Chapter One

 

 

“I have found her, Your Grace,” said Nettlefold, from the doorway, with the rain still running off him. “Both of them. And you had better have the rest from me than from your solicitors.”

Hugh put down his pen so carefully that the nib bent against the blotter. In four years, his secretary had never once come through a door without knocking. He had never arrived three days early. Nor, in those four years, had he stood on the estate-office boards with mud dried up the hem of his coat, breathing like one who had ridden the last four miles at a pace no sensible person keeps in November.

“Sit down.”

“I would rather stand, Your Grace.”

“Then stand, start from the beginning, and don’t spare me any part of it.”

Nettlefold set his case on the desk. “Lady Beatrix Ranscombe is alive and she is well. She is at Bath, in a street below Walcot, in two rooms over a chandler’s shop. Miss Frayne has had the whole care of her since the duchess died.”

“Katherine’s companion.”

“Miss Wilhelmina Frayne. Nine and twenty. She was with your sister-in-law eight years, from before the marriage, and she has kept your niece for nearly two more upon what she earns by taking in fine sewing.”

The fire cracked. Beyond the window the rain came across the park in a grey sheet, and a groom was leading Nettlefold’s horse away with its head down.

Sewing. Hugh turned the word over and could make nothing of it that did not shame him.

“Two years, in one city, under a name we might have guessed at. How did the search miss them?”

“Because no one in Bath has been asking after a Miss Frayne,” Nettlefold said it flatly, as a man laid down a card that he disliked holding. “The landlord took her for a widow and calls her Mrs Frayne, and she has let it stand. The child is Beatrix Frayne in that street, and every man you have paid these two years has been asking after a Lady Beatrix Ranscombe of seven years old, and there is no such person in the city.”

“Then somebody ought to have given them the name.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Who had it?”

“Her Ladyship, I imagine.” Nettlefold did not shift his feet. “And you.”

The clock above the bookcase went on filling the silence with its own small business, and Hugh discovered that he had no answer whatsoever. A notice of Katherine’s burial had reached the London office through the solicitor who had once acted for her mother, and it named the parish, but not the rooms to which she had moved in her last illness. Hugh had put the whole matter into the hands of Vale and Henshaw that week. Reports had been asked for, read, paid for, and asked for again. Not once in two years did he carry the question upstairs to his aunt’s fire. To carry it upstairs would have meant sitting in a room with a person who loved Kit, saying aloud that Kit’s wife was dead, Kit’s daughter was in England, and that he had no notion where.

“Go on,” he said, and it came out rougher than he intended, and Nettlefold went on as though it had not.

“I didn’t find them by searching. In August, you gave me the whole correspondence of the estate to read. On Thursday, at the London office, I came to a bundle marked as declined.” He laid a folded sheet upon the desk.

“That is your niece’s maintenance, Your Grace. Refused in March by a junior clerk.”

Hugh opened it. The paper was inexpensive and frayed along the folds. The handwriting was meticulous to a fault, done with a painstaking effort, as if the writer anticipated judgement before anyone had even read it.

Gentlemen,

I understand that you conduct the affairs of His Grace the Duke of Ellersden, and I write concerning his niece, Beatrix Ranscombe, only child of the late Duke and Duchess of Ellersden.

Her Grace died in January of last year, and her daughter has remained in my care since. I was companion to Her Grace for eight years and attended her in her last illness. There is no near relation upon her mother’s side to whom I can apply.

I can supply the particulars of the child’s baptism and her mother’s burial, and I hold letters in Her Grace’s hand by which my account may be established. I am unwilling to trust the originals to the post, as they are all the child possesses of that kind.

My means are nearly exhausted. I ask whether provision might be made for Beatrix’s maintenance while she remains with me. If the request should be made in some other manner, I should be obliged for your directions.

I remain, your obedient servant,

Wilhelmina Frayne

Across the foot of it, in a broad office hand, a clerk had written Declined, and under that: No substantiation enclosed. Hugh read it a second time. His hand had gone flat on the desk beside the paper, and he took it back and put it in his lap.

“She offers the baptism and Katherine’s letters in the third paragraph. What further substantiation was wanted?”

“None was asked for, Your Grace. It went in among the applications for relief because they believed the letter was false, as no girl under the name Ranscombe had been found during the search.”

“And the answer?”

Nettlefold produced a printed form with her name and the date entered in the blanks. Vale and Henshaw presented their compliments. A claim of this nature could not be entertained without satisfactory evidence, and no further correspondence was invited.

There was nothing on the back of it. Hugh turned it over expecting an apology. Absurd, and he knew it was absurd, but he turned it over all the same.

“They forbade her to write again?”

“They did.”

“The date?”

“The fourteenth of March. Hers came in on the eleventh.” Nettlefold hesitated for the first time that morning. “Between March and October, the same office charged you for nine journeys in the west country. The accounts are in the case.”

Hugh set the form down beside the letter and squared the two of them to the edge of the ledger, and the squaring did nothing at all for his temper. “Her direction is on it.”

“It is, Your Grace.”

“Street and number. And they sent a man to Bristol instead.”

“The applications and the search accounts were kept by different clerks. Neither saw the other’s papers.”

“They were under one roof, Nettlefold.”

“Indeed, Your Grace.”

“Curse them.” He said it quietly. Shouting would have been easier to sit through, and Nettlefold had the sense to write nothing down. “Every report they have sent me since March is to be laid beside that date. All of it. I want to see what I was being told in April while that was sitting in their office.”

“I began it on Thursday night, Your Grace, and I left Mr Henshaw’s orders to go down to Bath at once and wait there for your express.”

“Of course you did.”

There was a thing in the letter that Hugh had noticed at the first reading and had been keeping at arm’s length ever since, and it came back at him now with the whole force it had been saving up. She asked for the child’s keep. For herself she asked nothing. Not a shilling. No character, and no situation asked for. And when a clerk in London told her not to write again, she went back to her needle and fed his brother’s daughter out of it for eight months more.

What sort of woman did that? A woman with the whole business in her hands, and every means of pressing it, and she had written one polite letter and gone quiet.

