Page 16 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“Then hide it,” he said, “and be corrected for years,” and their eyes met over the little book and both of them were laughing without much sound, and Jane took it from his palm and their gloved fingers arranged the transfer with more diplomacy than the object strictly wanted, and Widow Cole, who missed nothing across her trestle, was paid tuppence and looked as if she had witnessed a transaction worth considerably more.

That was when the fiddler, who had been resting his elbow in cider, stood up on the wagon-bed and called the Roger de Coverley, and the green began to sort itself into a long double line, gentry-and-all, because it was that kind of festival and had been since before anybody’s grandfather, and Charlotte materialised out of the walnut party with gold dust on her knuckles, seized her uncle’s sleeve, and pointed. At the lines, at Jane, at the lines again, with the imperious economy of a field marshal disposing troops.

“You see how it is,” Robert said to Jane over the child’s head. His face was open and unhurried and the afternoon sun was in it. “I am under orders. I’d not dream of asking for myself, a man daren’t, twice in one week, but Miss Charlotte’s requisitions have the force of law, and it would go hard with the parish to see them flouted.” And there was one clear beat, between the fiddle’s warning chords, in which what he was actually asking, and what she would actually be answering, stood in the air between them plain as print for anyone with eyes.

And Jane, who had spent four years being nobody on the edges of rooms, walked out with him into the middle of the green, into the middle of the parish, into the long line under the elms, and took her place.

The Roger de Coverley is no intimate measure; it is a spirited romp. It belongs to the whole parish, drawing you down a corridor of clapping neighbours and leaving you delightfully breathless. Yet one figure remains at its heart: the top couple advancing alone down the centre of the set.

When their turn arrived, and the lines fell back to yield the aisle, Jane proceeded down that sunlit, cheering length with her hand in Mr Robert Moorfield’s. There, as the late sun cast long shadows over the churchyard wall, she understood with brilliant clarity amid the din that she stood, for the very first time, at the absolute centre of every eye.

The blacksmith, the walnut children, Eleanor turning at the set’s foot with the physician, Mr Watson, and, at the green’s edge, arrested midway between her carriage and the gingerbread, a tall dame in dove-grey silk with lorgnette raised, whom Jane did not know and would learn soon enough to be Lady Fenwick, taking in the viscount and the governess going down the middle hand in hand with the whole parish clapping the time.

The lorgnette held. The dance did not care. Charlotte wheeled at the bottom of the set between Eleanor’s hands, laughing again, gold-knuckled, the sound quite drowned and completely visible, and Robert turned Jane at the lane’s end with both hands and said, under the fiddle, wholly unwitty for once. “There’s not a picture in that house I would exchange for this one”, and the lines closed over them, and the parish roared on, and whatever prudence had governed Jane Prescott’s life to that hour went down the set with everything else, clapping.

***

They walked up the lime-walk at dusk with the fiddle still faint behind them, Charlotte between them and gone suddenly, comprehensively, to sleep on her feet in the way of spent children, so that Robert swung her up and she settled against his shoulder without waking, one gold-dusted fist closing on his collar in ancient proprietary trust.

Under the limes the light was down to its last honey, and the moment arranged itself without anyone’s permission. The sleeping child, the hush after the noise, the two of them fallen into step. Jane carried the little book against her ribs and was cataloguing the day for safekeeping, the laugh, the knot-lesson, the lane of clapping, with the diligence of a woman who expected to live on the interest of it for some years, and was therefore ambushed entirely when Robert stopped walking.

“Miss Prescott.” The teasing was gone. Even the certainty was gone, or rather it had gone down somewhere older and less comfortable. “I find I’m in danger of saying something a man oughtn’t to say with his niece asleep on his shoulder and no,” he sought the word, and his voice came quieter, “no arrangements made, nothing settled that would give the saying any right to exist. So I’ll say only the outermost edge of it. Today, on that green, that was the first afternoon since January that I have felt this family might truly thrive. And you are not incidental to that, and I am not able to go on pretending I think you are.”

The lime-walk held still. Jane stood with the book pressed to her ribs and her whole careful economy in ruins, and her own body, the one thing about her that had never betrayed her, that was the whole trouble with it, knew the fact she had been refusing for a fortnight. And neither are you incidental, my lord, and I have known it since the library, and I am a woman with four pounds in the world standing in a lord’s lime-walk wanting what governesses are broken for wanting. What she said, when her voice came, was level and it cost her the whole day’s happiness to make it so

“Then we had better walk on, my lord. The dew is falling, and she’ll take cold.”

