Page 5 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

Upon reaching the staircase, Mrs Brooks turned her eyes full upon Jane for the first time since her arrival, an observation at once sharp and fleeting, before her expression resumed its former indifference. “Well,” she said, which committed her to nothing, and turned to lead on.

Jane followed, and did not look up, since the briefest upward glance would have betrayed her, and spoiled the entire impression. On the half-landing above, at the edge of her sight, something pale had drawn back behind the baluster a moment after she entered the hall, a glimpse of a hem, the flash of a stocking, and then she was gone. She kept her eyes on Mrs Brooks’s keys and her face composed, and allowed herself to be observed the whole length of the stair by the small sentry above, with the particular care of a woman being introduced to a wild bird. There were no sudden movements, and no notice taken, and every fibre of her attention exactly where it appeared not to be.

You have kept vigil since first my carriage turned into the drive. She thought. Splendid. Then you saw me arrive with one box, and you know I’m nobody. Nobody is a very restful thing to be watched by.

***

In the library, at last, she found a semblance of openness. Here was a room that wore no mask and was brightened by firelight, lined with books worn soft by frequent study, and dominated by a grand desk buried under a sea of ledgers, papers, and the hasty hand of its master. Jane had been asked to wait, and she waited standing, and read the room instead of touching it. The poetry shelf was at eye level and had been visited recently. The estate volumes on the desk had been visited in anger, if the quill marks meant anything, and they did.

The door opened on a man in his shirtsleeves with his coat over one arm and ink on two fingers, already talking.

“Miss Prescott, you’ll forgive the state of me, I’ve been three hours in last quarter’s accounts and I’ve lost the habit of coats. Sit, please. I won’t. I’ve been sitting since breakfast and it has done neither me nor the arithmetic any good.”

So this was the Wastrel Viscount. Jane sat, folded her hands, and revised the newspapers. The papers had drawn her a soft man, blurred at the edges with claret. The man at the window was none of those things, tall, unshaven by half a day, and restless in the manner of harnessed impatience rather than dissipation, and his gaze, when at last it fell upon her, was total and unreserved. It was a small shock, like a step down in the dark. She was accustomed to being glanced at. She was not at all accustomed to being read, and she sat very still under it and gave him nothing to read, which appeared, unaccountably, to interest him.

“You’ve seen the terms,” he said. “Mrs Wilkins will have shown you my letter, if she’s the woman her handwriting suggests.”

“She did.”

“And you came anyway.” He set the coat down on the ledgers, decided against the window, and took the chair opposite her instead, forearms on knees, closer than an interview required and apparently unaware of it. “So we’ll not waste each other’s morning. I don’t care greatly about globes and French. What I want to know is what you’ll do on the day my niece spends four hours behind a curtain, misses her dinner and won’t come out for anyone. The last governess had a method. Her method was to pull back the curtain and be brisk. I am given to understand this is the accepted method.”

“It’s the usual one.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“No,” Jane agreed. “What I would do is nothing, my lord. I would bring my needlework to that room and sit down where she could see me and be uninteresting for as long as it took, the first day, and the second, and the tenth if she needed the tenth. A child in hiding is not being defiant. She is governing the only country she has left. If I lay siege to it, I teach her that nowhere is safe and that adults cannot be trusted at their word, and she’ll speak to me around Christmas of never.” She paused. “Your letter stated she watches from behind the furniture. A child who watches is asking a question. The whole of the work is to be an answer worth…”

The crash arrived from somewhere across the hall, china, and comprehensive.

Robert was on his feet before the echo settled. The door came open on Mrs Brooks with her composure worked loose at last, “The blue vase in the morning room, my lord, there is not a soul anywhere near it, and now I can’t put my hand on Miss Charlotte anywhere on the ground floor.”

“The east stairs. She’ll have gone up the east stairs. She breaks things when the day’s been too full, and the day has been quite taxing for her.” He caught himself in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and looked back at Jane, and she watched a man weigh pride against sense and throw pride out of the scale without a second glance. “The day has been too full because of your arriving, Miss Prescott, which is no fault of yours and entirely a fault of mine, I told her nothing until this morning. Wait here, if you’d be so kind.”

He was gone. Jane sat a moment in the wake of it, revising the newspapers a second time. He knows why she breaks things. He counts her days by their fullness. From the floor above came the heavy sound of a door closing hard, followed by a slow, deliberate tread upon the stairs, the unmistakable step of a formidable man, who sought neither stealth nor surprise.

She rose, and went to the poetry shelf, because waiting was a task like any other and she preferred to do usefully, and because the pale observer from the staircase had not gone up the east stairs at all. Jane had heard what Mrs Brooks and his lordship, in the midst of their distress, had missed: no footstep had passed the library door, and the softest murmur in the room was not the crackle of the hearth.

The window curtains at the room’s far end fell straight and heavy to the floor. All but the left one, which sat a half-inch proud at the hem, over the toes of two small shoes.

Jane took down a worn volume of children’s verse, carried it to the chair by the fire, the chair that faced the window at a comfortable, harmless distance, sat, and began to read aloud to the empty room, in the voice one uses when quite alone, for one’s own pleasure.

She read the one about the land of counterpane, and part of the swing, and then, turning pages as though hunting an old friend, she found the garden one, the child who keeps a secret garden where troubles cannot follow, and read it through warm and unhurried to the final couplet, which every child in England knew, and which she deliberately ruined.

“And no one there may weep or frown,” Jane read, “for I have pulled the ladder up…” she turned the page placidly, “and eaten all the plums.”

The curtain twitched.

It was outrage, plain as a shout. Jane turned back a page, frowning at it. “That cannot be right,” she told the book. “Plums. I could have sworn there were no plums in it at all, but the print is very small, and I am only a governess. I daresay whole orchards get past me.” She sighed, and read the couplet again, and got it wrong yet again.

The hem lifted. Four small fingers came round the curtain’s edge and held it open to a thin bright slice, and the eye behind it, blue, indignant, and seven years old, fixed on the book in Jane’s lap as if it might be rescued from her by force of watching.

Jane did not look at the fingers. She looked at the fire and turned another page. “Perhaps the next one has no plums in it,” she said comfortably, and read on, and let herself be corrected in silence, at length, by an expert.

***

Robert came back down the east stairs empty-handed, having found the linen press open and the window seat vacant, with the beginnings of real fear working at him under the calm he wore for the servants, and stopped two steps into the library, because his missing niece was standing in the window with the curtain wrapped round her like a court mantle, in plain view of the strange woman by the fire, who was reading aloud and taking no more notice of her than of the fire-irons.

He had the sense, arriving late into the still-room, of walking in on the middle of a treaty.