On the morning the school opened, a girl asked Lucian why he had a line upon his face.
Her mother made a sound of such immediate distress that the child turned to see what had happened behind her.
Lucian crouched, cautiously, because his knee had acquired opinions about crouching.
"An old injury."
"Does it hurt?"
"Not usually."
She considered this. Her bonnet had slipped over one ear, and somebody had washed her so thoroughly that a faint tide mark remained beneath her chin.
"I fell on a bucket," she offered.
"A formidable opponent."
She nodded and held out a finger upon which no visible trace of the encounter remained. Lucian inspected it with appropriate gravity.
Her mother began an apology. He rose and shook his head.
"I believe we understand one another."
The little girl went through the school door without once looking back at his face.
Lucian stood beneath the new lintel while children passed him in pairs, singly, reluctantly, at a run. The building smelled of fresh lime, cut wood, and the faint persistent damp of new walls. Light lay across desks not yet scratched by generations of unwilling scholars. In the mistress's room, the door stood open upon a small bed, a chair, and a shelf waiting for possessions.
Miss Ward, the young woman Vale had recommended, was inside directing a dispute over who might sit nearest the window. She had been a pupil-teacher in Ashford and possessed an expression of patient attention that sharpened unexpectedly when required. Her father had attended the meeting about her appointment and discovered, to his evident discomfort, that everyone wished to hear his daughter answer for herself.
Now she clapped her hands once.
The room settled.
Not entirely. A boy at the back was trying to put something small and moving into his pocket. But enough.
Thea stood beside a shelf of books, wearing a plain blue gown and an ink stain she had failed to remove. She did not look like a patroness bestowing an institution. She looked like a scholar trying not to rearrange another woman's shelves before being asked.
Lucian went to her.
"You are resisting," he murmured.
"Heroically."
"Will you survive?"
"If the geography is placed beside the arithmetic, perhaps not."
Miss Ward heard and smiled without relinquishing her authority. "I should welcome advice after lessons, Your Grace."
Thea inclined her head. "After lessons."
Lucian loved her for obeying that small boundary. It would have been easy to purchase agreement here. Harder, apparently, to make a place where the person paid to know something was permitted to know it.
Reverend Bellamy spoke briefly. There were thanks, a prayer, a few words about diligence. Lucian had prepared a sentence and forgotten it. When the moment came, he looked at the children and saw the Fenwick boy sitting near the back, shoulders raised almost to his ears.
"I hope," Lucian said, "that you will find things here worth asking about. And that you will ask."
That was all.
Outside afterwards, Roth observed that brevity would please the parents, who had work awaiting them.
"And you?" Lucian asked.
"I find I have several questions about the fuel account."
The estate had not mistaken celebration for a holiday from practical life.
Lucian was grateful.
Before they left, Miss Ward asked to speak with them in her small room. Thea waited while she closed the door, and Lucian saw that the young woman had prepared what she meant to say.
"I should like a book in which to enter what is needed," she began. "Fuel, repairs, slates. And a day when I may bring it to Mr. Roth."
"He will give you one," Lucian said.
"I mean a settled day, Your Grace. Not only when something has gone wrong."
He nearly repeated himself. Then he saw Thea's attention sharpen and understood that the young woman was asking for a way to make ordinary requests without first having to manufacture an emergency.
"Once a month?" he suggested.
"That would serve. And if there is disagreement, I should wish to know who decides."
Thea looked at him, not to rescue the answer but to let him give it.
They agreed upon a sum the mistress could spend without permission, a monthly meeting for larger needs, and a place in Roth's accounts where school expenses would be entered separately. Miss Ward wrote the arrangement down. Her hand trembled very slightly at first; by the final line it was steady.
When they stepped outside, Lucian glanced back at the door.
"She was afraid we would think her demanding."
"Possibly."
"Did you advise her to ask?"
"No."
Thea adjusted her glove.
"That pleased you," she observed.
"It did."
He had built a room and appointed a teacher. The teacher, already, was showing him where the plan was incomplete. He found it a better beginning than praise, though he suspected that lesson would require learning more than once.
By July the valley had grown almost extravagant.
The repaired cottage roofs showed clean lines against the slopes. Barley moved beneath the wind; sheep gathered in the few patches of shade; the beck ran low and clear between stones warmed by the sun. The western wall held. Widow Thompson's chimney drew so well that she now complained about the price of fuel required to satisfy it.
Lucian rode Tempest past the school on mornings when the road took him that way. Sometimes he heard recitation through the open windows, sometimes laughter, sometimes Miss Ward telling a person called William that the consequences of bringing a frog indoors had not altered since Tuesday.
He did not go in every time.
Thea had explained that a duke entering a classroom was not always an educational improvement. He had accepted the information with sufficient dignity to make her laugh for some minutes.
