Chapter One

 

 

“You are not the nurse I requested.”

The voice came down the staircase ahead of its owner. Elinor turned from the puddle spreading at her hem and watched Nathaniel Vale, the Duke of Rothmere, descend the last six steps without hurry, in the manner of a man unused to being kept waiting and disinclined to begin now.

“I am not a nurse at all, Your Grace,” she said. “I am Miss Wrenfield. The governess.”

“I did not request a governess either.” He frowned at her.

“Then I regret to inform you that one has arrived, and that the rain came with her,” she said, unable to help the sardonic lilt in her voice. She dropped a curtsy measured to the inch, no lower, and water slid from her bonnet brim down the back of her neck as she rose.

Somewhere above them, a door rattled hard against its hinges, and a man’s voice cracked on the words: “Open this door at once.” The duke did not look up.

“That,” he said, “is Mr Crane. He has been my son’s tutor for eleven days.”

“He sounds distressed.”

“He is locked out of the nursery. My son holds the key.” He stopped an arm’s length from her, near enough that she caught the trace of gold on his coat. He looked her over as he might look a delivery made in error. “I wrote to the agency for a tutor. A man of firm discipline and unsentimental character. I was specific.”

“You were, Your Grace. I read the letter myself.” Holding his gaze cost her more than she let him see. “It described a post requiring firm discipline, unsentimental character, and the education of a boy of seven. The agency sent what the post required.”

“The agency sent a woman.”

“The agency sent a governess. Lord Theodore is seven, Your Grace, not ten and seven. He does not need Greek forced into him by a man with a cane and a grievance. He needs teaching, which is a different trade.”

“You presume a great deal about what my son needs, for a woman six minutes inside my hall.”

“I presume nothing, Your Grace. I am listening to what eleven days of the other method has produced, two floors above our heads.”

The rattling upstairs stopped. A moment later Mr Crane appeared at the head of the stairs with his coat over one arm, his hat in his hand, and his dignity left somewhere behind him on the nursery floor.

“Your Grace, I must speak plainly.”

“You generally do, Mr Crane. Loudly, as well.”

“The boy is ungovernable.” Crane’s neckcloth hung loose on one side, the linen creased where small fingers might have gripped it. “He locked the schoolroom on Tuesday. He locked it again on Thursday. Today he fed my Cicero beneath the door one page at a time, so that I might appreciate the loss properly. I have taught the sons of a bishop and two baronets, Your Grace. I have never before been besieged.”

“You had never before met my son.”

“No, Your Grace, and I shall arrange never to do so again. I resign the post.”

“You are the third man to resign it.”

“Then I am in growing company, Your Grace, and I wish the company joy of it.” Crane bowed, glanced at Elinor’s dripping bonnet, and decided against wasting a warning on a woman already doomed.

Elinor watched him leave. “Three tutors in how long, Your Grace?”

“Four months.”

“And before the tutors?”

“A nurse. She remained from his mother’s death, seven years ago, until January this year, then left to care for her own mother.” He delivered it evenly, a man reciting an account that refused to balance. “Since January, tutors. You now know the history of the post. It does not improve with the telling.”

“It rarely does.” She drew off her gloves, one finger at a time, because her hands had gone stiff with cold and she wanted them capable if she was to be interviewed. “May I ask what the agency told you of me?”

“Nothing. The agency told me a tutor was engaged and travelling. I was expecting Mr Edward Marsh.”

“Mr Marsh accepted a post in Shropshire with a family whose son had not yet driven off three predecessors. The agency judged that the situation wanted a governess and that I was equal to it. I concurred.”

“You concurred.” He let the word sit between them. “On what grounds, Miss Wrenfield? You have answered nothing of your training.”

“Music, with visiting masters. Drawing and watercolour. French and Italian, both grammar and conversation. History, geography, arithmetic, the globes, dancing, and plain and ornamental needlework. I have taught for six years in two households, and I left both with written characters, which are in my trunk, which your footman abandoned by the door when the shouting began.”

“Fetch Miss Wrenfield’s trunk.” He did not raise his voice, and the footman by the doors departed at speed. “You will forgive me if I read the characters tonight.”

“I would think less of you if you did not. The first is from a baronet’s widow in Kent, who will tell you I am exacting. The second is from a family in Bath, who will tell you I am stubborn. Both are correct, and both households parted with me, regretting it.”

“Confidence is not a qualification, Miss Wrenfield.”

“No, Your Grace. It is a symptom of them.”

“Italian,” he said. “Conversation, you claim.”

“Yes, Your Grace, though I have never been to Italy.” She replied in perfect Italian.

“Your accent is bookish.”

“My accent is honest. It has never been nearer Italy than a circulating library.”

Some flicker of interest crossed his face and was gone, upon hearing Italy named by a woman who had only read of it. “And in those six years, did you have experience with difficult boys?”

