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“Butyou’regoing to put it in order,” he said. “You promised.”
“I thought you meant to help.” Yesterday, she’d wanted to be left alone with the job. Now the idea that he might go filled her with dismay.
“Well, yes.” He surveyed the papers as if they had a foul odor. “We’d better use the parlor next door for the rest.”
“A splendid idea. In fact, we should set it up as our filing space. We can divide documents into chronological piles.”
“Chronological,” he repeated.
“By year,” Penelope explained.
“I know what it means.” He turned in a circle. “Boredom and dust, that’s what it means.”
“How can it be boring when you might discover just the fact you need at any moment? Or some fantastic nugget of your family history?” Penelope turned to the small bag she’d brought. “As for dust…” She took out two lengths of cloth.
“What are those?”
“Sleeve stockings.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She pulled tubes of dark material over the sleeves of her dress. They reached well above the elbow and buttoned at the wrists.
“What the deuce?” said Daniel.
“They keep my gown clean when I work with old documents. Or other dusty things. My father’s man of business told me about them. His clerks keep ink off their coats this way.”
“Do they indeed?” He was smiling in a way that made her lips curve up in response.
“I know they look a bit odd, but they’re much easier to clean than my gown. And if the laundress can’t get out every speck, well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” She held up her arms for his inspection.
She looked silly and adorable and supremely competent all at the same time, Daniel thought. It was a potent combination.
She sat down at the desk, picked up a sheaf of papers, scanned the top one, and then leafed through the rest. “Are these your lists?”
“Right,” said Daniel, bringing his mind back to the tedious task at hand. He only got to sit with her if he went through the wretched records. “Things to do. I check off items as soon as they’re accomplished.”
She looked down and flipped through the pages again.
“Date at the top, you see, all right and tight,” Daniel added. And remembered, for some reason, the Latin master at school who’d looked over his translations with sad compassion.
“These lists go back months, and the things to be done are the same. Except that there are more and more of them.” Miss Pendleton gazed at him. “They all begin withrevise task list.”
Daniel nodded. “Takes a deuced amount of time.” Often it used the whole morning, and left him so irritated that he had to get out of the house.
“But do you actuallydoany of them?”
“Loads. Those lists are gone, because they’re all checked off.”
“I see.”
She seemed to doubt him. Daniel started to defend himself, and then realized that his case was weak. “Sometimes I feel like that king—what was his name?—who tried to fight off the sea with his sword.”
“Canute?” said Miss Pendleton. “I believe he was making a point about the impossibility of doing so. But my father was just the same. About papers, I mean, not the sea.”
She gave him a look that warmed Daniel right down to his toes.
“That’s why I started helping him,” she went on. “The accounts in particular made him frantic. And Mama—who’d been managing a great deal of them—grew too ill to do much.”