She taught there one afternoon a week when Miss Ward wished it. Stories, usually, and sometimes an introduction to books that were not intended to instruct anyone in proper behaviour. Lucian collected her afterwards and watched the children make their claims upon the next week's reading.
On one such afternoon Dr. Vale waited beside the gate with his horse.
"Another patient?" Lucian asked.
"A promised book."
"You have become involved."
"Against my better judgment. There is a girl who wishes to know how the heart works. I told her enough to satisfy her. She informed me it had not."
"An unfortunate beginning."
"The best sort."
The doctor looked through the window, where Thea was laughing at something a child had said. Sunlight found the silver in his hair.
"I had forgotten," he said, "that coming to a house need not mean someone is ill."
Lucian heard the loneliness within the dry remark.
"Come to dinner on Sunday. No one is permitted to develop a fever for the occasion."
Vale smiled.
"I shall hold you to that."
When Thea emerged, she was carrying a chalk mark upon one sleeve and three petitions for a story containing a shipwreck. Vale departed with a promise to bring the book. The children dispersed towards the farms.
Lucian offered his wife the basket he had kept hidden beside his saddle.
She looked inside.
"Bread. Cheese. Apples."
"An admirable inventory."
"Mrs. Holloway has been consulted."
"She has issued instructions. Consultation suggests I possessed a vote."
Thea looked from the basket to his face.
"Where are we going?"
"Black Tarn. If you wish."
She handed him the basket and took his arm.
"I wish."
They left the horses below the last rise and walked the remaining path.
Black Tarn lay in a fold of the moor, dark water held among reeds and rough stone. Even in summer it kept something of the cold sky within it. Clouds travelled over its surface without disturbing the reflected hills; a bird called from somewhere Lucian could not see.
He had come here often alone.
Alone had once seemed the point of it. No questions, no sudden movement at the edge of sight, no face upon which he might read the fear he expected. Now Thea climbed the last slope ahead of him, stopped at the water, and announced that the place had been named by a person lacking imagination.
"It is quite plainly blue today."
"You may petition the moor."
"Would it receive me?"
"More civilly than London."
They spread a blanket upon a dry shelf of grass. Thea removed her gloves, then her bonnet, then her shoes with the expression of a woman negotiating successive releases from captivity.
Lucian watched her place her feet in the shallows.
"Cold?"
She took a moment to answer.
"Invigorating."
"That is never an honest word beside water."
"Come and improve my vocabulary."
He sat beside her and took off his boots. The first touch of the tarn erased several clever things he had intended to say.
Thea laughed.
"Invigorating," he managed.
"Precisely."
They ate with their feet drying upon the warm grass. An ant inspected the cloth; Thea moved a crumb towards it and then defended the cheese from its associates. The conversation wandered from Miss Ward's books to a letter from Lady Margaret, who had declared the absence of scandal in Northumberland no excuse for failing to write twice a week.
Lucian lay back and listened.
For the first time in months, perhaps years, he could hear no necessary task within the next hour. The water would remain water without his inspection. Roth knew where the accounts were kept. The school had a mistress. The house had people who could manage it, and he was not proving his worth by keeping them all waiting for permission.
Thea fell silent.
He opened his eyes.
"What?"
"Nothing. You look rested."
"An alarming condition."
She lay beside him, propped upon one elbow.
"I used to think rest was something one earned by finishing everything."
"A reliable means of never having it."
"Yes."
He touched the loosened hair beside her cheek. She turned her face into his hand.
After a while she sat up and looked at the tarn.
"Can you swim?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"I have continued to emerge from water."
"I am told that is the principal qualification."
The far bank lay empty; behind them the path remained silent. They discussed the bottom, the weeds, the cold. Thea knew how to swim but not this water. Lucian showed her the shallow shelf where the stone descended gradually and warned her away from the dark drop beyond the reeds.
There was nothing elegant about entering a Northumberland tarn.
Thea made a sound that startled the unseen bird into flight. Lucian, already waist-deep, attempted reassurance and failed because he was laughing. She splashed him with both hands. He closed his mouth too late.
It was an undignified defeat.
They stayed near the shelf, the cold making every breath immediate. Her loose hair darkened upon her shoulders. His old scars, pale beneath the water, ceased to be objects of thought and became simply parts of a body required to keep itself warm.
When she reached him he held out his hands. She took them, steadying herself, and laughed again.
He had not known a laugh could alter a place.
Back upon the bank they wrapped themselves in the spare cloth Mrs. Holloway had included with suspicious foresight. The sun warmed their backs. Thea's hair dripped upon his wrist.
"We shall be scolded," she said.
"I am thirty-two."
"An insufficient defence against Mrs. Holloway."
He drew her closer.
She kissed him, slowly now, without the bright challenge of the water. He felt her shiver and tucked the cloth around her shoulders. They remained beneath the open sky, near enough to share warmth, listening to little waves strike stone.
"I am happy," she said.
He looked down.
"I know."