“No child is difficult without reason, Your Grace.”

“In this house, Miss Wrenfield, even the air has had difficulty with him.”

“Then the air and I will come to an understanding.”

“You are very certain of yourself.”

“I am very tired, Your Grace. The two read alike from a distance.”

“And up close?”

“Up close, I am certain of one thing only. A boy who drives off three tutors in four months is not wicked. He is working very hard at something, and no one has yet troubled to discover what.” She folded the wet gloves into her palm. “What was done about the locked door, before today?”

“Mr Crane’s predecessor had the lock taken off. My son barricaded the door with the schoolroom table instead, and the carpenter who came to remove the table required a guinea above his fee for the bruise. The lock was restored as the cheaper arrangement.”

“Good.”

His attention sharpened on her, the first wholly unguarded movement he had made. “Good, Miss Wrenfield?”

“A locked door is the only power that boy possesses in this house. Take it from him and he will find a worse one. I would leave him the key and make him willing to turn it, which is slower, and lasts.”

“And how long does your method take?”

“As long as the boy requires, Your Grace. He set the pace the first time a tutor raised a cane. I can only better it.”

“Mr Crane was instructed to be firm.”

“Mr Crane was firm with a seven-year-old in an empty wing, and the seven-year-old won. Firmness is not strength, Your Grace. Children can tell the difference long before adults learn to.”

The hall had gone very quiet around them. The footman returning with her trunk set it down with the care of a man determined to hear everything.

“You may dine and sleep here tonight,” the duke said. “The carriage will return you to the posting inn after breakfast, and I will write to the agency for a man.”

“Before you write, allow me ten minutes with Lord Theodore.”

“To what purpose?”

“He is seven, and he is holding a fortress alone at the top of your house, and the only adults sent up to him in four months have been men paid to break the siege.” She kept her voice level, the tone she used for spooked children and unpaid tradesmen alike. “Ten minutes, Your Grace. If he will not have me, I shall leave in the morning.”

He looked at her a long moment, rain ticking against the tall windows. She had heard that he weighed art dealers and frauds the same way, gave them time and let them feel the weight of it.

“You have not once apologised,” he said. “For the agency’s presumption, or your own.”

“It was not presumption, Your Grace. It was a judgment, and I believe it was correct, and apologising for correct judgments is a habit I cannot afford.”

Behind his eyes something moved and was governed before it could be named. “Ten minutes. I will take you up myself. The household has largely stopped climbing those stairs.”

The nursery stood at the end of the east corridor, behind a door of honest oak with a brass plate worn bright around the keyhole. The duke stopped six feet short of it, keeping to terms of truce he had never spoken aloud.

“He will not answer,” he said. “He has not answered a knock since February.”

“Then I shall not knock.” Elinor went to the door, gathered her wet skirts, and sat down on the corridor floor beside it with her back against the wainscot.

“Miss Wrenfield.”

“Your Grace?”

“You are sitting on the floor.”

“I am. It has been a long journey, and sieges are conducted seated.” She arranged her gloves on her knee to dry, fixed her brown curls that had come loose and spoke to the door panel. “Good evening, Lord Theodore. My name is Miss Wrenfield. I am not a tutor, I have no cane, and I have never read Cicero for pleasure, so you have already destroyed nothing I shall miss.”

Silence answered her, the particular listening silence of a child holding his breath on the other side of two inches of oak.

“I am told you hold the key,” she went on. “That seems sensible to me. A commander does not surrender the gate because someone new arrives at it. I would think less of you if you opened this door.”

The duke shifted his weight behind her.

“I am going to sit here a while, because I am tired and the floor is dry, which is more than can be said for me. You need not say anything. I shall know you are there by the quality of the quiet.”

The corridor clock carried them through a minute. Nothing moved behind the oak, and so she went on at the same unhurried pitch.

“I shall tell you what I know, so that we begin even. I know three tutors have resigned. I know you fed Mr Crane’s Cicero under the door one page at a time, in order, which tells me you have an organised mind and a sense of justice, and that Mr Crane offended both. I know your father means to send me away after breakfast. I asked him for ten minutes first, and I have spent three of them on this floor, so you may calculate for yourself how the rest is going. And I shall add one thing more. I have been locked out of better rooms than this one, Lord Theodore, and I have never yet held it against the person holding the key. So here is my proposal. If you would rather I went away, knock twice upon the floor, and I shall take myself back down the stairs and trouble you no further. If you would rather I stayed, do nothing at all. Doing nothing is the easiest yes in the world.”

The silence on the far side changed texture; the listening kind giving way to the deciding kind. Then the lock turned, one slow tooth at a time, and the door opened the width of a wary eye.

The boy was small for seven, dark-haired, with a pale, guarded face and an ink stain along one finger. He looked at her sitting on the floor in a wet travelling dress, glanced past her at his father, and retreated into the room without a word, leaving the door open behind him.

