Page 24 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“Put your writing-desk on the table.”

The travelling writing-desk was under her maid’s arm in the hall. Travers had it in the room before the sentence found its answer. Diana’s smile held. It was the holding that finished her, three seconds too long, lacquered, while the eyes behind it worked the new position, and Adelaide, watching, made a small sound like a beam taking weight.

“This is extraordinary,” Diana said, gently. “Am I to be searched, like the governess? How the house does repeat itself.”

“The house has been made to repeat itself. That was the whole design, and it was very good.” Robert laid the two notes on the table, side by side, singed and unsigned. “One brought me to the library. One brought Miss Prescott. Neither was written by the men whose names they carry, and both were written by the same hand, a hand with my letters to learn from. I wrote you a great many times, and I dare say I signed every one of them, and you kept them, sentiment, you’d have called it, if anyone asked. Open the desk, Diana. Or stand on your dignity, and I will open it, and we will both have to live with which of us I’ve become.”

For a moment nobody moved. Then Diana Harrington did the most honest thing he had ever watched her do. She looked at the desk, and at the notes, and at Adelaide, one flick, weighing whether that quarter still held, and, finding the position untenable, she surrendered it with the crisp economy of a general who does not waste men on lost ground. She opened the desk herself. She even, with a kind of terrible good breeding, angled it towards the light.

His letters, ribboned, on top, she had not even hidden them. Sentiment was, after all, her working capital. And beneath, folded small. Three sheets of foolscap covered margin to margin in a hand becoming his hand, the M with its tail taken over and over down the page like a fencer’s drill, the slant rehearsed line by line, and at the bottom of the third sheet, tried twice and abandoned, a bare gallows-post H.

Adelaide picked up the drill-sheets. She read them for a long time, far longer than their content wanted, and Robert understood that she was not reading the forgery. She was reading backwards through a month of her own certainties, watching each one come down. Came to me before dinner… the betrothal settled… fetched me to the library that the thing might be witnessed and made binding… and I went. I carried the pity to that doorway myself. She built it of my honesty. I was the material. When she set the sheets down her hands were not steady, and her voice, when it came, was a stranger’s, old, and quiet, and stripped of every ornament of command.

“I stood in that doorway and told an innocent woman to be gone before the notice ran.” A pause. “I gave her my word the character would be true. It is the only thing I said all night that was not your composition, Diana. I find I treasure that single sentence as another woman might cherish a surviving child.” “Oh, Adelaide.” Diana’s mask was off now, not flung, laid aside, the way a professional lays aside a tool between engagements, and what was under it was neither shame nor fury but a bright, tired, working clarity, and it addressed them both as colleagues. “Spare me the surviving child. You wanted him wedded by quarter-day, and I wanted to be wedded by quarter-day. I merely declined to leave the arrangements to Providence, which has never once come through for a woman pressed for time. The girl was an obstacle placed exactly where obstacles are always placed, and I moved her with the materials to hand. If it consoles you, nothing I used was false, but the letters. His face when she dances is a fact, your fear for the child is a fact, and her pride is a fact. I only organised the facts. It is what I am for.” She drew on one glove, unhurried. “You’ll not wed me now, and you were never going to enter into matrimony with me, I think, from about the second week, I saw it before you did. It is my trade to see it, so let us not perform the scene where you renounce me. Have the carriage brought round, Robert. I can be in town by evening, and you may tell the county what you please. The county has never yet believed a plain story over a handsome one, and mine will be handsomer by Tuesday.”

“Mine will be truer by Thursday,” Robert said, “and it will have exhibits. Travers, Lady Harrington’s carriage, within the hour. And Diana.” She turned at the door, one brow up, framed there a last time out of pure habit. “The inquiries a prudent man makes before a betrothal I never made them, eight years ago. I’ve a man of business making them now, about the Harrington affairs, out of ordinary form. If there is anything you would rather I heard from you, the hour is what it is.”

And there, in the space of an instant, as brief as a shutter’s shift, that same icy gleam he had glimpsed above the teacups, a movement passed behind her bright, fatigued eyes. It was not submission, nor apathy, but fear itself, seen for the first time in the years of acquaintance; and instantly the smile descended over it like a lid, and Diana Harrington said, “Good luck with your plain story, Robert. They cost the earth to keep,” and was gone down the hall with her back straight as a mast, her heels unhurried on the marble to the last.

Adelaide stood by the table with the drill-sheets under her flattened hand.

“Write to her,” she said. “Now, this morning. No, go. Go yourself. I will…” and her voice, for the second time in his life, failed of its road and had to find another, “I have a letter of my own to write, and it will be the hardest of my one and seventy years, and I had rather be at it before my courage thinks better of it. Robert.” He stopped at the door. His aunt was looking at the two forged notes, and her countenance was the selfsame face from the funeral, one that clasped a child’s hand as if it were a balustrade. “When you bring her back, and you will bring her back. She is the only person in this whole affair who has behaved throughout like a Moorfield. Tell her the character I write her now will want a very different first line.”