“Nettlefold.”

“Your Grace.”

“What does she want?”

His secretary understood the question. A mercy, since Hugh could not have explained it if he had been asked to.

“Nothing for herself, Your Grace. I read the letter four times looking for it. I didn’t believe it either.”

Hugh got up, went to the hearth, and came back without having decided what he meant to do there. A clean page waited in the notebook. “My niece is to be brought here. Both of them, quickly, and comfortably, and I want every part of it done properly.” He put his hand on the back of his chair. “A travelling carriage. They stop before dark every night. You write ahead yourself for good rooms and fires. If the weather turns, they take another day, and the coachman is paid for it. Ask Mrs Threadgill about Mrs Bell’s sister in Bath. A respectable woman to go with them on the road.”

“Miss Frayne may not wish to come.”

“Then provide for it.”

“In what capacity, Your Grace?”

“We shall settle that when she is here.”

He heard how thin that sounded even as he said it, and Nettlefold wrote it down without expression, and went on.

“The nursery, Your Grace?”

“Opened and aired, and the schoolroom window mended before they come. It used to let in the rain.”

“Her Ladyship keeps the linen inventory in the schoolroom.”

“Then she can count sheets elsewhere. The physician from Hartside, after they arrive, and let him be told plainly that it is a precaution. I will not have the child frightened on her first day here.” Hugh’s eye went back to the cheap paper on the desk. “Every debt in that street is paid. Ask Miss Frayne for an account of what she has spent upon my niece these two years, and tell her she is to be repaid.”

“She may have kept no account.”

“Then a reasonable estimate.”

“Reasonable to whom, Your Grace?”

“To her.” Hugh heard his own voice go up. “To her, confound it, Nettlefold, and not to me.”

The pencil went on across the page without a check, and after a moment Hugh sat down again. “That wasn’t aimed at you.”

“No, Your Grace.”

“It was, and I withdraw it.”

“Thank you, Your Grace.” Nettlefold turned a page. “There is one further matter in my book. Mr Bourne has asked again about the tenants’ dinner in the long barn. He asked in October and had no answer.”

“Then that is enough of an answer.”

“He believes so, but he is too well-mannered to say it.” The pencil hovered. “If it is to be held at all, there is an ox to be spoken for before the month is out, and the men have begun talking in the yard.”

Forty-six days. Hugh had known the number before he was properly awake, the way men knew the weather through a shuttered window, and he knew it every morning since the first of the month.

“Tell him I have it under consideration.”

“That is what I told him in October.”

“Then tell him again, and in your own words. Yours are better received than mine.”

“They generally are, Your Grace. I have less to lose by them.”

When the door had shut, Hugh sat for a while with the two papers side by side, hers and his own house’s, and made himself read the sentence about her means a third time. My means are nearly exhausted. He knew what he owed and what he was far from, and had known it for four years.

Katherine had stood up at Kit’s funeral, before the assembled county, with both hands shaking on the rail of the pew, and said that the new Duke of Ellersden killed her husband. She said it to a fellow of thirty who had been the Duke of Ellersden for eleven days, standing in the front pew of his brother’s church, in his brother’s place, wearing his brother’s black.

She was perfectly understood. There was not one person in that building who did not know precisely what she meant, and she never retracted it, not for a moment. Katherine refused every draft and every letter that came out of this house afterwards and left the county with her daughter before spring. Hugh had not pressed her because a man who agreed with the verdict did not appeal against it.

It had been an arrangement he could live inside.

Then Katherine died in January of last year. The arrangement turned into a child in two rooms above a shop, a woman with no claim upon her going without dinner to feed her, and a form with a line ruled through the place where a sum should have stood.

He folded the letter along its worn creases and put it into the inner pocket of his coat. The west corridor was cold. He went along it for the walk and not to reach any particular room, and stopped, as he always stopped, at the doors of the long drawing room.

The room had stood shut since the Christmas Kit died. It had the smell shut rooms get, dry plaster and old paper with a thread of sweetness underneath, and the covers stood about in there like a company waiting to be told what to do. The grate was swept clean and left empty.

Above the hall, iron hooks had been driven into the beams, four to each cross member, but there had been nothing on any of them for four winters. Eight and twenty years ago there had been a bough on the middle one with more ribbon than greenery by half. Kit had gone round the whole household in one wet afternoon and intimidated every servant in the place out of a length of it. Their mother laughed at the result until she had to sit down on the fender and be fanned.

Hugh shut the door on the room and went to find his housekeeper. Mrs Threadgill was in the linen room with every cupboard standing open, and she came out into the passage before he reached the door. She always knew who was in her corridor, and generally why.

“Lady Beatrix has been found,” he said. “She is at Bath, and she will be here within the week, along with the lady who has cared for her. Miss Frayne. Nettlefold has orders to give you whatever you ask for.”

The folded sheet in Mrs Threadgill’s hands stopped where it was. “How old is she now, Your Grace?”

“Seven.”

“Seven.” She stood with the linen against her and did the arithmetic he had done in the office that morning, and arrived where he had arrived. “Then I shall want the sweep before Saturday. I won’t put a child under a cold flue, and that chimney hasn’t been drawn since the year before last.”

“Take what you need and don’t come to me about the cost of any of it.”

“I had assumed as much.” She began folding the sheet down small, and her hands were not entirely steady, but she went on folding until they were. “What else, Your Grace?”

“You tell me.”

“A girl for the nursery. Nan Cotterill is sixteen, and there are three young brothers at home, so she isn’t ignorant of children. She is the only one who can be spared. Boots, gowns, a slate, and whatever else occurs to me at three in the morning.” She counted none of it on her fingers, having never in her life needed to. “And a cow.”

“A cow?”

“Children drink milk, Your Grace, and plenty of it when they have been going short. The little roan goes to market on Friday, and I should like her kept back, but Mr Bourne will tell me it is irregular.”

“Then tell Bourne the cow stays.”

“I shall tell him that I said the cow stays.” Mrs Threadgill set the sheet upon the pile and squared it. “It saves everybody a deal of trouble later, when he discovers you agree with me.”

