The stalks had to be drawn between thumb and forefinger so the small dry flowers fell into the wooden bowl without crushing, because crushing released the oil too early. Within a minute Meera’s fingertips were sticky and fragrant, and her shoulders had begun to soften. Anna stood in the doorway a moment longer than necessary, watching, and then she went. Sarah did not speak for some time.
The light through the south window was the color of weak tea. From somewhere above, a door closed, then opened, then closed again. A man’s voice said something short, and a woman’s voice answered, and then silence. Meera realized with a small cold start that the man whose voice she had just heard might very well have been him.
She kept her hands moving. She kept her face. After a long while, Sarah said without looking up, “You’ve not done this for pay before. ” It was not a question.
Meera considered three answers and chose the one closest to the truth. “No,” she said. Sarah nodded once. “You stripped them right, though.
Whoever taught you was patient. ” “A nun,” Meera said before she could stop herself. Sarah’s mouth did the corner thing. There were a great many corner things in this house.
A man came into the still room without knocking. He was not the Duke. He was perhaps forty, broad and red-faced, dressed in the soft, good clothes of an upper servant. He had a ring of keys at his belt and the particular smile of a man who used charm as attack.
He looked at Meera and stayed on her a beat too long. Meera lowered her own eyes and let her shoulders round a quarter inch and let her mouth go slightly slack, becoming in that small adjustment a girl of no consequence. “New,” he said. “Anna engaged her this morning,” Sarah said.
“She’ll help with the lavender while my hands mend. ” Mr. Latimer made a small humming sound. “His lordship is particular about who is in the house.
” “His lordship is at the home farm until noon and has never in my memory asked who stripped his lavender,” Sarah said. Mr. Latimer’s smile thinned. “All the same.
See me at the noon bell, girl, and bring your papers. ” Meera, who had no papers, said, “Yes, sir. ”
He stood another moment surveying the still room, then went. The door closed.
Sarah waited until his footsteps were well down the passage. Then she said very quietly, “You have no papers. ” Meera said, “No. ” Sarah said, “Then at the noon bell you will go to the dairy on an errand for me, and you will be very thorough about it, and you will not return to this room until I send for you.
”
“Why? ” Meera said. Sarah said, “Because you stripped them right, and because that man would dismiss a girl for the pleasure of it, and because I have not yet decided what you are, but I have decided you are not what he thinks you are. ”
At the dairy, a girl of perhaps fourteen was skimming cream.
She had a quiet round face and the stillness of a child who had learned that no one would hold her if she cried. She looked at Meera and said, “You’re the new one. ” “Yes. ” The girl said, “Anna says you’ll do, and Sarah says you’ll do, so you’ll do.
” Her mouth moved at the corner. “What is your name? ” Meera said. “Bess.
”
Meera sat on a stool by the door. She watched Bess work, watched the long wooden skimmer come down on the cream and lift it in a thin yellow sheet, watched the way Bess’s mouth moved silently as she counted. Counting was in this house the way one was permitted not to know. After a while Bess said without looking up, “He’s in the yard.
His lordship. He came back early. He is looking at the bay mare’s foot. ” Meera’s heart did one quick clean knock against her ribs.
“You can see him from the high window if you stand on the churn lid,” Bess said, and the offer was made so plainly that it could only have been a kindness. Meera stood on the churn lid and put only her eyes above the sill. A man was crouched beside a bay mare with his back to the dairy. He had taken off his coat and laid it across the mare’s back, and he was holding the mare’s near foreleg in his hands, speaking to her.
Meera could not hear the words, but the mare, who had been fretting, had set her ears at half mast and was leaning into his shoulder. A groom stood three paces off with a rasp in his hand, waiting. The man at the mare’s foot ran his thumb along the inside of the hoof and set it down very gently on the cobbles, then stood and put a hand on the mare’s neck, and only then turned his head and said something to the groom. Meera could not see his face.
