Rain on the Glass

Monday, May 6, 1816

The rain had been falling on the glass since before breakfast, and Linnea Corfield had stopped hearing it.

She had a heath on the bench in front of her, an Erica ventricosa in a six-inch pot, covered in flowers like small pink wax urns. It would not flower again until next spring. By next spring it would belong to a nurseryman in London, so she was painting it now.

She pushed her spectacles up her nose with the back of her wrist, because her fingers were pink to the second knuckle, and laid a wash of carmine thin as breath along the shadowed side of a single flower. Then she waited. The whole trick of a wash was knowing when to leave it alone.

“Is this fine enough?” said the child at her elbow.

Linnea looked. Philippa Kynaston, seven years old, was standing on an upturned crate with a glass muller in both fists, grinding green earth on a slab. There was green on her chin and on the end of one dark plait.

“Rub a little between your finger and thumb. Can you feel grit?”

Pip rubbed. “Yes.”

“Then it isn’t fine enough.”

“You said that an hour ago.”

“It was true an hour ago as well. Round and round, and then in a figure of eight, so you bring the edges back to the middle.”

Pip scowled and went back to it. She had a good scowl, black brows drawn down, her whole small face set against the world. She had arrived a little after nine, wet to the knees, having walked the mile from Brackenhope Castle by herself. It was the third time since March. The first time, Linnea had given her bread and honey and sent a boy up to the castle. The second time she had given her a paintbrush to wash. Today she had given her the muller, because a child who is running away from something does better with work in her hands than with questions.

Linnea had not asked what she was running from. She thought she knew. Lord Edmund Kynaston and his wife had gone off Brackenhope Bridge in the November flood, and there were three children up at the castle with a nurse and an uncle nobody saw.

Behind her the stove ticked. She did not look at it, and she did not look at the coal scuttle either, which held perhaps enough for four more days. Heaths from the Cape could bear cold better than people thought, but they could not bear cold and wet together, and it had been cold and wet since April. So the stove burned, on coal from a merchant in Ludlow who had not been paid since Christmas.

Her father had died on the twenty-eighth of January, fourteen weeks ago. He had been rector of Brackenhope for thirty years, and he had left her three hundred pots of Cape heaths, a glasshouse thirty-six feet long, an unfinished book, and debts of three hundred and forty pounds.

She had the figures by heart. The nurseryman had offered two hundred pounds for the three hundred pots. That left a hundred and forty to find. The glasshouse itself might fetch something as timber and glass. The new rector, Mr. Aldridge, took possession of the rectory on Midsummer Day, the twenty-fourth of June, and after that she would have neither a bench to paint at nor a plant to paint.

The wash had dried. She loaded the brush again and deepened the shadow under the lip of the flower, where the pink went almost to crimson.

“Why do you do the same flower over and over?” Pip asked.

“I don’t. This is the first one I’ve done today.”

“You did the same bit three times.”

“Three thin coats are better than one thick one. The light goes down through them and comes back up off the paper. A thick coat just sits there like mud.”

Pip thought about this. “Like the pond at home, when you can see the bottom.”

“Exactly like that.”

The child looked pleased for half a second, and then remembered she was not pleased with anything, and ground harder.

Linnea leaned back to see the whole sheet. The stem was right, and the set of the leaves, in their whorls of four. The book was called Corfield’s Heaths. It was to be seventy-two plates, issued in parts of four, and sixty-four plates were out. Mr. Nettleship in Paternoster Row paid five pounds a drawing. Eight more drawings would finish the book, and she wanted it finished more than she wanted almost anything. She wanted these plants to stay alive, and she wanted a bench with north light, and at eight and twenty, with forty pounds a year from her mother’s money and nowhere to live after June, she was not going to get any of them.

She was holding the brush clear of the paper, deciding whether the topmost flower wanted one more coat, when the light changed.

A shadow had fallen across the bench. Somebody was standing outside the glass door, and he was large enough to block half of it.

Pip saw him first. The muller stopped.

“Oh, no,” Pip said. “He’s come himself.”

The door opened, and the rain came in with the Duke of Brackenhope.

Linnea had last seen him when she was a girl and he was a young officer home on leave, fair and straight-backed in the castle pew, bored by her father’s sermon. She would not have known him now. He was a tall man, over six feet, and he had plainly walked the whole mile, because his greatcoat was black with water and his boots were mud to the ankle. He took off his hat. His hair was cropped short like a soldier’s, dark blond, and dripping.