“Put Nan Cotterill’s wage up,” Hugh said, “and tell her plainly she isn’t on trial. Otherwise she will spend the whole winter waiting to be sent back to the scullery, and a child of seven reads that in a face within a day.”

The housekeeper’s hands paused over the linen. “Very good, Your Grace.”

“What?”

“Nothing that won’t keep.” She turned towards a maid. “Ellen. Fetch the blankets from the cedar press, and air them at the schoolroom fire, and mind the moth.”

 

***

 

He found his aunt in the yellow room with her household book open and a finger between the pages, and she had the news out of him before he had properly reached the fire.

“Thank Heavens.” Lady Sibyl sat down rather suddenly, and at sixty she never did that. “Where?”

“Bath. She has been there the whole time, under the name of Frayne.”

“Frayne?” His aunt’s head came up. “Katherine’s Miss Frayne?”

“You remember her.”

“Of course I remember her. She was at the wedding.” Sibyl shut the book upon her finger. “Katherine had put Lady Denham next to the sister she had quarrelled with. That young woman moved her, and did it so quietly that no one in the room but I ever knew it had been done. Do you tell me she has had Beatrix all this while?”

“They were together even before her marriage, but since Katherine died, she has managed alone with Beatrix.”

“And nobody thought to look for her?”

“Nobody asked for the girl under the name Frayne,” Hugh said.

His aunt was quiet, and he watched her arrive at the place he had arrived at in the office, and take no pleasure in it at all. “You never spoke to me of the search.”

“No.”

“Not once, Hugh.”

“No, ma’am.”

She let that go, and turned back to the fire, and it cost her a good deal. “Well.” She opened the book again regaining her composure. “I shall find the likeness of Beatrix at three years old. She may be curious to see how she looked.”

“She may have one already.”

“Then she shall have two.” Sibyl ran her pencil down the page. “And Miss Frayne?”

“She comes with her.”

“For how long?”

“That remains to be settled.”

“Settle it before she arrives.” His aunt did not raise her head. “Thank her, pay her handsomely, and recommend her to a family who can employ her properly. That is a kindness. Leaving it open isn’t.”

“She has done us a considerable service.”

“Which is precisely why she should not be paid in a length of string.” Sibyl turned a page. “Beatrix will want a governess. Miss Frayne was engaged to read aloud and answer invitations, and I doubt whether she was ever trained to teach. I shall make inquiries.”

“Give her time to arrive.”

“I intend only to discover what is wanted.”

“Aunt.”

Sibyl raised her head. He found he had nothing to put after her name. She let that go too. On her way out she touched his shoulder, a brief pressure through the wool of his coat, and stopped in the passage to give an instruction about tea.

Nettlefold came in at half past six with the fair copy, read it through, and Hugh said yes to each item, and the carriage, the inns, the woman for the road, the physician, the debts, the chimney, the wage.

“That is all of it, Your Grace, unless there is anything further.”

“One thing further.” Hugh waited while the sheet was turned and the pencil was set at the head of the clean side. “My niece is to have every comfort this house can give. Whatever she asks for, and comforts she has never known to ask for. No servant of mine tells her she may not have a thing until they have come to me and heard me say so. She is to be met at the door. Mrs Threadgill will meet her, as well as my aunt, and you.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“And she isn’t to be brought to me.”

The pencil moved. Hugh waited for the question, but it never came. After a moment Nettlefold closed the book, bade him good evening, and went out.

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“There are berries on it, Mina. Real ones, hundreds of them, and a man in a green coat has carried off three whole armfuls.”

The greengrocer on the corner had got his holly out at last, and Beatrix had stopped dead before the barrow on the way back from the pump and had to be prised away from it, and she talked the whole length of Corn Street about the man in the green coat. So, Mina came up the stairs with cold hands and a shilling less than she had hoped, and found a gentleman waiting in the room with his hat upon his knees.

He got up. Grey, civil, and plainly having slept very badly in an inn.

“Miss Frayne. My name is Henshaw, and I act for the Duke of Ellersden.”

Mina had her hand on the back of the chair before she knew she had reached for it. That name she knew. It sat at the head of a printed form she read in March, standing in this room with her bonnet still on. Vale and Henshaw present their compliments. She read it then until the letters came apart.

“Henshaw,” she said.

“Miss.”

“Of Vale and Henshaw?”

Something went across the gentleman’s face and went away again. “The same, Miss.”

Mina composed several versions of what she would say in March and had polished two of them in April, and each one had begun with the words your office. She declined to say any of them. Any gentlewoman with no claim in law, in two rooms she was behind on, did not open an interview by accusing a duke’s solicitor of negligence, and she had been poor long enough to know the difference between being right and being able to afford it.

“Sit down, Mr Henshaw,” Mina said.

Her stomach dropped away from her so fast that she had to keep holding the back of the chair firmer. “Bea, go down to Mrs Dyer, love, and ask her about the wool.”

“You said we should do the wool after.”

“Now, if you please.”

Whatever the child heard in her voice, it worked. The door shut behind her. Mina sat down opposite the gentleman with her heart making an unreasonable amount of noise.

“Say it plainly,” she said. “I should rather have it plainly than kindly.”

“Then I shall.” Henshaw turned the brim of the hat once. “His Grace has learned where his niece is living. He is her guardian, and I had better tell you how, since you will be asked it in this county and you may as well hear the particulars from me.”

“Tell me.”

“The late duke left a will, made at his marriage and never altered, and it names his brother sole guardian of any child of the marriage in the event of the mother’s death.” The solicitor said it flat, as one recited something from a page one had read four hundred times. “The property is held by trustees. The charge of her upbringing is his. A settlement was made besides, and under it Her Grace was entitled to a jointure of nine hundred a year, paid quarterly out of the Ellersden estate, which she refused from the February of that year and went on refusing until she died.”

Mina heard the sum land in the room and go on lying there. “Nine hundred?”