Elinor rose, shook out her skirts, and went in alone.

The room was clean and cold, the fire banked low, the shelves ranked with soldiers in painted regiments. The boy had taken the window seat with his knees drawn to his chest, watching her with the flat patience of a child who had outlasted larger adversaries.

“Thank you for the door,” she said. “I shall not touch your soldiers, your shelves, or your key. And your fire wants coal, which I shall mention to someone whose business it is, and not as a complaint against you.”

He said nothing. She had expected nothing, and so she let her eyes travel the room once, slowly, as one reads a page that matters. The table held a slate wiped clean with a defiance she could read from across the room. Beneath the bed, just past the shadow of the counterpane, lay a sheet of heavy paper with a torn edge, the tear white and recent against old engraving.

She crossed the room, knelt on the cold boards, and looked at it without reaching.

“May I?”

Silence again, though its quality changed, and she took the change for consent. She drew the sheet out with both hands, careful, as with anything that matters. It was a map of the Mediterranean, engraved and hand-coloured, torn raggedly in half so that the sea ended in a white wound. Italy survived on this piece. The other was nowhere she could see.

“This is good engraving,” she said. “Older than you. Older than me, I should think. Whoever coloured this sea mixed the paint by hand, and it has kept its temper, which is more than most of us manage.” She laid it flat on her knees and studied the coastline as though the room held nothing more urgent. “Tell me, Lord Theodore. Which do you prefer, Greece or Rome?”

The quiet stretched so long she heard the fire settle. Then, despite himself, in a voice rusty with disuse around adults, the boy said: “Greece.”

“Why Greece?”

“Rome copied everything from Greece and then said it was theirs.” His chin came up over his knees. “Everyone praises the Romans for things the Greeks did first. It is not fair.”

“It is not. Though the Romans built better roads, which the Greeks would resent hearing.”

“Roads only matter if you have somewhere worth going.”

“Spoken like a Greek. The agency undersold this post.”

“The Greeks had Thermopylae.” He unfolded by an inch, his knees coming down. “Three hundred men held the pass. They knew they would lose and they held it anyway. Do you know about Thermopylae?”

“I know what the books say. I have never stood in the pass.”

“Nobody stands in it. Nobody goes to Greece. Papa went to Rome, Naples and Florence.” His mouth shut hard on the last word, as though the sentence had escaped under a door before he could feed it through page by page.

She let it lie where it had fallen. She turned the torn map toward him instead. “Where does the tear go? I have lost half the sea.”

He slid off the window seat, crossed the floor on quiet feet, and put one ink-stained finger on the white edge where the paper ended.

“Through Corinth,” he said. “It goes through Corinth.”

“Then Corinth has suffered worse than the Romans ever did to it. Does the other half still exist?”

The finger stayed on the torn edge. His eyes came up to hers, measuring, and the answer he gave was not the one she had asked for. “Are you truly going away after breakfast?”

“That is your father’s decision, not mine. I asked him for ten minutes, and you have given me rather more than that, for which I am grateful.” She set the map carefully on the bed, smoothing the torn edge straight. “If I am still here tomorrow, I should like to hear about Thermopylae properly. From the beginning, with the geography done correctly. Most people tell it wrong.”

“Everyone tells it wrong,” said Lord Theodore Vale, with the weary authority of a scholar of seven, and for one unguarded instant something close to a smile crossed the pale face and was gone, the way a carried light passes a window and leaves the glass dark again.

“Good evening, Lord Theodore,” she said when she got up. “Keep your key.”

He did not answer, but he stood in the middle of the room and watched her go, and he did not lock the door behind her.

The Duke of Rothmere had not moved six feet down the corridor. He stood where she had left him, one hand on the chair rail, and his face had gone still, the stillness of a man who had overheard a thing he had no place to put.

Elinor closed the nursery door with care. “How long were you standing there, Your Grace?”

“Long enough.” He looked at the door, then at her, and held the look a beat past courtesy, as one looks at a problem that had declined to behave like the ones before it. “He said Greece.”

“He said a good deal more than Greece.”

“Corinth.” He said the name as though testing whether it would answer him as well. “What did you do, Miss Wrenfield? Word for word. What did you say to him?”

“I asked him a question, Your Grace, I listened to the answer, and I declined to be astonished that he had one.”

“That is not a method.”

“It is the whole method. There is no trick in it for the next tutor to learn.”

“He has not answered a direct question from any adult in this house since February.” His voice stayed level, and hidden underneath ran something she chose not to name yet. “His nurse, his tutors, his own father. Silence, or the door. Ten minutes, and he gave you Corinth.”

“Then perhaps, Your Grace, no one since February has asked him a question he wanted to answer.”

“You will find this is not a warm house, Miss Wrenfield.”

“I did not come for warmth, Your Grace. I came for the post.”

