Page 14 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Jane caught one glimpse of the audience in the turn. Adelaide sat very upright, beating time no longer. And at the pianoforte, playing her too-quick tune with flawless hands, Diana Harrington watched the three of them go down the room, the man, the child, the governess, revolving in the afternoon light like something that had always existed, and for once in her handsome life, nobody in the room was watching her at all.

She saw it happen. That was the thing Jane took away from the whole shining unwise hour and turned over that night for longer than she liked. Not the dance, though the dance kept arriving in her mind’s eye unbidden, hand to hand, but the moment Lady Harrington understood that the room’s attention had gone elsewhere and would not be whistled back, and the way the music never faltered, not by a quaver. Her face remained quietly closed, like a house shutting up for a long absence.

***

The corridor took its toll on the way up to dress for dinner.

Diana was waiting at the turn by the long window, where the afternoon had gone grey, and she was alone, and she had brought no charm with her at all. It was, in its way, a compliment. Jane understood that even as her spine set. The performance was for people who mattered to the performance, and she was about to be spoken to as what she was.

“That was prettily done,” Diana said. “The whisper, the little set of three. Did you teach her the trick of it, or is she clever all on her own? No, don’t answer, it’s the same either way.” She turned the rings on one finger, unhurried, examining Jane with the frank thoroughness of a woman pricing a rival’s gown. “I am going to do you a kindness, Miss Prescott, because no one else in this house will. You are new to this country, so you cannot know how it goes, but I have watched it from the beginning of the world. A gentleman is charming to a governess. The governess, sensible, plain-living, no fool at all, begins, against every intention, to construe. The household notices before she does. The neighbourhood notices before the household. And then one morning the thing has a name in every servants’ hall in the county, and the gentleman is very sorry, and weds as he was always going to wed, and the governess is on the London coach with a character too warm in one particular to be shown anywhere respectable.” She let it sit. “It is not wickedness. It is only weather. I am telling you which way it blows.”

“You are kind, my lady.”

“I am practical, which outlasts kind.” Diana’s eyes were perfectly level, and there was no anger anywhere in them, which was somehow worse. Only assessment, and a first faint shadow of something Jane had never expected to see there and could not immediately name. “There are agencies in town that answer to me. Say the word before quarter-day, and you would go to a countess’s schoolroom with a character to make Mrs Wilkins weep, better than anything you’ll carry out of this house later, and later, Miss Prescott, is coming. I pay my debts in advance. Ask anyone.”

“And Miss Charlotte?”

“Is a child, and will be sensibly educated, and in a year will remember you as children remember governesses, which is warmly and not at all.” The rings stopped turning. “That distresses you. How interesting. You’ve let it become real, then, the little kingdom, the ribbons on the door handles. Oh yes, I notice things too. It is the one habit Mrs Moorfield and I share.” She stepped closer, and her voice came down to its working register, quiet and entirely without theatre. “Hear the whole of the kindness. I have a widow’s settlements and the patience of the grave, and I have been poor, which you would never guess, and I will deny. I know to the shilling what your position is worth and to the day how long positions last. You cannot afford this house, Miss Prescott. I could not have afforded it at your age either. That is not a threat. It is a costing.”

“Then we may deal plainly at last, my lady, for costing is my trade too.” Jane’s voice came out the way it had over the ledgers, quick and level, before she could school it, and she watched the flicker of surprise land, and did not regret it. “You have priced everything in this house but one item. The kingdom, as you call it, is not mine and never was. It is Miss Charlotte’s, and it does not transfer with the property. Good evening.”

She curtseyed, precisely, to the exact depth owed a baron’s widow by a merchant’s daughter, and walked on down the corridor at an unhurried pace, her heart going like a smith’s hammer. It was Diana, this time, who stood at the window and watched another woman the whole length of a passage, and Jane, counting her own steps to keep them slow, carried the knowledge of it between her shoulder blades like a hand of cards she had no intention of showing. Now I am worth watching to two of them. My father would say the price of a thing is what the buyers bid, and the bidding, Janie, has begun.

Chapter Eleven

The invitation came on a Tuesday, on paper so heavy it stood in the toast rack by its own authority, and Adelaide read it aloud at breakfast with the expression of a general reviewing an ally of doubtful value.

“We are to dine with the Fenwicks on Friday, and she requests the child be presented before dinner: a liberty disguised as an attention, and entirely in character.” A pause followed. The paper turned. “And she writes, beneath. The little one’s governess will of course attend her, and as we sit down thirteen without, perhaps Miss Prescott would oblige us at table. I cannot abide thirteen. The late Sir Giles’s mother passed away from it, or of the salmon, and one cannot be too careful.”

The silence at the table had a texture Jane was learning to read like weather. Diana buttered toast. Robert had stopped with his cup half-raised.

