Page 9 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

The fire ticked in the grate. Robert set down the poker with some care, because his first three answers were not fit for use, and looked at his aunt, who looked back at him steadily, an old woman in travelling black who had just laid a loaded thing on the tea table between them.

“Edmund,” he said, “has not clapped eyes on Charlotte in her life. He sent a wreath in January with the ribbon dictated to a shop.”

“He sent a wreath to a funeral that made her an heiress and you her keeper. He can count, Robert. It is his single accomplishment. A rich ward, a guardian the newspapers call the Wastrel Viscount, one column of print, one sympathetic ear in Chancery, and he would relieve you of her for her own protection and dine out on his conscience for a decade.” She let the picture stand a moment, and her voice, when it went on, dropped its armour by a fraction. “I have no illusions about Edmund. But he does not need to be right to be dangerous. He only needs you to go on being quotable. And you have given them years of quotations.”

“And your remedy comes in the second carriage.”

“My remedy,” Adelaide said, unblinking, “is respectability, arrived at by the swiftest road. A man with a wife is a settled man. The courts know it, the neighbourhood knows it, and every word Edmund has bought in Chancery Lane goes soft on the day the notice is in the Gazette. Diana is a widow of unimpeachable position. She has known you twenty years, and she is downstairs in my carriage. I do not deal in subtlety, Robert. I have not the time left for it. I deal in what answers.”

“You are proposing I enter into a matrimony to spite a lawsuit that does not yet exist.”

“I am proposing you wed before it exists, which is the only time matrimony is any use.” She rose, shaking out her skirts, closing the audience as she had opened it, on her own terms. “You may glare at me across dinner. I have been glared at by better, and I buried most of them. But understand me, Robert, because underneath everything I am saying is one thing only,” and there, briefly, the worry showed bare, an old woman’s fear standing in the wreck of her certainty, “I watched that child at the funeral. She did not cry, and she did not speak, and she held my hand as if it were a railing. I will not watch her carried out of the one house left to her because her guardian could not make himself dull in time. Whatever you think of my methods, we want the same thing. We are merely disagreeing about the price.”

***

Diana Harrington entered rooms the way other women entered water they knew to be warm. Robert watched her come down to tea, unhurried, perfectly framed by the doorway for exactly the moment the doorway flattered her, and felt the old scar beneath his ribs throb in readiness, then, finding no cause for alarm, subside once more.

Eight years ago she had been Diana Marsh, and he had been a second son with a second son’s income, and she had explained it to him kindly on a terrace at her mother’s card party, using the word practical four times. Lord Harrington had possessed forty thousand a year and gout, and had been deceased now for two of them.

“Robert.” Both hands out to him, warm through the gloves. “No, Moorfield. I must learn to say Moorfield. How strange the world is. I am so sorry, I never wrote after January, and I ought to have, and I have reproached myself the whole way from town. May I say it now and be forgiven? I am sorry about James. He was the best of all of us.”

It was gracefully done. Everything was, that had never been the question. She sat, and poured, remembering without asking that he took no sugar, a small flourish, laid where he would see it, and made casual small talk about town, mutual friends, and nothing in particular, but her eyes were having a completely different conversation and made casual small talk about town, mutual friends, and nothing in particular, but her eyes were having a completely different conversation. Touched his face, the room, the good pictures, the worn carpet-edge, and came back to him with a warmth as even and complete as lamplight.

“Your aunt bullies you,” she said, dropping her voice into confidence as Adelaide crossed the room. “She bullied me the entire journey. You are to consider us allies against her, I insist upon it. Though…” the lashes came down, and the next words arrived precisely as artless as eight years’ practice could make them, “I confess when she asked me to come, I did not require much persuasion. I have thought of you, Robert. These two years especially. One makes a great many practical choices at nineteen, and then one lives in the particular quiet those choices purchase, and one thinks.”

“Harrington Hall has forty rooms,” Robert said. “I’d have thought the quiet at least came in a handsome size.”