“Nine hundred a year while she lived, Miss. The unpaid instalments were set aside, and those arrears, with the interest upon them, now belong to her daughter under her will. They are held for Beatrix until she is of age, or marries under the terms of the settlement.” Henshaw did not lift his eyes. “I am aware of what that will sound like to a lady who has been paying a chandler for tallow out of what she gets for sewing. Since Thursday it has scarcely left my thoughts, and I haven’t slept especially well.”

“Why did nobody make her take it?”

“Because there is no law in England that compels a widow to accept her own money, and there was nobody living on her side to argue with her. This office wrote to her nine times and had every letter returned.” He put the pocketbook down. “And he means her to make her home with him. A carriage will call for her tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow?”

“The journey is to be made in easy stages, with arrival on the sixteenth.”

Tomorrow. Not a letter and a month of arguing, not solicitors writing to other solicitors while she found out what kind of man was at the other end. Tomorrow, and the rooms bespoken, and everything settled in a county she had not seen since the funeral, by people who had never asked her one question.

Through the bedroom door she could hear Beatrix telling Mrs Dyer about the man in the green coat. “You had better write this down,” Mina said.

Henshaw took out a notebook without any appearance of surprise.

“She is sick if she reads in a carriage, and she will tell you she is perfectly able, on account of wanting to finish her book. Take it away before you start and give it back at the inn.” Her hands had gone into her lap and folded themselves there. “She must face the horses or she can’t bear it above an hour. She will eat an apple when she refuses bread, so there ought to be apples. And she wakes in the night in a strange room and can’t find the door, and she calls very quietly at first, being anxious not to make a nuisance of herself. Somebody must sleep near enough to hear her the first time.”

The pencil stopped. “Miss Frayne…”

“I have not finished. There is the matter of her hair, which nobody but me has ever managed without pulling.”

“Miss Frayne, you may accompany her.”

Suddenly the world seemed to tilt. “I beg your pardon?”

“His Grace has made provision for your journey. You are to be under no apprehension whatever about the expense.” Henshaw had the grace to redden very slightly. “I ought to have said so at the beginning. I am sorry. The arrangements have occupied me since His Grace’s express found me at my inn on Wednesday night, and I put it in the wrong order.”

Mina let out a breath she had been holding since the word carriage, and it came out with a good deal more of her in it than she liked. Her eyes stung, and she looked hard at the fireplace until they stopped.

“Then I shall come.”

“I am glad.”

“You might have begun there, Mr Henshaw, and spared me four minutes I shall remember for the rest of my life.”

“I might. It is not the first thing I have done badly this week.”

“Now tell me the parts I shan’t like.”

“The invitation carries no offer of employment.” He said it steadily, to his own notebook. “A governess will be engaged in the proper course. His Grace intends to acknowledge your services generously, and will discuss your future with you himself.”

“And how long may I remain?”

“I have no instruction upon that point.”

There it was. She knew one must come, and had been waiting for the sentence throughout his kindness, and now that the answer arrived she discovered she could sit under the blow perfectly well.

“Very well. The carriage at ten, if you please. She ought to eat before we start.”

Henshaw wrote down the hour, and then set his pencil across the page.

“It may be easier to part here, where you have friends about you. I would advise you to consider it.”

“Beatrix would have nobody she knew at the other end.”

“Lady Sibyl remembers her.”

“She was three when they last met.” Mina heard how sharp that came out and did not take it back. “Forgive me. I have had four minutes’ notice of losing her and I am not at my best.”

He moved on to the debts, and she discovered that the word covered far more in his mouth than it had ever meant in hers. Rent. Food. Clothes. The physician who came in September. A windowpane Beatrix broke with a shoe while trying to get a spider out because the wretched creature kept running the wrong way.

“Mr Dyer told me the pane was his own affair,” Henshaw said. “I have it upon a list regardless.”

“You have made a list?”

“I have made four.”

“Why now?” She had not meant to ask it, but it came out anyway. “You have scarcely put a question to me about her, and you are offering to pay for a broken window, and the carriage is already engaged. Why this week, and not in the spring when I asked for help?”

“Because Mr Nettlefold found the direction last Thursday, and laid the matter before His Grace on Monday.”

“And before that?”

Henshaw put the pencil down.

“Before Thursday, inquiries had been going forward for two years.”

The room went very still. Down in the shop the bell rang and Mr Dyer said good morning to a customer in the voice he kept for people who owed him money.

“Two years,” Mina said.

“Since the duchess died.”

“Men going about Bath asking questions. For two years.”

“Yes, Miss.”

She sat quite straight with her hands in her lap, and inside her chest a thing she had kept flat for two years turned over and showed its other side. Two years of men in this city, a letter in March, and a printed form that had come back to her within the week telling her not to write again. Mina had gone without her dinner for the sheet of paper that letter was written on, and walked to the post rather than spare a penny for a boy.

“Miss Frayne?”

“I am perfectly well.” She was not, and her voice had gone thin and traitorous, but she put it back. “It is a great deal to be told at once, that is all.”

“It is.”

“Did they never think to ask after me?”

“They were asking after a child called Ranscombe,” Henshaw said it very carefully. “Mr Nettlefold tells me there is no such child in this city, and never has been.”

Of course there was not. She had let the landlord’s mistake stand in her second week in this house, and been glad of it every quarter day since, paying her rent as a respectable widow rather than as a young woman with a child, no husband, and no explanation she cared to give.

Two years. And a form.

She could fetch it now. It was upstairs under the lining of her trunk, folded into a square, with the line ruled through the place where a sum ought to have stood, and she could put it into this man’s careful hands. She could ask him what a woman is supposed to do when the family solicitors have forbidden her to write again.

And then the carriage would come tomorrow morning, and she would have made an enemy of the only person in the house who might speak for her.

Wait, she told herself. See her into it first. You can quarrel with the whole of England in the spring.

“I have the papers you will want,” she said, and got up to fetch them.

He read the baptismal record twice and Katherine’s letters once, asked her about two dates, accepted her answers, and made his copies in a patient hand. Mina stood at the window while he wrote and watched the holly go past below in the barrow, trying to fit the parts of the man in the north together but could not manage it. He paid for broken windows without a question, yet he had let two years go by.