***

He could not go until evening, and the day cost him the whole of his new discipline. The quarter’s rents were due to be attended to eleven with Winthrop across the table, tidy and attentive and watched now from behind Robert’s pleasant face like a specimen. The singed note bore the name of Diana, the twine that of Jasper, two hands weaving rival intrigues under the selfsame storm. A gentleman could scarcely take to the field with one fox bagged while the other ran loose in the covert. Worse still, the magistrates’ dinner at Lewes admitted no excuse; Sir Giles Fenwick presided, and half the county’s gossip would be forged at the very board where he must appear serene, plausible, and unbetrothed.

He returned home at ten o’clock amidst the first scatterings of rain, the wind rising fast from the south-west until the rustling limes sounded for all the world like rushing water; yet upon his threshold, he found the house illuminated most unnaturally. Every window on the nursery floor was burning. Doors stood open that were never open. And on the steps, in the wind, Mrs Brooks with a lamp, Mrs Brooks who did not run, running down to meet the horse before it stopped, her cap gone, her voice arriving before her

“She’s not in the house, my lord. Miss Charlotte. Her bed’s not slept in, the window-seat’s empty, the panel room, we know about the panel room, Betsey found it a month since, and we’ve let it be, empty, all of them empty, every hiding place we know and some we didn’t. Her cloak is gone off its peg and her boots from the rack. And my lord…” the lamp shook. The first real gust came round the house like something arriving, “Betsey heard the maids at their supper, talking where the child could hear, about Miss Prescott being gone away to the vicarage. And the nursery casement over the leads was on the latch, and it does not latch itself. She’s gone out, my lord. She’s gone out in this, to fetch her back, and the storm is coming up the valley faster than a child walks.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Robert had the household on the gravel inside a quarter-hour, and afterwards the servants would say, with the wonder of people revising a man’s whole ledger in one night, that his lordship had ordered the search like a colonel who had done nothing else all his life.

He would have told them the truth of it, had anyone dared ask. That twelve years at hazard teach a man exactly one employable skill, which is to think in odds while the table burns. He stood on the steps with the wind tearing at the lamps and dealt the house out like a hand of cards. “Torches and stable-lanterns, every man. The women to the house itself, attic to cellars, every press and seat and panel, Betsey has the list of her places, Betsey leads. Travers, the cellars and the leads. The men in pairs, no one alone, I’ll not hunt two lost instead of one. Coachman, the yard, the barns, the succession-house, and mind the well-cover. Peters, with me. Saddle the grey.” He was pulling his own girth tight as he gave the last of it. “Jem rides for the physician, Mr Watson. Tell him to bring what a chilled child wants, and tell him to come to the lake path. And you…” the second stable lad, already mounted, “the vicarage. Ask for Miss Blythe. Tell her Miss Charlotte is out in this, making for Miss Prescott, and has been out…” he made himself say it, “above an hour, we think. Go.”

The searchers went out from the steps in their pairs, and the dark took the lanterns one by one the way deep water takes lights, and Robert stood a heartbeat longer, doing the sum he could not say aloud. A child’s stride, a black park, water risen in every ditch, and the one person who holds the map of everywhere she goes is five miles off, believing herself dismissed.

“My lord,” Peters said, low. “Where do we ride?”

“East, along the wall to the lodge, then back by the lake path to meet the physician.” He swung up on the horse. “And Peters, as we go, you’ll watch the estate office as we pass it, and tell me what you see, and say nothing else about it.”

What Peters saw, and said in six words with his voice pitched under the wind, was. “Light’s burning, my lord. Blind’s up.”

The blind had never once been up after dark in ten tidy years. Robert rode on into the streaming black with that fact sitting cold at the back of everything, filed where he filed loaded things, because a man cannot hunt two foxes in a storm, and the child came first, the child came before every reckoning in the world.

But at the turn by the wall he looked back once. And the light in the estate office went out as he watched. Not the dying of a lamp, but the smothering of one.

***

At the vicarage they had given Jane the small room over the porch, and she had spent the evening being a problem the household was too kind to name, sitting where she was put, answering when spoken to, holding the teacup Eleanor filled and refilled without ever drinking it lower.

Eleanor had tried nothing clever, which was its own kindness. She had sat with her mending and let the clock do the talking, and only once, at the supper, she pretended not to notice Jane not eating, had she laid one card face up on the cloth. “I’ll say this, and then I’m done saying. You told me once the whole work was proving you’d still be there while they didn’t speak. Well, you’re the one gone silent now, my dear, and I’m still here, and that’s all the sermon I know.” And Jane had looked at the fire and thought. The ones who are ruined are the ones who go back to running nowhere, and had not been able to tell, all evening, which direction she had run.

The hoof beats came up the lane at a pace no parish errand ever rode.

She was at the window before the knocker went. She had the sash up and the boy’s face lifted white in the lantern-light below. She had heard it from the sill, over the rain, in pieces, Miss Charlotte, out in the storm, gone after Miss Prescott, his lordship begs, and afterwards Eleanor would tell it round the parish for years, how the governess came down the vicarage stairs like weather herself, cloak already swinging on, and was into the lane before the boy had his message half-delivered, and had to be run after with a lantern and physically put up behind him on the horse because she had set off on foot, five miles into a rising gale, without appearing to have consulted her own legs on the matter.