“Promise?”
“I promise.”
But Mel knew, even as she made the promise, that it was one she could not guarantee. Because things did happen and people did leave, the world was full of wrong things that could not be prevented, no matter how carefully one tried.
The matter of the garden remained untouched, as though the very mention of it might shatter the fragile glass of their composure.
They maintained a most scrupulous distance, never permitting their gaze to dwell upon the other a moment beyond what the dictates of their station demanded.
Yet, this unyielding propriety was a far more strenuous burden; for the ignorance that had once shielded them was gone, replaced by a shared and heavy understanding.
Mel busied herself with work with desperate intensity, seeking escape in work in pursuit of it.
She taught Anna the rudiments of French, which Anna attacked with the same organisational fervour she applied to everything. Within three days, Anna had created a system for tracking her vocabulary acquisition, complete with charts and tables and a colour-coded scheme for categorizing words by difficulty level.
“Je suis Annabelle,” Anna announced at breakfast on the fourth day.
“J’ai six ans. Je suis très intelligente.”
“Modest, too,” Rhys observed, not quite meeting Mel’s eyes across the table.
“Modesty is a performance,” Anna said, with the confidence of a child quoting a trusted authority.
“Accuracy is useful. Miss Grace taught me that.”
Mel felt her cheeks warm slightly and fixed her attention on her tea.
She coaxed Viola into reading aloud, a project that had seemed impossible when she first arrived at Hartfell and now seemed merely difficult. First whispers, barely audible even in the quiet of the schoolroom. Then sentences, spoken in a voice that trembled but did not break. Then whole paragraphs, read with increasing confidence to an audience of her sisters and, sometimes, her father.
Rhys had been there for one of those reading sessions, sitting in the corner of the schoolroom with a book of his own, pretending to read while actually listening to every word his daughter spoke. When Viola finished, stumbling only twice over difficult words, he had looked up with an expression of such raw pride that Mel had to turn away.
She took Thistle on nature expeditions that exhausted them both. They tramped through fields and along cliff paths, cataloguing every beetle and butterfly and interesting rock they encountered. Thistle’s specimen collection grew to alarming proportions, and Mel found herself spending evenings helping to label and organise finds that included three varieties of moth, a shed snake skin, and what Thistle insisted was a fossilised dinosaur tooth but which Mel suspected was merely an oddly shaped pebble.
“It could be a dinosaur tooth,” Thistle argued.
“Miss Grace says we should maintain scientific openness to unexpected possibilities.”
“I also said we should verify claims through evidence and expert consultation before accepting them as fact.”
“But what if the experts are wrong?”
“Then we revise our understanding based on new evidence. That’s how science works.”
“I think my dinosaur tooth is new evidence.”
Mel did not have the energy to argue. The exhaustion she was cultivating through constant activity had begun to catch up with her, settling into her bones and making everything feel slightly distant, slightly muffled, as though she were experiencing her life through a pane of glass.
She knew Rhys was watching her, she could feel his attention even when she was not looking at him, a constant awareness that prickled along her skin and made it difficult to concentrate.
He was still here, still in Cornwall. His extended visit had stretched past any reasonable duration, and still he showed no signs of departing. Letters arrived from London with increasing frequency, bearing seals that suggested important matters and important people requiring his attention. He read them and set them aside and remained at Hartfell, attending his daughters’ lessons and eating meals with the family and filling the house with his presence in ways that made it impossible for Mel to forget, even for a moment, that he was there.
She wanted him to leave, but at the same time she wanted him to stay.
The evening conversations had not stopped, but they had changed.
They still met in the study after the children were asleep and they still discussed matters of educational importance and household management. But the conversations were shorter now, more focused, stripped of the wandering philosophical discussions and personal revelations that had characterised their earlier exchanges.
They spoke as employer and employee. They maintained the distance that propriety demanded and they pretended that nothing had changed, even though everything had changed, and the pretending was exhausting for both of them.
