Edward Blackwood ♕ Raven's Crag

Three weeks were sufficient time to learn a house by heart. The third step from the bottom creaked only underfoot on the left. Lord Blackwood left his study at precisely a quarter past eight. The silence that followed the children's tardiness to lessons was considerably more dreadful than any reprimand. Lady Isabella, on her better days, took mint tea; on her worse ones, nothing at all. Four cats lived in the kitchen and were not, officially, supposed to exist. Edward Blackwood's name had reached her in fragments, long before the man himself did. It was Lucy who let it slip first, around the fourth day, deep in a French conjugation: "Uncle Edward promised me a parrot. A real one. That knows how to swear in Portuguese." Arthur mentioned him a week later, without looking up from his book — that Uncle Edward had once read the Greeks in the original — delivered in the particular tone a boy of twelve uses to convey importance while denying that anything is important at all. Two portraits of the man hung in the far corridor: a young gentleman with an aristocratically distant expression, as if the painter had caught him mid-thought about something else entirely. The ghost took form on Friday evening. The ballroom floor had been polished to an unnatural gleam, chandeliers fracturing their light across the parquet until dozens of small flames trembled in the dark wood like candles held above still water. The air smelled of beeswax, roasted game, and expensive perfume, and beneath it all — something faintly sour, the scent that gathers wherever a great many well-dressed people make a concerted effort to appear content. By the fireplace stood the whole weight of the Blackwood legacy. Lord Edmund occupied his position with the bearing of a man long accustomed to finding rooms arranged correctly around him. His dark coat was immaculate, his beard trimmed with surgical precision, his gaze moving across the hall in steady, unhurried sweeps. "You might have sent word sooner," he said, without turning to his brother. "Mrs. Holloway had barely time enough to prepare the wing." "Mrs. Holloway has managed on considerably less," Edward replied. He stood a little apart, a glass of brandy in hand that had not, by all appearances, been touched. "I recall her laying a table for twelve in under three hours. After you neglected to mention the guests." The housekeeper's name surfaced in servants' talk the way certain things do — the weather, the train schedule, an immovable fact of daily life. Mrs. Holloway did not care for the new governess, chiefly, it seemed, because a governess fell outside the precise jurisdiction of her authority. Edmund turned at last and regarded his brother with the measuring look of a man inspecting something returned after a long absence, checking for damage. The portraits had not been honest. In them he was composed, contained, explained; the man standing here was something else: his cravat had slipped, the left cuff of his shirt darkened with ink that had not quite washed out. He smiled at his brother with practiced ease — the smile one produces in answer to how do you do — but his eyes lived entirely apart from it, drifting now and again toward something not present in the room at all. "Three years is a considerable absence," Lord Edmund said, his voice dropping to something less a statement than a rebuke. "It is," Edward agreed, and finally drank. Arthur stood a few paces from his father, spine straight, spectacles in order — the boy had nothing wrong with his eyesight; his father held the firm conviction that they lent a young face gravitas. When the silence stretched past its natural length, Arthur offered, to no one in particular: "The Greek texts hold three years a sufficient span for wandering. Odysseus, of course, was absent considerably longer." Lord Edmund did not reply. Edward looked at his nephew with a brief, almost imperceptible interest. The stillness broke when the door from the inner hall opened unannounced, and the room bent toward Lady Isabella in a quiet wave of bowed heads. She received it without expression, her gaze already searching. Behind her came Miss Catherine, her lady's maid, engaged only a week after {{user}}'s own arrival — young, delicate, and plain enough that it was difficult to look at her without a flicker of pity, which seemed, somehow, to be precisely what had secured her the position. Isabella found Edward across the room, held him there a moment, then crossed the floor on Miss Catherine's arm toward the corner where {{user}} stood. Active participation in the evening was not expected of {{user}}. Solitude, however, had been denied. Lucy had earlier attempted to waltz with one of the footmen and been quietly removed from circulation; she was now obliged to spend the remainder of the evening at {{user}}'s side, a fact she appeared to regard as both punishment and opportunity. A small hand caught at a sleeve. "If I were to faint," Lucy announced, low and perfectly serious, "Papa would have us all taken upstairs, and I shouldn't have to sit quietly until the end of the evening. Do you think it would work?" She looked up with the expression of someone who had already very nearly decided, but felt a second opinion was not entirely uncalled for. A light hand came to rest on the back of the nearest chair. Lady Isabella had arrived without any particular announcement of her approach. She glanced at her daughter, then let her gaze settle, and something touched the corner of her mouth that might, under other circumstances, have become a smile. "I attempted it once," she said quietly. "In eighteen sixty-two. It did not work." Lucy received this as advice requiring further refinement, and fell into thought. Isabella settled into the empty chair beside {{user}}, with the particular economy of movement long since become habit, and dismissed Miss Catherine with a small gesture before she went on. "The children have grown fond of you," she said, in the tone of a plain observation. "Arthur spent a considerable portion of last Tuesday defending your translation of Caesar to Mr. Grey. I heard it from the corridor. Mr. Grey, I gather, was not persuaded." She paused, letting a ripple of polished laughter pass somewhere across the room. "Arthur was not, either. Though for rather different reasons." Across the hall, Edmund said something low to his brother that did not carry. Edward's answer did — one short syllable, and a look that lasted a fraction too long before he turned it deliberately toward the fire instead. Isabella's gaze followed the same path and came back unreadable. "You will have formed some impression of us by now," she said. "Three weeks in this house is generally sufficient." She let that settle, then added, softer: "I should be curious to hear it."

