Chapter One

 

 

Elizabeth Mercer was going to find employment in the house of the man who had buried her husband.

He had buried Thomas with his own orders. Lieutenant-Colonel Gavin Harrow had stood over the grave in the spring of 1814, signed the dispatch that made her a widow, and sent her husband’s effects home in a deal box that still smelled of saltpetre and another man’s tobacco. Four years had made the colonel a duke. The same four years had made Elizabeth a woman who weighed the stub of a candle to see if it would last a second night.

That want was what had brought her here. It had carried her up the Ravensmere drive in a hired gig and into a drawing room where the fire roared high enough to roast a goose, and where no one had thought to offer her a chair. She kept her feet and let the missing chair tell her exactly where she stood.

“You come to us without gentry references, Mrs Mercer.” Lady Matilda Harrow occupied the best chair in the best light, and she had arranged the interview so that Elizabeth stood. “The agency was vague upon the point. I should like it a great deal less vague.”

“My references are from officers’ wives and a regimental surgeon, my lady. Not one of them keeps a fashionable address, and two of them are dead, which I find improves their honesty considerably,” she said.

“You make very light of your own want of connection,” said Lady Matilda.

“I find it lighter to carry than to apologise for, and I have carried it some distance. There are not many houses in England that will engage an army widow with no people to speak for her. I have written to a good many of them. They write back, when they trouble to write at all, that they require a gentlewoman, by which they mean a woman with relations who may be dined.”

“And you have no relations who may be dined,” she said.

“I have a father in a Kentish churchyard and a husband in a Spanish one, and neither of them will accept an invitation. I am, in the particular sense an agency cares about, alone in the world. I tell you so at the start because you will discover it within the week, and I would rather you had it from me than from a letter written by somebody who wishes me ill.”

“You are blunt,” said Lady Matilda.

“I am quick. There is a difference, my lady, and a house with a difficulty in it generally finds a use for the second sort of woman, whatever it tells the agency it wants.”

Lady Matilda turned a ring on her finger, once. “Soldiers.”

“My references, you mean. Yes. And the wife of a colonel of artillery, who ran a household of forty through three winters of campaign on requisitioned flour and her own reckoning. I kept her accounts for two of those winters, and they balanced to the penny, which is more than I can say of most peacetime houses I have since had the keeping of.”

“And what became of those peacetime houses,” Lady Matilda asked, “that you are standing in mine and not in one of theirs?”

“They discovered, on closer acquaintance, that they wanted a gentlewoman after all, or that an army widow at the table unsettled the other servants, or that a woman who says aloud what a thing costs is a sore trial to a household that would rather not be told what anything costs. I have been let go from three respectable houses, my lady, for the crime of being useful in an unrespectable way. I expect Ravensmere will contrive to bear it a little longer, having a difficulty large enough to require me.”

“You were with the army, Mrs Mercer,” she said.

“With my husband, for part of his service.”

“How unusual,” said Lady Matilda dryly.

“How necessary.” Elizabeth held her hands easy at her sides, where the mend across the knuckle of her left glove sat in plain view for anyone who cared to look. “A captain’s pay would not stretch to two establishments. I went where the pay went. And when the pay stopped, it left debts in the place a pension ought to have stood, which is the other thing you will learn of me within the week. I would as soon you had that from me too.”

Mrs Anstruther stood near the door with a ledger pressed to her chest, and at the word debts she shifted, the way a careful housekeeper shifts at the naming of money owed.

“You are very free with your disadvantages,” she said.

“I have laid them out so that we need not pretend to them later. It saves a great deal of everyone’s afternoon, and I have found that the disadvantages one names oneself do a good deal less damage than the ones a stranger finds for you.” Elizabeth turned back to Lady Matilda. “You have not yet told me the difficulty, my lady. And there must be one, or a duke’s household would not have written this far north for a soldier’s widow it cannot dine with. I would rather hear it plainly than spend the afternoon guessing at its shape.”

A silence opened across the warm room. A log shifted in the grate and threw up a small handful of sparks, and Mrs Anstruther’s gaze went to it and away. Elizabeth had stood through silences laid by better tacticians than one old woman in a good chair, and she let this one go by without troubling to fill it.

“The child does not speak.” The words came flat, a thing set down on a table to be looked at. “You may as well have the whole of it. Lady Iris has not spoken since her mother died, two years gone now. We have engaged four women to mend the want of it. Four have failed and gone, and the last of them left a letter that used the word unnatural.”

“Mend it,” she said. “As one mends a torn stocking.”

“As one corrects a fault in a child,” said Lady Matilda.

“A child who has buried her mother is not a fault, my lady.” Elizabeth kept her voice level and low, the voice she had once used in tents where men were trying to die without making a fuss of it. “She is a child who has buried her mother. The two things may look near enough alike to anyone in haste, but they are not alike at all. A woman who cannot tell the one from the other has no business being the fifth to try.”

The ledger came down a full inch. Lady Matilda looked at her then in a way she had not before, less as a name on the agency’s list and more as a woman who had walked a long way to stand upon her carpet.

“The agency described you as respectable and reduced. It neglected to add opinionated.”

“The agency has never sat with the dying, my lady, and I have. A man at the end of himself tells the truth, because he has run clean out of the time it takes to dress it for company. I have kept the habit. I can wrap it in softer cloth, if soft cloth is what the post requires of me, but the bill comes to the same figure however one folds it.”

“And what would you do with her?” Lady Matilda asked. “This child you understand so completely from a chair you have not been offered.”

“Nothing, at first,” Elizabeth replied evenly.