The corridor clock counted four seconds of rain against the window glass.

“Mrs Garnett will show you to a room and find you a dry gown,” he said. “Unpack your trunk, Miss Wrenfield. You will stay the month.”

He was gone down the corridor before she could curtsy.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“His Grace does not enter the nursery.”

Mrs Garnett delivered it on the second-floor landing, in the tone of a woman reciting the eleventh commandment, and continued up the stairs without waiting to see how it landed.

“Never, Mrs Garnett?”

“Formally, at quarter-day, to review Lord Theodore’s progress. Otherwise, the east wing is his lordship’s, and the rest of the house is His Grace’s, and the two do not mix any more than the kitchens mix with the chapel.”

“Quarter-day,” Elinor said. “He reviews the boy’s progress, how?”

“In the steward’s room. Lord Theodore is brought down, recites what he has learnt, and is returned. A quarter of an hour, by the clock.”

“Brought down and returned. Like the rents.”

“You will keep observations of that kind behind your teeth, Miss Wrenfield, where they may yet do you some good.” The housekeeper replied, but did not say the observation was wrong.

“And the boy comes down for dinner?”

“His Grace dines alone.” The housekeeper’s chatelaine kept time against her hip, a small steady music of keys. “Lord Theodore takes his meals in the nursery. You will take yours there as well, or in your room, as you prefer.”

“At seven, I dined with my father every evening. He was absent-minded and frequently in debt, but he was at the table.”

“Then you were fortunate in your table, Miss Wrenfield, whatever it cost.” Mrs Garnett stopped at the head of the corridor and faced her. “I shall say this once, because you seem a sensible woman and because three tutors did not trouble to learn it. This is a good house. It is not a happy one, and the two are not the same, but the difference is not your business to mend. Your business is the boy.”

“The boy is the difference, Mrs Garnett.”

The housekeeper’s mouth moved, something that on a less disciplined face might have become agreement. “These doors are the duchess’s rooms. They have been closed these seven years and they stay closed. The maids dust quarterly under my eye. You will have no occasion to enter, and you will not make one.”

“I understand.”

“The gallery is open to you, the library with His Grace’s leave, the gardens at any hour Lord Theodore is fit to be out in them.” She moved on, keys swinging. “Breakfast in the nursery at eight. Lessons at nine. His Grace expects a written account of progress each Friday, delivered to the steward’s room. He will not ask you for it in person.”

“Does His Grace ask anyone for anything in person?”

“He asks the land steward, the bailiff, and Parliament, in that order.”

“And Lord Theodore? Who has charge of him when lessons are done?”

“Sarah, the nursery maid. She is eighteen, fond of him, and lets him keep beetles in a soup dish, which I have arranged not to know about. The Cook sends up gingerbread on Sundays and calls it kitchen economy. Davies cleans his boots twice when once would serve.”

“Then he is loved.”

“He is pitied, Miss Wrenfield, which wears the same apron and does different work. The household is fond of him in the way a household may be. Fondness below stairs is no substitute for notice above them.”

“And His Grace?”

“His Grace provides. There is no bill for that child’s comfort left unpaid, and no hour of his company spent.” The keys went silent under her hand. “I have now said more than I intended twice in one morning, which is your doing, and it will not become a habit.”

They had come down again into the hall, where the morning post lay on a silver tray. Mrs Garnett’s eye caught on the topmost letter and stopped, and her face shut like a ledger.

“Bad news?” Elinor asked.

“News.” The housekeeper set the letter apart from the rest, face up, with two fingers. The hand on the direction was elegant and certain of itself. “Lady Cassandra Ridgeway writes to announce herself for a visit. A connection of the late duchess’s family. A distant cousin, as she claims.”

“That will be pleasant for His Grace. Company. Is her ladyship expected to stay long?”

“Her ladyship’s visits begin with a fixed end and acquire extensions.” Mrs Garnett restored the tray to perfect order, and her voice returned to perfect service. “She notices everything. You will want the schoolroom in good order, Miss Wrenfield, the boy’s collar clean, and your accounts exact. She behaves as if she is the lady of the house. That is all I shall say, and I have already said more of it than I intended.”

The schoolroom adjoined the nursery. It was a long room with good northern light, a globe with the Pacific rubbed pale, and a shelf of primers arranged by a hand that had wanted them used. Theo was at the table when she came in at nine, sitting very straight, with the torn map squared in front of him like a wall he meant to hold.

“You stayed,” he said.

“I said I would, if your father permitted. He permitted.”

“Sarah said you would not. She said governesses never come back after they have seen the house.”

“Then Sarah is now wrong, which will be excellent for her character.” She hung her shawl on the peg by the door. “We shall begin with arithmetic, because it is the worst thing first, and then geography, because you are owed something for surviving the arithmetic.”

“Mr Crane began with Latin.”

