A spray of dead ivy snapped beneath Elliot's boot, releasing a breath of mould and old earth. He ducked under a rusted iron arch half-swallowed by bramble, the metal cold against his cheek, and found himself on the south terrace for the first time in memory. The flagstones had cracked into jigsaw pieces, black with damp, and rosebushes grown wild stabbed at his trouser legs with thorns the size of kittens' claws. Somewhere beyond the yew hedge, a wood pigeon cooed its throaty, repetitive grief.
Elliot had been sent to fetch Old Tom for breakfast, a task Mrs. Pembury dispatched each morning with the certainty of sunrise. But Old Tom was not at the toolshed. He was not at the potting bench. And the third place Elliot knew to look, the walled rose garden, had stood locked and forbidden for as long as the stable boy had lived in the groundskeeper's attic above the stables. Until today.
Elliot heard voices before he saw the speakers. The terrace lay one wall removed from the formal parterre, separated by a stretch of gravel path and a border of lavender gone to woody skeletons. He pressed himself against the cold stone of the dividing wall, curiosity snaring him the way a rabbit's foot snared a hound. He knew better than to spy. He had been told better often enough. But a boy of eleven could not help what a boy of eleven heard.
Mireille Calloway stood at the terrace's centre, hands braced upon her hips, her dark hair pinned beneath a straw bonnet tied with a green ribbon. She wore a morning dress the colour of weak tea, its hem already darkening with the soil of the morning's intent. Behind her, two of the younger gardeners waited with shears and a wheelbarrow, their faces wearing the patient, nervous look of men awaiting orders they suspected might be countermanded.
Old Tom stood opposite her, his back to Elliot. The old man's shoulders made a ridge beneath his patched corduroy jacket, and the long-handled secateurs in his grip trembled, though whether from age or feeling, Elliot could not say.
"Miss Calloway." Old Tom's voice came out gravelly, slow, each word a stone turned over. "I cannot. His lordship's instructions were plain. The terrace is to stand. The roses are to stand. Nothing is to be touched. Nothing is to be cleared. The grounds are a memorial, and memorials must breathe as they were left to breathe."
"I am aware of his lordship's instructions, Tom." Mireille's tone carried warmth enough to suggest she did not consider herself above the old man, though a governess addressing a gardener could never quite escape the strangeness of the arrangement. "I have also read them, every line, in the household ledger Mrs. Pembury keeps in the stillroom. I know the date they were written. I know the hand. And I know that they were written in the first weeks of mourning, by a young man barely twenty-one, when grief had a particular shape and the world seemed as though it must remain forever frozen in that shape."
"Miss." Old Tom's voice tightened. The secateurs rattled against each other. "I have tended this garden for fifty years. I knew the lady when she walked here. I knew the child. I knew what was planted and why. To touch it now would be a kind of murder."
"Then consider me the murderer, Tom." Mireille's voice did not sharpen, but something beneath it did, a kind of quiet steel. "Consider me the woman who has come into this house under circumstances we shall not discuss in the open air, and who finds herself, by a series of accidents not of her making, charged with the management of an estate whose master cannot bring himself to enter his own south gardens. The terrace stones are a hazard. The roots have begun to lift the flagstones near the balustrade. A footman twisting an ankle there would cost the household a fortnight's wages in surgeon bills. I have proposed a sensible programme. Cut back the dead wood. Re-set the worst of the stones. Re-establish the paths. The roses may remain, in the main. I am not proposing a bonfire of sentiment."
"You are proposing change." Old Tom's words fell like pebbles into a well. "Change is what killed the house. Change is what brought the ledgers to ruin. Change is what brought us all here, into this new arrangement, with your ladyship's employer hiding in the library and the master's mother plotting in the west parlour."
Elliot felt his stomach turn at the word mother. He thought of the Dowager Lady Ashworth, of her scent of cloves and powder, of the way her eyes measured a boy's usefulness the way a butcher measured a carcass. He pressed closer against the stone.
"I am proposing nothing that will harm a living rose." Mireille's voice held its warmth, but beneath it Elliot heard the note of someone accustomed to being obeyed in schoolrooms and finding the world less cooperative outside them. "I am proposing to clear dead wood and reset stones. If his lordship objects, he may countermand me. But until he does, I require your hands and the hands of these men, and I require them this morning."