“Nothing.” Lady Matilda’s brows lifted. “We are to pay a fifth woman for nothing.”

“You have been paying four women’s worth of correcting, and the correcting is the thing that has failed. I would do nothing to her at all, not at first. I would sit in the room with my work in my lap, ask her for nothing, and wait. Children come out when the room stops demanding that they come out. It is not a method the agency can set a price upon, which is precisely why the agency keeps sending you women who ring bells.”

“And if she never comes out?” said Lady Matilda.

“Then I shall have kept a lonely child company for a fortnight, my lady, which is more than the last four contrived between them, and you will be not one penny worse off than you were the morning I arrived.” Elizabeth let that sit. “She will come out. They come out, in the end, if a person is patient and honest, and does not flinch at what the child carries with her. I have a great deal of practice at not flinching. It is the one trade the war left me fit for.”

“She hides,” Lady Matilda said. “Under the furniture, as you have already seen for yourself. In the wardrobes. Once, for the better part of a day, in the icehouse, in January, while the whole household dragged the lake for her. She will not eat unless she is watched. She tears up her own drawings the moment they are finished. The physician calls it a melancholy of the nerves and bleeds her for it, to no purpose that any of us has been able to discover.”

“You have bled a grieving child.”

“The physician has. I did not care for it either, if that signifies anything to you.”

“It signifies a great deal to me, my lady, and a great deal more to her.” Elizabeth’s voice stayed level, and the levelness of it carried farther than temper would have. “There will be no more bleeding while she is in my keeping. A child who has lost the one person who made the world safe does not need a vein opened into the bargain. She needs to be told, by somebody who will not lie to her, that there is some safety left in the world yet. A lancet has never reached that, and it never will.”

“How old is she?” Elizabeth asked.

“Six. Seven in the autumn,” said Lady Matilda quietly.

“And four when her mother died.”

“Four. She spoke until the morning of the funeral and has not spoken since.”

“Then she has been silent for the better part of the years she can remember, my lady. You have not engaged a governess. You have engaged an interpreter, and you would do well to hope I learn the language quickly, because she has had two years to forget that anyone ever spoke it.”

“The last woman but one was sensible enough.” Lady Matilda turned the ring again. “A clergyman’s daughter. Patient. Kind, by her own lights. The child bit her.”

“Good,” said Elizabeth.

“Good?” said Lady Matilda.

“It is the first sign of spirit you have offered me in the whole of this interview, my lady. A child who still bites has decided she is worth defending. It is the ones who have stopped biting that a person ought to lie awake over. Did the clergyman’s daughter understand what she had been handed, when those small teeth went in?”

“She gave her notice the same afternoon,” Lady Matilda returned.

“Then she was frightened, and the child knew it. That is no great crime in the woman, but it made her the wrong one for this house.”

Mrs Anstruther found her voice. “The duties are the whole of her care. Lessons, such as she will take them. Her meals, her airing, her hours. The last governess kept to the schoolroom and rang for everything that crossed her mind, and His Grace did not care for it.”

“His Grace concerns himself with the schoolroom?”

“His Grace concerns himself with everything and remarks upon almost none of it.” The housekeeper flushed, as though she had handed over a coin she had meant to keep in her own pocket. “You would do better to learn that today than at your own cost a month from now.”

“And does His Grace ask after the child?” Elizabeth asked.

“Every morning of his life, ma’am. He is told she is the same as yesterday, and he says nothing to it, and goes about his day.” Mrs Anstruther’s voice gentled in spite of her. “He has not been inside the nursery above twice since the funeral. He stands at the door of it of an evening, when he believes the house is not attending. He does not go in.”

“Why does he not go in?” Elizabeth asked quietly.

“That is a question above my place, Mrs Mercer, and a good way above yours, and you will oblige the whole household by not asking it anywhere it might be overheard.”

“I shall add it to the list, which is already a long one, and I have been under this roof scarcely an hour.” Elizabeth let her gaze travel once over the high fire and the good furniture and the costly quiet of the room, then set it back upon the old woman.

“Ravensmere is not a camp, Mrs Mercer.”

“No, my lady. A camp is generally noisier.”

The fire cracked and settled, and from beneath the long body of the pianoforte against the far wall, a slipper scraped the boards and went still.

Elizabeth held her head where it was a moment longer. Three campaigns had taught her to finish a step before she searched the ground for the snake. Then she let her eyes travel, mild as weather, to the shadow beneath the instrument, where a child sat folded into the smallest shape a child could make, both thin arms locked about her knees.

Lady Matilda had drawn breath to begin again. Elizabeth lowered herself instead to the floor in front of the chair, skirts and dignity and the last of her good wool together, until she was no taller than the dark space beneath the piano.

“You have found the best seat in the room,” she said into that dark. “The fire cannot reach you so far back, and you can watch every door at once without turning your head. I chose the same, in tents, whenever there was a corner to be had. I am not going to ask you to come out.”

The shadow did not move. Then two eyes, very pale in the dimness, found hers and held to them without a blink.

“My name is Mrs Mercer. You need not tell me yours unless you wish to. I expect many people ask you questions and then wait for an answer, and that can be a noisy sort of quiet.” Elizabeth folded her hands in her lap and made of herself a fixed and patient thing on the floor. “I am going to stay just here a while. You may look at me as long as you like. Looking first is sensible. I would look at me for a good long while too, before I decided whether I believed me.”

A door on the far side of the room opened, the one Elizabeth had marked for the servants’ use.

“Anstruther said the agency woman had come, so I…” Gavin Harrow stopped on the threshold of his own drawing room.

