At the door of his dressing room he stopped because the door was locked and the key was not in it. He stood with his hand on the handle. It would not turn. From the long gallery behind him he heard the child’s laughter again, closer now.
A young voice saying with delighted insistence, “Is he here, Mama? Is he really here? ” And a woman’s voice, not his wife’s, hushing gently. The boy dropping confidingly: “And what shall I call him then?
” The nurse after the smallest hesitation: “You shall call him sir, my lamb. ”
“Only sir? ”
“The way the gentlefolk do. ”
The footsteps moved away.
The dressing room door under his hand remained immovably locked. He stood there with his palm on a brass handle that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s and had never in his life refused him. He understood that the boy in the gallery was his son, and that his son had been instructed to call him sir. He walked back along the gallery in the other direction because he could not bear to walk where the child had gone.
He went into the library. The curtains had been taken down and washed. The pipe smoke smell was gone. The chair by the fire fit him, but the small table beside it had been replaced with a writing desk.
On the desk were ledgers open in a hand that was not Mr. Halling’s. He sat in his chair and stared at the cold grate. After a long while he became aware of a folded paper on the corner of the desk addressed in his wife’s hand to him.
He opened it. He read it twice. Supper would be served at the usual hour. Mr.
Palfrey would attend at ten the following morning at her ladyship’s request. His grace was welcome to be present. The boy had been told his father was a traveler who had come a long way and would be tired. No introduction need be made tonight unless his grace wished it.
The paper was signed with her given name only, not her title. A full stop after it. He had never seen her use a full stop after her own name before. At supper she was at the foot of the table.
He sat at the head. The soup was good. The wine was the wine he had laid down himself in the second year. The room was as it had always been except in every detail in which it was not.
She did not speak first. She ate neatly, without sound. He filled the silences with small talk. She received each remark with grave attention and offered nothing in return.
By the meat he had stopped talking. She had ordered dishes he disliked. Not flagrantly. Consistently enough that it could not be accident and discreetly enough that it could not be complained of.
She had been practicing. At the end of the meal she rose. She did not wait for him to dismiss her. She inclined her head.
“I have had your old room made up for you tonight. ”
The room he had slept in as a boy. Narrow bed, cold east window, small portrait of his great aunt that had frightened him at seven. “My room is being repainted.
You did write that you would not be home until autumn. ”
He had written that. “And when shall I have my room back? ”
“When it is finished.
”
She left. He understood that he had been moved in his own house to the room of a boy. The move had been arranged so neatly that he could not object without seeming a fool. This was only the first of the small reasonable things that were going to be done to him.
At ten in the morning Mr. Palfrey was shown in. He was not what he had expected. Thin, perhaps forty, courteous, unhurried.
He bowed to him with exact propriety and to her with a degree more warmth. He sat in the third chair, set at an angle to the other two. The chair of the witness rather than the principal. Mr.
Palfrey took out the first paper. A deed of trust dated four years prior, signed by his grace in his own large careless hand and by her ladyship in her small deliberate one. He remembered signing it. He had been on his way to the races.
Mr. Halling had said it was a formality. He had signed where the finger pointed. He had kissed her hand without looking at her face.
He had gone to the races and won. He listened now as Mr. Palfrey read. Clause by clause, he discovered what he had signed.
A settlement that placed the boy’s portion, the entail of three smaller estates, the rents of the home farm, and a fund he had not troubled to calculate into the sole and uncontested control of his wife during the boy’s minority. With full discretion as to investment, expenditure, education, residence. With the right to appoint and dismiss any officer of the household or estate. He had signed the keys to his own house because he wanted to be at the races by noon.
Mr. Palfrey laid down the deed and took out the second paper. A petition lodged eleven weeks earlier for the alteration of the boy’s surname. Granted.
The third paper was his wife’s will, drawn the previous month. The boy, under his new name, was constituted the sole heir of properties whose title had passed irrevocably out of his grace’s gift four years ago. He listened without moving. When Mr.
Palfrey finished, he said in a voice he tried to keep level, “You have changed my son’s name. ”
“He is my son also. ”
“You have changed his name. Without my consent.
”
“With your consent. You signed it. ”
He had begun to shake. “You tricked me.
”
“No. You did not read. ”
He stood up. The chair scraped loudly.
Mr. Palfrey did not flinch. She did not flinch. “You have made me a stranger in my own house.
”
She let the silence hold. Then very quietly: “You made yourself one. ”
He sat down and put his face in his hands. When he looked up she was watching him with the same patient, courteous attention.
“What do you want of me? ”
“Very little. Your absence, chiefly. As before.
”
The dryness of the last three words was so small and exact that he understood she had been the wittier of them all along. He had simply not been listening. He did not leave that day. There was the boy he had not yet seen.
He walked in the garden. He came around the yew hedge and there on the lower lawn was a small boy in a blue coat sitting on the grass with a wooden horse beside him. The boy looked up. He had his mother’s eyes.
The boy stood and bowed. “Good afternoon, sir. ”
“Good afternoon. ”
“Are you the traveler?
”
“Yes. ”
“Have you come from very far? ”
“Yes. ”
“Did you see the sea?
”
“No. ”
The boy seemed sorry for him. He crouched down to his horse. He watched his son play and could not move.