“Mr Crane is already ahead of us, and we are not. Take out your slate.”

He took out his slate. For half an hour she set him sums dressed as supply problems, three hundred men holding a pass on so many loaves a day, and he worked them with his tongue between his teeth and an appetite he tried to disguise as obedience.

“If the loaves run out on the fourth day,” he said, “the Persians win.”

“Then check your subtraction, because Greece is depending on it.”

He checked his subtraction. He found the error himself and scrubbed it out with his sleeve before she could offer the cloth, and when she told him it was right, he looked at the answer longer than the answer required.

“Mr Crane said I was idle.”

“Mr Crane confused idle with unwilling. A boy who feeds Cicero under a door page by page, in order, is not idle. He is thorough.” She crossed to the window to open it a crack, and stopped. “There is a soup dish on your sill, Lord Theodore, with holes punched in the cover.”

He had gone rigid in his chair. “Sarah lets me. It is only Hector. He eats bark.”

“Hector.” She lifted the cover an inch. A stag beetle the size of her thumb considered her from a bed of leaves with an air of injured dignity. “A good name. Troy could have used him. He stays, on the condition that he attends geography quietly and does not eat the maps.”

“Mr Crane said livestock had no place in a schoolroom.”

“Mr Crane no longer has a place in this schoolroom, and Hector is still here, which should tell you how the campaign ended.” She turned the globe until the boot of Italy came round under the window light. “Geography. Show me Rome.”

His finger went to it at once, certain as a compass. “Have you seen it?”

“Rome?”

“You said you had never stood in the pass at Thermopylae. Have you seen Rome?”

“No.” She said it plainly, because he would smell anything less. “I have never been out of England. I have seen Kent, Bath, three counties between, and a great many schoolrooms.”

She had braced for contempt. What he gave her was nearer to fellowship, wary and surprised by itself. “Then how do you know things? About the roads and the engraving and how the sea is coloured?”

“From books, letters and maps. Other people’s eyes, borrowed honestly.” She set her fingertip beside his on the little engraved city. “Some places become familiar in imagination, Lord Theodore. I have read Rome so long that I should know my way without asking directions. Whether the real city would forgive me my confidence is another matter.”

“If you could go truly,” he said, watching her finger on the engraved city, “where would you go first?”

“Rome first. Then Greece. Then I should be ruined for England entirely and have to be shipped home in disgrace and live on my memories like an old soldier.”

“You could stand in the pass.”

“I could. Somebody ought to, who would come back and tell it correctly.”

“Papa has seen it.” The same escape under the door, and this time he did not slam his mouth shut after it. He watched her instead, testing what she would do with the offering.

“Then your father knows things I do not, and that is useful, because between us we shall keep you accurate.” She gave the globe a quarter turn. “Now. The Colosseum. Tell me what you know, and I shall tell you where the books disagree.”

“It held fifty thousand men. Mr Crane said eighty. The green book in the library says they flooded it for sea battles, real ships, with real prisoners to row them, and Mr Crane said that was a fable for the credulous, and he took the green book away.” The grievance came out level, itemized, a clerk presenting evidence. “Did they flood it? Truly?”

“The accounts say it was done, early on, before the cellars were built under the floor. How they managed the water is the part the books argue about, and I have never read a settled answer.”

“Then nobody knows.”

“Somebody might,” Elinor said, and caught the small report of the corridor floor a half-second before she chose to go on regardless. “Somebody who has stood in it.”

The Duke of Rothmere stood in the doorway. She had not heard him climb, only that last betraying board, and she would wonder afterwards how long he had been there before the house gave him up. Theo had gone still, a soldier caught between two commanders.

“Your Grace.” She rose. “You find us at the Colosseum. Lord Theodore wishes to know whether the sea battles are fact or fable, and the books disagree, but you have stood in the place. Will you settle it?”

For a moment she thought he would simply withdraw. He came one step inside the door instead, and the schoolroom rearranged itself around him without anyone moving.

“The naumachiae are attested,” he said. “Flooding the arena was possible in the earliest days, before Domitian built the hypogeum, the substructures, beneath the floor. After that it could not hold water and the sea battles were staged elsewhere. The structure seats fifty thousand. Mr Crane’s eighty included standing room and exaggeration.” He delivered it to the globe, to the window, to the air above his son’s head. “The travertine is pitted where the bronze clamps were mined out of the stone in later centuries. That is the part the engravings never show.”

It was, word for word, a better answer than any book in the house could have given, and he handed it over flat, the way he might read out a bill of lading. Theo had leaned forward after hearing the word “hypogeum”. At the word “travertine” the next question was already forming. His mouth opened on “Papa, did you…”, but the duke consulted his watch.

“You have what you need for the lesson,” he said. “Carry on, Miss Wrenfield.”

He was gone before the question could launch. Theo looked at the empty doorway, then down at the torn map, and closed his mouth on the unasked question with a care that was worse than tears.