Elizabeth came to her feet before she had decided to, her knees answering an old instinct she despised even as it lifted her from the floor.

Four years had greyed him a little at the temples and done nothing to the rest. The stillness was the same he had worn at the graveside, hat in both hands, while the chaplain ran the words on ahead of the rain. This was the man who had written the letter that made her a widow, the one she had read a hundred times by a failing candle until the creases went soft. He had sent her Thomas’s sword, and his ring, and his debts. He had never once sent her the manner of his dying.

“Mrs Mercer,” he said.

“Your Grace.”

“You are acquainted.” Lady Matilda’s look went between them and missed nothing, the way a quartermaster misses nothing in a list of stores.

“His Grace was my husband’s commanding officer,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.” He said it and nothing more, a man closing a door on the rest of the sentence.

Lady Matilda rose from the best chair. “Then the matter is settled. We cannot have a woman in this house who comes to it with such a connection already formed. I am obliged to you for the journey, Mrs Mercer. Mrs Anstruther will see you down to—”

“No,” Gavin said.

The fire was the loudest thing in the room.

“No?” Lady Matilda turned upon her nephew with the worn patience of a woman who had known him since he was in leading-strings and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

“She is not to be sent away,” he said. He had not come past the threshold, and his eyes had gone to the dark beneath the pianoforte, where the pale gaze now tracked him in Elizabeth’s place. “She stays the fortnight, if Iris will have her.”

“Gavin, the woman is plainly—”

“The terms are good ones. Anstruther has them set down fair.” He brought his look back to Elizabeth, full and level, and the weight of the graveside came with it. “I would be glad of your service in this house, Mrs Mercer. It has not been an easy house to keep.”

There it stood, the very thing she had come north to earn, held out before she had done a single hour’s work to deserve the having of it. She set her feet square on the cold floor.

“And what are the terms, Your Grace, that I should not be told them before I am thanked for accepting them?”

“Forty pounds a year. A room of your own, with the fire kept lit through the night. A half day on Sundays, and the use of the library on the days the family does not require it.”

“That is a generous wage for a fortnight’s trial.”

“It is the wage for the post,” said Gavin evenly.

“Posts of this kind do not pay forty pounds and keep a night fire, Your Grace. Not for a governess with no people and a dead man’s debts behind her. They pay eighteen and a tallow candle, and they teach her to be grateful for the candle.” Elizabeth did not move so much as a step towards the offer. “A woman who has weighed sugar against the length of a winter learns to read a price the way you read a map. So I will ask plainly. What does forty pounds and a night fire want of me that eighteen and a candle would not?”

A muscle shifted at the corner of his jaw and was still again before she could put a name to what had moved it. Mrs Anstruther’s ledger slid open against her chest, and she caught it without looking down. Lady Matilda sat back into her chair more slowly than she had risen, and the way she watched Elizabeth had changed, as if a name she had meant to cross off a list had risen and walked to the top of it instead.

“It wants nothing of you the work does not,” Gavin said. “There is a character besides the wage. When you leave this house, whatever the reason for your leaving, you go with one in my own hand that will open any respectable door in England to you.”

“Whatever the reason?”

“Whatever the reason.”

It was a great deal too much. She had stood in too many camps to take generosity laid on with a trowel for anything but the face of an account whose reverse she had not yet been shown.

“Why?” she said.

He did not answer her. The quiet stretched, and went on stretching, until the silence became the whole of his reply. She had no figure to set against it yet, only the shape of a debt she had not been allowed to see.

A small, warm hand slid into hers.

Iris had come out from under the piano without a sound, the way a child learns to move about a house where noise is counted a fault. She pressed close to Elizabeth’s side, her thin fingers wound through the mend in the glove, and kept her eyes on the carpet, giving no one in the room her face. She had made her choice without a word, and whatever it cost her, she was not going to let any of them watch her pay it.

The breath went out of Lady Matilda all at once. “The fortnight, then,” she said, and the edge had gone from her voice somewhere down on the floor with the rest of them. “We shall see how the fortnight goes.”

“I have not yet said that I will take it,” Elizabeth said.

“You have a child fastened to your hand, Mrs Mercer, a duke who will not be moved, and nowhere else in England that will so much as dine you.” Lady Matilda’s mouth did something that, in a warmer woman, might have grown into a smile. “I think you will take it.”

“I think I will.” Elizabeth looked down at the small fingers laced through her glove, and then at the man in the doorway who had not crossed it. “On the understanding that I asked the terms before I was thanked. I will not be commanded into gratitude, Your Grace. Not even for forty pounds and a night fire. Gratitude given on command is the one debt a poor woman can never afford, because it never once comes off the books.”

“Then it is not commanded,” Gavin said. “Only asked of you.”

“Asked, I can manage,” she said, and something in her eased.

He inclined his head and went back through the servants’ door, and the going was a degree too quick for a duke at his ease. She could not have said, by the time the latch caught, whether what he left in the air behind him was the relief of a man reprieved or the caution of a man who had just stepped around something on the floor.

Elizabeth stood in the over-warm room with a silent child’s fingers locked through the seam of her glove, and three winters of campaign told her plainly enough what manner of place she had walked into. Ravensmere wore carpets and good fires and called itself a house. She had crossed enough hard ground to know a field of battle when she was standing in the middle of one, whatever it had been furnished to resemble.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

Gavin had got no farther than his own study door before his aunt was upon him.

“You will tell me why, Gavin, and you will tell me before that woman has slept one night beneath this roof.”

