Page 4 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“The house is quieter this morning. The gentlemen who were making all the noise have gone away, and they will not be coming back. I sent them off before breakfast.” He paused. “Cook is making lemon biscuits. She says they are for Sunday, but she has made a spare dozen and put them where I could see them, which in my experience of Cook is a form of instruction.”

The curtain hem did not move. He had not expected it to. He looked at the shoe, and the shoe stayed where it was, which he had learned to count as its own kind of answer. She was listening, or at least she was not fleeing, and with Charlotte the distance between those two things was where he lived.

“I hid in this room once,” he said. “Behind that same curtain, I think, though I was eight, and taller than you, so it did a worse job of it. My mother had passed away in the spring, and the house was full of aunts, and every one of them wanted to tell me how I ought to be feeling about it. So I stopped coming downstairs.” He turned his hat over in his hands, examining the brim as though it interested him. “Nobody found me for a whole afternoon. I remember being pleased about that, and also, this is the strange part, furious. Both at once. Pleased that the hiding worked, and furious that nobody was better at looking.”

The curtain moved.

Not much. The hem shifted, and at its edge appeared four small fingers, parting the fabric just enough to admit the passage of a single eye. Behind the gap, in the shuttered light, a sliver of blue. His brother’s exact blue, aimed at him down the length of the quiet room, steady as a sentry.

She had never once looked at him. Three weeks of trays and doorways and the backs of curtains, and this was the first time his brother’s daughter had spent her attention on him deliberately, and Robert found he was holding perfectly still under it, the way one holds still for a wild thing deciding about one’s hand, and that his chest hurt.

He inclined his head to the gap in the curtain, gravely, as he would to a duchess.

“I’ll leave the biscuits on the schoolroom table,” he said, and rose, and did not offer his hand, and did not look back from the door, though it cost him something, because being watched out of a room was the most she had ever given anyone, and he did not intend to spend it all at once.

***

Hamish Watson came at dusk, as he did most Thursdays, on the fiction that a physician ought to keep an eye on the household and the fact that he was the last man in Sussex who had liked Robert before January. He heard the account of the morning with his boots to the library fire and his glass untouched, which was his way when he was listening properly.

“Turned out Latymer,” he said at last. “There’s a sentence I’d have wagered the practice against, this time last year. You know it’ll be all over Town by Friday. Reformed is the one thing they’ll never forgive you.”

“They forgave me everything else. It seems only fair to leave them something.” Robert leaned forward. “She looked at me, Hamish. This morning, behind the curtain, she held it open and she looked at me. Three weeks have passed, and only now does she yield. I must know the truth of it, whether something within her is healing at last, or if I have simply startled her into it.” “What did you do when she looked?”

“Nothing at all! I simply bowed, placed the biscuits on the school room desk and left the room.” “Then it’s mending,” Hamish said, “or beginning to think about it. You did the one thing nobody’s done, my dear friend you made looking safe. Everyone else who’s found that child has crowed about the finding. The last governess used to pull the curtain back, did you know that? Straight back, brisk as stripping a bed. To teach her hiding was nonsense.” He turned his glass by the stem, not drinking. “A child doesn’t go silent from stubbornness, Robert. Grief that size, in a body that small, the words are the one door she can still lock. She’ll unlock it for somebody. But it will be somebody who can be trusted not to come charging through, and, I’ll say this plainly, because you pay me to be plain…”

“I don’t pay you at all. You drink my claret.”

“Because I’m owed. Plainly, then. It can’t be you alone, and it can’t be Mrs Brooks, who is a good woman with the patience of a struck flint. That child needs someone whose whole employment is the noticing of her. Someone who’ll sit outside the locked door for a month without rattling the handle.” He paused, and something crossed his face that was not about Charlotte at all, a softening Robert marked and filed, because it arrived in the same breath as. “Miss Blythe does something of the kind with the orphan children at the parish. Eleanor, Miss Blythe, the vicar’s sister. She says the trick of it isn’t getting them to talk. It’s proving you’ll still be there while they don’t.”

