Chapter One

The summons came while Jane was correcting Miss Amelia’s French composition, and it was Sarah the under-housemaid who brought it, which told Jane everything before a word was spoken. Good news in the Hargrove household travelled by the butler. Bad news was given to whoever happened to be passing the stairs.

“Her ladyship wishes to see you, miss. In the morning room.”

“Thank you, Sarah.”

Jane set down her quill, squared the composition against the edge of the desk, and took stock of herself in the schoolroom’s small mirror. Her dress was a quiet grey, the cuffs impeccably clean, and her chestnut hair pinned back with such severe precision that not one tendril had escaped by eleven o’clock, a small daily victory nobody had ever remarked upon. Beneath that neat, dark crown, her cool grey eyes surveyed the schoolroom, sharp and composed, missing very little.

Lady Hargrove was at her writing table when Jane entered, and she did not look up at once. She finished her sentence, read it over, and appeared to find it satisfactory. Jane waited in the middle of the carpet, at the precise distance she had learned in her first month. Near enough to be addressed, far enough that her ladyship need not tilt her head.

“Ah. Miss Prescott.” Lady Hargrove set down her quill and smiled at a point slightly to the left of Jane’s shoulder. “You will be pleased for us, I know. Sir William has accepted the appointment in Calcutta. We sail in September.”

“That is a great honour for Sir William, my lady.”

“It is, though I am sure I shall find the climate a trial. Everyone says the society there is quite tolerable now, and of course the girls will come with us.” She turned over a letter on the table, aligning it with its fellows. “Which brings me to you. We shall not require you after the end of the month. The girls will have a native ayah for the voyage, and afterwards, as well. Amelia is nearly sixteen. Everyone remarks on how beautifully I have brought her along, and I begin to think there is very little left for a governess to do.”

Jane had taught Amelia her French, her Italian, her globes, her sums, and, in the third year, patiently, after two masters had given her up, how to hold her temper at the pianoforte long enough to learn it. She said none of this.

“I understand, my lady.”

“I knew you would be sensible. You are always so sensible, Miss Prescott. I have often said it is your best quality.” Lady Hargrove drew a folded paper from the little drawer and held it out. “Your character. I wrote it myself this morning.”

Jane took it. The seal was already pressed, but her ladyship had left it unfastened, in the manner of employers who wish their generosity to be read before it is delivered. Jane did not open it. She had a fair notion of what it contained, because she had heard Lady Hargrove compose such letters aloud before, diligent, respectable, most useful. Useful. In four years she had come to understand the word thoroughly. It meant invisible, with duties.

“You are very kind, my lady.”

“Yes.” Lady Hargrove was already reaching for her quill. “The month’s wages will be made up to you, naturally, and Simmons will see about your box being corded when the day comes. Do close the door as you go. There is a draught from the stairs.”

Jane closed the door softly behind her. On the landing she passed the long glass that hung opposite the window, and it offered her, as it always did, a woman in grey whom the house looked through rather than at. She had ceased to argue with the glass years ago.

In the schoolroom, Miss Amelia had abandoned the composition and was trimming a bonnet.

“Mama says we are going to India,” she said, without looking up. “I shall ride an elephant. Fanny Herries will be sick with envy.”

“I am sure she will. You have neglected your accents off élève again.”

“It hardly matters now, does it?” Amelia held the bonnet at arm’s length and turned it. “Miss Prescott, do you think blue ribbon, or the cherry?”

“The blue. Cherry will quarrel with your complexion in a hot climate.”

“You see, that is what you are good for,” Amelia said, pleased, and reached for the scissors. It was, Jane reflected that it stood very nearly as an epitaph. Four years had elapsed, and the child had spoken with greater truth than her mother. That was what she was good for, and when the ribbon was chosen, the choice as forgotten.

She picked up the composition and marked the accents in, one by one, because the work was hers whether or not anyone would ever look at it.

The last evening, the house forgot her early. There was packing above stairs and the mention of India in every conversation. The fire in the grate had burnt down to a pile of grey ash as it had been neglected. Jane sat patiently in the cold room amongst her corded trunk. She had finished with a household which had forgotten her very existence through the entire week when the door opened slowly and Sarah, the under-housemaid, entered, carrying a tea tray that nobody had rung for.