She could see the line of his shoulder under the white shirt, and the dark hair at the back of his neck where it met his collar, and the small economy of his movements. He was not a heavy man. He had not raised his voice. He had taken off his good coat for a horse.
She got down from the churn lid. “He speaks kindly to his horses,” she said. Bess considered this. “He speaks kindly to most things.
Except to Mr. Latimer. But only when Mr. Latimer deserves it, which is often.
”
Meera asked how long Mr. Latimer had been there. “Since before me,” Bess said. “He was here when his lordship’s father was alive, when his lordship was a boy, when the old duke died and his lordship came back from the war, when the lawyers came about the marriage.
”
“The marriage? ” Meera said carefully. “The northern marriage. They say she is very proud.
Mr. Latimer says it often. He says she will come in the spring with twelve trunks and a French maid and a dog she does not like, and she will look at the house and find it small, and at the people and find them rough, and at his lordship and find him quiet, and she will be displeased with all of us and we shall have to learn new ways. He says her father is a hard man and her mother a colder one, and she is the daughter of both.
”
Meera set her hand on the cool whitewashed wall. The grandmother in chapel was true. The story of the three girls was a story she had heard at her grandmother’s knee. To hear it now from a fourteen-year-old dairy maid in the mouth of Mr.
Latimer meant that someone in her own household was writing to him. Someone had been writing to him for a long time. “And what does his lordship say? ” Meera asked.
Bess said, “Once. In the autumn, Mr. Latimer was at the table in the steward’s room, talking about her, and his lordship was passing. He put his head in at the door and said, ‘You have never met the lady.
’ Mr. Latimer said, ‘No, my lord, but one hears. ’ His lordship said, ‘One hears a great many things in this house, Latimer, and most of them are not true, and the ones that are true are not yours to repeat. ’ Then he went.
Mr. Latimer was quieter for a week. Then he began again. ”
Meera understood that she had been given in less than a morning more honest information about her future husband than nine years of letters and lawyers had ever provided.
He spoke kindly to horses. He had defended her once, sight unseen. He had not pressed the point. He did not tell Mr.
Latimer to be silent again, which meant either he did not know Latimer was still speaking, or he had decided to let the household form its own opinion and wait for her. She did not go back to the still room. She took the long way round the orchard wall to a small wooden door, half hidden by a tangle of last year’s briars. She stood with her hand on its rough wood and let herself think.
She could keep the disguise for another day or two, then slip away before her own carriages arrived and present herself at the front door in silk as if she had never been here. Or she could go to him now, stand in the stable yard and wait until he turned, and tell him who she was. She thought about the look on his face, on Anna’s face, on Sarah’s face, on Bess’s. They had been kind to her without knowing who she was.
Kindness given to a stranger was a different and rarer thing than kindness given to a duchess. She wanted to keep the first kind in her hands a little longer before she traded it for the second. She opened the door and came out into a sunken square with a stone basin in the middle and a sundial on a low pillar. On one of the stone benches a man was sitting.
He had his back to her. He had a book open on his knee and was not reading it. He was looking at the basin in which there was no water at this season, at the sundial on which there was no sun at this hour. He did not turn.
He said, “You walk quietly. The gardeners take the gravel. You are not one of the gardeners. ” Meera found her voice.
“No, my lord. ” He turned his head only a little, enough to see her at the edge of his sight. She saw his face for the first time. He had a long mouth that did nothing at all, and gray eyes the color of the stone basin, and a small thin scar at the edge of his jaw that her mother had not mentioned.
He looked at her, at the jug, at the apron, at her shoes, which were good shoes, better than a kitchen maid’s. He did not look at her face for very long. He was a man who had been taught not to stare at women in his employ. “You came up from the kitchen?
” he said. “From the dairy, my lord. With buttermilk for Mrs. Sarah’s tincture.
” He said, “Ah. ” She could not tell whether he believed her. “You are new. ” “Yes, my lord, this morning.
” “What is your name? ” “Meera, my lord. ” “Only Meera? ” “Only Meera, my lord.