“He stood in it,” the boy said finally. “He never says that part.”

“He said it today.”

“He said it to the window.” Theo squared the map again, a quarter-inch correction it did not need. “Will you put it in the Friday paper? That I made him come in and the lesson was interrupted?”

“You made nothing happen, and nothing was interrupted.”

“Mr Crane wrote things on Fridays. He read them to me first and said it was honesty.”

“Then I shall tell you what I intend to write, and you may audit it: A boy who found his own error in subtraction and corrected it unprompted, which is rarer in grown men than you would credit. A boy who keeps his evidence in order, his maps squared, and his beetle fed.”

He turned that over with visible suspicion, looking for the trap in it. “Papa reads them?”

“I am told he does.”

“He never says.” He drew the slate back toward him. “May we do more supply problems?”

They did more supply problems. He worked them in silence, and got every one right, and did not look at the answers afterwards at all. At noon she set the lesson for the morning, which was French, and he objected that Mr Crane had called French a language for dancing masters.

“Mr Crane lost a war with a seven-year-old,” Elinor said, gathering the slates. “We do not take strategy from him. Half of what I know of Rome came to me through Frenchmen who troubled to go and look at it. You will have French, and Hector will have bark, and I will have your collar clean by nine, because we are to be inspected by a ladyship and we shall give her nothing to notice.”

 

***

 

She found the duke in the long gallery an hour later, where Mrs Garnett had said he walked at midday when the weather kept him in. He heard her coming but did not turn from the window.

“Miss Wrenfield. The schoolroom is two floors up.”

“Lord Theodore is having lunch, Your Grace, and I am told I have the gallery.” She stopped at a distance the most exacting chaperone could have certified.

“You have something to say. Say it and return to your post.”

“Thank you for the Colosseum.”

“You contrived it so that refusal would have cost more than the answer. I recognise the manoeuvre. I have used it in committee.”

“And yet you answered fully. The hypogeum, the clamps, the travertine. He will remember every word of it a year from now. I would stake my wages.”

“Then the lesson succeeded, and this conversation is a redundancy.”

“The lesson failed, Your Grace.” She said it quietly, and watched his reflection in the window glass give up the pretence of looking at the park. “The facts succeeded. The lesson failed. He did not want the seating capacity of the Colosseum. He wanted his father to stand in the same room with him for more than two minutes. You gave a cold answer to the window and consulted your watch, and he watched you do it the way one watches a coach pull away without him aboard.”

“My son does not lack for anything, Miss Wrenfield. Masters, books, the best instruments money commands.”

“He is provisioned, Your Grace. Like the pass.” She let the word find its mark. “Provisioned, and holding it alone, and counting the loaves.”

“You have been in this house one day.”

“And he has been in it seven years.”

“Seven years in which he has wanted for nothing.”

“He wants for one thing, Your Grace, and it is the only thing in this house that cannot be had by asking Mrs Garnett for it.”

The duke turned from the window. The midday light was behind him, casting his face in shadow.

“You were engaged to teach my son, Miss Wrenfield. Geography. Arithmetic. French, in due course, and whatever else the post requires.” His voice stayed level, and the level was the warning. “You will not instruct me on fatherhood.”

“Then do not make it so easy, Your Grace.”

The silence went one breath past safety. He left without answering, down the full length of the gallery, and his stride was a fraction too quick for a man who believed he had won.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“There is a locked room at the end of the south passage.”

Nathaniel laid his quill pen across the drainage accounts and did not otherwise move. Miss Wrenfield stood in the doorway of his study, where no governess had been invited and past which Hartnoll, his steward, had plainly failed to bar her. Hands folded, chin level, dressed neatly for the work of being difficult.

“Miss Wrenfield. The household conducts its business with me through Mrs Garnett or the steward. You were told as much yesterday.”

“I was. I have come anyway, because this cannot be written in a Friday paper and read at your leisure, and because Mrs Garnett would have refused to carry it, to spare us both.” She came no further than the threshold.

“You might have waited until I sent for you.”

“You will not send for me, Your Grace. I am told you conduct the boy’s whole education without once being in the same room as the person conducting it. It is both efficient and poor, and I have decided not to honour it in a matter of this importance. Lord Theodore took me through the south passage this afternoon. He stopped at a locked door and would not put his hand to it. He told me it was called the dead room. He has never been inside it. He knows only the name, and that you keep the key on your person, which is the kind of thing a watchful child learns about a father he is not permitted to follow.”

The name went in under his ribs and lodged there. He kept his hand flat on the blotter, where it would tell her nothing.

“That room is locked for a reason.”

“I do not doubt it. I should like to know the reason, and then I should like to ask you to set it aside for one hour a week.”

“You overreach.”

