Page 13 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Hamish would have told him to post it quietly. His aunt would have told him to say nothing and smile at dinner. But he had spent twelve years perfecting the art of being underestimated, and it had left him with a workman’s knowledge of the tool from the other side, and what he wanted now, wanted with a cold exactness that would have surprised the hazard tables, was to stand in that tidy office and put the thing on the desk and observe.

***

Winthrop rose as he entered. “My lord. An unexpected pleasure. The rents are ready for your…”

“I am not here for the rents.” Robert laid the sealed letter on the squared blotter, address up, where a man who read upside down for a living could not help but read it. Mr Josiah Louth, Lothbury, London. “I’m engaging an examining accountant, Winthrop. Louth. The bank’s man. I require a full examination. Every book, every year of my brother’s time and mine, papers, contracts, the lot. He’ll have the use of this office when he comes, and you’ll give him whatever he asks for.” He said it pleasantly, in the voice he had used for a decade to tell hostesses their parties were charming. “After ten years’ faithful service, I thought you were owed the courtesy of hearing it from me and not from the village.”

And there it was.

A man’s face is a made book too, and Winthrop’s was a good one; the surprise arrived properly, the deferential nod arrived properly, the very wise, my lord, a prudent measure for any estate in these times arrived word-perfect. But Robert had sat across candlelit baize from every kind of liar in London, and he had learned the tell that no discipline reaches, because it lives below discipline, not the face, the hands. On the word examining, the estate manager’s right hand, the tidy hand, the hand that squared papers, flattened itself on the desk and pressed, until the fingertips went pale at their edges, and held there through the whole handsome speech like a man leaning on a door he could feel opening.

“I knew you’d see the sense of it,” Robert said. “That will be all.”

He walked back up to the house through the wet morning at an easy pace, whistling something idle, every inch the reformed wastrel taking the air, and behind his own pleasant face he was doing what she did, he realised. He was entering it in the ledger with the sums perfect, and the hands pressed white. Ten days remained before he departed for Louth. Standing at the window of the estate office, he was sensible of being watched along the entire sweep of the gravel drive; yet for the first time in his life, Robert Moorfield found in that scrutiny a species of useful intelligence. Somewhere behind him, a man with two calendars had just been handed a date by which the truth arrived, and whatever that man did next, he would have to do it soon, and in a hurry, and in view.

Sing, he thought, pleasantly, and did not look back.

Chapter Ten

The dancing was Adelaide’s idea, and like all Adelaide’s ideas it arrived as a completed fact at breakfast.

“The child moves like a ghost and stands like a fence-post, and she is nearly eight. She should have begun at six. Lady Harrington has offered to instruct her.” Diana inclined her head, all gracious surprise, as though the offer had not been rehearsed between them over the candles, “and we shall make a beginning this afternoon in the drawing room. Miss Prescott, you play, I presume? All governesses play.”

“Well enough for country dances, my lady.”

“Then you will play. Three o’clock.”

So it was that Jane found herself at the pianoforte with the carpet rolled back to the skirting, watching the lesson assemble itself in the long gold light. Adelaide established on the sofa with the air of a magistrate at assizes, Diana in the room’s centre, lovely in sprigged muslin, her patience already arranged, and Charlotte delivered to the middle of the bare floor like a prisoner to the bar, her eyes going first, always first, to the bench where Jane sat, measuring the distance to her, before anything else in the room was permitted to exist.

I’m here, Jane thought at her, steadily, over the music stand. Sightline unbroken. Go on.

“Now then, Charlotte.” Diana’s voice was honey warmed for company. “We shall learn to make a curtsey that would do for a duchess, and then the first figures. Watch me, dearest, so. The foot slides behind.”