Lady Matilda followed him into the study without waiting to be asked, and shut the door behind her with the particular softness of a woman who meant to raise her voice and did not want it carried down the passage.

“I have engaged a woman the child will endure,” he said. “They have been thin on the ground these two years.”

“A soldier’s widow.” Matilda crossed the carpet. “With no people to stand surety for her, no portion to steady her, and no character to her name but the word of an army surgeon who is very probably dead. In this house, of every house in England.”

“In my house,” said Gavin.

“In the house Helena’s family still watches as though the lease ran to them and not to you. Tonight, you have made them a present of it. You have made them a present of a paragraph.” She set both hands flat upon the far edge of the desk and leant her weight into them. “Why this one? Four women came and went through that schoolroom and you could scarcely be troubled to learn their faces. This one you settled inside the hour, over my plain objection, in front of the servants, who will have carried it to three kitchens by now.”

“She managed the child,” he said.

“She sat upon the floor with the child. That is not management, and you have commanded men enough to know the one thing from the other at a hundred paces.”

“Then she did inside an hour what four hired women could not contrive in a twelvemonth between them. Name it whatever soothes you. I mean to keep the result.”

“I am not quarrelling with your result, Gavin.” Matilda straightened from the desk and regarded him. “I am quarrelling with the speed of you. You came through that door this afternoon and went white, as though you had taken a ball in the chest.”

“I was tired,” he said flatly.

“You are forever tired. It has not before this rearranged your whole face in front of your aunt and your housekeeper.” She let the words settle, then turned down a fresh road. “You are a widower of two years, with a daughter who does not speak and a chair standing empty at the foot of your table. If you mean to keep a young woman about the place, the county will write you a tale whether or not you sit to have it drawn. It will not be a kind tale, and it will not be a true one.”

“Let the county write,” he returned. “It has a poor hand and a worse memory, and I have outlasted its opinion before.”

“Iris cannot outlast it. You may weather any amount of talk. A girl of six, who will one day want a season and a name clean enough to carry her into it, cannot weather a single sentence of the wrong sort.” Matilda’s voice found an edge. “If you want a woman in this house, then marry one. A suitable one. There are three within an afternoon’s drive who would take you by Michaelmas and quiet every tongue in the county by the Sunday following.”

“I have been married.” He laid his palm flat and squared the blotter beneath it. “I did it suitably. I cannot in conscience recommend the experience.”

That brought her up short.

“Helena did not deserve to be spoken of in that tone,” she said, quieter.

“No. She did not deserve the tone, and she deserved a great deal more than she was handed.” He kept his eyes upon the wood. “She wanted a husband who looked at her the way she had been raised to expect to be looked at. She was given one who was unfailingly civil, frequently absent, and quietly grateful each spring when the season carried her off to town and left him his silence. I will not lay that on a second woman to spare a few dowagers the labour of gossip.”

“And the child.” Matilda would not let it go. “You will give her a governess, and an aunt past sixty, and call the matter settled. A girl wants a mother, Gavin, not a succession of hired women and a grandmother’s understudy.”

“Iris wants to be let alone to grieve at her own pace, which is the one mercy this household has refused her for two years while it hired women to correct her into cheerfulness.” His voice stayed level, and the holding of it showed at the jaw. “She has a governess now who does not try to mend her. I will not counterfeit the rest to please a county that never once asked after the child while she fell silent.”

“That is unjust,” said Matilda.

“It is just, and you know it,” he said, “or you would not have looked away just now.”

She did not deny the looking away.

The letter lay open beneath the lamp, and near the foot of it the agency had set the whole engagement down in a clerk’s careful hand. Mrs Elizabeth Mercer, widow of the late Captain Thomas Mercer, of the 43rd. His thumb came to rest upon the word widow and stayed there.

He had seen her first across a long table outside Badajoz, in the spring of 1812, before she was a widow. The dinner ran loud with officers and louder with their telling of themselves, and Thomas Mercer was the loudest at the board, a captain with a fine laugh and a habit of being proved right too publicly. His wife sat at his elbow and watched the room, marking who was about to make a fool of himself and who would have to mend it. When a young ensign at the foot of the table went grey and swayed over his wine, fever taking him before the whole laughing company, not one of the men remarked it. She rose without a word, crossed behind their chairs, and had the boy’s stock loosed and his head down between his knees before the colonel beside her had finished speaking.

The lamp guttered, and the word steadied again under his thumb.

“You have gone off somewhere I am not permitted to follow,” Matilda said. “You do that a great deal more than you used to do.”

“I was reading,” he said.

“You were not reading. The page has not so much as turned.” She came round the corner of the desk, nearer than she had stood before, and brought her voice low, in the way of a woman who already counted the walls among the listeners. “I knew the regiment the moment the agency wrote it out. The 43rd. Her husband served under your own command.”

“So did a great many men,” he said.

“And yet this one’s widow you have engaged at forty pounds a year and a character in your own hand, on the strength of an hour.” She held his gaze without blinking. “Did you bury him yourself, Gavin? The captain.”

The question landed exactly where she had aimed to put it.

“I buried a good number of them myself. It was the portion of command they keep out of the songs.”

“Did you write the letter home?”

“I wrote a great many letters home. I had a steady hand and the worst news in England to carry in it.”

“And his widow has come to the very man who wrote hers, and put her hand to his daughter inside an hour.” Matilda spread her own hands. “You see why I do not sleep easy in my bed.”

“There is nothing improper in a child taking her governess’s hand.”