She had seen him properly only twice, his visits to Ashcombe having a way of falling in the months when Katherine sent her to Bath to sit with her mother. Once at a wedding, where he had stood by a pillar talking to a bishop and had smiled perhaps three times in five hours. Once at a funeral, where he had stood through the whole service without sitting down, and had never turned his head when Katherine got to her feet.

Katherine had been Duchess of Ellersden for six years and had refused, from the February after her husband’s death, every farthing the estate was obliged to pay her. A jointure under the settlement. Mina had watched her burn two drafts and send the third back unopened, and had said nothing, since one who had just lost her husband was permitted to be mad for a while, and by the time the madness should have passed it set. Kit had never cared for Ellersden, and after the wedding he took his bride to Ashcombe, the smaller house over the moor, and left the great house and the running of it to his brother. Everything else Mina knew of the Duke of Ellersden came to her from Katherine, over eight years, in a voice that got colder every time his name came into it, and she was at Ashcombe when the message came, and had sat on the stairs outside Katherine’s door most of one night. In the morning she took Beatrix out into the garden so the child would not hear her mother. Afterwards Mina held her friend’s hand through the nine days before the funeral, in rooms at the Marbury inn, since Katherine would not sleep one night under his roof.

Mina knew how Kit Ranscombe died, but she did not know why Katherine said what she said in that church. She asked once and had been told never to ask again.

“There,” said Henshaw, sanding the last copy. “Is there anything else I may do for you?”

“You may tell me what Ellersden is like.”

“Very well conducted. Mrs Threadgill has been housekeeper there one and thirty years.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No.” He put the copies together and squared them. “It is what I am able to answer, miss.”

 

***

 

The rest of the day went in a kind of hurry that never became progress. Mina packed and unpacked the same three things twice. She wrote a direction on a label, but her hand was unsteady, so she wrote it again. Mrs Dyer came up with the week’s washing over her arm and found her in the middle of the floor with a child’s shift in both hands and no notion at all how long she had been standing there.

“Well, my dear?”

“He takes her tomorrow. I may travel with her. After that I must ask a duke what is to become of me.”

“There’ll be money enough in that house to keep the pair of you.”

“He may prefer somebody trained to teach. Or somebody with better references than a lady who has been dead two years.” Mina put the shift in the trunk. “Mrs Dyer, what am I to say to him? I keep standing here inventing sentences and each one of them sounds like a woman asking for a place.”

“You will be a woman asking for a place.”

“I know it. That is what makes it so unpleasant.”

“Then ask for the room next to hers,” Mrs Dyer said, shaking out a travelling dress, “and ask on the first day. It gets a deal harder after.”

Mina found the card from the lady in Queen Square among her sewing things and turned it over twice. A situation had been mentioned in the summer, a companion wanted at Cheltenham, thirty pounds a year, and she let it go by because it would have meant leaving Beatrix.

She put it under the child’s papers in the travelling bag. Not hope, exactly, but a person who had been poor kept a card like that the way she kept a candle end.

That night the waits came down the street and stopped at the corner, four men and a boy with a fiddle. Beatrix knelt up on the window seat with the curtain over her head and made Mina open the casement two inches, although the room was perishing.

“Will there be singing at my uncle’s house?”

“I have no notion.”

“There must be a great many more rooms to sing in.”

“That is true, but it isn’t the same thing at all. Come down before you catch a cold.”

“We had a pudding last year,” Beatrix said, in the tone of a person laying evidence before a magistrate. “It fell over when you took the cloth off.”

“A piece stuck, and I ought to have loosened it first.”

“Mrs Dyer turned that side to the wall and we ate it anyway and it was very good. And the year before, you had a cold and stayed in the shawl all day and I brought you things.” The child considered the street. “That is two. I should like one that is a proper one.”

Mina shut the casement and did not promise her anything. She lay awake a long while afterwards with the child’s arm flung across her, and thought about a night in January of last year, and a hand like a bundle of sticks in a cloth closing round her wrist.

She remembered Katherine’s words: Not Ellersden. Not to him, Mina. Say it.

She promised, of course. A woman of eight and twenty dying at Bath in January is owed whatever four words will make her easier, and at that hour Mina would have promised to walk into the sea.

She kept the promise fourteen months. Then the copying dried up in a wet spring and the child got a cough that outstayed its welcome, and there came a morning in March when she counted the tin three times over and the answer would not do. She had sat down at this table and written to a firm of solicitors in London, and broken her word to a dead woman for the price of a winter’s coal.

For nothing. They kept a form printed for women like her.

She told nobody, and she would tell nobody, and how could she? There was no way of saying it aloud that did not end with a stranger deciding either that she betrayed Katherine or that she was lying about it now. Both were true, but neither was the whole of it.

That evening the dressmaker sent fourteen shillings for two gowns. Mina divided them between her purse and the little pocket inside her stays, and found that the division took her three attempts.

She had woken well before light and lain there running the day forward. What if the carriage came early and Beatrix had eaten nothing? What if the child were sick on the road and the woman took against her? What if the duke had thought better of it overnight and sent a second letter? And beneath there were other questions, going round like a wheel with a flat spot. What do I say to him when I get there? What do I do when he says no?

She dressed Beatrix. Mina found butter on a bonnet string and washed it off. She looked round the two rooms one last time and discovered that everything in them belonged either to the child or to the landlord, and that two years of her life had left no mark on the place at all.

The carriage came; it had four horses, and half the neighbourhood was at the windows. Mrs Cobb was waiting by the step with a basket over her arm.

“You’ll be Miss Frayne. I’ve ginger biscuits, and we shall stop for hot soup before the afternoon’s out. Has the child eaten?”

“Most of her breakfast. She was too busy at the window to finish.”

“Then she may watch me instead,” said Mrs Cobb comfortably, “and we shall see how long she lasts at it.”

Beatrix said goodbye to Mrs Dyer in the shop doorway, formally, with her hand held out. “You have been very good to us.”