It went as any observer of the past fortnight could have predicted, which was to say the child performed each movement with the wooden exactness of a little automaton, one beat behind the instruction, her whole living attention elsewhere, and Diana’s patience, being cut for an audience rather than for use, began to show its seams in small ways Jane cataloged from the bench, the smile renewed a fraction too often, the dearest acquiring an edge fine as paper’s. Adelaide beat time on her knee and issued corrections that corrected nothing. Charlotte turned when turned, stopped when released, and stood.

“She wants an example,” Adelaide pronounced at last. “Robert!” for he had appeared in the doorway some minutes since, drawn by the music, and had been leaning there watching in a silence Jane was careful not to examine, “Make yourself useful. Stand up with Lady Harrington and let the child see the figures danced as they are meant to be danced. You were good for little at twenty, but at least you were good for that.”

“How the years improve one’s references,” Robert said, and came in.

Jane played. She played a steady, serviceable line and kept her eyes on the music she did not need, because what was assembling on the floor did not require her opinion. Diana took her place opposite Robert with the ease of a woman resuming a property, the turn of her head exactly judged, her hand settling into his at the first figure as though eight years were a fiction someone else had invented. They danced well together. That was merely true, and Jane set it down as true, the sums first, her father’s rule, and did not look up. The gold light and the music did their gracious work, and so she heard rather than saw the small determined feet cross the floor. She only raised her eyes when the music stumbled under her fingers because Charlotte had arrived at Robert’s side and was pulling his sleeve down to her mouth.

The whisper was for him alone. Even Adelaide’s ears, which missed little, could have caught nothing of it. But every eye in the room watched him receive it, bent low, gravely, a privy councillor with his sovereign, and watched him straighten with something suppressed and glittering about the mouth.

“I am corrected,” Robert announced to the company. “Miss Charlotte informs me that she cannot see the figures properly from where she stands, and that they would go better…” the pause was pure mischief, and aimed, Jane realised one instant too late, directly at the pianoforte, “if Miss Prescott danced them. She is, I am told, the person who does things so that Charlotte can follow them. I find her reasoning sound and her authority absolute. Lady Harrington, would you be as good as to take the instrument?”

The silence had texture. Adelaide’s certainly not, and Diana’s laugh arrived at the same moment and cancelled each other, and into the gap Robert simply extended his hand towards the bench, palm up, and waited. Jane sat one full bar of unplayed music with the whole architecture of the room reversed around her. The governess summoned from the margin to the centre, the beauty dispatched from the centre to the bench, the child standing in the middle of it all like a small engineer watching her bridge take weight.

Decline, said four years of service.

The sightline, said Charlotte’s eyes, which had gone wide and fierce with something between hope and instruction.

Jane rose, and came round the pianoforte, and put her hand in his.

“The Boulangère,” Diana said from the bench, sweetly, settling her skirts. “Since we are teaching.” And she struck up the tune a shade too fast, which was its own small entry in its own small ledger, and Jane stood up with Robert Moorfield in the rolled-back drawing room and danced.

She had not stood up to dance in five years. Yet her form recalled the steps instantly in the first figure, as smooth ice yields to a skater’s stride; and what she had never before been called upon to perform, her feet acquired in the space of eight bars.

That there was a difference, wide as a county, between dancing with a man and dancing with a man who attended. He did not perform the figures at her. He danced them with her, adjusting to her step within three measures and then, having learned it. They moved in such perfect accord that the figure seemed to originate from both at once. Whenever the turn brought them hand to hand, his eyes met hers before her own could reach his face, every time, as though her countenance were the very page upon which the dance was inscribed. No partner had ever favoured Jane Prescott with his attention during a dance. Gentlemen were accustomed to look over her shoulder towards the greater fortunes seated by the wall; but this man made her countenance his sole guide. Charlotte solved the last of it. Midway through the second figure she planted herself beside them, arms lifted, and was absorbed without a word into the set, Robert handing her round in miniature, Jane bending to turn her, so that the dance reassembled itself around three, unequal and complete, the child laughing aloud now, actually laughing, a sound with rust and daylight in it, wheeling between them down the length of the gold room.