“Frequently. It is the only direction left to a woman in my position.” She held his eyes without apology, as she held most things. “There is a room in this house full of the things your son most wants to understand, and it has a name in his mouth that no seven-year-old should have. Dead room. He learned that word here, Your Grace, in the place that should have taught him living ones.”

Nathaniel rose, because remaining seated had begun to feel like a concession. “Tell me what is in that room, Miss Wrenfield, since you appear to have decided.”

“I have not opened it. I am not in the habit of opening doors I am forbidden, though I am rather in the habit of resenting them.” The smallest pause, there and gone. “I am told it holds what you brought home from the Continent. Maps. Coins. Pictures. The things a man gathers when he has been somewhere I will never go.”

“It holds what I brought home, and it is none of your concern, and it will remain shut.”

“Why?”

“Because I shut it.”

“Yes.” She did not flinch from it, she did not soften it, and she did not glance back towards the door behind her. “Shut as the rest of it is shut. The east wing, the duchess’s rooms, the man at the head of the table. The only person in this house left rattling the handles is seven years old and frightened of his own name.”

The clock on the mantel, eleven minutes fast and proud of it, filled the room with its error. He let it. A man learned, in committee, that the one who spoke next had usually lost.

She spoke next, and had not lost. “He is the future Duke of Rothmere, Your Grace. He will hold this title, these acres and that collection whether he understands them or runs from them. You may raise a boy who walks into his inheritance, or one who has been taught to call the best of it a tomb. There is no third room he can be put in.”

“You know nothing of inheritance.”

“I know what it is to be surrounded by doors one is not permitted to open.” It came out level, an account stated and closed, with no self-pity in it. “My father owned a great many books and could not keep the rain off them. I learned five languages in rooms where I was not permitted to sit. So, I grant that I know nothing of dukedoms, Your Grace. I am an authority on the other matter.”

“You said you resented the doors.”

“I said I was in the habit of resenting them. I did not say I indulged it. Resentment is a luxury, Your Grace, and I have never been able to afford the upkeep.” She held the words steady. “A governess who resents may sulk, and one who sulks is dismissed, and a dismissed governess does not eat. So, I learned to want things and leave the resentment off them, which is a colder skill and travels better.”

“You are describing my son.”

“I am describing everyone in this house who is not you.”

“You have a low opinion of my house.”

“I have a high opinion of your house and a worried one about the people in it. They are not the same opinion, Your Grace, though they are often mistaken for one another.”

He had crossed Europe. He had outwaited an art dealer in Florence over a forged Caravaggio until the man wept. He had sat in committee rooms while better-born men confused volume with argument and had never once been argued into a position he had not chosen. He turned from the window because he could not, this time, find the high ground.

“What did the boy do, at the door? You have told me what he called it. You have not told me what he did.”

She weighed how much of it he could be handed at once. “He put his hands behind his back. A child of seven, in front of a shut door, locking his own hands behind him so that no one could accuse him of having touched it.”

“That is a small thing.”

“It is the smallest thing in the world, Your Grace, and it told me his whole education. He has decided that the wanting is the offence. Not the touching. The wanting.” Her voice did not rise. “A child will build a lesson out of an absence faster than out of a blow, and the lesson he has built is that he must not want what grief has locked away. So, he stands at your door at seven years old with his hands behind his back, disciplining himself on your behalf, and he calls it the dead room because no one has given him a living word to put there instead.”

He had nothing to set against it. The clock counted his silence and gained another minute on the truth.

“What, precisely, are you asking for?”

“Not the room. I am not asking you to throw it open and let a child loose among the things you have locked inside.” She unfolded her hands. “A map. A coin. Perhaps one picture. Enough to make his father real to him.”

“I am real enough.”

“Not to him.”

It was said without cruelty, which was how it cut. He had given the boy a duke. The boy had wanted a man who had stood in the Colosseum, and the duke had answered to the window and looked at his watch, and somewhere two floors up a child had set the failure away with the seating capacity and the missing clamps, in that same careful order.

“You said a picture.”

“I said a map and a coin. The pictures stay on the wall in the dark, where they can do no further harm.”

“One map,” Nathaniel said. “One coin. You will treat them as the property of the estate, which they are, and you will return them to me each Friday with your account.”

“An experiment, then.”

“An experiment. If the boy improves, we continue it. If he does not, the room is shut and the matter ends, and you will not raise it again.”

“Agreed.” She inclined her head. “One hour each week. I will choose neither item without you, and I will return both to you each Friday, in person, since you will not come up to fetch them.”

“In person.”

“You object to the steward’s room. Then I will bring them to wherever you keep the drainage accounts, and you will count them in front of me, and we will both put our names to it that the estate has lost nothing to a child’s education.”

“You have arranged my Fridays for me, Miss Wrenfield.”

“I have arranged one quarter-hour of them. The rest you may keep entire.” She inclined her head. “Now, since neither of us trusts the other to choose the map, shall we go together?”