”
He looked at the sundial. “Meera is a name from the south. ” She said, “My mother was from the south, my lord. ” It was true, the first true thing she had said in this garden.
He said, “Mm,” in a way that was very like Bess and very like Sarah. “You are cold. ” “No, my lord. ” “Your hands are blue.
”
He stood up, took off his dark coat, and held it out to her across his forearm, not over her shoulders. He said, “Take it to the kitchen with you. Tell Anna the still room is to have a brazier from today. Tell Sarah her hands are to be looked at this evening by Mr.
Hollis when he comes for the mare. Tell Mr. Latimer nothing. ”
She took the coat.
It was warm from him and smelled faintly of horses and cold air and something dry and clean like old paper. She said, “Yes, my lord. ” He sat down again and opened his book at a different page, and she understood that she had been dismissed, and that the dismissal was a kindness because he had given her a moment to leave without being looked at. In the kitchen, Anna took the coat without expression and hung it on a peg by the door.
Then she said, “His lordship says the still room is to have a brazier from today. ” “Mm. ” “Mr. Hollis is to look at Sarah’s hands this evening when he comes for the mare.
” “Mm. ” “And I am to tell Mr. Latimer nothing. ” Anna’s eyes came up at that, sharp and bright and entirely amused.
For the first time the corner thing widened into something almost a smile. “You’ve met his lordship then. ”
Meera did not see him properly again for two days. She saw him at a distance crossing the yard, riding out at dawn, standing at a window in the early dusk looking down the avenue of limes.
She watched him each time with the sustained attention of a person who has decided that watching is for the moment more useful than being seen. On the third evening the still room bell rang once, sharp and bright. Sarah looked up and said, “His lordship. ” Meera went.
He was in the long passage with a candle in his hand. He said without preamble, “Meera, Mrs. Penn’s hip is bad tonight. There is a tincture in the still room in the small green bottle on the third shelf.
Take it to her in the kitchen and stay until she has drunk it, because she will not drink it if no one stays. ” She said, “Yes, my lord. ” He said, “Thank you,” which was a thing no master in her father’s house had ever said to a servant. She took the tincture to Mrs.
Penn, who drank it under protest, then looked at Meera over the rim of the cup and said, “You have a good face, girl. ” “Thank you, ma’am. ” “Don’t thank me. It wasn’t a compliment.
A good face is a thing that gets used. ” Meera sat by her until her breathing evened, then got up and went out. In the passage she nearly walked into Mr. Latimer.
He had been standing in the dark just beyond the kitchen door. He said, “The new girl about at this hour with his lordship’s tincture, I see. You have not been to see me about your papers. ” “No, sir.
I have been about Sarah’s work. ” He stepped closer. The passage was narrow. He smelled of port and of the dry indoor smell of a man who did not go out enough.
“Who sent you here? ” She said, “No one sent me, sir. I came for the work. ” “You are not a kitchen girl.
Your hands are too fine and your back is too straight. ”
She straightened her back, which she had been holding deliberately rounded for three days, and let her face become for a single breath the face she had been born with. She said in a voice that was her own, “I write to no one, Mr. Latimer.
But I have read lately that a steward who writes two letters a day and shares his port with no one is generally writing about his employer, and such letters are paid for in the end by whoever reads them, and the price is rarely what the steward expected. ”
Mr. Latimer’s face went briefly the color of the whitewashed wall. Then it composed itself.
He said very softly, “You are a strange kitchen maid. ” “Yes, sir. I have been told so. ” She stepped past him neatly and walked down the passage without hurrying.
That night in the small room over the still room she did not sleep much. Toward dawn she got up and went down to the still room. She wrote a note to Sarah saying she had gone for hyssop and would be back by the bell, and put it under the wooden bowl. Then she went out by the garden door.
The world was the color of pewter. She walked through the orchard to the sunken garden. He was there on the same bench. There was no book on his knee this morning, only his hands folded loosely and his eyes on the sundial on which there was no sun yet.