“That is not an answer to the thing I asked, and you have grown uncommonly skilled this evening at answering some gentler question in its place.” She studied his face the way she had once studied his school reports. “You never speak of Spain. Four years, and not a word of it crosses the table. A man with nothing to hide grows tedious about his campaigns. The one who says nothing at all has chosen his silence on purpose.”

“Spain was mud and fever and other men’s funerals. I spare you because there is nothing in it worth an evening of yours.”

“Or because there is a great deal in it, and none of it worth your saying aloud.” Matilda drew breath and set her shoulders. “I shall put the plain thing to you one last time, and then I shall leave you to whatever it is you do in this room every night behind a shut door. Why did you keep her?”

He could have handed his aunt a dozen reasons: the two years of the child’s silence broken inside the hour, the whole house that turned upon a competence this widow carried in her two bare hands. Every one of them would have been true, and every one of them would have been offered to keep her from the one reason he did not mean to say.

“Because Iris took her hand,” he said.

“That is not a sufficient answer,” said Matilda.

“It is the only one I intend to give,” he said evenly.

Matilda held his eyes a while, and whatever she found in his face she chose not to speak aloud, which from her was a rare enough mercy that he marked it.

“Then hear what I intend to give you, since you will take nothing kinder from my hand.” She gathered her shawl close at her throat. “Selina March will have word of this before the week is out. There is not a household within thirty miles that fails to carry its tales to her by the second post, and a soldier’s widow lodged at Ravensmere, set in authority over Helena’s only daughter, is the precise tale she has waited four full years to be handed.”

“Then she shall be disappointed in it,” said Gavin. “There is nothing here for her to carry away.”

“There does not need to be a thing here, Gavin. You have never understood as much, and it has never yet cost you, because you have never before given her the shape of a thing to point at.” Matilda’s tone hardened. “She will not require a single fact. She will require a young widow, a silent child, a duke who will not remarry as he ought, and a parish with nothing better to do over its tea. You have furnished her the whole tableau and lit the candles besides.”

“And what would you have me do? Turn the woman out into the dark to feed Selina March a worse tale by morning?”

“I would have you keep the woman’s duties plain, her hours full, and her person where the household can plainly see it. No private conferences, no unnecessary attentions, and no giving the servants any corridor tale to carry below stairs.” She let that strike and left it where it fell. “I am old, Gavin. I am not blind, and I am not the only creature under this roof who is neither.”

“You would have me watched.”

“I would have you careful. There is a difference, though you have never much liked it.” Matilda’s gaze did not soften. “From what I have seen of Mrs Mercer, she knows very well how to conduct herself. I am asking whether you do.”

“She came here for honest work and a character to carry away with her.” His voice came out lower and surer than he meant to let it. “She did not come to be watched along the corridors like contraband, nor to have her name handled by Selina March for the parish’s amusement. I will not have it.”

“Then be as careful of her name as you are suddenly eager to be of her comfort.” Matilda’s look sharpened on him, and something in it shifted, as though a long suspicion had at last found a fact to stand upon. “A man does not defend an hour’s governess in that voice. He defends a woman he has already decided matters.”

He had said too much. The lamp smoked on, and neither of them reached to trim it.

“She is under my protection,” he said. “That is all.”

“Of course it is.” Matilda did not believe him, and did not trouble herself to pretend she did. She crossed back towards the desk. “I will tell you what I am afraid of, Gavin, since you will not tell me what you are. I am afraid you have seen a woman in need and mistaken provision for absolution. It is an old Harrow failing.”

“You make me sound calculating.”

“I make you sound your father’s son.” She watched the words go home. “He provided too. There was never a roof out of repair nor a debt left standing in the whole of his life, and your mother went to her grave still wondering whether the man had ever once looked at her on purpose. I buried them both. I should not care to see you mistake a full storehouse for a full heart.”

“Then it is as well I have engaged a governess and not taken a wife,” he returned.

“It is as well if you remember she is one.” Matilda gathered her shawl once more at her throat. “Mrs Mercer will not be put in Helena’s rooms, I suppose.”

“She will not,” said Gavin shortly.

“Good. She will be under Helena’s roof, in authority over Helena’s child, and that is enough resemblance for idle tongues without your adding to it. Selina will not trouble herself over which corridor the woman sleeps in, if there is mischief to be made of the matter.” Matilda’s voice came down a degree, which from her bordered upon alarming. “Be careful. Do not let kindness look like concealment, and do not let pity put the woman in a position she cannot defend.”

“She has done nothing that wants defending.”

“No. And that is precisely why you must not give anyone occasion to make her appear as though she has.”

She reached the door and stopped there, her hand laid flat upon the wood.

“You wear too much upon your face tonight, Gavin.”

“I have nothing written upon me that wants reading.”

“No?” She did not turn round. “Then you have improved a very great deal since we left the drawing room.”

And she went out, drawing the door to behind her as softly as she had first brought it open.

 

***

 

Alone with the smoking lamp, he let the second name come up at last, the one Matilda had not spoken and did not know enough to dread. A house full of old soldiers dragged old soldiers’ acquaintance behind it like a baggage train, and somewhere down that train, if the world meant him real harm, rode Major Lionel Renwick. The man had made an art in Spain of setting himself between two officers and putting a quiet light to each in turn. He had watched Gavin watch Elizabeth Mercer across a dozen mess tables and said not one word of it at the time, which was how his sort kept a thing against the day it would pay. Should Renwick learn that the captain’s widow now slept beneath the captain’s colonel’s roof, he would have no need of a lie. The plain truth would arm him well enough.

A knock came at the door, and Mrs Anstruther put her head round it to ask where Mrs Mercer was to be lodged for the night, the room above the schoolroom having stood damp since October and needing three days of fire before it would be fit for anyone to sleep in.

