Page 23 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“So you are down too. I am sorry for it. This was ill-arranged, and you ought to have been spared the sight.” Adelaide came past her into the room, drawing her shawl close, a woman concluding the business of a long day. “But perhaps plainness is kindest, since plainness is your own coin. Lady Harrington came to me before dinner. The betrothal will be announced within the week, before quarter-day, as it must be. It answers everything. You of all people know precisely what it answers.” Her eyes, on Jane, were not unkind, and were therefore unbearable. “You will oblige the family by being gone before the notice runs. The inquiry will be closed quietly, no constable, no stain that follows you. I will write the character myself, as I said, and it will be a good one, because it will be a true one. You have my word, and my word, Miss Prescott, unlike much else in this house, has never wanted mending.”

“Jane.” Robert had put Diana from him, was putting her from him. His hands were at her arms still, and whether they had been holding her off or holding her, the doorway had already ruled and could not be appealed, and his face across the lit room was the landing-face, the white one. “Jane, no. Whatever this looks like…”

Whatever this looks like. Four words with a graceful letter folded up inside them, full of esteem and regret. She had the whole text by heart, from long before he owned a library. Jane heard the roaring arrive from a great distance, the sound of water closing over the year she was one-and-twenty, and she did the one thing remaining in the inventory of Jane Prescott. She curtseyed, to the room, to the silk, to the candles, to the composition entire, the precise depth owed by a merchant’s daughter to her betters, and said, in a voice that came out level because it came out dead, “I wish the family every happiness. Your lordship will forgive me. The hour is late,” and was gone up the dark stairs before her candle could show anyone her face.

Behind and below she heard the library give tongue, his voice, once, raised as she had never heard it, her name in it. Then Adelaide’s, the door, and she did not stop. Explanation was a room she had stood in before. They kept you in that room while the furniture went out the other door, and the explanation was always good, and the furniture was always gone.

***

He came to her door at midnight. She had known he would. She had the candle out by then, and sat in the dark on the bed’s edge, dressed, with her hands folded in her lap like a woman in a waiting room, and let the knock come, soft, one knuckle, their knock, and let his voice come after it, low against the panels, and did not move.

“You won’t answer. Very well, I’ll say it to the door, then. The door and I are old colleagues.” A breath she could hear. “It was made, Jane. The whole of it, the candles, the hour, my aunt fetched down on cue. I was brought there by a message I believed came from Watson. I’ll show it to you. She heard the latch and was around my neck before the door had cleared the frame, and what you saw was me trying to unwind a woman from my collar without putting her on the floor, which it turns out cannot be done gracefully by candlelight, and I cannot fathom how she knew the very minute…” The voice stopped itself. Steadied. “No. You don’t need my forensics tonight, and every word of them can be made to sound like a man talking fast. I know how it sounds. I’ve been the man it sounds like.” The panel creaked faintly. Weight against it, a forehead, perhaps, or a flat palm. “So, only this. Nothing is settled. Nothing will be announced. I have made no offer to anyone alive, and the only sentence I’m building wants daylight and an open door and your name in it, exactly as I said in this spot two nights ago, and my word is the one thing I never once pawned in twelve years of pawning everything. You told me so yourself, you entered it. Check the books, Jane. That’s all I ask. Hold the account open until morning, and check the books.”

She maintained her silence with that practised reserve to which she had so long been accustomed. She sat in the dark with her palm flat on the coverlet, an inch of air between her hand and rising, and the whole of her wanting to cross the floor and lay it on the wood breast-high where his would be.

She did not go, and the reason she did not go was the true wound, and she knew it even as it worked. Henry’s voice through a different door that last morning in Cheapside, and every word of it plausible too. If she went to the panel she would believe him. Belief was not the danger she could not survive twice; hope was, and against hope she had only ever found the one remedy, which was distance, applied at once, in the largest available dose.

At length, his steps retreated along the passage, hesitant and lingering, until all grew silent yet again. She lit the candle then, and did her night’s work with the method that was all the mother and father and country left to her. The resignation first, three lines, no reasons given, reasons were doors, and she was finished leaving doors, dated, signed, sanded. Then the primer. She tore out the Jasper pages, double dates and eight shillings and waxed twine, and folded them square, and wrote across the fold, For Mr Louth’s successor, whoever he may be. Everything here can be sworn to. J.P. The library note she took from her pocket and would have burned, as instructed, and stopped, the corner already browning, snuffed it against the washstand’s marble. Left it lying there, singed, face up. She wanted nothing of that library in her luggage. Let the house keep its own paper.

The hiding-places page she did not tear out. That page went with her. Some accounts are not transferable.

At the last, in the grey hour before the birds, she went along the sleeping passage to the nursery door, and stood before it, and took the white ribbon from her pocket, the treaty ribbon, off her own sill, and tied it to the handle. The grammar had no knot for this. Knotted plain meant good morning. The trailing end meant come, and there was nothing in the whole language they had built for forgive me or I was not honest with you or be braver than I have been able to be, so she tied it plain, a good morning with no day attached, and stood a moment with her hand on the small door of the small country she had governed for six weeks and lost in one, and did not permit herself the sound she wanted to make, because the border guard might wake, and the border guard must sleep.

I said I would not be lost, she told the door, silently, clerk to the last. Enter it against me. The first default of my life. And enter this also, wherever true things are still kept in this house, and that it was not for want of cherishing you.