“Cook sent it up, miss. And she says…” Sarah set it down with the concentration of a girl repeating a lesson, “she says you’re to eat the seed-cake now, while it’s warm, and there’s a parcel under the cloth that’s for the coach tomorrow and not for sharing, and if anyone asks, the seed-cake was burned and thrown out.”

Under the cloth, wrapped in paper she found a cold fowl, bread, more cake, and a twist of tea, a servant’s fortune, which had been assembled in a kitchen where every raisin was counted by the housekeeper and entered against the month.

“Sarah. This will be missed.”

“It will not, miss, for Cook will see to what is lacking.” The girl stood a moment, working her apron hem, and then delivered the rest in haste, the way below stairs delivered its verdicts, all at once or never. “Cook says four years and never once did you ring twice for anything, or blame the young miss for the schoolroom fire, or carry tales down of what was said up. She says them upstairs won’t know what they had till the next one, and the next one will teach them. And I’m to say…” the apron hem suffered, “the morning Miss Amelia locked me in the linen room for a game and forgot me, and you heard, and came, and never told her ladyship it was Miss Amelia, on account of I’d have been the one turned off for it. You never even said you’d done anything. Cook says that’s the trouble with you, miss, begging your pardon. You do things so quiet that only the quiet people see them.”

She bobbed and was gone before Jane could assemble an answer, which was as well, because Jane had none that would have kept its shape. She sat in the school room which was growing colder, with a stolen supper and the discovery, turning it the way she turned all unexpected figures, twice, looking for the error, that she had been keeping her accounts in the wrong room for four years. Above stairs, nothing had been entered. She had checked the total often enough, and it was nil, and she had called that the whole ledger. But below, in the kitchen, in the linen room, in rooms she had never thought inspected her at all, a second set of books had been kept the whole time, small entries, in her favour, by the only people in the house whose attention cost them something to spend.

The quiet people see them. She ate the seed-cake while it was warm, as instructed, and entered the evening where she entered things that would not balance, and took the parcel down to the coach in the morning, and it was Sarah, of all that household, who stood at the area railing in the grey early light to watch her go.

***

Mrs Wilkins’s registry office stood in a narrow street off Holborn, up a stair that smelled of dust and tallow, and its waiting room was furnished with one bench and eleven women. Jane arrived early and was still the ninth to be seen. She spent the interval studying the room, since the room declined to study her. Genteel poverty had a uniform, and every woman on the bench wore it. Gloves darned at the fingertips, hems turned once, backs held straight by the last thing that could not be pawned. Not one of them looked at another. To look was to see one’s own reflection, and none of them could afford the sight.

***

“Miss Prescott.” Mrs Wilkins pronounced names like items in an inventory. “Sit down.”

Jane sat. Mrs Wilkins read the Hargrove character through small spectacles, in silence, twice.

“Four years in one situation. That speaks well. Why did they not take you to India? Families generally prefer to keep a governess who knows the children.”

“Her ladyship felt the girls’ education was complete.”

Mrs Wilkins looked at her over the spectacles. She was a square, dry woman who had spent thirty years hearing what employers felt, and translating it. “Complete. Just so.” She laid the letter down. “Well. You have references, you have experience, and you have no family to make difficulties, which some houses count a virtue. What I do not have, Miss Prescott, is a situation for you. The season is against us. Nobody engages a governess in the last week of May. They go down to the country and remember their children want teaching in October.” She paused as though considering carefully what she ought to say before giving it voice. “There is one place. It has been on my books for three weeks, which for the salary offered is a curiosity in itself. A hundred pounds a year.”

Jane kept her countenance composed, which cost her something. Forty was the common figure. Sixty was generous. “The family?”

“Lord Moorfield. Sussex. A viscount, recently come into the title.” Mrs Wilkins took off her spectacles and polished them, which Jane suspected was what the woman did instead of choosing her words in view of a client. “The child is his niece. His late brother’s daughter, seven years old, orphaned by a carriage accident this winter past. The particular difficulty is that the little girl has not spoken since. Not a word, I am told, to anyone. She hides about the house and cannot be got to lessons at all. Two governesses have been and gone inside a month apiece.”