“Put her in the east room,” Gavin said.

“Your Grace, that is a guest chamber.”

“Then it has a bed, and a fire already laid, which is more than the schoolroom can offer her tonight.”

Mrs Anstruther hesitated. “It is not where we usually put a governess.”

“No,” he said. “But tonight it is where we shall put this one. The schoolroom chamber can be made ready properly tomorrow.”

“Very good, Your Grace.”

The door closed upon whatever she had thought better of saying, which would be repeated below stairs before the candles were trimmed and reach Matilda before the breakfast china.

He should have stayed at the desk with the accounts that still wanted his hand. Instead, he climbed to the nursery.

The door stood half open, and the lamp within threw a long wedge of light across the corridor boards. He stopped at the edge of it, in the dark the light did not reach, and did not go in.

Elizabeth sat upon the low nursing chair beside the cold hearth, with Iris folded on the floor against her knee and a slate and a worn stub of chalk between them on the boards. She was not setting the child to write. With the chalk she drew slowly, a single line at a time, naming none of it, and laying the chalk back upon the slate after each shape, so that Iris might take it up if the wish came to her.

The child did not take it up. She watched Mrs Mercer’s hand the way she watched the whole world, from a careful distance, her own hands tucked under her knees. Then Elizabeth set the chalk down once more and did not reach after it, and waited, and went on waiting past the point where any of the four before her would have prompted, or sighed, or rung the bell for supper.

Iris picked up the chalk.

She did not draw with it. She only held the stub, turning it between her small fingers, and Elizabeth bowed her head over the slate as if a great deal had just been said between them. When she answered, her words were too low for him to catch from the dark of the passage.

A gentleman governed himself. Whatever else a man might be at the end of a long day, he did not stand in an unlit corridor watching his daughter’s governess because the sight of her had stirred something he had spent years teaching himself to leave untouched. Mrs Mercer had not yet passed a night beneath his roof, and already she had found a language for Iris that none of them had thought to learn.

He stepped back without a sound, the way the army teaches a man to give up a position he has no force to hold. The wedge of lamplight thinned to a thread as he went, and he carried the old disturbance down the stairs with him into the dark.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“You need not speak today,” Elizabeth said. “I promise I shall not ask it of you.”

The schoolroom had warmed by mid-morning, and Elizabeth had drawn two chairs to the table and taken the nearer of them.

The child sat across the schoolroom table with a slate untouched at her elbow and both hands folded in her lap, waiting to find out where the trick lay.

“Some people talk a great deal and say very little,” Elizabeth went on. “I have known gentlemen talk from breakfast to supper and leave a room no wiser than they found it.” She laid the slate between them and set the slate pencil beside it, pushing neither one closer. “So we shall not trouble ourselves with talking. We may draw, or we may not draw. Both will do.”

Iris looked at the slate and did not touch it.

“You may draw anything you like,” Elizabeth said. “And I shall not ask what it is unless you wish to tell me.” Her voice softened. “You need not give me anything today. Not words. Not pictures. Not even a look, if you are tired of giving those too.”

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Iris drew the slate pencil to her, set its edge to the slate, and filled in a square, blacking it corner to corner until no white showed through anywhere. She pushed it across the table without raising her eyes from her own hands.

Elizabeth looked at it for a long moment, the way she had once looked at a wound before deciding whether it wanted cleaning or only covering.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Some days feel like that.”

She left the black square where it lay.

“May I draw one beside it?” Elizabeth asked.

Iris did not answer, but she did not pull the slate away.

Elizabeth took up the slate pencil and drew, beside the black square, another of the same shape, only outlined, the middle left empty. “There. Mine is a square too. I have not decided what goes inside it yet.”

Iris considered the empty square. Then she set one finger upon it, light as a moth landing, and looked up.

“You may keep it,” Elizabeth said. “I can always draw another.”

The child did not smile, but she did not push the square away either, and Elizabeth counted that the better bargain of the two by a wide margin.

The tea came up at eleven, and it came up wrong.

A senior maid in good print carried it rather than an under-housemaid, and it was China tea, the sort kept under lock, with sugar already spooned into the bowl. Elizabeth had run a household on requisitioned flour and weighed sugar against the length of a hard winter, and a tray of such quality in a motherless child’s schoolroom set her counting before she could stop herself.

“That is very fine tea for a nursery,” she said.

“His Grace’s standing order, ma’am.” The girl set the tray down and bobbed, young enough yet to keep talking once she had begun.

“For Lady Iris?”

“Yes, ma’am. Best China for the schoolroom, the fire kept up the same as the family rooms, and her little ladyship’s tray carried up by one of the upper servants. He had the whole of it written out for Mrs Anstruther two years gone, and it has not changed by so much as a coal since.”

“Two years gone,” Elizabeth said.

“When the late duchess passed, ma’am.” The girl glanced at the door and dropped her voice to the pitch servants keep for the things they most enjoy reporting. “That is when most of it started. He had the pianoforte tuned not a month back, and there is not a soul in the house plays it. The tuner comes twice in the year, regular as the quarter rent, on His Grace’s own order. Cook does say—”

“Sally.” Mrs Anstruther stood in the doorway. “The landing linen wants you.”

The girl went the colour of her own print and fled.

“You will not get the household out of that one now,” Elizabeth said pleasantly, “having frightened her clean out of her tongue.”

