way, by the green, because her legs wanted the time even if her half-day did not.

The green lay drowsy in the afternoon, the elms full, the church napping over its wall, and at a trestle by the churchyard gate, a broad soft-faced woman presided over a table of worn books with the contentment of a spider who liked her web better than any fly. Widow Cole. Jane knew her without introduction, because Eleanor’s Monday talk had furnished the whole village in miniature, and she stopped, spent a farthing’s worth of time she could not spare, and could not help, at the trestle’s end.

“The governess,” said Widow Cole comfortably, by way of greeting. “You’ll be wanting the shelf’s left end, then. Sermons in the middle for them as buys books by weight, and the left end for them as reads. There’s a Cowper with the back gone and a book of voyages the schoolmaster treasured past its binding, may he rest in peace, and I’ll tell you what I tell nobody. The shelf never empties, and you’re not to wonder at it, and Lewes has nothing to do with the case.” Her small eyes, folded in the soft face, were as sharp as Tindall’s. “You’ve his look, if I may say. The schoolmaster’s. One of them as walks along a shelf touching the spines like they was counting heads.” She took Jane’s farthing for a coverless Cowper and delivered, with the change, the village’s own ledger-entry, settled and dated. “They’re saying up and down this green that the little Miss came out of the hedge bold as a robin, Monday, and gave you a flower in your Miss Blythe’s hearing. Four years I’ve sat this trestle across from that church, and I’ve heard nothing told in this village, nothing, miss, that gives me half the pleasure. You’ll want the right end of the shelf next time. Poetry’s the right end. I’ll set the good ones by.”

Jane carried the Cowper and the parcel up the field path in the long light with her mind doing two kinds of sums at once, and neither of them would close.

The first was the cold one, and it walked beside her like a bailiff. The account was never settled. The falsehood was not caution. It was habit, a year deep, rendered-and-no-reply, and he told it to my face, smiling, over the open petty-cash book, and to a woman he had watched read a column. Which means the falsehood is load-bearing. Which means the whole structure is. And directly behind that, the colder one. And I can do nothing with it. A governess, five weeks in the house, carrying a copied page against the estate’s own manager, I would be gone by Saturday and the page with me, and he knows it, and that is why he smiled. The proof lay hidden against her ribs, as heavy as a secret that could be spent but once, and by a voice the world would credit; a voice which, by any reckoning of her own, was not yet hers. The second sum would not sit in a column at all. It was a shilling’s worth of chalks that nobody paid for, a shelf’s good ones set by. A village that had passed a child’s flower from trestle to smithy to bakery like news of a ship come safe in, and Jane, who had walked into this parish a month ago as nobody, walked up out of it in the June evening carrying a paint-box, a broken Cowper, and the confounding discovery that the village had been keeping accounts of Moorfield the whole year long. Patient, exact, unpaid, and kind, in the way of creditors who have decided the debtor’s heart is good.

The white ribbon was on her door handle when she came up. Knotted plain, with a stem of lavender through the knot, the newest word in the grammar, coined that week, whose meaning she had worked out on Tuesday and verified on Wednesday. I watched for you, and you came back.

Jane stood in the passage a moment with the parcel in her arms, and then went in, and unwrapped the paint-box, and set the copied page in the primer’s back with the other entries, dated, ruled, waiting, and, on the fresh line beneath the Saturday sums, made the evening’s entry in a steady hand

Thursday. The stationer’s account. Never settled, starved a full year, copy taken, dates entire, T. will keep his page and his counsel. Debt discharged from my own purse, £4 16s 8d. Remaining to me, £4 3s. She looked at that figure a while, four pounds three shillings, and the whole of Jane Prescott, entered against a falsehood a year deep, and found that her hand, when it went on, was steadier than the sum deserved.

The falsehood is load-bearing. Say nothing. Watch everything. And enter this last, because it is also true and a clerk must keep the whole account. The village watches this house as I do, closely, patiently, and on the side of the child.

Chapter Six

The trunks arrived first, as heavy cavalry goes before a general, and Robert counted eleven of them coming off the second carriage before he stopped counting on principle. He had been given no warning beyond a letter that morning, his aunt’s hand, three lines, announcing herself and dear Lady Harrington for a visit of unspecified duration undertaken for the family’s sake, and he had known Aunt Adelaide too long to mistake the phrase for sentiment. The family’s sake was not an endearment. It was a jurisdiction.

She came up the steps drawing off her gloves, kissed the air beside his cheek, and inspected the hall over his shoulder in one continuous motion, so that greeting and inspection concluded together.

“Robert. You look tired. I suppose that is the accounts. The whole town says you have shut yourself up with them like a clerk, which I confess I found difficult to credit.” Her eyes finished with the hall and returned to him, and they were not unkind, which was the thing about Aunt Adelaide that unarmed people missed. They were worried. They had merely never learned any dialect for worry except command. “Well. We are here now.”

“So I see. Eleven trunks’ worth. Am I to know for how long?”

“For as long as it takes, and I will thank you not to be pert before the servants.” She surrendered her travelling cloak, established herself in the drawing room, in James’s chair, he noted. Taken without hesitation, the way one takes a chair in a house that is family property rather than a brother’s home, and came to the point with the directness he had, in fairness, always respected in her. “You will want to know why I’ve come, and I will tell you before Diana is down, because it concerns you nearly. Robert, Mr Pettigrew has written to me. Twice.”

“The family solicitor writes to you about my affairs. I find I want to hear that sentence again.”

“He wrote,” Adelaide continued, “because he has received inquiries. Your cousin Edmund has been asking questions. About the guardianship, about whether it was ever formally examined, given the circumstances, whether a man of your…” she selected the word with tongs, “…history is a fit and proper person to have sole charge of Charlotte and of Charlotte’s fortune. He has consulted someone in Chancery Lane, Robert. That is not curiosity. Men do not pay for curiosity.”