“I got along with you.”

“You have. Mina says so, and she doesn’t say it about everybody.” The child hung on to the hand long after she had finished speaking. “I shall send you a letter with a seal on it.”

“Then I shall put it on the mantel and be insufferable in this street till Easter,” Mrs Dyer said, and went into the shop, and stayed there.

Mr Dyer carried down the shell box and the little stool and shook Mina’s hand in the street. He had never once done that in two years.

“The room shall need a great deal of cleaning after you,” he said.

“I dare say it will, Mr Dyer.”

“Aye. Well.” He went back inside, and that, she understood, was a speech.

Beatrix went up the carriage step in her coat, resembling a young princess, and immediately began an inventory of the interior. Her descriptions were loudly delivered through the window for Mrs Dyer’s benefit but were largely inaccurate.

Mina stood on the pavement a moment longer. Two hundred and fifty miles of road ahead, leading to a house she had never seen and a man who could put her out of it whenever he pleased. No claim in law, and no name anywhere in the business. Not one door anywhere in England that she could open by herself.

Her hands had begun to shake, but she pressed them flat against her cloak until they stopped. She had exactly one thing to bargain with, and it was that a child of seven wanted her.

That would have to do.

“Mina.” Beatrix had moved her book along and was patting the seat. “I have saved your place.”

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“Come inside, both of you, and mind the third flag, for it holds water,” said the square, upright woman who had come down the steps into the rain before the carriage step was properly down. “Mrs Threadgill. I keep this house.”

She had a blanket over her arm and put it round Beatrix without asking anybody’s leave. “You will take a hot dinner, and then you will take a bath, and I shall hear no argument whatever upon the second.”

“I never argue about baths,” said Beatrix.

“You will argue about this one. The water comes up three flights and forms opinions of itself on the way.”

They came in at the lodge in the last of the light. The drive went on so long through wet parkland that Beatrix asked twice whether they were still upon the road, and she had to be told they had been on her uncle’s land since the milestone at the top of the hill. Beatrix had put her hand into Mina’s, and left it there for the last half mile, and neither of them remarked upon it.

Then the trees gave out, and the house rose before them and kept going. They could see grey stone, wet through, a pediment in the middle, and rooks all along the roofline complaining about the weather. There were two lamps by the door, and above them a great many windows with nothing behind any of them.

Now Beatrix had got free of the blanket to interrogate a stone lion beside the steps. “Is that a real mane?”

“It is stone, love.”

“I know it is stone. Does a real one look like that?”

“I have never been near enough to a real one to judge,” said Mrs Threadgill. “You may ask him again when your shoes are dry.”

The hall was stone and high, with a fire at the far end that had been lit an hour too late to do the room any good. Three people stood waiting in an arrangement that had plainly been discussed beforehand, and a good many more were about who had been asked to be there by nobody at all. Two housemaids had discovered urgent business at the same window, a boy with a coal scuttle had stopped halfway up the service stair and forgotten what the scuttle was for, and a head withdrew from the gallery above so fast that the movement told her more than a stare would have.

Mina put her chin up. It took a moment’s work, and then she made herself take it all in.

Above her the beams carried iron hooks, four to each great cross member, empty until the season should require them. It was the cold that troubled her. Half the doors along the hall were shut, and the servants passed them without a glance, as though those rooms had ceased to belong to the house.

Lady Sibyl came forward from the foot of the stairs. “You are very welcome here, Beatrix. You are to call me Aunt Sibyl.”

Beatrix remembered her curtsy and produced it with one muddy foot behind the other. “Thank you, Aunt Sibyl.”

“Lady Beatrix Ranscombe,” said Sibyl, to the child, in the tone of one reading a name off a monument. “Which is what you are, whatever anybody has been calling you in Bath, and I am told nobody has called you it in two years.” She sat down on the hall settle with difficulty and no assistance whatsoever. “You have your mother’s mouth,” Sibyl said steadily. Then, in a different voice altogether, “I found a little picture of you at three years old. It turned up on Sunday, and I dusted it myself. You shall have it when you have eaten.”

“Is there one of Mama?”

“There is one of your mother when she was younger, in this house, and you shall see that too.”

The child studied her with enormous attention and appeared to arrive at a favourable verdict. Sibyl turned.

“Miss Frayne. You have made good time.”

“The arrangements were excellent.”

“My nephew is particular about such things.” Lady Sibyl’s eye went over the travelling dress in under two seconds, and there was nothing in the doing of it that anybody could have complained of afterwards. “Your room is beside the schoolroom, two doors from hers. We dine at six but my nephew dines at seven, alone, a habit of long standing and no comment upon anybody in this hall.”

“Thank you.”

“His Grace will send for you when he wishes to speak of the arrangements.”

Mina heard that sentence for exactly what it was and thanked her a second time. Mr Nettlefold, who had opened the carriage door himself and had said very little since, produced a pocketbook.

“Mr Nettlefold, may I ask you one thing before I am taken upstairs?”

“You may ask me a great many, miss. I shall answer fewer.”

“Am I to be in the schoolroom or out of it?” She kept her voice pleasant with an effort she hoped did not show. “I would rather be told on the first evening than find it out over a fortnight. She will know within a day if the grown people are pretending, and she will say nothing at all about it, but she will decide privately that not a soul in this house means a word they say to her.”

The secretary shut the pocketbook. “I haven’t got an answer for you. I would sooner tell you that on a doorstep than let you discover it over a fortnight.” He nodded towards the stairs. “Your bell is the third from the end, and it is answered. If it goes ten minutes unanswered, come and tell me, and I shall enjoy what follows a good deal more than you will.”

Mina found she almost liked him. Mrs Threadgill took them up herself with a candle and went the long way about it. By the second turning Mina understood that it was a lesson rather than a wrong turn.

“Schoolroom here. Day nursery through. Both chimneys swept this week, whatever anybody tells you. Back stairs at the end for the trays. That way goes nowhere you want.”

“Where does it go?”

“The long drawing room,” said Mrs Threadgill, and walked on.