Old Tom was silent a long while. The wood pigeon resumed its cooing. Elliot watched a beetle climb the crumbling mortar between two stones, its carapace shining the green-black of old bottle glass.
"I will send for his lordship," Old Tom said at last, and the words had the quality of a concession and a threat at once. "I will send Elliot. The boy runs faster than my knees."
"Elliot is fetching you to breakfast," Mireille said. "I saw him pass the kitchen garden not ten minutes since. He will be along directly. In the meantime, Tom, I ask you. As one who has served this house to consider what service means when the master is no longer in a state to direct it."
The old gardener's shoulders rose and fell. Then he lifted one hand and gestured sharply to the two waiting men. "Clear the path along the balustrade first. Nothing more. Cut nothing living. And when his lordship comes, you will speak of this to him, Miss Calloway, and not to me."
"I will speak of it to him myself, Tom. I will speak of it to him plainly." Mireille stepped aside to let the men pass, and as she did so her gaze happened to fall upon the gap in the yew hedge where Elliot's face, pink with cold and eavesdropping, betrayed him utterly.
She did not startle. Her expression did not change. She simply looked at him with the calm recognition of a teacher who has caught a pupil behind the curtain at the puppet show.
"Elliot," she said. "You have found Tom, I see. Pray conduct him to the kitchen when he has finished here, and tell Mrs. Pembury that we shall be within the hour."
"Yes, miss." Elliot's voice came out smaller than he would have liked. He ducked his head and would have slipped away, but Mireille raised a hand.
"Wait a moment." She crossed to the yew hedge, stepping lightly over the worst of the brambles, and drew from her reticule a small paper twist. "A piece of barley sugar from the stillroom jar. Mrs. Pembury keeps it for the kitchen children. You may consider yourself owed one for your errand. And," she added, her voice dropping so that Old Tom, already shuffling toward the balustrade, might not hear, "if you should happen upon his lordship before I do, you will say nothing of this conversation. Do you understand?"
"Yes, miss."
"Good. Off with you, then."
Elliot took the barley sugar and went, but his feet carried him not toward the stables and the warm kitchen beyond, but toward the east wing, where Lucien Ashworth kept his study on the mornings he kept any room at all. The boy could not have said why. Perhaps the barley sugar had put him in a mood of small loyalties. Perhaps the sound of Mireille's voice, asking him to keep a confidence, had stirred in him the contrary wish to deliver a confidence of his own to someone he trusted more. Perhaps, simply, he wished to be the one who brought news, for once, instead of the one who fetched old men to their porridge.
The east wing corridor smelled of dust and lamp oil. A door opened somewhere above, and footsteps descended a staircase Elliot could not see. He flattened himself against the wall, the barley sugar clenched between his teeth, and waited.
Lucien Ashworth came down the stairs with the slow precision of a man who suspected the floor might give way beneath him. He wore a dark frock coat over trousers that had been pressed by a valet who had long since gone elsewhere. His face, in the thin morning light from the stairwell window, had the look of something left out in weather. He was twenty-three. He looked, in that moment, older.
"Elliot." His voice was smooth, measured, and betrayed nothing. "What brings you to this wing at this hour?"
"Mr. Harwick sent me about the pony's shoe, my lord, and I thought to take the long way to the kitchen." The lie came out of Elliot's mouth before he could consider it, and he felt the heat of it in his ears.
Lucien's gaze rested on the boy's face for a moment, then moved past him down the corridor. He did not pursue the lie. Perhaps he had none left in him to spare for the catching.
"Walk with me," he said, and set off toward the rear of the corridor, where a small door opened upon a flagged passage that ran behind the library and emerged, by a circuitous route, into the stable yard.
Elliot fell into step a half-pace behind, the barley sugar dissolving against his tongue. They passed a window that looked upon the kitchen garden, where Old Tom's two assistants were already at work upon the terrace balustrade, their shears flashing in the watery sun.
Lucien saw them. Elliot saw him see them. The marquess stopped in the passage, his hand rising to the stone embrasure, and stood a long moment without speaking.
"Who gave the order?" he asked at last, and his voice was quiet, and very careful, and entirely without inflection.
The shears stopped. Below, in the kitchen garden, one of the assistants straightened slowly, as if his spine had become something to be reconsidered. He did not look up toward the window. He understood, perhaps, that to be seen was a different matter than to be caught.