“And the other difficulty?”

Mrs Wilkins set the spectacles down. “You read the papers, I believe.”

“I read what is left in schoolrooms.”

“Then you will have met his lordship already, after a fashion. They had a name for him before the title found him. The Wastrel Viscount, one of the sheets called him, this spring, cards, and worse company, and money going through his hands like water through a sieve. Three candidates I sent to that house refused the situation on his reputation alone, and one refused it on the doorstep, or so she claims.” She folded her hands. “I will be plain with you, Miss Prescott, because you strike me as a woman who prefers it. It is a great deal of money, and there is generally a reason when a great deal of money cannot fill a respectable post. A young person under that roof will be observed by every tittle -tattle in Sussex, waiting for her to put a foot wrong. If a foot is put wrong, it will not be his lordship who pays for it.”

The office was quiet. Below in the street a knife-grinder was crying his trade, and eleven women were waiting their turn on the bench outside the door.

Jane looked at her own gloved hands, and did the arithmetic she had already done twice that morning by way of prayer. Nine pounds and some shillings stood between her and the street. Two months, if she ate little, ten weeks if she ate less. She had made such calculations before. She had been one-and-twenty the last time the ground opened, standing in her father’s drawing room while men in aprons carried the furniture past her; she had counted the pieces going, because counting was the only occupation left to her, and the last thing down the steps had been Papa’s portrait, face turned to the carrier’s shoulder as if he could not meet her eye. Henry had not come that day. Henry had written instead, a graceful letter, full of esteem and regret and his mother’s views, and she had understood at last that his attachment had been to Prescott & Sons, general merchants, and that the firm being sold, the betrothal had been sold with it. He had entered into matrimony with Miss Rowley with six thousand pounds the following spring. Jane had read of it in a newspaper somebody left in a schoolroom.

That was what charm was, in her experience. It was the light a man shone on you while he was reading your ledger.

“The child,” Jane said. “Has any physician attended to her?”

Mrs Wilkins blinked, as though a candidate had never yet begun at that end of the question. “There is mention of a local man. Why?”

“Because a child who has stopped speaking is not being willful. She is keeping the only thing she still governs. I had a pupil once who did not speak for a season after her brother had passed away. She wanted patience, not discipline, and everyone about her wanted her scolded into conversation.” Jane drew off her gloves, finger by finger, and folded them in her lap. “I will take the situation, Mrs Wilkins.”

“On account of the hundred pounds.”

“On account of the hundred pounds,” Jane agreed, “and the child. His lordship’s reputation is his own concern. I have been four years in service, and in four years I have found that gentlemen of fashion do not look at governesses at all. I expect to be perfectly safe from his notice, and he from mine.”

Mrs Wilkins regarded her through a silence that had judgement in it, and then, unexpectedly, the judgement warmed by a degree. It was the first time all morning that anyone had looked at Jane directly, not at her references, not at her darned gloves, at her, and she registered the novelty of it with a small, dry astonishment, filed where she filed such things.

“You will do, I think,” Mrs Wilkins said. “Or you will be back on that bench by Michaelmas, but I find I would not wager on it. The terms ask for the earliest possible date. Can you travel Thursday?”

“I can travel Wednesday.”

“Thursday. Arriving on the day you were not expected serves nobody but the housemaids’ tongues.” Mrs Wilkins was writing already. “You will take the Brighton coach from the Golden Cross, and a hired chaise from Lewes. The estate will bear the charge. Moorfield Manor, Miss Prescott. Ask for the housekeeper, Mrs Brooks, and do not expect to be welcomed. Houses in disorder never welcome the person sent to mend them.”

She was still writing as Jane rose, and did not look up again, but at the door Jane felt the spectacles lift and follow her out, which was one more glance than London had spared her all year.