After a while the boy said, “Sir, would you hold the soldier? Only for a moment, because the horse must speak to him and I cannot do both voices. ” He held out his hand. His Grace took the soldier and held it.
The boy did the horse’s voice in a small important rumble. The soldier had to answer “Yes, Captain” and “Very good, Captain. ” He found himself answering in a voice not entirely steady. The nurse came down the path.
“Master Edmund, it is time for your tea. ”
The boy bowed. “Thank you, sir, for being the soldier. ”
“You are welcome.
”
Master Edmund. The name was not the name he had given. Edmund was her father’s name. He sat on the bench for a long time.
He had not known the boy’s voice. He had not known the boy bowed. He had not known any of it because he had not been there. In the morning he came down early.
He found her in the breakfast room. She poured his coffee. The small gesture undid his rehearsed sentences. “I should like to know him.
”
“You are welcome to know him. On certain conditions. ”
“You will not tell him this year or next who you are to him. He is a child of seven.
He has been told his father lives abroad and is not well. He does not need to be told that his father is the traveler who held the soldier. In time, if you are constant, he may be told. You will not enter the nursery without the nurse’s leave.
You will not give the boy gifts without first showing them to me. You will not speak to him of his name. His name is Edmund Maitland. ”
Maitland was her father’s name.
“And mine? ”
“You may bear what name you choose. ”
“And you? What am I to be to you?
”
“You are to be civil. At this table when you are in this house at the hours I keep. In your own apartments by ten in the evening. You are not to bring any person into this house without my consent.
”
She paused. “You are not to bring her into this house at all. ”
He asked what if he refused. She said he would not refuse because the alternative was the courts, and the courts would go as Mr.
Palfrey would tell him they would go. He did not choose the courts. He stayed through summer and autumn and into the first frosts. He kept her hours.
He came to the table and left it at her hours. He listened to Mr. Palfrey and the new agent and learned slowly how the place ran. He went to the garden when invited.
He held the soldier. He was yes captain and very good captain. In September the boy fell and grazed his palm and came to him because he was the nearest adult. He wiped the small palm with his own handkerchief.
The boy thanked him gravely and ran off. He did not see her except at meals. She was not cruel. She was simply finished with a particular use of her face.
In October he wrote to the woman in town. A careful, courteous, final letter. He sealed it with his ring. He did not regret it.
Winter came. The boy was given a small pony. His Grace walked beside it on three afternoons a week through November while the nurse walked at a discreet distance and his wife watched from the window of the small drawing room. The boy spoke to him of birds, of the gardener’s cat, of why the moon was sometimes in the afternoon.
He answered with what care he could. He found he liked answering. The boy did not call him sir after the first month. He called him by no name, addressing him with a small clearing of the throat or a tug at the cuff.
Once in December the boy said, “My mama says you have come to live with us. For how long? ”
“As long as your mama likes. ”
“Do you like us?
”
“Yes. ”
The boy nodded and returned to the question of the cat. In February the boy had a fever. On the third night the nurse met him at the nursery door.
“He is asking for his mama, sir, and her ladyship is asleep at last, and I have not the heart. ”
“I will sit with him. ”
The nurse looked at him a long moment. “Yes, sir.
”
The boy was small in the bed, eyes bright with fever. “Is that you? ”
“Yes. ”
He took the boy’s hand.
The fingers closed around two of his at once with the unthinking trust of a child too tired to choose. The boy drowsed and woke. “Tell me a story. ”
He told a story about a horse that lost its rider and found its way home through a dark wood.
He made it up as he went. The boy drowsed and said, “Who’s home? ”
“The horse’s. ”
The boy slept.
At some point the door opened behind him. She came in. She stood for a moment behind his chair. He did not turn.
She looked at the boy and at the hand in his. Then she went without sound. In the morning the fever was less. By evening it was gone.
At supper that evening she had ordered the dish he had always loved, the one she had been careful not to put before him in his first weeks home. He looked at her. She did not look up. After a while she said, “You may, if you wish, take the boy to see the sea in the summer.
”
“I should like that very much. ”
“We shall see. ”
The we in her mouth was the first we she had used to him in seven months. He understood, sitting at the head of his own table with a wife who had taken his name from his son and his house from his hand and given him in their place a chair to sit in and a story to tell, that he had been given very late a thing he had not deserved.
He intended, for as long as she let him, to be worthy of it. Spring came. The grass over where the fountain had been grew in and matched. The boy went to the sea in July with his mother and the traveler who walked behind them on the shingle and held a small bucket and a small jacket and did not speak unless spoken to.
The boy ran ahead and shouted at the gulls. His wife stood beside him in a plain straw hat. “He is not afraid of it. ”
“No.
”
“I was afraid of it the first time. ”
“You never told me. ”
“You never asked. ”
She said it without sharpness, the way one notes a small old fact about the weather of a long ago year.
“I am asking now. ”
She looked at him for a moment longer than necessary. “There is time, perhaps, to tell you. ”
She did not say there was.
She said there was perhaps. He took it. He had learned to take what was offered and not ask for more. The wind worked at the brim of her hat.
Without thinking he reached up and held it for her. She let him. They stood like that for a moment. Two people on a shingle beach with a small boy at the water’s edge.
A great deal still unsaid between them, most of it perhaps never to be said. But the silence between them was no longer the silence of an empty room. It was, on that afternoon, enough.