The carrier’s cart came up the Lewes lane at first light, bound past the vicarage, and took up a woman in grey with one corded box, who paid her tuppence and sat very upright among the crated hens and did not look back at the house, except once, at the turn where the limes ended, when the sun came up the valley and lit the long stone front all at once, gold, every window ablaze with borrowed morning, and in the fourth window from the oak there was no candle, with no ribbon on the sill. There was nothing pale against the pane, and in a high window of the guest wing, one curtain, which had been drawn aside, dropped back into place with the small finality of a ledger closing on a page whose sum had come out, at last, exactly as its keeper had always intended.

Chapter Twenty

The resignation was on his study desk at seven, squared to the blotter’s edge, and it was weighted; he stood a long moment before he touched anything, with the little duodecimo from Widow Cole’s stall, plums and all corrected, returned.

The letter he read once. Three lines, no reasons, the hand perfectly steady. Her notice, effective at once, with thanks for the household’s many kindnesses. It told him nothing, because it was built to tell him nothing. It was the book that talked. He picked it up, and it fell open where a pressed flower marked it, the garden poem, the true text, and Robert stood in his quiet study holding the whole message she had actually left him. I am not keeping even this. I am severing the account entirely, down to tuppence, so that nothing can be repossessed. A woman fleeing a scene ran with what she treasured. A woman executing a judgement returned it.

“She went on the carrier’s cart, my lord.” Travers, at the door, grey about the mouth. “Before the kitchen was lit. Simms the carrier, bound past the vicarage, his usual road.” A hesitation, decades deep. “Miss Charlotte is on the north landing, my lord. She won’t be moved. I thought you would want to come yourself rather than have her lifted.”

Charlotte sat against Jane’s shut door with her knees drawn up and the white ribbon off the nursery handle wound twice around her fist. She did not look at Robert when he sat down on the boards beside her, with his back to the same wall, the two of them at the foot of the same closed door like petitioners at a court that had risen. Under her other hand, flat on the floor, lay the primer pages, the folded square Jane had left addressed to a man who did not exist yet, held the way drowning men hold spars.

“She tied it plain,” Robert said at last, to the passage in general, because the country’s language was the only one left and he would use it or say nothing. “Plain means good morning. It doesn’t mean goodbye. There is no knot for goodbye, I’ve learned the whole grammar, and it isn’t in there. Whoever invented the code left the word out on purpose, I think. She would never teach you a word she meant to use.” The small fist tightened on the ribbon. “I am going to bring her back, Charlotte. Today has business in it that cannot wait, one piece of business, one hour of it, and then I ride to the vicarage, and I do not come back alone. You have my word, and you keep the accounts of my word, and you know its balance.”

The blue eyes came round to him then, swollen, fierce, interrogating, and held his for a long, unbearable audit, and then Charlotte did the one thing in her whole silent arsenal he had no defence against. She took his hand, turned it palm up, laid the folded primer pages in it, and closed his fingers over them with both of hers. Here is the evidence. Do the business. Then she went back to watching the door.

He was on the stairs, the pages in his breast pocket, when Mrs Brooks intercepted him, and her face brought him to a full stop.

“The maids did her room, my lord. I set them to it myself. I had not have strangers’ judgement loose in there twice.” She held out her hand. In the palm lay a half-sheet, singed along one corner, smelling of snuffed flame. “This was on the washstand marble. Burned at the edge like she’d started to do as it says and thought better. My lord…” and Mrs Brooks, who had governed her voice through thirty years of family weather, did not quite govern it now, “I’ve read it. I couldn’t help but read it. And I’ve carried your lordship’s notes about this house since you wrote with your fist round the quill. That is not your M.”

***

It was not his M.

Robert stood at the study window with the singed note flat on the sill in the morning light, and beside it, drawn from the drawer where he had dropped it two nights ago, the message that had fetched him to the library, R.M., come down at ten, I have the proof you wanted, H.W. He perused the two side by side with eyes made clear by the spring, until at last the ink surrendered its secrets, sum by sum.

The hand was good. The hand was better than good, his own slant caught, his own abruptness caught, and the tail of the M taken at a single confident stroke. But a forger, like an embezzler, is betrayed by perfection. His own true M, dashed ten thousand times in ten thousand impatient signatures, collapsed at the tail, always, the stroke dying as his attention left it, and this M finished. Completed itself, proud of its work, curled home like a signature practised. And the H of Hamish’s supposed hand had the same proud finish, and Hamish looped no H, had never looped an H, and wrote a bare gallows-post of an H that his apothecary cursed weekly.

Two notes. One evening. One author, someone with his letters to copy from, and years of them. Someone who could put a sheet under a door in the guest passage at half past nine unremarked, someone with the minute itself to time, and how she knew the very minute, and Robert stood unmoving while that last figure walked out of the dark and took its seat, because there was only one way to have known the minute of an assignation you had forged both halves of. You set it yourself, both letters, both clocks, and then you had merely to be embraced and be found.

He did not send for her. He sent for his aunt, and told her one thing only: bring Lady Harrington to the morning room in a quarter of an hour, and say nothing of me, and Adelaide, reading his face, went white along the cheekbones and did as she was asked without one question, which in my one and seventy years she had possibly never done before.

They came in together. Diana was dressed for travelling, that was the first intelligence, and it said everything about the campaign’s schedule. The stroke was delivered and the victory secured, with a retreat managed before the air had even cleared. Though she paused half an instant upon discerning him by the window, she turned the hesitation at once into a smile of exquisitely measured regret. “Robert. I hoped we might speak alone before I, this wretched, wretched night. You must let me say how I…”