"My lord." Elliot swallowed. The barley sugar had gone gritty against his teeth. "I don't know."
Lucien's hand on the stone did not move. His fingers were long, the nails trimmed close, and there was a faint roughness at the knuckles as though he had spent more of his recent hours among work than was fitting for a marquess.
"Then we will ask," Lucien said, and he pushed off from the embrasure and walked on, and Elliot followed, because that was what one did when the Marquess of Ashworth moved, even when the Marquess looked as he looked now, as though the house had leaned upon him and he had not been permitted to lean back.
The flagged corridor was cold underfoot. Elliot's boots, which were not his own but had belonged to a former stable boy gone to seek his fortune in Manchester, pinched at the toes. He had not told Mr. Harwick. He had told no one. There were not, in Elliot's small experience, a great number of people to tell.
They emerged into the stable yard by the smaller of the two doors, the one whose latch Old Tom had mended with wire and patience and which still, in certain weathers, required a particular persuasion. The air came to them smelling of straw and horse and the faintly sweet rot of the midden, and beneath it the colder note of stone that had not seen sun in days.
Lucien did not go to the stables. He crossed the yard with a steady, unhurried stride and passed through the gate in the low wall that separated the working yards from the ornamental gardens. Elliot trotted to keep up. He had not been bidden to come, but he had not been bidden to stop, and in his experience with Lucien's moods, which were not so much moods as weather, it was safer to remain within the radius of his orbit than to be left to drift in the cold beyond it.
The ornamental gardens at the rear of the house had been, in some previous tenure of the estate, a thing to be proud of. There were still bones to it: the great rectangular pond, drained now to a sump of leaves; the pergola, its rafters bearded with old clematis; the rose beds in their ordered rows, each plant tied to its stake with the green twine Old Tom kept in the pouch of his coat. The roses themselves were not what they had been. There had been a blight two summers past, and Old Tom had burned what he could and pruned what he could not, and what remained was a thicket of blackened canes and, here and there, a single late bloom that had opened out of season, pale and improper, like a confession offered at the wrong hour.
Lucien stopped at the edge of the nearest bed. He did not look at the roses. He was looking at the place where the shears had been, which was now only a memory and a man beginning to walk, with studied casualness, toward the tool she'd at the garden's far corner.
Elliot hung back near the gate. He knew, in the way that stable boys know things, that he was a witness now and not a companion, and that there are moments when a witness must learn the trick of making himself smaller.
Old Tom emerged from behind the she'd. He had been there all along, of course. He was always there, somewhere among the bays and the spent beds, a figure so folded into the garden that one suspected the garden had grown him as it grew its moss. He came forward at his own pace, which was not a pace at all but a slow unfolding, his boots heavy with the morning's damp, his hands in their gauntlets hanging at his sides like tools put down for the moment but not put away.
He saw Lucien. He saw Elliot. He did not hurry.
"My lord." The voice was rough and gravelly, and it took its time over the two words as though they were stones to be turned in the mouth. "A cold one."
"The terrace balustrade," Lucien said. "Who gave the order, Tom?"
Old Tom considered this. He considered it the way he considered the weather, or the progress of a slug across a particular leaf, with a patience that was not so much patience as a kind of long, settled refusal to be hurried by anything so impermanent as a question.
"Now, my lord," he said, and then was quiet, because he was Old Tom and had not yet been answered by whatever it was inside him that decided what was to be said and what was to be withheld.
Lucien waited. He was good at waiting, in the way that those who have been made to wait a great deal are good at it. He did not shift his weight. He did not look away. He stood among the dead roses as though he had been planted there, and the dead roses leaned toward him as dead things will, by the faint persuasion of the wind.
Elliot, at the gate, became aware that his ears were cold and that the barley sugar had gone entirely and left behind only the ghost of its sweetness against the roof of his mouth.
"It was a long time coming, my lord," Old Tom said at last, and there was something in his voice that Elliot could not read, a thing between apology and defiance, like the note of a bell that has been struck but is not yet sure of its pitch. "The stone has been cracked these three years. The masons in the village will not come without being sent for. The ones in the town will not come without being paid."
"And so my mother sent for whom?"