Something glinted momentarily in her gaze, a mere instant, no wider than a breath, wherein a cold and scheming nature betrayed itself beneath her outward warmth; but in the next, it was vanished, replaced by a low, self-deprecating laugh of the utmost charm. “I had forgotten,” she said, “that you were the only man in London who ever listened to what I actually said. How I have missed being in danger at tea.” And she skillfully turned the conversation to the gardens, proving to be altogether delightful. Robert took his tea and listened, with the feeling of a man presented with a flawlessly kept set of accounts, wondering, with the quiet vigilance he had lately been obliged to cultivate, what secret entries the second ledger might conceal.

***

They brought Charlotte down before dinner, because Adelaide required it: “I have come fifty miles. I will see my great-niece, Robert. She cannot be entirely feral.” The gathering was accordingly convened in the drawing room, each member of the company seated in due order, an arrangement Robert realised, too late, was precisely the worst method of conducting any business concerning Charlotte.

The door opened, and Charlotte stepped across the threshold, only to come to a sudden stop.

She was in her good frock, hair brushed to a shine, and she stood on the carpet’s edge surveying the assembly, the great-aunt upright in the wing chair, the beautiful stranger arranging her skirts into a welcome, the room full of eyes, with the flat vigilance of a garrison assessing a treaty party. And then she did the thing that rearranged the room’s entire architecture, though only two people in it understood the survey had concluded. She crossed neither to her uncle nor to the ladies, but walked straight to the plain grey figure who had entered behind her and stood by the door as staff stands, and pressed herself into Miss Prescott’s skirts, and took a fold of grey wool in one fist, and from that fortified position turned to face the company, prepared now to be introduced.

“Come here, child,” Adelaide said, not unkindly, putting out a ringed hand. “Come, let me look at you. I am your aunt Adelaide. Your papa was my nephew and a great favourite of mine. Come.”

Charlotte looked at the ringed hand. Her fist tightened in the grey wool. She did not move, and the silence went on one beat past comfortable, and then two.

“She is shy,” Diana said gently, beautifully, to the room. “Poor lamb. And no wonder, with everything that has happened.”

“She is not shy,” Adelaide said. “She is being permitted to cling to a servant in her own drawing room. Miss Prescott, is it? You may leave her with us. You are keeping her babyish. Loosen her hand and go. She will settle the moment you are not there to be clung to. It is the same with dogs.”

Robert saw the governess’s chin come up, and had one clear look, before her face closed over it, at what lived behind the composure. Not hurt, which he had braced for, but a swift cold reckoning, an entry made. She did not loosen the small hand. She looked down at Charlotte, and her voice came out level and unhurried, pitched not to the room but to the fist in her skirts.

“I’ll be just outside the door, Miss Charlotte. On the chair by the long window, where you can see me through the gap. I won’t go anywhere at all.”

She unpicked the small fingers gently, gave them one press, and went, and Charlotte’s eyes followed her the whole way, and then went to the door’s gap, verifying, and found the promised chair and the grey shoulder in it, and only then, garrisoned by that sightline, turned back and delivered to her great-aunt a curtsey of geometric perfection and absolute silence.

“There,” Adelaide said, satisfied, to the room in general. “You see. Perfectly biddable. It wanted only firmness.”

Robert stood at the mantel with his tea going cold, watching his niece watch the crack of light at the door, and said nothing yet, filing, in the new habit of a man lately taught to check things, the sum his aunt had just misread by an entire column. It wanted only firmness. It had wanted a sightline, and every soul in the room had missed it but him and the woman on the chair in the passage.

***

At the evening’s end he passed through the hall in time to hear his aunt at the housekeeper’s door, brisk and settled. “…the rose room for Lady Harrington, mind, the one with the south light, and I shall want the linen inventories and the menus brought to me after breakfast, Mrs Brooks, so long as I am under this roof. His lordship has quite enough with the estate. The house will be my province.”