The corridor was as cold as stone itself, from underneath and all at once, and their two candles made the only light in the whole length of it. “How many rooms have fires in them?”

“Six. Seven from tonight, with yours.” The housekeeper went four paces before the rest of it. “There is coal enough in that yard to burn the place down twice over. I don’t order fires in empty rooms. I have been saying so for four years, and it answers very well provided nobody looks at it closely.”

The schoolroom was warm, and a young maid sprang up beside a tray. “Nan Cotterill, miss. Housemaid until this week, and with three young brothers at home. Nan, come and be looked over.”

Nan approached and was examined, turning scarlet in the process. She was then asked for a cushion, as the chair had raised Beatrix’s chin just above the table.

On the table itself, set out with some care, lay four objects: a jar of dried lavender, a cup of milk with a saucer over it, a wooden sheep, painted once and much handled since, and one hard pear. Mrs Threadgill considered the arrangement with her mouth perfectly straight.

“The lavender will be Ellen. The milk is the Cook, but I have no explanation whatever for the sheep.” She moved the pear an inch to the left, where it sat better. “I shall speak to all of them.”

“Oh, please don’t.”

“I shall speak to all of them,” said Mrs Threadgill, “for the form of the thing, and I shall be a great while getting round to it.”

Beatrix ate two rounds of bread and butter and most of a third, and got her boots off under the table. Then she turned about on the bench, having wiped her hands upon the cloth in a manner Mina intended to raise with her later.

“Thank you for the fire,” she told the housekeeper. “And for the bread. There is a sheep upstairs, and I don’t know who to thank, so will you thank them, and say I have called him Mr Bell.”

Nan made a small noise and converted it into a cough. “I shall pass it on. Why Mr Bell?”

“Because of the bell on him. It is worn off, but you can see where it was.” Beatrix thought about it. “He has come a long way too.”

 

***

 

Mina’s own chamber lay two doors along. It was a good room, and that was the whole difficulty with it. A fire lit, a bed with hangings and paper laid ready on the writing table. Beside the hearth stood a small worn armchair carried in from elsewhere within the hour, to judge by the fresh dents in the carpet a foot from where its feet now stood.

The family slept along the east front while the servants slept above and below. This passage was neither, and whoever chose it had spent time on the problem and solved it exactly.

She had gone into the gap, but she had lived in a gap for eight years and had furnished it tolerably. She turned the key in her trunk. The lock clicked, but the lid declined to move. She tried it again with one knee on the corner that had warped at the inn on Tuesday, and got nothing for it but a broken nail and a word she was glad the child had not heard.

“Which gown, miss?” Nan called from the bedchamber.

“The blue one, if I can get at it. Give me a moment.”

She went along to the schoolroom hearth to retrieve the poker, and was carrying it back across the landing when a man came round the turn of the stair. “Miss Frayne?”

Mina stopped with the poker in her hand. Her first thought was that she had got him wrong at the funeral. The figure on the stairs stood taller than the one in her memory.

Her second thought was about the coat. It was made in London by a tailor who charged what he liked. The boots had been made for him, and nobody else, and the plain gold ring on his little finger was worth more, in all probability, than the entire contents of her trunk. Everything about him said money that had never had to be thought about, and a house that did as it heard.

Her third thought arrived without any invitation whatsoever, and it was about his face. It was no kind face, and no soft one either. Everything in it went in straight lines. A hard jaw, a straight nose, dark brows set low and rather heavy, and a mouth held so level that it might have been drawn on with a rule. Black hair, cut short, and grey coming in early at both temples in a way that had nothing to do with his age. His eyes were dark blue, and they were fixed on her with an attention she was in no way prepared for.

He was a great deal better-looking than a man had any business being at the top of a staircase with the light nearly gone, and whoever had described the Duke of Ellersden to her as cold had been describing a reputation, and not this. He was very grave, and very still, and he stood like one accustomed to rooms arranging themselves around him.

“Your Grace.” She could find no words to say. She had rehearsed a short account of the child’s health for this meeting, delivered standing, in a proper room, with a footman by the door and a chair between them.

His eyes went from the poker to her face, and one eyebrow moved perhaps a sixteenth of an inch. “Is there a difficulty with the fire?”

“With my trunk.” Mina attempted to set the poker against the wall, discovered that it would fall the instant she let go, and kept holding it. “The fire is behaving beautifully. I was going to lift the edge of the lid.”

“Has the key broken?”

“The key works perfectly. Everything works except the part that permits me to have my clothes.”

The crease at the side of his mouth deepened, but went away again, and she found she wanted very much to see whether it would come back. “May I?”

“Oh, there is no need to trouble you. I was about to ring for a servant.”

“Show me where it catches.”

That was not a request. It was no order either. Mina had no idea what to call it, and she went along to her own doorway with a duke behind her and her ears going hot.

She knelt by the trunk while he came to the door and stopped there with one hand on the frame. He did not come in, and Mina registered that with a distinct and unwelcome flare of gratitude.

“There. The corner is warped, and the lid sits proud on that side.”

“You have been pressing it here?”

“I began there. By the time I could reach the key I had arrived somewhere near the middle.”

He measured the distance between the two with his eye, and she watched him work out exactly what that must have looked like, a grown woman flat across her own luggage in a strange house, and then decline to say one word about it.

“Shall I hold it while you turn the key?”

“If you please.”

And then the Duke of Ellersden crossed her bedroom floor, knelt on her carpet in a coat that cost more than her year, and put a hand on each end of her trunk lid. This is the most peculiar quarter of an hour of my life. She had been in the house forty minutes. Nobody had formally presented her to the man, and he had nothing from her but a name. And here he was upon the floor with his sleeve against her worn old strap, holding down a warped lid for a woman with no standing in his house whatsoever.

“Now,” he said.

Mina steadied the key. The brass moved but stopped against the warp. “A little more on your left, Your Grace.”

He shifted his hand. His knuckle came within an inch of hers on the leather, and Mina took her hand back too quickly and hoped it had gone unseen, though he had missed nothing in that chamber since he came into it.