***

Her room in Cheapside was let by the week, and it took Jane until the candle was half gone to pack a life into one corded box and a valise. It was quickly done because there was little of it, the grey dresses, and the workbasket. A pressed flower from a garden that no longer belonged to anybody she knew, and, wrapped in flannel at the bottom, a small book bound in scuffed calf. P. Prescott, Private Instruction in Accounts, for Jane. Her father had ruled every line of it himself, the year she was twelve. A lady who can read a ledger, Janie, will never be deceived twice.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the little book open on her knee and the candle leaning its light over her shoulder, and she permitted herself, briefly, the luxury of being nobody at all. Not sensible, not useful, not respectable. A woman going fifty miles to a silent child and a man the newspapers laughed at, because those were the only two doors left open, and because, she could be honest at this hour, in this room, where there was no one to arrange her face for, some contrary corner of her heart preferred the door nobody else would walk through.

The child hid, Mrs Wilkins had said. Hid about the house, and would not speak.

Sensible girl, Jane thought. I should do the same.

She wrapped the book in its flannel, laid it under the grey dresses where soft things were safest, and blew out the candle on the last night anyone would pay her no attention in London.

Chapter Two

The drawing room at Moorfield had survived a siege. Robert stood in the doorway and took the inventory with a practised eye, because until this winter the wreckage would have been partly his own work. The card table still dressed in the previous night’s battle, a burgundy stain covered the length of his forearm across the Aubusson. A chair lay overturned and left where it fell, and one of the tall candles which had burned down into its socket with wax hanging off the mantel resembled something that had tried to escape. The room smelled of smoke and spilt wine and other people’s enjoyment.

Latymer was breakfasting on it all in his shirtsleeves, boots on the sofa, working through a plate of cold beef with the scandal sheet propped against the coffee pot.

“You’re famous again,” Latymer said, without looking up. “‘The Wastrel Viscount is lately retired to Sussex, where the hazard tables of London mourn him and the tradesmen of Sussex tremble.’ Tremble, my dear fellow. Vane desires to know whether we shoot today, or if your gamekeeper has given you the slip like his predecessor.”

“Where is Vane?”

“Still abed. So is Rushmere, though not, I think, in the room he started in.” Latymer turned the sheet over and gave him a lazy grin over it. “Sit down, Moorfield, you’re looming. It’s your own house, you might at least enjoy it. We came all this way to rescue you.”

“From what?”

“Respectability. Terrible affliction. Carries off men our age every season.”

Robert crossed to the window instead of the chair, which gave him the lawn, the drive, and a moment to arrange the thing he had decided somewhere in the small hours between his second brandy and his first look at the ledgers. On the way, he passed the pier glass, which dealt him the brief, unhelpful sight of a man with dark hair, keen hazel eyes, and every appearance of being precisely what the prints proclaimed him.

He had earned the sight honestly. That was the very trouble of it. There was no injustice anywhere in that paragraph to resent. He had sat down to those tables and drunk that wine and made himself the object of ridicule in London, with some diligence, over twelve years, because being the family disgrace at least had the merit of being an appointment nobody could take from him. James had been given everything else. Robert had kept failure for himself, and guarded it with great diligence, and been comfortable there.

Then a curricle had gone over on the Brighton road, and comfort had perished with it.

“Freddie.” He said it to the window. “There was a footman this morning with his eye blacked.”

“Ah. That.” Latymer had the grace to set down his fork. “Rushmere took exception to being put to bed. It’ll be made right, I’ll leave the fellow something handsome, and you know how Rushmere is when he’s…”

“I know how he is. I’ve been how he is.” Robert turned round. “There’s a child in this house.”

“The niece. Yes. Never seen her, mind, is she real, or do you keep her in a cabinet?”

It was said idly, and it landed like a key turning. Never seen her. Three days these men had filled his house, and in three days not one of them had set eyes on Charlotte, because Charlotte, who was seven, and whose mother and father had gone out one January morning and not come back, had judged the company his friends made and hidden from it, all night, in the cold, somewhere in the east wing, while the house rang below her.

Mrs Brooks had delivered that intelligence at seven o’clock, at his door, in the tone of a woman presenting a man with the bill for his own character.

“You’ll want the carriage brought round by ten,” Robert said. “All three of you.”

Latymer laughed, and then arrived, visibly, at the discovery that no one was jesting with him. It changed his face by degrees, which Robert watched with something that was not quite regret. “You’re turning us out. You. Robert Moorfield is turning men out of a house for high spirits.”