“You will get it out of none of mine, Mrs Mercer, while I have the managing of them.” The housekeeper came in and squared the tray the girl had set down crooked. “Whatever sum you are working in that head of yours, you will oblige me by working it in silence. This is a good house. It is not a comfortable one. The two are not always the same house, and you would do well to learn the difference before you go drawing up totals.”

Elizabeth looked again at the tray, the careful fire, the room kept ready around a child who seemed scarcely able to notice any of it. “I meant no offence, Mrs Anstruther. It is only that a great deal appears to have been kept exactly as it was.”

“Nothing that need trouble your sleep,” the housekeeper said shortly.

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I suppose not.”

“Then spend your waking hours upon the child, which is the thing you are paid for, and leave the rest of the house to keep its own counsel.” Mrs Anstruther paused at the door. “You are quicker than the last four. I have not yet settled with myself whether that is to the good of anyone. Drink your fine tea before it goes cold, since His Grace took the trouble to order it for you.”

 

***

 

He came as far as the schoolroom threshold near dusk, a footman trailing at his heel with a question half out of his mouth.

“Not now. After.”

Two words, flat, given without a glance, and the footman folded the rest of his sentence away and carried it back down the stairs.

Thomas used to come into their billet wearing that voice at second hand, the colonel’s voice, after the colonel had corrected him before the whole company over some small matter of drill. A gentleman by birth and a tyrant by practice, Thomas would say, dragging his boots off by the fire, and the man keeps ice where the rest of us were issued blood. She had believed him, the way a wife believes a husband, and a cold officer who never raised his voice made an easy enough figure to dislike across a battlefield and a grave. The voice on the landing just now had been the very same voice, and yet it had cut off the footman’s question without cruelty. She had been certain, for years, that she knew the man it belonged to.

The footman’s tread faded below, and Gavin lingered on the threshold with his hat still in his hand, not yet crossing the sill.

“You may come in, Your Grace. It is your schoolroom,” Elizabeth said. “I only borrow it by the hour.”

“Iris has torn something.” He looked at the workbox open at her side, not at her.

“Her doll. The arm came away clean at the shoulder. I am putting it back on.” She threaded the needle without looking down at it. “Did you require me, or did you climb two flights of stairs to watch a woman sew?”

He was quiet a moment. “I am told Iris has settled with you.”

“She has allowed me to sit near her without objection. I should not call that settled, precisely, but it is a beginning.”

His eyes moved, briefly, to Iris.

The child had gone still at the table, her gaze passing between the two grown people the way she watched a door she was not sure would stay shut. Elizabeth bent her head to the doll and spoke to the child rather than the Duke.

“Hold her steady for me there. That is it. If we make the stitches small and close, the arm will hold better.” The needle went in and out. “When a thing tears, we mend it where it has torn. We do not pretend the tear was never there. We only make it strong again.”

“Is that a governess’s philosophy,” Gavin said, “or a soldier’s wife’s?”

“It is a seamstress’s, Your Grace. I have been all three, and the seamstress has been by far the most use to me.” She drew the thread tight. “The other two only taught me what tears, and in what order it goes.”

“And what does a seamstress make of this house?” he asked.

“That it has been mended in a great many places, Your Grace, and that every seam of it has been hidden carefully away.” She did not glance up. “Hidden seams fail first. They take the strain where no one thinks to check them, until the day the whole garment gives at once.”

He said nothing to that, which was an answer in its own right. He crossed the sill then, at last, and came near enough to watch her hands work the calico. She kept her eyes on the needle and felt him there at the edge of the light.

“There.” She knotted the thread, bit it close, and stood the doll upright, both arms restored to their proper places. “Good as she was. Better, in the one place that counts.”

“Better in the place that counts.” He said it low, and not, she thought, of the doll at all.

She looked up, which she ought not to have done.

For the length of a single breath, neither of them moved. The fire ticked in the grate. Iris looked from one face to the other and back, and whatever she found written there settled some braced thing in her shoulders. She reached out and gathered the mended doll into her arms.

“Thank you,” Gavin said, “for her arm.” He set his hat back on his head. “I will keep you from your work no longer, Mrs Mercer.”

He was gone down the stairs before she had decided whether she was sorry to see the back of him.

She took Iris out for an airing before the last of the light failed, down past the walled kitchen garden to the stable yard, where a child might stand and watch the horses brought in without one living soul requiring her to be charming about it.

The under-steward was bent over a gelding’s near fore when they came into the yard, a square-built man of perhaps fifty with a soldier’s way of standing even at his ease. He straightened and held his look on her a beat longer than a stranger had any call to.

“You’ll be the new one, for the little lady.” He touched his forehead. “Briggs, ma’am. Samuel Briggs.”

“Elizabeth Mercer,” she said.

“Mercer.” He turned the name over the way a man turns a coin he half believes he knows. “Not Captain Mercer’s lady. Of the 43rd.”

“His widow. You knew him?”

“Knew of him, ma’am. I was Ninth myself, but the Ninth and the 43rd shared a deal of Spain between them, and a deal of mud along with it.” He ran his palm down the gelding’s leg and gentled the animal, his eyes on the work and not on her face. She knew the courtesy of it, a man giving a widow somewhere to put her own eyes. “Brave to a fault, the captain, by all they said. And sometimes the fault as much as the bravery.”

“That is the kindest honest word anyone has said of him in four years,” Elizabeth said. “Most people choose the bravery or the fault and leave the other off the account entirely.”

“I’ve buried men enough to know they come as a matched pair, ma’am. The brave lads and the foolish ones are mostly the very same lads. It is the careful ones who come home to their dinners.” He set the hoof down. “You’ll forgive me. I don’t often get the chance to say his name to a body who would care to hear it said.”