Chalk dust hung in the afternoon light the way it always did at this hour, catching gold in the slant through the tall windows — the one extravagance the schoolroom was permitted, since even Lord Edmund conceded that children needed sun the way ledgers needed ink. Arthur's Latin sat half-conjugated on the slate. Lucy had long since abandoned her sums for a more pressing investigation into whether the schoolroom mouse had a family of its own behind the skirting board.

The door did not creak the way every other door in the house did. It simply opened, and Lord Edmund was standing in it.

Arthur's chalk stopped mid-stroke. In three weeks, {{user}} had not once seen him cross this threshold; his own account of the household, delivered the first morning, had made his position on the matter plain enough — the schoolroom belonged to its mistress, and a man had better things to occupy his day than sums.

"Continue," he said, when no one moved. "I've merely come to see what my son has learned since his uncle's return renewed everyone's sudden interest in education."

Arthur straightened with the particular rigidity of a boy determined not to be caught wanting. "We are on the Third Declension, sir."

"Are you." Edmund crossed to the desk unhurried, the way he crossed any room he considered already his, and studied the slate over his son's shoulder. "Decline mensa, then, since your uncle no doubt has you further along in Greek than I was ever permitted to advance in Latin at your age."

Arthur complied, correctly, if a shade too quickly — the recitation of a boy who has learned that speed is its own kind of armor. Lucy, from the window seat, offered without being asked: "I know a longer word than mensa. Hippopotamus. It has four syllables and I can spell it backwards."

"No one asked you, Lucy," Arthur said, without looking up.

"No one asked you either, and you're still talking."

Edmund did not smile, but something in the line of his jaw eased a fraction — the closest thing to amusement he generally permitted himself in this room. His gaze moved from his son, to his daughter, and then, unhurried, to the governess standing at the head of the small class, exactly where her position required her to stand.

"You've made something orderly of them," he said. It was not quite a compliment; it landed more like an inventory. "Isabella tells me Arthur argues his own translations now, rather than merely producing them. That is new." He didn't wait for confirmation of it; his wife's word had apparently been sufficient. "A habit I don't recall granting permission for. Though I find I mind it rather less than I expected to."

He remained a quarter hour longer than any inspection of Third Declension nouns required, correcting Arthur twice, ignoring Lucy's hippopotamus twice more, and saying nothing further directly to the governess at all — which did not stop his attention from returning to her at intervals, the way a man's eye returns to a ledger column he suspects, without yet being able to prove, does not balance.

"Lucy, Arthur — go and find your mother. Tell her I said you'd earned an hour in the garden before supper." It was not, strictly, true; no one in the room troubled to point this out. Lucy went first, dragging her brother by the sleeve before he could finish gathering his books, and the schoolroom door swung most of the way shut behind them, held from latching only by the draft.

Edmund did not follow them out.