“For frightening a little girl in her own home. The high spirits you may keep.”

“Goodness, it’s true, then.” Latymer stood, and there was a glint of real spite under the drawl then, the kind that only ever shows in a man who has been comfortable at your table. “The sheet had you to the letter. Retired. Reformed. What comes next, a pew, and a plain wife, and prayers before cards?” He reached for his coat. “You were better company as a disgrace, Moorfield.”

“I was easier company,” Robert said. “It isn’t the same article, though I grant the two are often confused. Travers will have your things brought down. Give my regards to the hazard tables.”

He held the door. It was, on the whole, a politer eviction than any he had personally been subject to, and he was in a position to compare.

***

The east wing kept its shutters half-closed, which had been James’s economy and was now simply habit, so that walking into it from the morning side of the house was like walking into the house’s memory. Robert went up with the tread he had been teaching himself, unhurried, audible, nothing that could be mistaken for pursuit, and stopped at the nursery landing.

The room they had made Charlotte’s stood open. The grate was cold, the bed untouched; upon the table, the bread on the supper tray grew stale beneath its cloth. Her night-dress remained folded where it had been laid. Wherever she had passed the night, it had certainly not been in her own bed. He found her in the old parlour at the wing’s far end, and he found her the only way she was ever found, by the toe of one small shoe, motionless, beneath the hem of the window curtain.

Robert did not approach the curtain. He had made that mistake the first week, and been taught better by the sound of a child pressing herself against a windowpane to be smaller. Instead he lowered himself to the floor by the cold hearth, an undignified operation for a man in top-boots, and addressed the middle distance.

“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.”

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.

“…though if the boy would only ask the lamplighter,” Miss Prescott was saying to the page, “he’d find posting a much better trade than piracy, and his mother would be spared a deal of worry. But nobody in these poems ever asks the person who knows.”

The curtain-wrapped ambassador watched her with an expression Robert had not seen above stairs in three weeks: interest. There was no sign of a flinch, nor the sentry’s stony posture. Instead, there was an intent, leaning forward air of possession. A child listening to her own book mishandled by an amateur who would clearly be lost without supervision.

He glanced at the fire and made his decision the length of one indrawn breath.

“There you are, Miss Prescott,” he said, at exactly conversational pitch, crossing to the shelf as though the window contained nothing but weather. “I must beg your pardon as we have to deal with household matters. You have found the poetry from my mother’s collection. Some of the volumes are older than I am and every one of them is better company.” He drew one down at random and turned it in his hands. “You were saying, before we were interrupted. About being an answer worth asking.”

“I was about to say, my lord, that it can’t be hurried, and that I would rather promise you patience than progress.” She closed the book on her finger, easy, unhurried. “Progress belongs to Miss Charlotte. It will go at her pace or it won’t go at all, and whosoever should attempt to persuade you to the contrary is assuredly seeking to turn a profit.” And there it was again, that level grey look that had sat through the wreck of his interview manners without once flattering him, and hadn’t flattered him now. Robert had spent twelve years in rooms where every sentence aimed at him required something, and had grown as fluent in the dialect as any man in London. This was not the dialect. This was a woman staking her professional word on the slowest possible answer, in the interview of a post she badly needed, in the full presence of the child, whose attention was entirely captured. The curtain had fallen quite still, possessed of that eager, clinging stillness so natural to youthful curiosity.

Three weeks, he thought. Three weeks he had crept and coaxed and left biscuits like offerings at a shrine, and earned one eye at a curtain’s edge for it, and counted himself a diplomatist. This woman had been in his house half a morning. She had not approached, had not coaxed, had done nothing whatever but sit down and be worth watching, Charlotte had come out of the curtain to the length of her own two feet and stood in the open window, holding her ground, for a stranger.

Not for a stranger. For the one person under this roof who had made no attempt on her.

“You’re engaged, Miss Prescott,” Robert said. “From this morning. Mrs Brooks will see you settled.” He restored his mother’s book to the shelf, and allowed himself, at the door, one look back at the pair of them, the governess reading, the curtain’s small garrison standing down by inches, and found, with an odd sensation somewhere under his waistcoat, that of the two of them it was not his niece he had been looking at first.