Two O’Clock

Friday, May 10, 1816

“Miss Corfield, Your Grace,” said Mrs. Hobday from the library door. “She’s walked up from the village, and she asks whether she may see the nursery before she sees you.”

Gideon put down a pen he had not been using. At the long table Quince looked up from a draft with blanks in it, and looked down again.

“Where is she?”

“In the hall, taking off her pattens. I offered her the morning room and a fire, and she said she had rather not be made comfortable just yet.”

That sounded like her. He went out to the hall.

She was standing on the flagstones under his grandfather’s portrait, in the same black gown, with a grey cloak dark at the shoulders and mud on her hem. A mile of wet lane had put colour in her face. She had no maid with her, but Mrs. Hobday had stayed by the stair foot with her hands folded, and Gideon understood that his housekeeper had appointed herself to the duty.

“Your Grace.” Miss Corfield curtsied. “I said I would send or come. I have come, but I am not ready to answer. I should like to see the children first.”

“You wish to look over the ground.”

“I wish to know whom I am asked to be a mother to. I know one of them a little. I have only seen the other two in church, in black, from six pews back.”

“That is reasonable.” He turned his head so that the stair window was on his left. “I will take you up myself. I should warn you that my arrival is not generally a success.”

“Then I shall see that as well,” she said.

The schoolroom was at the top of the east stair. He had climbed to it on Wednesday for the first time since the funeral. He had stood ten minutes in the doorway and got eleven words out of his nephew. He had counted them afterwards.

His boots on the bare treads announced him as usual. When he opened the door, a scrap of white pinafore was just vanishing behind Nurse Onions’s skirts.

Mercy Onions bobbed. She was a broad, fresh-faced Shropshire woman of thirty-one who had been Arabella’s nursery maid before she was nurse, and since November she had looked permanently short of sleep. “Your Grace. Ma’am.”

“Nurse Onions, this is Miss Corfield, from the rectory. She has come to visit the children.”

Three pairs of eyes went to the visitor. Crispin was at the window with a ledger open on the sill. He was a thin, fair boy of ten in a black jacket, and he stood up at once and bowed, because Edmund had taught him to. Philippa was at the table with a slate. She gave Miss Corfield one hard look, and Miss Corfield returned it gravely. Something passed between them that Gideon could not read. Then Philippa bent over the slate and scowled at it as if it owed her money.

One blue eye and some fair curls appeared at Nurse Onions’s hip. The eye found him and disappeared.

He stayed by the door. He thought he would do least harm there.

Miss Corfield did not go to the children at once. She stood for a moment and looked about her, at the fireguard and the globe and the rocking horse with one ear gone. On the windowsill a mussel shell of green paint sat alone with a clear foot of space around it. Then she crossed to the window, and she did it slowly.

“Good morning, Master Crispin. Is that a thermometer outside the sash?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What does it say?”

He did not need to look. “It was forty-four at eight o’clock. It will not be noon for six minutes.”

“Forty-four degrees, in the second week of May. My heaths would agree with it. They have been complaining for a month.” She bent to see the instrument through the wet glass. “That is a good one. London made?”

“It was my father’s. He had it from Mr. Troughton.”

“Then you are quite right to nail it up. May I see the book?”

The boy hesitated, and then turned the ledger toward her. Gideon could see it from where he stood. There were ruled columns in a careful round hand, with the date, three readings and a word or two beside them.

“You began on the first of the month,” she said. “Ten days. And what is this column?”

“Weather, ma’am.”

“‘Rain. Rain. Showers. Heavy rain. Rain.’” She read it without smiling. “How heavy?”

Crispin frowned. “Heavy.”

“Heavier than Tuesday?”

“I think so.” He looked at the page, and Gideon saw that it troubled him. “I don’t know how to say how much. It rained on eight days. But I can’t write down how much rain there was. You can’t count it.”

“You can measure it, though. You can do it to the tenth part of an inch.”

The boy’s head came up.

“My father did it every morning for twenty years,” Miss Corfield said. “You want a copper funnel with a sharp rim, five inches across, set into a jar so that nothing splashes out and nothing dries up. You stand it level on open grass, well away from walls and trees. Every morning at the same hour you pour what it has caught into a narrow glass with marks up the side, and you write down the figure. If you do that for a month you can say that May had four inches, or five. If you do it for a year you know something about this valley that nobody else knows.”