“Thirteen,” Adelaide repeated, flatly. “She has juggled her own table to arrive at thirteen, and I am meant not to see it. Augusta Fenwick has wanted a look at this household since January, and now she has contrived to seat the whole of it in her dining room like specimens on a card.” She folded the invitation. “We accept, of course. Refusing Augusta is the one thing more dangerous than obliging her. Miss Prescott, you will need your grey silk, if you possess one, as you will be examined from soup to dessert, and you will survive it, because you have been examined by myself for a month and Augusta is merely louder.”

“I possess a grey wool, and a governess is furniture at such tables. Furniture survives most dinners.”

“At most tables,” said Adelaide. “At Augusta’s residence, every article of furniture has been formally catalogued and set to account.”

***

The Grange dressed itself handsomely, glowing with candles enough to light a campaign and boasting a drawing room upholstered in the very shade of prosperity. The company numbered fourteen, comprising Jane, the Fenwicks, a marchioness’s widowed cousin down for the season, the Reverend Mr Purslow, a young curate whose ambition was rivalled only by his anxiety, two squires with their wives, and the Moorfield party, who were presented to the room like the principal course of a banquet. Charlotte was presented before the soup was served, as requested. She came in on Jane’s hand in her good frock, performed her geometric curtsey to the assembled candlelight, and stood, pale, contained, her eyes doing the room in one sweep and finding Jane’s station by the door before anything else in it was permitted to exist. Lady Fenwick descended in dove-grey magnificence.

“And here is the little heiress herself. What a solemn great pair of eyes, to be sure. You shall tell me, child, which you like better, the seaside, or town? Speak up. My devotion to children is well known.”

The room’s talk dimmed helpfully. Charlotte looked at the enormous, kind, looming face, and her chin went down, and the silence began to stretch towards the place where silences become events, and Jane stepped in from the margin, unhurried, and did the only mending such moments allow. She gave the child a task in place of a performance. “Miss Charlotte, Lady Fenwick keeps a globe in her library, I believe, the famous one, with the discoveries painted in. Perhaps her ladyship would let you find the great southern ocean on it after dinner, if you make your goodnights prettily now.”

She offered another deep and flawless curtsey, tugging lightly at Jane’s hand to signal their business was concluded. Diverted from an answer she was never to receive, Lady Fenwick promptly declared herself charmed. She raised her lorgnette, her gaze drifting thoughtfully between the child and the governess.

“How well she manages her,” said the lorgnette’s owner, to the room, in the voice of a woman filing a specimen. “How very well.”

Dinner was announced, and Jane went in last and unescorted, taking her seat near the bottom of the board between Mr Purslow and the deaf ear of a squire. The table itself mapped the social geography of the realm: Robert sat at Lady Fenwick’s right hand, Diana shone opposite him in the full favour of the candlelight, Adelaide anchored the centre like a bastion, and the vast expanse of white damask stretching between the head of the table and Jane’s humble station was as wide, as charted, and as cold as any ocean on the globe. The examination proceeded by courses.

With the fish, the marchioness’s cousin wondered aloud, to the table, over Jane’s head, in the third person, which was the grammar of it, whether governesses did not find dining in company awkward, poor things, neither one thing nor the other, and Lady Fenwick said that dear Miss Prescott seemed to manage everything, by all reports, and let by all reports sit on the cloth like a card played face down. With the saddle of mutton, one squire’s wife told the other, at conversational volume, that her sister had turned off a governess at Michaelmas for encouraging the children to be attached to her, which was the ruin of discipline, and both looked nowhere in particular with great precision. Jane ate what was put before her, answered what was addressed to her, twice, in three courses, and kept her spine as her father had kept his books, and found the whole of it survivable in the way of known weather. She had dined at the foot of tables four years, and the third person was her native climate.

What was new, what pulled at the table’s current like a moon, was the head of it.

Robert was doing his duty by his hostess, and doing it well. She could hear the runs of laughter, Lady Fenwick’s and Diana’s braided through his. But three times before the cloth was drawn, she counted, because counting was what she had instead of blushing; his attention came down the table’s length to her end. Not idly. Deliberately, once at the third-person beat with the fish, arriving with a look that was a hand set flat on a table. Once at the squires’ wives, with something at the mouth’s corner that at closer range would have been dangerous, and once for no reason at all that the table supplied, which was the worst of the three, because Lady Fenwick was mid-sentence beside him at the time, and Lady Fenwick’s sentences never ran on without her eyes running with them.

The lorgnette did not come up that time. It lay by the hostess’s plate while its owner talked on, brilliantly, of nothing, and watched the viscount observe the foot of her table, and put it away somewhere behind her powder with the rest of the evening’s inventory.