A black silk patch covered his left eye. From under it a scar ran down, from the eyebrow across the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth, pale and straight as a ruled line.

She had heard about it. All the village had heard about it, and nobody had seen it, because he had not come outside his own park gates since November. She made herself look at it once, properly, the way she would look at a specimen she meant to draw. Then she had seen it, and she looked at the rest of him instead. His right eye was grey, and it was not looking at her at all. It was fixed on the child on the crate.

“Miss Corfield,” he said. His voice was rough, as though it did not get much use. “You have my niece.”

“I have, Your Grace. She is quite safe, and a good deal drier than you are. Will you shut the door? The heaths dislike a draught.”

He shut it. Water ran off the hem of his coat onto the brick floor.

“Philippa,” he said. “Get your cloak.”

“No,” said Pip.

“That was not a request.”

“I’m busy.” She took hold of the muller again and ground with great energy, not looking at him. “Miss Corfield needs this green. You can’t just stop in the middle. It goes hard.”

“You left the house without a word to anyone. Nurse Onions has been crying since ten o’clock. The grooms have been dragging the mill pond.” He said it flatly, like a man reading a list. “You will come home now.”

“Why did you come?” Pip’s chin went up. “You never come. You sent the groom the other times. You don’t go anywhere. Nurse says you don’t even go to church.”

“Pip,” said Linnea quietly.

“Well, he doesn’t! And he doesn’t come up to the nursery, and he doesn’t have dinner with us, and now he comes here in front of everybody and tells me what to do.” The child’s voice had gone high and shaking. “I don’t have to do what you say. You’re not Papa.”

It was very quiet in the glasshouse after that. The rain drummed on the roof.

The Duke did not move. Linnea saw the words go into him, all the same. His mouth went tight on the scarred side, and his hand closed slowly on the brim of his hat. He looked like a man who had been hit somewhere he had been hit before.

He said nothing. She understood that he did not know what to say, and that he was not going to shout. That surprised her.

Pip had gone white under the green smudges. She knew exactly what she had done.

Linnea put her brush in the water jar and wiped her fingers on her apron.

“Your Grace,” she said, in the voice she used for the churchwardens, “you are standing in my light, and you are dripping on a tray of seedlings that took my father two years to raise. If you would be so good as to stand over there by the stove, you will be out of my way and you will stop shivering. Pip has five minutes’ work still to do before she can leave. Nobody leaves colour to dry on my slab, I’m afraid, not even to oblige a duke.”

The grey eye came round to her. She thought he would refuse. Dukes were not, she supposed, often told where to stand.

He looked down at the seedling tray by his boot and stepped carefully away from it. He went and stood by the stove.

“Five minutes,” he said.

“Thank you.” She turned to the crate. “Now, Pip. Feel it again.”

Pip rubbed the green between finger and thumb. Her hand was not quite steady. “It’s smooth,” she said in a small voice.

“So it is. That’s a good morning’s work. Take the palette knife, scrape it all into the middle, and then into this.” Linnea gave her a clean mussel shell. “Every bit. Green earth costs money.”

The child scraped. Linnea wrung out a rag in the water bucket and handed it to her, and Pip washed the slab and the muller without being told how, because she had been shown last time and had remembered. Linnea noticed that, and was glad of it.

She also noticed the Duke watching. He stood with his back to the stove and steam beginning to rise from his coat, and he watched his niece clean a slab of glass as if he had never seen her do anything before. Perhaps he had not.

His gaze moved along the staging. There were heaths on both sides, tier above tier, three hundred pots of them, some in flower, white and rose and scarlet and a green like a lime. At the far end, in the warmest corner, the broad paddle leaves of her father’s great tub plant stood up nearly to the glass. He looked at all of it slowly, and then at the bench and the half-finished drawing.

“My brother took your father’s book,” he said abruptly. “The parts are in the library.”

“Lord Edmund was one of the first subscribers. My father thought very well of him.” She paused. “We were all very sorry, Your Grace. He and Lady Edmund are missed in the village.”

He gave one short nod. It seemed to be all he could manage on that subject. After a moment he said, more stiffly still, “I should have written to you in January. Your father buried my father, and he buried my brother. I did not come to his funeral. That was ill done.”

“You were not well enough to be expected.”

