by Paul Butler
Sophia, I could see, had paid no attention. Her thoughts were upon the surface of the tea in her cup. Both the Admiral and Harville were coming towards me now as though to draw me into a discussion; clearly neither of them had seen anything strange in my manner.
“What do you say, Frederick?” said the Admiral. “Harville insists that the presence of a robin in a suburban garden in March is proof positive that there will be a fine spring. I imagine that would be music to the ears of a young man about to be married and hoping to enjoy the countryside with his new wife.”
“Oh tush, dear,” cried Sophia, “do you imagine poor Anne means to tramp the fields and meadows around Kellynch holding Frederick’s gun as he moves from one hide to another?”
Only then, as Harville’s laugh and the Admiral’s guffaw filled the room, did I notice that Lydia Harville’s eyes were on me and that her expression was both unsmiling and curious.
“And yet, Mrs. Croft,” said Harville, still laughing and quite oblivious of his wife, “I have often heard ladies, Miss Anne included, speak of the refreshing influence of nature in all seasons. Perhaps Captain Wentworth can be persuaded to leave his gun behind occasionally.”
Harville had drawn close to my shoulder and had taken on the stance of an ally. In spite of my worries, or perhaps because of them, I found myself wishing for a return of the warm comradeship we used to feel for each other. I had been remembering, through bouts of personal terror, the Harvilles’ extraordinary kindness to Louisa Musgrove in her sickness, the way they had both given themselves entirely to her cure.
“That is a good suggestion, Harville,” I said. “And I’m sure Anne will teach me to love nature without the percussion of gunfire to quicken my appreciation.” There was more laughter that settled into a happy pause. But I caught Lydia Harville’s expression again. Once more she was looking directly at me and in a way that seemed to acknowledge that something had passed between us.
“But Captain Wentworth,” she said leaning to the side table and ringing the brass bell, “you must be anxious about your guest, surely.”
“Yes,” I said. Against my will my limbs had drawn themselves straight as though to attention. “Anne found me this morning and told me that Captain Mason had arrived.”
The Harvilles’ maid, Jenny, slipped into the room. On a tray, she carried a letter. My stomach gave a jump as I recognized Oliver Mason’s seal. My first thought was that Mason’s original letter had been miraculously retrieved from Mrs. Smith, the torn corner repaired, the broken seal expertly removed and a new one applied. It made little sense, especially when there was a much simpler and more likely explanation, namely that it was a different letter, but the confusion was further measure of how very disoriented I had become when faced with evidence of Oliver Mason’s presence. Within the space of two minutes I hadn’t recognized a friend of long standing and I had woven an elaborate, almost supernatural explanation for the commonplace of occurrences. Calm down, I told myself.
Jenny stood before me with the tray. And this time, there was a knife by the letter. My fingers sweated as I picked up the letter. Then, when Jenny did not immediately leave, I was obliged to take the knife as well.
I caught the hint of a smile in Jenny’s blue eyes as I sliced under the wax then, as casually as I could, laid the envelope and knife back on the tray. The girl curtsied and left.
“Captain Mason retired almost as soon as we could make a room for him,” said Lydia. “He said we might not expect to see him until our dinner tonight.”
“What a man of mystery your Captain Mason is, Frederick,” said the Admiral pleasantly, “communicating by letters and locking himself in his room.”
There was nothing in the comment but the Admiral’s habitual bluffness, but I saw something altogether more penetrating in Lydia Harville’s expression.
“Quite,” she said.
As I unfolded the missive, I moved, as though in private reflection, away from Harville and into the dimmest corner of the room.
“Oh Frederick,” said Sophia, “come further into the light. You know it is bad for your eyes to read in the shadows!”
I gave an indulgent smile. The contents of the note, I had already established, were both shorter and less terrifying than I had feared. I murmured distractedly, “but you know that I, as well as your husband, have been forced on occasion to read charts by the moon.”
Sophia gave a frustrated sigh aimed not at me but at the Admiral. “Don’t I know it?”
I skimmed through the letter once more and a panic that had become almost habitual of late began to subside.
Dear Frederick,
I write now to renounce the contents of the letter I sent only two days ago, and to apologize for them. I know they must have caused you the most vexing of times and I will find it hard to forgive myself even if you were to forgive me. I look forward to meeting your Anne tonight, if I am still welcome, and I know as a certainty from the strength and courage of your judgement that she must be worthy of any man.
Yours in friendship,
Oliver Mason
I folded the paper and slipped it into my pocket, sensing the attention only of Lydia Harville as I did so. No one else thought anything about it. Harville and the admiral were murmuring about the likely weather at Kellynch and Sophia was watching them. But a new worry had begun to sprout; Lydia’s interest, if it persisted, might soon attract the curiosity of the others. Such thoughts, however, were interrupted by a heavy knock.
“Good gracious,” said the Admiral, as we heard Jenny’s footsteps scuttle down the hallway, “who could that be?”
“My dear,” said Sophia, “it is hardly an unsociable time to call. It could be anyone…” then she turned to me, “perhaps it is Anne.”
