第79章 The Middle Watch

The days after the hearing settled into a rhythm that Rosalind came to think of as the middle watch — that long dull sacred stretch between midnight and morning when nothing happens except the keeping of the ship. Mornings belonged to Barrow: affidavits sworn, fair copies collated, the vocabulary of Chancery acquired syllable by syllable until Rosalind could read a bill of costs without flinching, which she regarded as the most expensive education in England. Afternoons belonged to the family. Gabriel sat for three hours daily in Chloe's best front room turning the hearing into drawings — Cleave's enormous hands, Violet's gloves, the paper fitting its gap — because, he said, courts remember testimony and forget faces, and it was the faces that would need remembering in fifty years. Thomas went north twice with funds and instructions, and returned the second time carrying a letter from Graves so characteristic that the whole household passed it around the supper table like a relic. *My lady,* it ran, in the steward's upright line, *the valley is well and the household insufferable with good health. The following is entered as fact and no opinion accompanies it. Since your departure the light upon the wreck has stood each night from full dark until slack water. On the eve of Saint Thomas it was absent from the wreck and was observed instead at the head of the cliff stair. Mr. Hobbey the gamekeeper, coming up late, reports it stood aside for him on the ninth step like a courteous person in a passage. I have accordingly set a lamp each evening at the top of the stair, on the principle we keep for travelers, and each morning the lamp is out and the light is back upon the wreck, and the mother-lamp in the hall leans toward the door all day like a dog watching a gate. The tally within its glass remains four, and a rest. Mrs. Violet desires me to add that the frost-prints upon the shingle have neither faded nor been disturbed, which she says is impossible, and she has stopped saying so. The sheep are well. The garden wants you. Respectfully — G.* Rosalind read it four times, and wrote back the only instruction that occurred to her: *Keep the lamp at the stair-head filled. Feed whatever asks. We come home after Christmas.* It was, she reflected, sealing it, a strange sentence to put in the post; stranger still that the whole table had approved its wording without amendment, including the solicitor. Afternoons also belonged, unexpectedly, to Ines and Chloe, who had discovered in each other the twin appetites of doctrine and mischief, and between them they conquered Bloomsbury the way weather conquers a coastline. It began when the lamplighter's girl came for the weekly trimming of the Gower Street brackets and stayed transfixed before the traveling lamp, and Ines — who had promised herself she would never again let a child stand too short to see over a sill — fetched a stool. By Saint Thomas's Day there were nine of them, daughters of lamplighters and crossing-sweepers and one indignant chimney-boy who claimed he could sing anything a girl could sing and proved it, gathered of an evening in Chloe's kitchen learning the phrases: tower, window, shrine, door, and last the sea-verse, six notes folding back like water over shingle, which the smallest girl carried home wrong for a week and then suddenly right, to Ines's visible satisfaction. "You are planting a station," Rosalind accused gently, over the dish-washing. "I am planting *choruses*," Ines said, unrepentant. "Stations want lamps and deeds and lawyers, thank God we have you. But a tune, keeper — a tune travels without luggage. Two hundred years ago my family's chant crossed an ocean inside rope-skipping games and arrived intact. Let us see what London does with it in fifty." The evenings, always, belonged to the hour. Some nights it was cards, some nights walls walked in the square with snow squeaking underfoot and the gas hissing overhead, and once — Chloe's doing entirely, a fiddler hired, furniture rolled back, Aunt Chloe herself calling figures with the authority of a woman who had scandalized three counties before her marriage — it was dancing. Julian danced now, having decided with a sailor's totality to master the thing or die, and mid-figure, swinging her through the candlelight of her aunt's drawing room, Rosalind caught their reflection doubled in the dark windows: two people laughing in a warm bright room while winter leaned on the glass, and thought of another ballroom years ago where a rake had taught a governess to stop bracing against joy, and understood that she was dancing in her parents' footsteps and did not mind at all. Other evenings were quieter than that, and one of the quietest stayed with her longest. She had been practicing signatures for the affidavit — her fair hand gone stiff with court weather — and tearing failures across the knee, until Julian took the pen from her without comment, set it down, and put a length of rope into her hands instead. "Splice me this," he said. "You have watched me do it a hundred times." "I have watched you *sail* a hundred times; I cannot sail." "You can splice. Different muscles. The hands learn it the way the ear learns your mother's step on a stair." He sat opposite her, knees touching hers, and talked her through it: strands opened, marlinspike, the tucking over and under that looks like nothing until suddenly the two ropes are one line with no lump and no memory of having been two. Her first attempt splayed like a crow's foot. Her fifth held his weight when he hauled on it, testing, and he pronounced it a seaman's job and refused to say which seaman. "That is the whole secret of my trade," he said, coiling the finished splice between them on the hearthrug like something asleep. "Nothing at sea is strong by itself — not rope, not anchors, not ships, not men. Everything holds because it is worked together with something else and then hauled upon to prove the union. Courts want documents. Sailors want splices. You and I have been making one since a cove in Derbyshire, and no drawer in Westminster can hold ours." She kept the splice. It rode in her reticule through every day of the recess, and more than once, waiting outside chambers while the men argued procedure, she put her hand into the bag and found the smooth joined place with her thumb, and went back in steadier. It was near midnight on the twelfth day, the fire sinking and the house asleep, when the knock came — soft, even, unhurried, the knock the whole coast of Christendom knows — and Barrow's junior stood on the step with snow in his hair and a note in his fist, too breathless for ceremony: "From Mr. Barrow, ma'am. The examination is complete. The officer reports—" he gulped air, "—genuine. All of them. The paper, the ink, the age — *genuinely old*, beyond dispute. Sir Charles has seen the report. Chambers tomorrow, ten o'clock, both parties, upon the question of what follows. Ma'am—" the boy abandoned dignity altogether, "—Mr. Barrow says to tell you it is *Christmas Eve*, ma'am, and he has never known Sir Charles to sit on Christmas Eve in forty years, and Sir Charles has ordered chairs brought in."