“I was well enough.” He looked away. “I did not choose to be looked at.”

She did not know what to do with such a plain answer, so she left it alone, like a wash. “Well,” she said, “you have been looked at now, and the roof has not fallen in. Pip, is that slab dry?”

“Yes, Miss Corfield.”

“Then come here.”

Pip came down off the crate. Linnea crouched, so that their faces were level, and spoke low, though the glasshouse was too small for the Duke not to hear.

“That was a hard thing you said to your uncle. You knew it was hard when you said it. I think you said it because you are angry and he was the nearest person, and I understand that very well. But he walked a mile in this rain to find you, when he might have sent a groom. You might think about that on the way home.”

Pip’s lip trembled. She fought it and won. “Are you going to say I can’t come back?”

“That isn’t for me to say. It is for your uncle. I will tell you that I don’t take apprentices who climb out of windows. If you come again, you come by the front gate, with leave, and somebody knowing where you are.”

“He won’t give leave.”

“Have you ever asked him?”

Pip said nothing. She plainly never had.

Linnea stood, took the child’s cloak from the nail by the door, and fastened it under the green chin. She put the mussel shell into Pip’s hands. “That’s yours. You ground it. Carry it flat, and stand it on a windowsill to dry, and it will keep for years. You only need to wet it.”

Pip held the shell in both hands as if it were an egg.

The Duke had come away from the stove. He stood over them, hat in hand, and for a moment she thought he would speak to the child. He looked at the shell, and at the top of Pip’s bent head, and his mouth moved slightly.

What he said was, “She has given you a great deal of trouble, Miss Corfield.”

“She has given me a morning’s grinding, Your Grace. I have paid for worse.”

“It will not happen again.”

“I expect it will,” Linnea said. “She is seven, and she is unhappy, and it is warm in here. But that is your affair and hers.”

The grey eye rested on her. She could not tell whether he was angry. His face did not give much away, and half of what it might have given was under black silk.

“Good day to you,” he said.

“Good day, Your Grace. Good-bye, Pip.”

He opened the door for his niece. Pip went out under his arm with her shell held flat before her, and did not look back.

He did not follow at once. He had seen the paper.

Linnea had pasted it to the inside of the door pane a fortnight ago, facing outward, for the carrier and the tradesmen who came round to the back. She had written it in her best round hand, and she knew what it said as well as she knew the Lord’s Prayer.

TO BE SOLD by private contract, before Midsummer Day next, a GLASSHOUSE, 36 feet by 14, with stove and flues complete, to be taken down by the purchaser. The collection of Cape Heaths, about 300 pots, is already bespoke. Apply to Miss Corfield at the Rectory.

He stood in the rain and read it from the other side of the glass. It took him a good while for so few words. She saw him reach the end and go back to the beginning.

Then he looked through the pane, straight at her, and she felt her face go hot. She was not ashamed of being poor. Her father had spent his money on something beautiful and she would have helped him spend it again. But she did not enjoy watching a duke read the size of her ruin off a door.

He said something. The glass and the rain took it, and she had to open the door a hand’s breadth to hear.

“Midsummer,” he repeated.

“Mr. Aldridge has the living. He takes the house on the twenty-fourth of June.”

“And the plants are sold.”

“To a London nurseryman. I have his offer. I have not yet had his money.”

“And you?”

It was an impertinent question, even from the man who owned most of the parish. She answered it anyway, because he had been plain with her about the funeral.

“I have not yet decided, Your Grace.”

He nodded once, put on his wet hat, and went. Pip was waiting at the garden gate with her shell. He did not take her hand, and she did not offer it. They went out into the lane one behind the other, the very tall man and the very small girl, both of them stiff as posts.

Linnea shut the door and stood a moment with her palm against the cold frame.

Then she went back to her bench, because the light would not last and the topmost flower did want one more coat. She cleaned her spectacles on the one dry corner of her apron and picked up her brush. Her hand was perfectly steady, and she was absurdly glad of it.

She fed the stove first, and she counted the lumps as she put them on.

When she straightened and looked out through the streaming glass, he was still there. He had stopped in the middle of the lane with the rain coming down on his shoulders, and Pip was ten yards ahead of him, looking back to see why. He had turned round.

He was not looking at Linnea. He was looking at the glasshouse, at the whole length of it, as a man looks at a piece of ground he means to remember.
***