The Fit Person

Tuesday, May 7, 1816

Mr. Nathaniel Quince had left London on Monday morning, slept at Oxford, and reached Brackenhope Castle at four on Tuesday afternoon. He refused a bedchamber and a rest. He asked for a table, a good light and the Duke, in that order.

Gideon gave him the long table in the library and stood at the window while the solicitor unpacked his bag. Rain was coming down the valley in grey sheets. Beyond the park wall he could see the top of the church tower and one corner of the rectory roof. Yesterday was the first time he had been beyond that wall in nearly six months.

“I am ready, Your Grace,” Quince said.

He was a bald, exact man of eight and fifty, and he had set out his papers in a row, squared to the table’s edge. He had served Gideon’s father. He did not waste words, which was why Gideon could bear him.

“Then report,” Gideon said.

“On Thursday last, the second of May, the Lord Chancellor heard Mr. Pargeter’s petition. He made no order as to the guardianship. He referred it to a Master to inquire and report who is the fit and proper person to have the care of the three infants.”

“Which Master?”

“Mr. Horatio Pym.”

“What sort of man?”

“Sixty-three. Dry. He reads every paper put before him and cannot be hurried, flattered or frightened. I have known him report against a marquess in favour of a linen-draper’s widow.”

“When does he sit?”

“In August. He will give us a day in the first fortnight.”

Gideon turned from the window. “Three months.”

“Barely.”

He came to the table and sat. He took the chair that put Quince on his right, as he always did now. It had become a habit, like sitting with his back to a wall.

“I want the ground,” he said. “All of it. Why is there a question at all? They are my brother’s children. They were born in this house.”

Quince folded his hands. “Because of two pages written in 1808, Your Grace. Lord Edmund made his will when Master Crispin was two years old. He named his wife sole guardian of any children of the marriage, and he named nobody after her. He was four and twenty. He did not expect to die, and he certainly did not expect her to die in the same hour.”

“And Arabella’s own wishes?”

“The law gives a mother no power to appoint a guardian by will. Had Lady Edmund written a hundred pages, they would bind no one. As it stands, the father’s appointment died with her on the fourteenth of November. From that night the children have had no lawful guardian whatever.”

“They have had me.”

“They have had your roof, your purse and your name. Those are a great deal. They are not a right.” Quince touched the first paper with one finger. “Mr. Pargeter’s bill in March made all three of them wards of the Court of Chancery. Nothing can now be done with their persons or their fortune without the court’s leave. You cannot send Master Crispin to school without it, nor can Mr. Pargeter remove him.”

“Their fortune. Arabella’s settlement.”

“Thirty thousand pounds, settled by her late father on her and her children. There were two trustees, old Mr. Pargeter, who is dead, and his son, who therefore holds it alone.” Quince’s voice did not change. “He has the money in his hands already, and he asks for the children to go with it.”

Gideon thought of Rupert Pargeter as he had last seen him, at the funeral in November. He was a sandy, pleasant man of about forty, a corn-factor from Bristol with a house at Clifton. He had wept at the graveside and pressed Gideon’s hand in both of his. He had said that if there was anything, anything at all, that a mere uncle could do.

Gideon had thought him kind. He had been in no state to think anything else.

“What does he say of me?”

“I have the petition here.”

“Read it.”

Quince hesitated. It was the first time Gideon had ever seen him do so.

“I have been shot at by French artillery, Mr. Quince. I can stand a paragraph.”

The solicitor put on his spectacles and read in a level voice.

“‘That His Grace the Duke of Brackenhope, the paternal uncle, is a single gentleman of retired and melancholy habits, grievously disfigured in the late war; that since the death of the infants’ parents he has not gone beyond his own park, receives no company, attends no place of worship and transacts no business of his estate; that he dines alone, and that the infants, among them the heir presumptive to a dukedom, are left wholly to the care of a nursery servant. That your petitioner, the maternal uncle, is a married man of regular life and good fortune, whose wife is ready to receive the said infants as her own.’”

He laid the paper down.

Gideon looked at the rain. The clock on the mantel was loud.

“Which part of that is false?” he said.

“I had hoped Your Grace would tell me.”

“I walked to the rectory yesterday.”

“Once.”

“Once.” He rubbed his hand over his jaw. He had not let Oakes shave him that morning, and it rasped. “Then none of it is false. He has drawn it unkindly, but he has drawn it true.”

He had not gone beyond his own park. That phrase had found its mark, and the memory came up, as it always did, whole and at once.

Tuesday, the fourteenth of November. The half-yearly rent audit at the Feathers in Ludlow, with a dinner for the tenants after. The Duke took the chair at that dinner. His father had done it for forty years. Gideon had been home from Brussels three months, with a face he had not yet learned to carry, and he had stood in this room and told his brother that he would not sit at the head of a table while forty-five farmers tried not to stare at him.