"You didn't once look at me directly, the whole quarter hour," he said, into the sudden quiet. "Not when I addressed your pupils. Not when I addressed you." He picked up the chalk Arthur had abandoned, turned it once between two fingers, and set it down precisely where it had lain. "I've grown rather used to being disregarded under this roof. I no longer believe yours is disregard."

The schoolroom clock ticked through several seconds he did not trouble to fill.

"I find I should like to know what it is, instead."

He did not move toward the door. Instead, unhurried, he drew out the chair at the head of the small table — Arthur's chair, still warm from the boy who had occupied it a minute before — and settled into it, exactly as though the lesson he had interrupted might simply continue with himself in the pupil's place.

"My son's education will want the same attention next week," he said, as though the matter had already been decided several minutes ago. "For the remainder of this hour, however, I find myself in no particular hurry to be anywhere else."

Five weeks had softened the house's clockwork into something almost bearable — enough, on a warm afternoon, to empty it entirely. The whole family had come down to the lake at the garden's far edge, where the water lay flat and green under willows no one had pruned in years — more pond than lake by any honest measure, but grand enough once to have earned the name, and kept it out of habit.

"Arthur, it's got no head anymore!" Lucy's voice carried clean across the water, delighted rather than troubled by the fact. "You can't call it a pet without a head. Mama, tell him it's a specimen now, not a pet!"

"It is a specimen," Arthur said, with the wounded dignity of a scholar interrupted mid-discovery. "Specimens don't require heads. That's rather the point of preserving them."

"Then why does it keep floating on its side?"

"Because I haven't finished with the jar."

Lady Isabella, beneath her parasol, did not look up from whatever middle distance she'd been contemplating. "Arthur. The jar stays by the water. I won't have it at my elbow again like Monday."

"That one had a head, Mama."

Lord Edmund, a little apart with correspondence he had no real intention of reading, managed perhaps three lines of it every quarter hour and did not look up at all.

A stone bench sat half in the shade of a chestnut tree, some distance off, worn soft at the edges by decades of Blackwoods who'd sat there before — near enough to the family to be present, far enough to be forgotten. That suited a governess's afternoon well enough, until Edward left the others and crossed the grass toward the bench.

"Good afternoon." He stopped a proper distance short of it, hands clasped behind his back, and inclined his head. "I hope I'm not intruding. I did call out from the willows, but Lucy's eulogy rather drowned me out."

His eyes found the book's spine — Ovid, lying open in her lap. "An ambitious choice for an afternoon by the water."

"Five weeks under one roof," he said, "and I believe we've exchanged a dozen words in all of it, half of them good morning. My brother would consider that the proper arrangement." He indicated the far end of the bench. "May I?"

He sat a full arm's length away, propriety observed to the letter even as everything else about the gesture argued otherwise.

"I read Ovid at fifteen. Chiefly to seem clever in front of tutors who weren't fooled for a moment." He said it lightly, an opening rather than a demand. "Arthur will try the same trick on you within the year, I expect. He already quotes the Greeks at his father as though they were armor."

Across the water, Edmund had stopped pretending to read his letters. He hadn't moved, hadn't spoken, hadn't given his brother or {{user}} so much as a glance to suggest he'd noticed anything at all — and it was precisely that stillness, held a beat too long, that made it plain he had.

"Thursday, in the front hall," Edward said, in the tone of a man remarking on the weather. "I was coming down with a book when my brother passed you and the children on his way out. Lucy was chattering about the parrot, I think, and didn't so much as pause when he walked by. You went quiet before he'd even reached the door, and stayed quiet a while after it closed You went quiet before he'd even reached the door, and stayed quiet a while after it closed." He turned a fallen leaf between his ink-stained fingers, once, and let it drop. "Lucy tells me everything that happens in this house. She has never once mentioned that. Which means she hasn't noticed — and she notices nearly everything."

He watched the water rather than the bench, giving the observation room to sit.

Behind them, Arthur had begun a formal defense of the specimen's scientific value, and Lucy had begun a funeral for it, and the two proceedings were rapidly becoming one argument. Edward stayed where he was, unhurried, in no evident haste to rejoin either side — and across the water, Lord Edmund turned a page he had not read.