Old Tom's mouth worked under his mustache. "The men came on Tuesday, my lord. From the squire's yard. They were paid in coin I did not see the face of, and Mrs. Pembury kept the book."
"Mrs. Pembury." Lucien repeated the name as though he were tasting it, and finding it, perhaps, not to his liking. "And the roses, Tom. The climbing roses against the south wall. They were not cracked."
"No, my lord." Old Tom's gaze went, briefly, to the thicket of blackened canes, and stayed there. "They were not cracked. They were only in the way, my lord. Of the path. Of the new path that is to run from the terrace to the orangery, as the lady your mother has it in mind."
"A path."
"A path, my lord. With gravel from the quarry at Whitford, which is not the gravel we have used heretofore. The gravel we have used heretofore comes from the pit by the home wood, and the home wood is yours, my lord, and the quarry at Whitford is the squire's."
Elliot saw something move across Lucien's face, or thought he saw it, in the way that one thinks one sees a fish turn in dark water. It was there and then it was not. The marquess's hands, at his sides, did not close. His shoulders did not rise. He stood among his dead roses like a man who has been told a thing he already knew, and has been told it now in a voice that will not let him pretend otherwise.
"And the shears," Lucien said, and his voice was very even, very quiet, and had the quality of a thing held carefully in two hands. "The shears were not needed for the balustrade, Tom. The balustrade requires a chisel and a man who knows which end of it to hold."
"No, my lord." Old Tom's voice was the same gravel, but lower now, as though he had drawn it down from a shelf. "The shears were not needed for the balustrade."
"And so."
"And so I lent them, my lord. Being asked. Being asked by a person whose asking I had not the right to refuse, and not the heart to refuse, though I knew it for a wrong thing as I did it."
Elliot, at the gate, found that he had stopped breathing. He made himself breathe again. The air tasted of straw, even here, and of the cold green smell of the dead roses, and of something else, something he could not name, that was perhaps only the smell of a thing being said that could not be unsaid.
"Go in, Tom," Lucien said. "I will speak with you later."
Old Tom inclined his head. He did not hurry. He turned, and walked back toward the she'd at the same slow unfolding, and the gravel of the path that was not yet a path crunched under his boots with a sound like small bones.
Lucien stood among the roses. He did not move. He stood with his hands at his sides and his face toward the house, which from here showed its least becoming face, the face of service yards and pantries and the small, mean windows of rooms in which no one was meant to take delight. A housemaid crossed one of those windows with a dust cloth in her hand and did not look out.
Elliot, at the gate, discovered that his legs had begun to tremble, very slightly, in a way he did not think was visible. He had not been scolded. He had not been sent away. He had been permitted to remain, and this permission felt, in the pit of his stomach, like a heavier thing than any scolding.
"My lord," he said, and his voice came out higher than he had meant it to, and cracked on the second word in the way of boys whose voices have not yet settled into their final shape. "My lord, I am sorry. I should not have come this way."
Lucien turned his head. He looked at Elliot, and for a moment his face was the face of someone who had forgotten there was anyone to look at, and then it was his own face again, and he almost smiled, in the way that one almost smiles at a child who has offered a thing that cannot be accepted and cannot be returned.
"You came this way," he said, "because you have a quick tongue and a sweet tooth, and because I asked you to walk with me, and because it is, I think, a morning in which a great many people are walking in directions they would not, upon reflection, have chosen." He paused. "Which of these is the true reason, Elliot?"
Elliot considered. The trembling in his legs subsided a little. "The first two, my lord," he said. "And the third. I don't know about the fourth."
Lucien did, this time, smile. It was a small thing, and it did not reach as far as his eyes, but it was there, and Elliot felt the warmth of it in a way he could not have explained to anyone, least of all to Mr. Harwick, who had firm views on the subject of smiles from the gentry, which views Mr. Harwick kept largely to himself but which Elliot had overheard him impart, in the hearing of the mare, to the empty stable.
"Go and find Mr. Harwick," Lucien said. "Tell him I will be at the terrace in a quarter of an hour. And Elliot."
"My lord."
"Do not tell him why."
Elliot nodded. He set off across the yard at a pace that was not quite a run and not quite a walk, and which he hoped, if observed, would pass for the latter. Behind him, among the dead roses, the Marquess of Ashworth stood a moment longer, and then he turned, and walked, with his steady, unhurried stride, toward the house.