“Yes,” Robert said. And then, not moving, with the last light through the limes on his face and something in it that was almost, absurdly, hope. “You didn’t say I was mistaken.” “No,” said Jane, already walking. “I didn’t.”

He caught her up in three strides, and they went on to the house through the failing gold without another word, but at the turn of the walk she felt his glance come sideways once, and did not meet it, and carried it anyway, the whole way up the gravel, like a coal in a chafing-dish, and from the first-floor window of the rose room, behind glass the dusk had turned to mirror, a figure that had been standing there some while watched the three of them come home together out of the limes, the man, the sleeping child, the governess, and let the curtain fall.

Chapter Thirteen

Lady Fenwick called on Monday, before the knocker was properly awake, which in the county’s grammar meant she had news she could not keep over a second breakfast.

Robert was sent for to the drawing room and went with his ledger-hand still inky, and found the visit already at full sail. His aunt was upright at the tea table, Diana arranged by the window with needlework she never advanced, and in the place of honour, sat Lady Fenwick herself. “Lord Moorfield.” Lady Fenwick gave him her hand and her most charitable smile, which was the one that came with sentence attached. “I was just telling your dear aunt what a triumph Saturday was. The whole village speaks of nothing else. So affable, so wonderfully unstudied, quite the new fashion of lordship, everyone says so. My coachman had it from the sexton that you subscribed to the church roof on the spot.”

“The roof leaks on the parish, ma’am. It seemed the neighbourly place to put money.”

“And you danced.” Her lorgnette came up, less to see him than to have something judicial in her hand. “With the whole green, I hear. Even now, who was it? Your little niece’s governess. Miss… Prescott. I do recall her from my dinner, quaint little thing, I may say.” The name arrived carefully, like a card laid face up. “Down the middle of the Roger de Coverley, hand in hand, before every soul in three parishes. My dear Lord Moorfield, how democratic. I said to Sir Giles, it is exactly what dear Lady Harrington was saying to me at Christmas, that Robert Moorfield never did anything by halves, bless him, and never will.”

“You are all kindness, Lady Fenwick,” Robert said. “It’s a great comfort to a man, knowing his Saturdays are so well attended.”

She stayed three-quarters of an hour, and it was masterly in its way. Not one sentence that could be repeated as an accusation, and not one that was anything else. The governess was mentioned several more times, always in praise, so capable, they say, so very much trusted, quite one of the family, one hears; each compliment was bestowed with all the deliberate care of a woman stacking firewood, whilst Adelaide received every grain of it with a countenance as impassive as a closed ledger. Diana’s needle, by the window, went in and out, in and out, advancing nothing.

It was the repetition that struck Jane most upon reflection. To praise a person once is a courtesy; to praise them repeatedly, and from the lips of a woman who never expended a word without calculating its return, is an act of deliberate design. It was to establish a reputation, to fix it irrevocably in the minds of the family, so that when a darker sentence was eventually needed, the ground should be well prepared. So capable. So entirely relied upon. Quite one of the family.

Each one true, each one warm, each one a small neat stone laid in a wall whose purpose would not be visible until the wall was finished and something stood behind it that could not get out. Lady Fenwick had not come to engage in idle gossip as gossip was merely a small coin. She had come to lay foundations, and to mark, in the countenances of the family, whether the ground were fit to receive them. Adelaide, meeting each stone with the impassive air of a closed account book, permitted her to proceed undisturbed; for Adelaide had learned half a century since that one does not interrupt a builder in the midst of his wall. You wait, and you learn the shape of what she means to build, and then you decide whether to let it stand or bring it down on her while she is still inside it.

At the door, farewells given, Lady Fenwick paused for her parting shot, which she delivered with tenderness. “You must bring the dear child to me again at the Grange, Lord Moorfield, before the summer ends. And do give my regards to Miss Prescott.” The lorgnette came up one last time, and travelled, unhurried, from his inky hand to his face, and there performed its small arithmetic in public. “So few households would be brave enough to keep her.”

The street door had barely shut on her before Adelaide said, to the room at large, in a voice Robert had last heard the day his father had passed away. “Diana. You will excuse us.”

***

Diana went, trailing one glance that offered him sympathy and terms in the same look, and Adelaide crossed to the writing table, unlocked her correspondence-box, and laid a letter on the cloth between them with the flat finality of a magistrate producing the weapon.

“That came Friday. I had meant to spare you until I’d answered it. After this morning I find sparing you is a luxury this family can no longer bear the cost of. Read it.”