“Why narrow?”

“Why do you think?”

He thought. Gideon watched him do it, with his fair brows drawn together as Edmund’s used to be over a column of rents.

“Because it stands taller,” Crispin said slowly. “The same water would be higher in a thin glass. So you can see a small amount.”

“That is exactly why.”

“What if it snows?”

“You bring the funnel in by the fire, let it melt and measure the water.”

“Does a frost crack the jar? Should it be the same hour as the thermometer? Papa said eight in the morning was best, because of the dew.” The words were coming faster than Gideon had ever heard them come from him. “Where is your father’s one now, ma’am?”

“On the rectory lawn, where it has always been, catching a great deal,” she said. “It will want somebody to read it. I have not had the heart since January.”

Gideon looked at the clock over the mantel. She had been in the room five minutes.

Crispin took his noon reading to the minute and wrote it down. While he did, Miss Corfield spoke to Nurse Onions about hours and meals, like any caller. The children breakfasted at eight and dined at two, and Miss Tabitha was in bed by half past six. She asked nothing that a rector’s daughter might not ask. At some point in it the curls came out from behind the skirts as far as the shoulder, and a small voice said, “You have windows on your eyes.”

“I have. Would you like to see through them?”

She took off the spectacles and held them out at arm’s length without stepping nearer. Tabitha looked through them at the floor and then at the rocking horse. Then, by accident, she looked at Gideon in the doorway.

She dropped them. Miss Corfield caught them before they reached the boards.

“Pirate,” Tabitha whispered, and was gone again.

Gideon did not move. He had stood under grapeshot with less effort.

Miss Corfield put her spectacles on and glanced at him once. There was no pity in it, and he was glad of that.

“Thank you, Nurse Onions,” she said. “Your Grace, I am ready for the library now.”
***
Quince rose when they came in, was presented, and sat down again at the far end of the long table with his pencil. Mrs. Hobday left the door standing wide. Gideon noticed both things. So did Miss Corfield, and she seemed to approve of them.

She would not take the chair by the fire. She stood by the table with her hands folded, as she had stood in her own glasshouse.

“You gave me your terms standing, Your Grace. I will give you mine the same way. There are four.”

“Go on.”

“The first. Those children dine at two o’clock. You will dine with them, at their table and on their mutton, every day you are at home. You told me yourself what Mr. Pargeter has written, that you dine alone. I do not care how it reads to a Master. I care that a child of four knows you only by your boots on the stairs.”

Gideon thought of the white pinafore going behind the skirts. “At two. Every day. Agreed.”

“The second. They are told the truth, all three, today, and by you. They are told that their uncle is marrying so that they can stay at Brackenhope, and why. They will not be handed a love story they can see through.” She paused. “You offered me plain dealing, so I must tell you something. Pip was under my staging yesterday. She had come to ask your leave, and she got there before you did. She heard every word.”

He stared at her. “Every word?”

“Down to the door that locks, though I am glad to say that she did not understand it. She gave me her promise to keep silent for one day, and I think she has kept it. She was biting her tongue nearly through upstairs. I will not ask it of her for an hour longer. She told me that holding her tongue felt the same as lying, and I could not prove to her that she was wrong.”

That explained the scowl, and the look between them. His niece had sat through yesterday’s supper and this morning’s breakfast with that inside her, at seven years old. He felt something he could only call respect.

“They shall be told before dinner,” he said. “Agreed. The third?”

“I go on with my work. I am at my bench every morning while the light is good, and nobody fetches me away from it to receive calls. The book is to be finished. I will be your duchess in the drawing room and before your Master, but I will be one with paint on her hands. If that would shame you, say so now.”

“It would not. The glasshouse is to be yours by deed. What you do in it is your affair.”

“The fourth, then.” For the first time she seemed to brace herself. “Plain dealing runs both ways. You are not the only one who may say a plain thing. You must also hear one, even when you do not care for it.”

“That is fair.”

“Then here is one. Yesterday you stood the whole time with your right side to me. You did it again in the hall just now, and on the stairs. You turn when I move. It must be very tiring, and I wish you would not trouble. I looked at your face on Monday. I have seen it.”

At the far end of the table Quince’s pencil stopped.