Edmund had laughed at him, kindly enough, as he always did. “Then I’ll go, and tell them you have a cold. Bella can come and buy ribbons. We’ll be home by ten.”

It had rained for three days. The Corve was over its banks by dusk. At a quarter past ten Preece had hammered on the library door, hatless, and said only, “The bridge, Your Grace.”

Gideon had run most of the way. He remembered lanterns, and the parapet gone on the downstream side, a ragged gap in the stone. He remembered the brown water, and the carriage on its side forty yards down against a willow, one wheel still turning. He had gone in from the near bank with a rope round his waist and six men holding it. He had been a major of heavy dragoons and had brought guns across rivers in Spain under fire, and he had not been able to get one carriage door open in time. They had been dead when he reached them, and likely dead before he left the house.

Edmund had been thirty-one, and Arabella twenty-nine. She had bought the ribbons. They found the parcel in her lap.

He had not been over that bridge since. He had not been anywhere. He had come home, shut this door, and let a nurse of thirty-one take three children from him as if they were a duty he could hand to a subaltern.

“Your Grace,” Quince said.

“I am attending.” He was. He had learned long ago to put a thing down and take the next thing up. “State my position as you would to another lawyer.”

“You have the stronger claim by blood and rank. The heir to Brackenhope ought to be bred at Brackenhope, by the man he will succeed, among the people he will one day have under him. The children have never lived anywhere else. Chancery does not like to move infants without cause. All of that is in your favour.”

“And against.”

“Everything Mr. Pargeter has written. The court does not ask who loves the children, or who is the greater man. It asks one question: in whose house will they be best brought up? Mr. Pargeter offers a married house, a lady at the head of it, and a regular life. You offer a castle with the shutters closed. A duke’s heir cuts both ways, Your Grace. The Chancellor will take particular care of him, and that may mean taking him away from you.”

“Can I win as I stand?”

“No,” Quince said. “I do not think you can.”

Gideon respected him for it. He had known colonels who could not give a straight report of a lost position.

“Then how do I change the ground?”

“You marry.”

Gideon stared at him. Quince did not blink.

“You marry at once. By common licence it can be done within the month, in your own parish church, and by August the lady will have been three months mistress of this house. You open it. You dine with the children. You are seen at church and on your land. Then when Mr. Pym asks who is to bring up these infants, the answer is a duke and duchess, in their father’s home. Mr. Pargeter’s best page becomes waste paper.”

“You would have me buy a wife to win a suit.”

“I would have Your Grace make an honest offer to a sensible woman. It is done every day, for far worse reasons than three orphans.”

Gideon laughed. It was not a pleasant sound, and he had not made it for some time. He turned his head, deliberately, so that the last of the daylight fell on the left side of his face.

“Look at it, Mr. Quince. Which sensible woman do you suggest?”

“I have looked at it, Your Grace. I looked at it in August, and I will tell you what I told myself then. It is a scar and a patch, and you are a duke with forty thousand acres. You would not want for acceptances.” Quince took off his spectacles and folded them. “That is exactly the difficulty. A girl out of the schoolroom who takes you for the coronet will be useless to you. Mr. Pym will have her before him. He will ask her questions, and he has been listening to liars for thirty years.”

“Then what do I need? Be precise.”

“A woman, not a girl. Respectable, of some standing in this neighbourhood, so that the rector and the steward can speak to her character. Sensible. Good with children, and seen to be. Not a beauty and not a fortune-hunter. If she had some plain reason of her own for the match, one she would not be ashamed to say aloud, I should like her the better. The Master will believe a reason he can understand.” He paused. “And she must be able to look at you across a breakfast table. I say it with respect.”

“Say it without. It saves time.”

“Then she must not flinch. The Master will be watching for it.”

Gideon got up and went back to the window. It was nearly dark. Down in the village a few lights had come out.

He was thinking, against his will, of a brick floor and the smell of wet earth and coal smoke. A tall woman in a black gown and a painter’s apron, with silver spectacles and pink fingers, had looked him full in the face. She had looked once and steadily, as one looks at a map, and then she had told him he was standing in her light.

Nobody had told him to move in a year. People stepped around him.

He had stood by her stove like a recruit, and he had watched her take Philippa in hand with a dirty slab and a mussel shell, and no fuss at all. The child had cut him to the bone, and Miss Corfield had neither scolded her before him nor pretended not to hear. She had waited and dealt with it afterwards, low and straight. She had told Philippa he had walked a mile in the rain when he might have sent a groom.

He had not known anybody had noticed that. He was not sure he had noticed it himself.

He had read the paper on the door, too. He could have recited it.

“I will give you an answer at dinner,” he said. “Seven o’clock. You will want to wash.”

“Your Grace dines with me?”