“Sounds like a tradesman’s knock,” countered the Admiral. “I hardly think Miss Elliot has such large knuckles.”
The door opened and Jenny curtsied, addressing Harville. “It is a man to see you, sir. He wouldn’t give his name.”
Harville gave a mild exclamation, straightened himself, and followed his maid out into the hallway.
“Some hawker most likely.” The admiral picked up a teacup but we all remained silent and oddly attentive — which was prescient. In a moment, a raised voice boomed through the closed drawing room door. A fear came into Lydia’s eyes as she replaced a cup in its saucer. Sophia looked at me. The words were indecipherable save for something about “dare” — likely part of the phrase “how dare you” — although crowded in a greater number of syllables.
The memory of Harville’s stick and the blood flashed into my mind. Crossing the room, I opened the door into the hallway. The Admiral, following, closed the door after us sheltering the ladies from the disturbance. When I saw Harville from behind, stick ominously in hand, I realized this indeed was the other Harville, the one who had acted in fear and anger when I had asked after the whereabouts of Elsie.
For the moment Harville’s figure obscured the man to whom he was speaking, although I heard his words well enough. “It’s your choice, right enough,” he said. “But you’ll have no say then. I can use the knowledge as I like.”
“And you can hang for it too,” hissed Harville, stick gripped with sudden intent, its metal tip rising from the floor. It remained suspended in wait for a swing that seemed destined to follow.
The Admiral and I now stared at each other, the surprise under his bushy brows quite mirroring my own. When I looked back to the door, Harville’s opponent came into view. I couldn’t exactly place why, but I had been expecting Plato, the African. It was not that this man’s voice, nor his manner of speaking, matched to any degree; it was more that Plato was the only man I had ever heard impugn Harville’s reputation, and therefore the only man I could imagine arguing with him so openly.
But the antagonist was not the African but rather some creature — half human, half ra
t, an animal of the sewers. A grizzled face was all jaw and broken nose and gimlet eyes peered out from under a hood. Palsied strings of white hair wound down from his collar and hung limp upon his chest like frayed pieces of rope. A single upper tooth pressed like an anchor into the flesh of his bottom lip.
He looked at us and, seeing the movement of his face, Harville turned also. “I am seeing this man from the premises,” he said coldly. “He has no business here.”
But the man was rooted to the spot and quite unafraid, it seemed, despite the stick in Harville’s hand. Then, quite suddenly, he half turned as if to leave. But as he did so he glanced, in turn, at Harville, then at me, then at the Admiral. “Oh I’ll have business, sirs, I’ll have business with you all in the end.”
When he took his first lurching pace from the entrance, Harville, to our surprise, followed, raising his stick as though to strike the man’s retreating back.
“Harville, no!” I cried.
He turned to me, white-faced, and I felt the coldness of recent weeks return. I had ceased to know my friend.
17. NURSE ROOKE
I DID SO HATE TO WORRY MY OWN Mrs. Smith and I could see my news doing battle in her features.
“Henry might help us, Mrs. Rooke?” Furrows appeared on a brow made golden by the hearth. “For thirty-five sovereigns, a grave-robber might eliminate a man whose disappearance will cause no commotion and provoke no investigation?” She gave me a familiar look, one I had first seen when she was a child and I her governess.
Weeks before my banishment from her parents’ home, I had caught her in my bedchamber. In her hand was my upturned purse. She had been shaking it so that any secreted coins would tumble onto the floor. There had been nothing inside, of course. I had adopted the habit of hiding my money away — the dear little rascal had pilfered too large a portion of wages and I had been obliged to restrict access. Much as I adored her, much as I loved to feel her nestling presence under my wing, I had been forced to frustrate this particular profitable enterprise of hers; I did need some money for thread to re-sew my clothing’s worn seams, and for writing materials and other such odds and ends.
In the circumstances, you might suppose the look in question to have been guilt, but that would be to underestimate the true spirit of my Miss Adeline; she had a mind even then to outfox the world and all its expectations. No, her look that day told me she felt cheated, that she the felt the weight of a true injustice coming down upon her. She was the one who has been needlessly robbed and I, who had thoughtlessly left my purse coin-free, was the cause.
So it was now. The news I had given her was another upturned purse that had proved empty. I feared some retribution in the form of an insult or cutting remark. As a mother dreads the judgement from her child more than from any other, so it was with Mrs. Smith and me. But it was more than this; it grieved me sorely indeed to think I was the bringer of such serious frustrations.
“I believe, Mrs. Smith,” I said, trying to pave a way forward, “there might be others who can better your offer.”
She breathed deeply and looked into the flames. “Continue, Nurse Rooke. Tell me everything you know.”
“Henry met Plato in the Abbey graveyard within an hour of my meeting him. I was too distant to tell what was said. But there was the air of a conspiracy about them, in their posture, in the slender distance between them.”
Mrs. Smith closed her eyes.
“But there is more,” I said quietly.