Gideon felt the blood come up under his collar. He had not known that it could be seen. He had thought it was only a way of standing, like keeping his back to a wall.

No one had named it to him before. Oakes would have, if Oakes had ever been on the wrong side of it.

He turned to face her squarely, with the window light full on the patch and the scar. It cost him more than he would have expected. She looked at him as she had looked at the boy’s ledger. Then she nodded, as though he had answered a question correctly.

“Agreed,” he said. His voice was rougher than he liked.

“Thank you. Then yes, Your Grace. I will marry you.”

She said it as briskly as a farmer’s wife closing on a pig, and she put out her hand.

He took it. It was a long, strong hand, a little cold from the walk. The first two fingers and the thumb were stained a clear deep yellow that had not been there yesterday.

“What is that?”

“Gamboge. I was up at five. I could not sleep, so I painted.” She looked at their joined hands and then took hers back. “It does not come off for days. I am sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said, and then wondered why.

Quince had come down the table. He bowed to her properly now, as he would to a client.

“Madam, I shall draw the settlement tonight and leave a fair copy at the rectory tomorrow, so that you may read it at leisure. The glasshouse, the stove and the whole collection will be vested in two trustees for your sole and separate use. I propose myself and Mr. Preece, His Grace’s steward, unless you object. Your father’s creditors will be paid in full within the week. You will have pin money of four hundred pounds a year, paid quarterly into your own hand. Your jointure will be two thousand pounds a year, should you survive His Grace.”

Her eyebrows went up above the silver rims. “I did not ask for a jointure.”

“No,” Gideon said. “It is not a thing you ask for. No Duchess of Brackenhope has been left with less, and you will not be the first.”

She considered him. “Is that plain dealing or pride?”

“It is pride.”

“Well, I suppose I must hear that too.” There was almost a smile in it. “When?”

“By common licence, in St. Milburga’s, on Thursday the twenty-third,” Quince said. “Thirteen days hence. That gives you eleven weeks as mistress of this house before the Master sits.”

“And the glasshouse cannot come down until I have somewhere dry to put three hundred pots. I shall want to see that walled garden, Your Grace, and to speak to Mr. Preece.” She pulled her cloak straight. “But the children come first. It is twenty minutes to two.”
***
He told them in the schoolroom. He stood on the hearthrug with his face to all three of them, since he had just agreed to it. Miss Corfield stood a little to one side.

He had no gift for softening things, and he did not try to.

“Your uncle Pargeter has asked a court in London to send the three of you to live with him at Clifton. I mean to keep you here, in your father’s house. The court is more likely to leave you with a married man than with a single one. So I have asked Miss Corfield to marry me, and she has agreed. She will bring her glasshouse and her plants and live here with us. We shall be married on Thursday the twenty-third. That is the whole truth of it, and you will not be told any other.”

Nobody answered. Nurse Onions had her apron to her mouth.

“I knew,” said Philippa. She let out a breath as if she had been holding it since yesterday. “I knew first.”

“So I am told. You kept your word. That was well done.”

She went scarlet and glared at the slate.

Crispin had gone very white. “Can the court make us go, sir? If it decides to?”

“Yes.”

“When does it decide?”

“A gentleman called a Master hears us in August. The decision comes after that.”

The boy nodded slowly. He looked at Miss Corfield. “Will the rain gauge come as well, ma’am?”

“It will come first,” she said. “You may carry it.”

From behind Nurse Onions a small voice asked, “Is the pirate getting married?”

“He is,” said Gideon.

There was no reply to that.

Miss Corfield tied her cloak strings. “I shall go home now. It is your dinner, Your Grace, and theirs. I have no place at it yet.” She stopped at the door. “It wants five minutes of two.”

Then she left him to it.

The nursery maid brought up boiled mutton, turnips and a rice pudding, and nearly dropped the tray when she saw him. There was no fourth chair, so Nurse Onions fetched one from her own room. It was too low for him, and his knees came up against the underside of the table.

He sat with Crispin on his right and Philippa across from him. Tabitha was at the far corner on a cushion, as close to her nurse as she could get without leaving her seat.

Crispin looked at his plate. Philippa stared straight at the patch, daring it. Tabitha looked at him over the rim of her mug with round blue eyes and did not blink.

Gideon picked up his fork. The clock over the mantel struck two, and nobody at the table said a word.
***