She shook her head.
"Not merely relieved. Not happy because the worst has not happened today. Happy."
The distinction entered him quietly.
He thought of the child with her bucket injury, of the school window, of the doctor coming to dinner without being called to a sickroom. Of a morning when fear had not been the first thing he reached for upon waking.
He had spent so long measuring improvement by the retreat of pain that he had almost failed to notice what had arrived in its place.
"So am I," he said.
The words did not frighten him when they were spoken.
Blackwood's letter arrived three days later.
Roth brought it with the other correspondence. He did not remark upon the seal, though Lucian saw him recognize it. Thea was at the school; the morning room was quiet except for a fly moving insistently against the window.
For a moment Lucian wanted to leave the letter unopened. Happiness, apparently, had made him neither invulnerable nor immune to an old man's handwriting.
He opened it with the paper knife.
Edmund Blackwood wrote that time had afforded an opportunity for reflection. He regretted the public distress occasioned by their differences. Certain circumstances had been misrepresented to him; concern for his sister's family had carried him beyond the bounds of discretion. He hoped his nephew would not permit advisers with no stake in the Greymont name to encourage a lasting estrangement.
There it was, unchanged beneath the softened phrasing: a hand reaching past Lucian towards the people beside him.
The letter proposed a visit in autumn. Quietly, without the misunderstandings attendant upon public occasions. A family conversation. A chance to repair what had been damaged.
Lucian read it twice.
Then he laid it upon the desk and went to the school.
He did not enter the classroom. He waited beneath the ash tree until the children came out and Thea followed, carrying a book against her chest.
She saw his face.
"What has happened?"
"A letter. Nothing more."
He handed it to her when they reached a quiet stretch of road.
She read without speaking. When she finished, she folded the paper along its old lines rather than crumpling it, though he suspected the restraint cost her something.
"What do you wish to do?"
"I do not know yet."
"Then you need not know before luncheon."
He looked at her.
"You would receive him if I asked?"
She considered the question carefully.
"I would discuss with you what receiving him would mean. I would not pretend to be unafraid of the harm he has done. But I shall not choose your answer for you."
He nodded. It was neither the obedience his father would have demanded nor the convenient absolution another man might have wanted.
It was better company than either.
That evening they walked through Marianne's garden. The roses were past their fullest bloom, their scent held low in the warm air. Lucian stopped beside the bench.
"I thought forgiveness meant I should eventually wish to see him."
Thea sat down.
"Do you?"
"No."
The answer came plainly. No anger dressed it for battle.
"Then perhaps the word is less important than knowing that."
He watched a petal fall into the cleared earth.
"He will call it your influence."
"He has called nearly everything my influence. I cannot prevent him becoming repetitive."
Lucian laughed, and found that he could imagine his uncle somewhere in London without wishing either to defeat him again or to explain himself until understanding occurred.
The freedom of it was almost physical.
He wrote the answer the following morning.
The first draft ran to two pages. It rehearsed the evidence, the false medical concern, Marianne's papers, the hearings. He read it through and recognized the familiar labour of trying to win a verdict already won.
He put it aside.
On a fresh sheet he wrote that he had received the letter. He did not agree that their estrangement arose from misunderstandings. Blackwood's conduct had been deliberate and had endangered people Lucian loved. No visit would be arranged, now or in the autumn. Any necessary legal business could pass through Mr. Eversley.
Then he paused.
Beyond the window Thea was speaking to the gardener. She wore her bonnet badly because she had tied it without consulting a looking glass. One hand moved as she described something, and the gardener nodded with the cautious expression of a man reserving judgment until he understood what a duchess wished him to plant.
Lucian returned to the page.
I release you from my anger. But we have nothing more to say.
He read the sentence, crossed out nothing, and signed his name.
When Thea came inside, he let her read it.
She did not congratulate him on magnanimity. He was glad. There had been enough occasions in his life when suffering had been expected to make him admirable.
"Will you send it?" she asked.
"Yes."
She handed him the sand shaker. He dried the ink, folded the sheet, and sealed it.
It was astonishing how small a finished letter could be.
At the door he gave it to the footman with the rest of the post. Then he went to find Roth, who wished to discuss a drain beneath the lower pasture. The problem had grown more expensive while Lucian was occupied with his uncle, as drains apparently took advantage of divided attention.
He listened. He asked a question. Roth supplied a figure which made him wince.
Outside, the school bell rang across the valley.
Lucian turned towards the sound before he could help it.
For a moment he saw the whole slope: repaired roofs, summer fields, the road running down towards Ashford, the pale school wall among the trees. None of it had been made perfect. Winter would find weaknesses; storms would discover roofs; children would arrive with fears a school could not wholly cure.
Yet something existed now that had not existed before, and people other than himself were carrying it forward.
"Your Grace?" Roth said.
Lucian looked back at the estimate.
"Yes. Let us mend the drain."
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