She turned to me and I wondered at the hint of fear in her eyes. Never in her adult years had I seen her look so vulnerable, so in need of comfort. Rather than deliver the news — and I did not know its significance for good or bad, though an instinct told me it could not be good — I had a great urge to fall to my knees before her, to take her head and bury it under my wing as I had used to do when she was a little child — my arm almost ached with this desire. But I held back, of course. This was no longer what she expected from me. Instead I told her of the other meeting, how Henry had gone to the lodging of Captain Wentworth, the Crofts, and the Harvilles, and how Captain Harville had looked wild and shaken his stick at Henry.
“Did you hear anything that was said?” asked Mrs. Smith, “or get any sense of the subject of their communication?”
“No, Mrs. Smith, except that Henry must have posed a question and the answer was the most emphatic no.”
“It’s incredible,” Mrs. Smith said, rubbing her hands against her thighs, “we offer Henry more in gold than he has ever been given for a single job. But rather than agreeing and carrying out the instructions, he allows Plato to bargain for his life. And now there is this visit to Captain Harville. Wentworth, his closest friend, could not garner information from him. Yet, after a meeting with Plato, this lowest form of human life we call Henry feels emboldened to try. The world, Nurse Rooke, is spinning away from its predetermined course. We are travelling into a very dark region indeed.”
“Yes, Mrs. Smith, we are.”
She looked at me with suspicion. Though I had intended no reproach, the words had been shaken from me like fruit passed the natural time for falling. There had been trepidation in my voice.
“You perhaps have mixed feelings, Nurse Rooke, about my decision regarding Plato?”
There was no point in hiding anything from Mrs. Smith. She could see clean through my skull. “Nothing that has hampered my duties, Mrs. Smith.” I felt my back straighten as I spoke. It was the truth.
But there was something else I didn’t know how to broach. Poor Captain Wentworth, poor Miss Elliot. We were crossing a line, it was certain. What threatened her most, if only she knew it, was a moral danger. This was why I longed to take her under my wing, to protect her from herself. Love is a terrifying thing. It makes one long with such fury to both please and to guide, and the two were so often in opposition.
For the moment she was contented with my answer and she looked into the flames. Her distraction emboldened me to make a suggestion: “What if Henry has the information already, Mrs. Smith?”
She turned to me suddenly. “What do you mean?”
“About the maid; what if Henry already knows what Captain Harville won’t reveal? What if that’s why he went to Captain Harville — to threaten him with disclosure?”
“Oh, Nurse Rooke,” she sighed, her shoulders slumping in an emotion that seemed very much like relief. “How diverting you can be! If I don’t know, you don’t know, and Plato doesn’t know, how can a sewer creature like Henry know?”
My lips tingled but I distrusted my heart; even for one such as I, enduring disparagement after disparagement may take too great a toll. There was too much at stake, however. I had to serve my mistress even if it meant I was to be ridiculed in the process. “There is one particular set of circumstances, Mrs. Smith, which would put Henry more in knowledge than anyone.”
She stared at me, flames dancing in her eyes.
I nodded.
“But why?” she said softly. “Why would such a thing remain secret?”
I smoothed down my apron, surprised that Mrs. Smith’s tone had remained almost respectful, yet feeling some suspense as I knew this might end at any moment. “I don’t know, Mrs. Smith. But what circumstance other than death would give Henry the confidence to come to the home of a gentleman? What kind of knowledge, other than the gravest of secrets, would make him spurn thirty-five crowns from us and seek more elsewhere?”
The thought seemed to wash over her. “Nurse Rooke,” she said quietly, “you have indeed touched upon something, after all.”
I pulled my apron hem, trying to hide the fact that her praise had brought me perilously close to tears.
“But in the meantime, we cannot be idle.” Her voice was suddenly brisk and full of action. “If there is information to buy we must be sure that Plato is not the one who buys it. We must take away his money.”
“Ta
ke away his money, Mrs. Smith?”
“Certainly.”
She smiled at my confusion. “You know where he keeps it. You have told me many times.”
The fire popped. I looked to the grate and then back to Mrs. Smith. “But that would be stealing.”
Mrs. Smith tilted her head and clasped her hands upon her knee. This, I remembered, was one of the postures I had tried upon Miss Adeline herself when I had first been made governess in her home; I had seen it in a book of instruction for young women entering the profession and, as it promised to promote the idea of one’s intractable authority in the nursery and classroom, I had set upon it high hopes. It was a surprise now to see my former pupil using it upon me when the method had achieved so little success when I had used it upon her. “Come now, Nurse Rooke,” she said, the old scorn returning, “you have stolen before.”
“Yes.” I remembered only too well. But I had never stolen since. My criminal activity since rejoining my Miss Adeline had been limited to providing information and passing messages that merely abetted in a blackmail planned by another. I had helped to bring misery, if not ruin, onto many it was true. But never since that day in Miss Adeline’s parents’ home had I been solely responsible for any single clearly defined breach of the law.
“Then you must do so again — listen to me.” She turned in her chair and fixed me with some intensity. “Do you know what brought the Roman Empire to an end, Nurse Rooke?”
“I have some memory, but my schooling in history was a long time ago.”