The garden door was difficult, as it always was when the rain had been at the hinges, and Mireille Calloway put her shoulder to it, and felt the wood give, and stood for a moment in the long grass that had grown, since the gardeners had been let go, against the back of the house. She had come out to look for Lucien. She did not know, precisely, why she wished to find him. She had told herself, on the stairs, that it was because she had a question about the accounts, and another about the candles, and a third about the boy who had brought the message to the stables. None of these questions required his presence. All of them could have been put in writing, and put more neatly so. But she had come anyway, because the house, since morning, had felt like a held breath, and because Lucien had gone out of it like a man who could not bear to be breathed in any further, and because she had heard his boots on the flags, and then had not heard them, and then had heard them again, and then had not.
She went along the path that ran under the kitchen windows and past the old herb beds, which were mostly gone to seed, and which smelled, in the wet, of rosemary and of something older, and of the particular sweetness of things that had been left to do as they pleased. She went past the place where the sundial had stood before it had been taken down for want of a mason, and past the cedar, which had been there when the first Ashworth had come to the estate, and which would, Mireille supposed, be there when the last of them had gone. She did not find Lucien.
She was about to turn back, and to tell herself that she had been a fool to look, and to write her questions on a piece of paper, and to send them up by one of the maids, when she saw, at the far edge of the garden, where the yew hedge gave onto the small, neglected churchyard that belonged to the family, a figure that she recognized, even at that distance, by the cut of his coat, and by the way he stood, which was the way he always stood when he wished to be quite sure that no one would come near him.
She did not call out. She went forward, quietly, along the path that ran between the graves. The grass was long here too, and wet against her stockings. There were three stones within the hedge, and two of them were of the older sort, with the lichen on them thick as a felt, and one was newer, and was of a marble that had begun, already, to stain at the edges. Mireille knew, without reading, whose name was on the newer stone. She had heard it spoken of, by Mrs. Pembury, in the way that one speaks of a thing that is not to be spoken of. She had heard it spoken of, by Old Tom, who had laid out the grave with his own hands, in the way that one speaks of a thing that has been laid to rest.
Lucien was kneeling at the stone. He did not hear her come. He had his hat off, and his head bent, and his shoulders, which were broad and which Mireille had always thought of as the shoulders of a man who bore a great deal without complaint, were shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
She stopped. She did not mean to stay, and she did not mean to watch. But her feet, for once, did not obey her, and she stood, with her hand on a branch of the yew, and she saw what she saw, and she could not, after, pretend that she had not seen it.
He was weeping. Not in the way that men are supposed to weep, which is with sound, and with a handkerchief, and with a great many apologies afterward. He was weeping in the way that a man weeps who has learned, somewhere in the years that he has been a man, that the sound of his grief is not a thing that anyone wishes to hear. His face was quite still, and his lips were pressed together, and the tears, which were not many, went down his cheeks and into the line of his jaw, and dropped, without ceremony, onto the front of his coat. He did not wipe them away. He kept his hands on the stone, one at either side of the name, as though he were afraid that if he let go, the name would go too.
Mireille's first thought, which came quickly, and which she was ashamed of almost as soon as it came, was that this was a piece. That the man who had been, since her arrival, the Marquess of Ashworth in his most unforgiving aspect, the man who had spoken to her of duty as though it were a kind of weather, and of his sister as though she were a kind of mistake, was now performing, for an audience of one, the part of the grieving brother, in order that the audience might see, and might soften, and might be more pliable, in the days that followed, to the kind of suitor he had chosen for his estate.
Her second thought, which came slower, and which she was not ashamed of, was that this was not a piece. That there is a quality to certain griefs which cannot be counterfeited, because the cost of counterfeiting them is too high, and the benefit too small. That the man who knelt at the stone was not aware that he was being seen. That the man who knelt at the stone had, perhaps, not been aware, for a very long time, that anyone wished to see him.
She thought of the house, and of the drawing room, and of the cold look he had given her across the cold hearth. She thought of the account books, and of the line, neat and unsentimental, that he had drawn through the name of a sister who was not yet dead. She thought of Mrs. Pembury, and of the way Mrs. Pembury had spoken of his mother, and of the phrase that had been used, which was that his mother had not been a woman to feel a thing she could not use. And she thought of the boy, Elliot, who had looked up at him in the stable yard, and who had seen, in the eyes of the Marquess, something that Mireille had not, until now, had any reason to look for.