The south passage held the cold the rest of the house had been built to keep out. Nathaniel took the key from the ring at his waist, and stood before the door he had not opened since the day his wife was buried.

“You need not come in,” he said. “I can bring the items out to you.”

“I should rather see what I am refusing him the rest of, Your Grace. It will make me more accurate when I argue for the next coin.”

The lock gave with the reluctance of long disuse. He pushed the door, and the closed-up breath of the room came out to meet them.

Sheets lay over the shapes like snow over furniture. Shuttered windows held the afternoon out. Along the far wall the framed engravings hung in their ranks, with the columns counted off in his own younger hand on the mount beneath. A long table carried the cabinets of coins under glass gone grey with dust. In the corner, swathed and roped, the fragment he had argued a Neapolitan out of and never been able to look at since.

She stood still in the doorway and read the room as she read everything; slowly, top to bottom. She did not exclaim. He had braced for exclaiming, but her silence was worse; the quiet of a woman taking an exact inventory of how much had been buried alive in here.

“You counted the columns,” she said.

“I was four-and-twenty and certain the world could be got right if one only counted carefully enough.”

“And was it?”

“No.” He went to the coin cabinet, lifted the dust sheet and folded it, because his hands wanted an occupation. “I counted thirty-six columns at Paestum and corrected a guidebook in the margin and believed I had improved the world. I came home with crates of improvement, and a wife who asked me what I had seen, and found I could only give her the measurements.”

“And the rest?”

“There was no rest. That was rather the discovery.” He set the sheet aside. “Choose your coin, Miss Wrenfield. The Vespasian, for the Colosseum. He will like that the man who built it is here in his hand.”

He drew it from the tray and held it out on his open palm.

She reached for it. Her fingers came down toward the worn bronze and his palm tipped up to meet them, and for the space of a held breath their hands shared the same small column of cold air above the coin. Her warmth crossed the gap and stopped there. He found he knew, to the inch, the distance at which not touching stops being an accident.

Neither of them closed it.

She took the coin by its edge, careful of his skin, and he drew his hand back to his side. The thing went unremarked because remarking on it would have made it true.

She turned the bronze to what light the shutters allowed. “He looks tired.”

“He had recently won a civil war and inherited an empire that had burned. He was entitled to look tired.”

“Theo will ask whether he was a good emperor.”

“Tell him the man built something that outlasted everyone who laughed at him, and let the boy work out for himself what good is supposed to mean.”

“And the map?” Her voice was steady.

“The one he tore is the western Mediterranean. I have its match.” He lifted a portfolio, turned the leaves, and slid free a hand-coloured chart of the same sea. It was whole, the coastline running unbroken through Corinth and on. “He may have this, and he may mend the torn one against it, if he is careful. A boy who feeds Cicero under a door in order can be trusted to mend a map.”

She moved along the wall to the framed ranks. “The Bay of Naples. You drew the smoke on the mountain yourself.”

“Vesuvius obliged me by smoking the week I was there. I thought it a great piece of luck at four-and-twenty. I have since revised my notion of luck.”

“And the Forum, with the cattle in it.”

“They pastured cows among the emperors. The English visitors found it a disgrace. I found it the one honest thing in Rome, the present grazing on the past without troubling to ask its leave.” He turned from the wall. “You are doing it again, Miss Wrenfield.”

“Doing what?”

“Asking me small questions to keep me in the room.”

“Is it working?”

He did not answer that.

“And that, in the corner. The shape under the rope.”

“Stays roped.”

“I only asked its name.”

“It does not have one I use.” He did not look at it. “You have a coin and a map. This is not in the treaty. Do not negotiate for ground you have already taken.”

“You were listening, in the schoolroom. Longer than two minutes.”

“Take your spoils, Miss Wrenfield, before I reconsider the wisdom of the campaign.”

She gathered the coin and the rolled map against her, and at the door she stopped, and he understood she was going to say one more thing, because she always had one more thing, and he discovered he was waiting for it.

“Thank you,” she said. “Not for the coin. For coming in yourself. You did not have to stand in this room to hand me a map. Theo will ask me what to call it now,” she said. “And I should not like to give him another wrong word and have it stick the way the last one did.”

“It is the Tour room. It was always the Tour room. Someone else gave it the other name, and it was not him, and it was not you.”

He knew she had heard the rest of that sentence, but she had the grace to leave it unspoken.

Then she was gone up the cold passage, her step quick and even, and he was alone in the room with the door open behind him for the first time in seven years.

He folded the dust sheet again, though it did not need folding. The cold came up through the floor and into him as it always had. She had named it all to his face in daylight: the closed door, the closed wing, the man shut away behind them, and had not once looked away. No one had said any of it aloud to him since the day it was sealed. He stood among the covered shapes and could not tell whether he wanted her to leave or wanted her there to speak the truth as she did.