“Say it as often as it pleases you. He has been a captain in a box on my mantelpiece for four years. It will do him a world of good to be a man in a stable yard for the length of an evening.”

That won her a look, and then the ghost of a soldier’s grin, there and gone again. “You talk like the camp, ma’am, begging your pardon for it.”

“I talk like four years of the camp. It does not wash out in one laundering.”

“No, it does not. There is a deal of us walking about England talking like a country we would as soon forget.” He gentled the horse. “They tell one tale of your captain still, ma’am, if you would not take it amiss to hear it.”

“I would like nothing in the world better,” she said.

“There was a powder wagon caught fire at a crossing, the mules screaming in the traces, and every man with sense in his head pulling away from it. Your captain ran the wrong way entirely. Cut the traces, walked the mules clear with the wheels alight behind him, and came out of it with no eyebrows and the better part of one glove gone. Laughed about it for a week after, by what they say.”

“That is Thomas entire,” Elizabeth said, and had to stop a moment over it. “He could never once pass a fire without running into the heart of it. It was the best of him and the worst, and at the last I think there was not much else left over.”

“Aye.” Briggs gentled the horse, though the animal no longer needed it. “In the end, ma’am, by the little I know of it, I would say it was the whole of him and all.”

“Were you there?” she asked. “When he fell?”

“No, ma’am. The Ninth was three miles off and thankful for it that day, by what reached us after.” He kept his eyes on the gelding. “I’ll not hand you a soldier’s tale and call it a fact. I don’t know the how of it, and the men who do are thin on the ground, or gone quiet, or both at once.”

“Every man I have ever asked has gone quiet on the how of it.” She heard her own voice go careful at the edges. “Four years, and not one of them will give me more than that he was brave. A brave death is a curtain people draw across the part they would sooner not describe to a widow.”

“It is meant as a kindness, ma’am, near always. The manner of a man’s dying is rarely the piece his widow is thought to want kept by her.”

“I am not most widows, Mr Briggs. I have laid out the dead with these two hands. I can bear the how of a thing. It is the curtain I have never learnt to bear.”

He weighed her for a moment. “Then you have come to the wrong county for plain answers, and I’ll tell you that much kindly. Up here a thing gets kept. It does not get told. You’ll have marked that already, I expect.”

“I am marking it by the hour,” she said.

“You mark a great deal, ma’am, for a governess, if you’ll let me say it.”

“It is the one wage they cannot dock me, Mr Briggs. Noticing costs a widow nothing, and it has kept me alive where the pay ran out.” She let the yard fill a silence for her, and then made the sort of talk meant to look as though it went nowhere. “You would have known the other names, then. Falbrook. Renwick.”

“Major Renwick.” A shadow went over Briggs and left him plainer than before. “Aye. There is a man could stand himself between two friends and have them both served up for his breakfast. I would not have looked to hear that name spoken up in this corner of the country.”

“Is he the sort of man one hears of, in the end?” Elizabeth asked.

“He is the sort who arranges to be heard, ma’am, and arranges to be the last man talking when he is. Keep clear of him, should he ever come round this way. He collects a body’s troubles and lays them by against the day they will fetch him the best price.” Briggs straightened from the horse’s leg. “There. I have gone and frightened you, and you only stepped out for the air.”

“I have been frightened by professional men, Mr Briggs. An under-steward with a kind voice will have to try a great deal harder than that.” She let her eyes go to the house, to the lit windows, to the one room she knew was kept too warm against the night. “May I put you a question a servant ought not to be asked? You are free to decline it, and I shall think no less of you.”

“You may put it. I have a long and honourable history of saying the wrong thing, ma’am. One more will not spoil the record.”

“His Grace. The fires, the fine tea, a piano tuned for nobody, the east room with its hearth kept burning all night. And now myself, engaged inside the hour and lodged like a guest in the house. Why does the man take such care of people he is not obliged to?”

Briggs was quiet a good while, gentling a horse that had long since settled. When he spoke, he chose the words the way a careful man crosses a stream, setting his weight on one stone before he trusts the next.

“His Grace has a conscience, ma’am. That will be the whole size of it, near enough.” He laid it down gently, the way a man sets down a load he believes will ease the one beside him. “Men die under a commander. Good men, brave ones, the sort that go forward when forward is the wrong way to be going. He remembers every last one of them, and there is not a thing on earth to be done for the dead, so a man like him does it instead for the living they leave behind. Your husband was his to lose, ma’am. You are what was left. He will provision you to the end of your days and never once put a word to the why of it, for the why of it is a grave he stood over and helped to fill in.”

“That makes a great deal of sense.” Her voice came out a good deal steadier than the inside of her. The thing fit. The fine tea, the carefully tended fire, the guest chamber offered to a governess for a single night: all of it looked like the reckoning of a guilty man squaring an account he could never settle with the dead. To be one line in his ledger, marked Mercer and paid down in firewood, was a colder comfort than she had bargained on, and she took it anyway, because the cold reading was the one she could afford to keep. “More sense than anything has made since I came here.”

“It is no shame in him, ma’am, if that is where your worry lies. A conscience is the better half of a…”

Briggs stopped where he stood.

Elizabeth followed the line of his look. The Duke of Ravensmere stood at the corner of the stable wall, a dozen feet off, and he had been there long enough to see the two of them bent close over the gelding’s flank, her head near the under-steward’s.

He looked first at Briggs, then at her, then at the narrow space between them. For the half second before he mastered himself, there was nothing ducal in his face at all.

He had not been quite quick enough.