She thought of the fire at her own father's house. She thought of the sound the beam had made, when it had given. She thought of the smell of the smoke, which was a smell she had carried, for years, in the back of her throat, and which she would carry, she supposed, until she was carried herself. She thought of how her own face had looked, when she had come out of the house, and of how no one had come near her for a very long time, because they had thought, perhaps, that she wished to be alone, and she had wished, in truth, for nothing in the world so much as to be asked.
She went forward. She went softly, on the wet grass, and she did not speak, and she did not clear her throat, and she came, at last, to a place that was within a few paces of where he knelt, and she stood there, and she waited, and she let him see her, when he was ready to see her.
He was ready sooner than she had thought. He looked up. His face was wet. His eyes were not red, which was a thing she had not known to be possible, and which made the wetness, in its way, the worse. He did not speak. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and the yew held them both in a quiet that was not unkind.
"My lord," she said, at last, and her voice was low, and she was careful not to say too much with it. "I have come to find you."
He gave a small nod. He did not ask why. He put his hat back on, and he stood, and he was, for a moment, unsteady on his feet, in the way that a man is unsteady when he has been kneeling longer than he had meant to. She did not offer him her hand. She thought he would not have taken it.
"I am sorry," she said. "I did not mean to come upon you."
He shook his head. "There is nothing to be sorry for," he said. "You came, and you found me, and it is no worse than it would have been if you had not."
"It might have been better," she said, and he looked at her, and she thought she saw, in the set of his mouth, the beginning of the small, wry thing that she had seen in the stable yard. But it did not quite come. He looked, instead, at the stone.
"She was nine," he said. "When she died. She was nine, and she had a way of drawing horses that was not in the least correct, and she had a way of asking questions that was not in the least kind, and she had a way of running, in the garden, that made the gardeners, who were then still gardeners, pretend that they did not see her, because they liked to see her, and because they knew that if they looked at her too directly she would stop, and ask them what they were about, and they would have to think of an answer."
He paused. "I am not telling you this," he said, "because it is a thing that requires telling. I am telling you because I find that I cannot, at present, keep it in."
"Then do not keep it in," Mireille said. "Not on my account."
He was quiet a moment. "You had a fire," he said, and it was not a question.
"I did," she said.
"Did you lose," he said, and then stopped, and she saw that he could not, for the moment, bring himself to put the rest of the question into words.
"My mother," she said. "And my father. And my younger brother. And the house, which was not a great house, but which was ours."
He nodded. He did not say he was sorry. He did not say he understood. He said, "The garden was hers," which was not, in any sense, a thing she had expected him to say, and which she understood, after a moment, was not, in any sense, a thing he had meant to say. He looked, then, as though he had given away a piece of himself that he had not intended to give, and she thought, again, of the drawing room, and of the line through the name, and she thought that she had been wrong, in part, about the line, though she could not yet have said in what part.
"We will plant something," he said. "In the spring. When there is money for it, which there may not be. Something that she would have liked. Old Tom will know what she would have liked. He was the one who used to walk with her, when she ran."
Mireille did not speak. She stood, and he stood, and the yew held them, and the rain held off, for that little while, as though it had decided, on its own account, to be considerate.
Then he drew a breath, and squared his shoulders, in the way that she had seen him square them before, and she saw that the Marquess of Ashworth was coming back, and that the brother was going, and that there would be, in a moment, no trace of the weeping but the dampness on his coat, and the small, careful set of his mouth. But she had seen him. And she could not, after, pretend that she had not.
"Walk back with me," he said. "If you have a mind to. And if you have not a mind to, walk back with me anyway. I find that I am not, just now, in a state to be left to my own devices."
"I will walk back with you," she said.
They went out of the churchyard, and along the path, and past the cedar, and past the place where the sundial had been, and he did not speak, and she did not speak, and when they came to the kitchen door he stopped, and he said, "Thank you, Miss Calloway," and she said, "My lord," and he went in, and she stood a moment, in the wet, and felt the weight of what she had seen settle, in a place that was not uncomfortable, and that she would carry, for a long time, in the way one carries the knowledge of a thing that has been, against all expectation, shown.