The key turned. The lid came up with a jerk, and she caught the edge before the lid struck the wall.

“Oh, thank heaven.” She sat back on her heels and laughed, and heard how much relief there was in it. “I had begun to think we should have to unpack it through the bottom.”

“You would have wanted a saw.”

“I had the poker.”

“You had a poker,” he agreed, “a trunk, and a strong opinion, and I am not sure which of the three would have come off worst.”

Nobody had warned her he would be jocular. Nobody had mentioned that, and she was still deciding what to do about it when he stood up. She stood up too, and the room suddenly seemed to have shrunk.

He was close enough for her to see that the grey at his temple had come early, and that he had not slept properly in a good while. He smelled of rain and of the outdoors. His hands were narrow and quite unmarked, and there was a smear of dust across one knuckle where her old strap had rubbed him.

He has got dirty. On my account. In his own house.

And a moment after that, from nowhere at all, uninvited and entirely improper, she thought: Is there a wife in this house? Not a soul has mentioned one. A young lady in the county with an understanding, then, or a betrothal half arranged, and why in the name of goodness am I standing on a landing with my hair coming down and wondering about it?

Mina put that thought away with considerable firmness. She was nine and twenty, and had been a servant in all but the wage. She had exactly one thing to think about in this house, and it was seven years old and in the next room.

“The carpenter can mend that,” he said. “Have him see to it while he is in the nursery. There is no reason to wait.”

“Thank you. May I take this back and go to Beatrix? She will be wondering where I have gone.”

He stood back at once. When she came out again, he was in the passage with the poker in his hand, holding it by the handle the way people hold a thing they have picked up and cannot now think what to do with. She took it from him with more composure than she had managed five minutes earlier.

“Threadgill tells me you have eaten.”

“Very well, thank you. Your people looked after us at every stop. Mrs Cobb produced biscuits at intervals, and Beatrix has taken to measuring distance in them.”

“And how far was it?”

“Four days. We were still within a day’s supply when we came through your gates.”

She glanced up to see whether that had landed, and found him watching her with an attention she had no idea what to do with, and busied herself with the poker. “You will want to know your way about,” he said. “The south lawn and the kitchen garden are safe for her. Beyond the gardens, take a groom. The bank falls sharply on the east side of the lake, so go round by the boathouse path.”

“May she walk out every day? She has been kept in two rooms for two years, and it has taken a toll on her.”

“Every day if it is not raining.”

“Whose permission do I ask?”

“Mine.” He said it without any ceremony at all. “And you have it. You won’t be sent from one person to another about a child’s walk while she stands in the hall in her cloak.”

Mina had braced herself for a fortnight of exactly that difficulty and discovered she had not a word to say. “Thank you.”

Then Nan’s voice came through the schoolroom door, and after it the quick sound of Beatrix’s feet, and Mina turned as the child came out with a ribbon in her hand.

The duke went still. Beatrix stopped to straighten her slipper. By the time Mina turned back, all the colour had drained from his face. He had taken a hesitant step towards the staircase, one hand clenched tightly against the seam of his coat.

“You will excuse me. Nettlefold is waiting.” He inclined his head and went down before she could put a word together, and she heard him ask a servant, in exactly the level voice he had used holding the trunk, to send Bourne to the office.

“Mina, will you tie it?” Mina knelt and fastened the ribbon about the loosened plait, and took rather longer over it than the plait required.

“Was that him? The uncle?” Beatrix had her whole face round the doorframe. “He is enormous. Nan said he was enormous and I thought she was making it up.”

“Yes, love.”

“He is very tall.” Beatrix worked at the problem. “Did he not want to look at me?”

Say he was called away. Say he has pressing business. Say anything at all that will get her to bed without this.

“I don’t know why he went,” Mina said. “It had nothing to do with you or anything you did. I shall find out, and when I know, I shall tell you.”

“Even if it is a bad reason?”

“Even if it is a bad reason. Have I ever told you a comfortable lie?”

“No.” Beatrix considered. “You told me the pudding was ruined.”

“It was ruined.”

“It was very good ruined,” said the child, and went to find the shell box.

Halfway up the flight, later, Mina discovered she had company. A housemaid stood on the half landing with an armful of linen and an expression arranged the instant before. The girl bobbed, bid her goodnight, and went off along the upper passage at a speed that had nothing to do with linen.

Lady Sibyl came through the schoolroom door an hour later. “My nephew has been up here.”

“He helped me with a trunk that had trouble opening. It was very good of him.”

“The servants attend to such things, Miss Frayne. You should refer your requests to Threadgill while you are learning our arrangements.”

The heat went up the back of Mina’s neck so fast that it frightened her. I did not ask him. I did not send for him, hint, or leave a door open. I was retrieving a poker and he came round a stair and offered. What precisely was I to have said? No, Your Grace, kindly go away and let me break my own furniture?

She thought all of it in perhaps a second and a half, but pressed it flat, and put the poker in its stand.

“I shall remember that,” she said.

“See that you do.”

“Lady Sibyl, may I ask you one thing, and then I shall let it go?” Mina came round. “If he hadn’t offered, and I had rung for a servant on the evening I arrived, and taken a footman off his work to open a trunk, would that have been better received?”

Lady Sibyl’s chin came up, and for a moment Mina thought she had gone too far. “No,” said Lady Sibyl. “It wouldn’t.”

“Then I am glad we have settled it.”

“We have settled very little.” The old lady sat on the edge of the schoolroom chair. “Your place here must be discussed with my nephew. Tonight, one question only. Is she a good sleeper?”

The question was so unlike the rest of the interview that Mina answered before she thought about it. “She wakes about two and can’t find the door in a strange room.”

“Then you were quite right to ask for that one,” said Lady Sibyl, and got up. “Your hands are cold. Tell Nan to build up that fire, and if the girl says the coal is counted, tell her I said it isn’t.”

She went as far as the door and stopped there. “Miss Frayne. When my nephew left this passage this evening, did he see the child?”

“He saw her.”

“Ah,” said Lady Sibyl, and went away without explaining one word of it.