第76章 The Winter Road

They rode south on Wednesday in two carriages — the household's old chariot and a hired landau for the trunks — with Thomas driving the first team himself rather than trust the valley roads to any whip who had not grown up cursing them. The party was itself now a small vessel under articles: Rosalind and Julian and Ines in the chariot; Gabriel riding postilion for the sketching light; Violet ahead with the document case chained to her wrist by a device of Julian's devising that she had pronounced undignified, worn like a relic, and checked hourly ever since. The covenant traveled in that case, wrapped as it had crossed the Atlantic of paper — oilskin within oilskin — together with fair copies of everything, because Barrow, their man of business, had drilled them by letter all December: *originals for inspection, copies for argument, and never let the two travel in one coat.* Mr. Barrow of Gray's Inn had disliked Mr. Selby on sight some years before either principal knew the other existed, and had consequently taken the case the way a terrier takes a rat-infested granary: personally. The winter country unrolled gray and jeweled. Frost furred the hedges silver; carters saluted the carriages through scarves; and every time they changed horses Rosalind stood in the yard breathing the different smoke of a different town while the mail came in and the world went about its business of not being on trial. Ines rode facing forward, having declared after Lisbon that she had spent fifty years watching things leave and intended to spend the rest of her life watching things arrive. They kept the hour. That was the private victory of the road. However long the stages, however deep the ditches, whatever the weather did to the schedule — between the last light and supper, one hour belonged to neither Chancery nor claimant. On the second evening, snowed into a wayhouse outside Stafford with the fire smoking and the landlord apologetic, Julian produced from his luggage a battered pack of cards, taught her casino by the hour together, lost seven hands running with a face of profound maritime grief, and was discovered cheating at the eighth so clumsily that she laughed until the candle guttered. On the third he made good his threat and learned to dance, practicing a country step in the yard of the George with Ines calling figures from the inn sign above like a bosun aloft, until the chambermaid watched from an upper window with such open enjoyment that he bowed to her and retired undefeated. And on the fourth evening Rosalind paid her side of the contract. She had been working at something small for days with her back half-turned, guarding the paper the way cats guard kittens, and she put it into his hands without ceremony: herself drawn in charcoal — Julian at the ship's rail of some imaginary quarterdeck, coat collar up, watching to seaward, rendered with a sureness that stopped his breath, because the hand that drew it had known his shoulders since a cove in Derbyshire and had, moreover, inherited whatever gift it is in her blood that sees true what the eyes have never been shown. "You are standing," he said at last, "in the bow of a ship that hasn't been built." "Then you had better live to command her," Rosalind said. "I have drawn true things before, in this family, and been believed too late. I am given to understand we are attempting to reverse the custom." London took them at dusk on the fifth day, as winter takes all arrivals: with fog, with noise, with ten thousand fires turning the air to bronze. Ines pressed her face to the carriage window like a girl and said nothing for a full mile, which those who knew her understood to be her highest form of praise; and then the streets narrowed, brightened, turned naval, and Wapping swallowed them whole for an hour of pilgrimage — the water-stairs where a dead painter's letters had surfaced after thirty years in other hands; the chest-line taverns where Gabriel's grandmother's letters had lain boxed since before his birth — before the carriages climbed west out of the river smell into the broad clean dark of Bloomsbury squares. Aunt Chloe met them on her step in Gower Street with lamps lit in every window, having fed the watch, the neighbors, and the postboy intelligence of their coming for three days past. Eleanor's sister was sixty now and laughed as loudly as ever; she gathered Ines under the arm at the door — the two women had never met and required no introduction, recognizing each other across the threshold the way lighthouses do — and announced over their heads to the street at large: "The keepers have come to town, and they will want feeding, and nobody in this house speaks of lawsuits after eight o'clock, upon which point I intend to be the tyrant my sister never had the heart to be. Tom — the boxes. Gabriel — mind the paint box, it is worth more than the carriage." Inside, supper waited, and letters. Three were from Catalina, reporting the valley well, the lamps trimmed, the vault aired daily, Graves upright and insufferable. The fourth lay apart on the hall table, propped against the candlestick like a visiting card, and though it was addressed in no name Rosalind knew, her body recognized the hand before her mind finished reading the superscription — sharp, sure, forward-leaning, the writing that dated itself months into the future. She carried it through to the dining room unopened, set it beside her plate, and looked around the table: husband, brother, aunt, archivist, painter, and hinge, all steaming gently over soup, all waiting. "Tomorrow belongs to the lawyers," she said. "Tonight there is soup. But I think — I think this came to tell us what we are really riding for." And she broke the seal with her thumb, as she had broken the other two, and began aloud, while the fire ticked and the fog pressed at the windows of Gower Street like a sea against a hull.