He did not turn his head. He said, “You walk quietly. ”
She sat on the bench opposite. The stone was cold through her dress.
She put her hands flat on it. He looked at last at her face, and his gray eyes were patient and not unkind, and not entirely calm. She said, “My lord, I came up the drive four days ago with a basket of pears, and I told the gatekeeper my name was Meera, and it is my name, but it is not the only one. I am the lady you are to marry in the spring.
”
He closed his eyes. He closed them in the way a man closes his eyes when a long-held breath has at last been let out. He opened them again. “I thought so.
” She said, “When? ” He said, “On the gravel the first afternoon, I saw your shoes. A girl who had walked from the village would have scuffed them. You had come from the inn where someone had cleaned them for you the night before.
I thought then you might be a runaway from a great house. I did not think at first that you might be mine. ”
“When did you think it? ” “In the sunken garden.
When you said your name. My mother’s name was Meera. She was from the south. ” He said, “I knew then, but I did not know what to do with knowing.
I did not want to ask you in the garden in case the asking made you go. So I waited. ”
“Why did you wait? ” she said.
“Because I have been told for nine years that you are proud, and I did not believe it, but I did not know. And because it seemed to me when I saw you on the grass that you had come to learn the same things about me, and if I let you learn them you might learn them better than if I told you. ”
“What did you learn? ” he asked.
She thought about it. “I learned that you speak kindly to horses. I learned you defended me once and did not press the point. I learned that Mr.
Latimer has been writing to someone in my father’s house. ” He said, “I know. For some months. I have not yet decided what to do because the someone is your father’s secretary, and to dismiss him I must first speak with my godfather, who is in Vienna, and these things take time.
” He paused. “I confess I wanted to wait until I had met you. If you had turned out to be the woman described, I should not have had to do anything. ”
“And if I had?
” she said. “I should have married you anyway, because we are pledged and because I do not believe a pledge is unmade by being inconvenient. But I should not have given you my coat in the sunken garden. ”
She laughed.
It was a small laugh, very surprised, and it was the first sound of its kind that she had made in four days. He heard it, and his long mouth moved at last. He said, “You may stay another day. I will say nothing to anyone.
On the sixth day you will come to the front door in silk, and I will meet you there as if we have never spoken. Then I will tell Anna, and she will be angry for a quarter of an hour, and then she will not be angry anymore because she will see that you came to know her on her own ground. ”
“And will you meet me in the long gallery after? ” she said.
He said, “Yes. And I will say to you that the girl in the still room had blue hands and a straight back, and a grandmother who taught her well, and that I have been waiting for her since I was nine years old, and I did not know it, because no one had told me what I was waiting for. ”
On the sixth day, the great front door opened. A girl in silk and pearls walked into the black-and-white hall.
Anna, standing at the foot of the staircase that turned twice, saw the girl’s face and went still for one quarter of a heartbeat, then curtsied. The corner of her mouth moved. Behind her, Sarah’s corner moved, and Bess’s corner moved. The man at the top of the staircase came down slowly, as a man comes down when he has been waiting at the top for a long time and does not want to hurry it now that the moment is here.
He bowed over her hand and said, “My lady. ” She curtsied and said, “My lord. ” His thumb passed once, very lightly, across her knuckles, where there were no longer any traces of lavender, but where she knew he could still feel them. They were married in the spring, in the small chapel at the end of the avenue of limes.
Sarah lived another seventeen years and taught Bess everything she knew. Bess ran the still room until she was an old woman and counted the cream aloud to her own grandchildren. Tom became steward at twenty-eight and was so honest the tenants complained of him fondly for forty years. Mr.
Latimer left at midsummer with a small pension he had not earned and a great deal of injured dignity. He wrote for a little while to whoever would still receive his letters, and then he stopped because no one would. And on winter nights, when the fire had burned low and the room was quiet, Meera would sometimes tell the story of the quarter of an hour she had given herself, and how it had stretched into days, and how she had found at the top of that gravel drive not the thing she feared, but a man who had quietly waited to see who she really was.