“Does she,” Robert said gravely, and had the pleasure of watching the physician discover the fire needed his whole attention.

But the phrase stayed with him after Hamish had gone, the way a burr stays. Whose whole employment is the noticing of her? He carried it up to the study with the last candle, past the ruined drawing room, which could wait, and the ledgers, which could not, but would, and sat, and mended a quill, and wrote to a registry office in Holborn whose direction Hamish had left on the back of a visiting card.

The wording gave him trouble. What he wanted did not fit the form. Wanted, a governess, but it wasn’t lessons the post required, and any candidate frightened of a newspaper would be worse than none. He wrote the salary first, and made it a figure that would oblige even a sensible woman to sit down, and then, after the requirements of the schoolroom, he added a line he suspected no registry had received before, and signed his ruined name under it.

The child does not speak. Applicants unwilling to be patient of silence, or of being watched from behind the furniture by a person of seven who has buried both her parents, need not present themselves.

He sealed it, and set it on the salver for the morning post, and sat a while with the candle between himself and the dark window, where the glass, doing what glass does at night, showed him a man at a desk, looking for all the world like somebody’s responsible father.

“Early days,” he told the reflection, and left it burning for the letter’s sake.

Chapter Three

The chaise put her down in a fine grey drizzle, and Moorfield Manor made no move to welcome her, which Jane found honest of it. The house stood long and stone-faced above its lawns with half the east wing shuttered, resembling a gentleman with one eye closed, and though she could see a dozen windows from the sweep, not one of them held a face. She had been looked at by houses before. This one declined, and there was information in that too.

The door was opened before she reached it, not for her sake, she understood at once, but so that the woman opening it might have the advantage of the steps.

“Miss Prescott.” A woman of some fifty years, the housekeeper bore a crown of silvery hair and a demeanour as sturdy and unchanging as the finest heirloom oak, and her gaze went past Jane’s face to the valise, the corded box on the chaise, and back, completing the inventory of her in the time it took to say her own name. “Mrs Brooks. You’re expected.”

It bore little resemblance to a true welcome, and while the conviction was mutual, both parties preserved a discreet silence upon the matter.

Jane was led through a hall that wanted flowers and got none, past a drawing room with its door shut fast, a smell of new beeswax and old smoke about it, a room lately scrubbed of something, and along a corridor hung with Moorfields going back two centuries, every painted eye of them managing to look elsewhere. Mrs Brooks talked as she walked, in the flat voice of a woman who had given that very same account twice already that spring and expected to give it again by Michaelmas.

Instead of listening, Jane, having already gathered the essentials from Mrs Wilkins and her own observation, read the house. It was a habit as involuntary as her own breathing: to her, a room was a ledger, keeping account through dust, wear, and deliberate display. Moorfield Manor, observed as she walked from door to schoolroom, was a house that had ceased its accounts the preceding winter. The flowers stood neglected; the drawing-room door remained closed upon a scrubbed emptiness; and the portraits in the gallery seemed to stare studiously past her. Beneath the third frame, a pale rectangle of silk marked where a picture had been removed. There was no nail which could only mean that it had not been sold, but taken down, a quiet act of a house unable to bear its own gaze.

She filed it all without meaning to, the way her father had filed a shop’s whole solvency in the time it took to buy a paper of pins. A house in arrears with itself. Grieving, and behind on the grieving, and paying the interest in small neglects. The fault lay not with the child; she was but the visible symptom of a deeper disorder. “You’ll want to know about Miss Charlotte, and I’ll tell you plainly what the others weren’t told plainly enough. The child doesn’t speak. Not won’t, doesn’t, not a word since January, not to me, not to his lordship, not to the rector’s wife who has a gift with children, or so the rector says. She hides. Behind the curtains, in the linen press, under the stairs, we lost her for a whole morning once and found her folded onto the bottom shelf of the still-room like a tablecloth. She’ll appear for meals when it suits her and vanish when it doesn’t, and if you go pulling her out of places, I’ll tell you now, and you’ll be the third this year to leave by the door you came in.”

“I don’t pull children out of places,” Jane said. “It teaches them nothing except to find better places.”