“It seems I had better begin somewhere.”
***
Bat Oakes had the razor stropped and the water hot before Gideon reached his dressing room. He was forty-six, square and grizzled, and he had been troop sergeant when Gideon was a cornet who could not tell his horse’s near side from its off. A French musket ball in the Peninsula had given him a limp, and nothing had ever given him tact.

“Sit down, Your Grace. You’ll not go down to a London attorney looking like a Spanish muleteer.”

Gideon sat. Oakes tipped his head back with two fingers and went to work with the soap.

“How is the nursery?”

Oakes’s brush stopped for a second. He had not been asked that before.

“Quiet. Miss Pip took her bread and milk last night and went to bed without a word to anyone. She’s got a shell of green paint on the windowsill, and she’ll scratch the eyes out of whoever touches it. Master Crispin’s reading his thermometer three times a day and writing it in a book. Started the first of the month. It’s his father’s thermometer.”

“I know whose it is.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” The razor came down the right cheek in one clean stroke. “And Miss Tabitha asked Mercy Onions this morning whether the pirate was coming upstairs.”

“The what?”

“The pirate. It’s the patch. She’s four.”

Gideon said nothing. Oakes wiped the blade.

“She don’t mean harm by it. She’s seen you maybe five times since Christmas, and every time it was on the stairs with you going the other way. A child that size, she sees a great tall fellow with a black patch who never speaks. What’s she to think? She hides behind Mercy’s skirts when she hears your boots.”

“She is afraid of me.”

“She don’t know you. It’s not the same thing.” Oakes turned his chin to the light and began, with great care, on the left side. He shaved along the scar as a man ploughs along a hedge. “None of them do. Begging your pardon.”

“You never beg my pardon. Don’t begin now.”

“Then I’ll say it straight. Lord Edmund’s been dead six months and you’ve been dead with him. Them three upstairs lost a father and a mother and an uncle the same night, and you’re the only one of the three they could have back.”

It was the longest speech Gideon had ever heard from him. He let the razor finish its stroke before he answered.

“Quince says the court will take them. Pargeter has asked for them, and as things stand he will get them.”

Oakes’s hand stayed steady, though his breathing did not. “The Bristol gentleman? Him that cried at the church?”

“Yes.”

“And what does Mr. Quince say you’re to do about it?”

“Marry. Within the month.”

He waited for the laugh. Oakes rinsed the razor.

“Well,” the sergeant said. “It’s about time somebody said so. I’d have said it myself by Whitsun.”

“You think a woman can be found.”

“I think you’re asking the wrong man. Chin up.” The blade went under his jaw. “Have you one in mind?”

Gideon looked at the ceiling. “What do they say in the village about the rector’s daughter?”

There was a short silence above him.

“Miss Corfield,” Oakes said slowly. “They say she nursed the old man two years and never complained of it. They say she knows more about growing things than any gardener in the county, and she’ll tell you so if you ask. They say the rector died owing three hundred and forty pounds, the most of it for coal and glass and seeds from Africa, and she’s selling every pot to pay it, and has to be out by Midsummer. Mrs. Hobday thinks it a crying shame.” He wiped the last of the soap away with a warm cloth. “Eight and twenty, and no beauty, the lads say. I’ve seen her in the lane myself, and I’d say the lads are fools.”

“That was not what I asked.”

“No, Your Grace. But I thought you might like to know.”

Gideon stood and took the towel from him. In the glass he saw what he always saw, the patch and the white line. He made himself look at it a moment longer than usual.

She needed three hundred and forty pounds and a place to stand her glasshouse. He needed a duchess a Master in Chancery would believe. He would not have to pretend to her, nor she to him. It could all be written down, clause by clause, and signed. He understood terms of surrender and terms of supply. He thought he might manage terms of marriage, if nobody asked him for more than was on the paper.

And Philippa, who would not come to him across a room, had walked a mile in the rain to that woman three times.

“My black coat,” he said. “And Oakes.”

“Your Grace?”

“Tell Nurse Onions the pirate will come upstairs tomorrow. She had better warn Miss Tabitha.”

Oakes’s weathered face did something complicated. “I’ll tell her.”
***
Two places had been laid in the dining room for the first time since November. The candles showed how large the table was, and how long it had been empty.

Quince was standing by the fire. He had changed his neckcloth and nothing else.

“Your Grace said I should have an answer.”

“You shall.” Gideon went to the head of the table and stood with his hand on the chair. He found that his mouth was dry, which was ridiculous. He had not yet asked her, and she might very well refuse. “You asked for a woman of sense and standing, known in this neighbourhood, good with children, with a plain reason of her own. One who does not flinch.”

“I did.”

“There is such a lady, a mile from here. Yesterday she told me to get out of her light, and I did it. I mean to call on her on Thursday.”

Quince took out his pocket-book and his pencil, and waited.

“Her name,” Gideon said, “is Miss Corfield.”
***