A Survey of Faults

After that he began, without ever admitting that he was doing it, to seek her out. It happened by a kind of mutual fiction. The Earl would discover an urgent reason to be in the part of the park where Honora was working — to inspect a wall, to consider a tree — and Honora would discover that she had a perfectly legitimate question about a boundary that only his lordship could answer, and the two of them would stand in the cold for an hour discussing culverts while neither of them said a single true thing about why they were there. She learned him slowly, the way she learned land. His name was Crispin Aldous, and he had been earl for six years, and for six years the house had been shutting itself one room at a time, like a body drawing in its limbs against the cold. She learned that the scar had a year attached to it that he would not name, and that the year had also taken something else, something he kept in the east wing, behind the one shutter that was never quite closed. She learned that he was clever, and bitter, and lonely in a way he had stopped expecting to be cured of, and that he had a sense of humour buried under all of it like a coin under floorboards — you heard it, faintly, when you stepped in the right place. "You disapprove of me," he said one afternoon. They were standing in the wreck of the formal garden, where box hedges had grown into shaggy green animals. "You walk my grounds and you tally my faults the way you tally my fence-posts. I can see you doing it. You have a surveyor's face, Miss Vane. It hides nothing and measures everything." "I do not disapprove of you, my lord." She made a note. The sundial was four degrees off true; someone had knocked it, years ago, and no one had cared to set it right. "I disapprove of waste. You have a great deal of it. A house with forty rooms and one fire. A park that could feed a village, gone to thistle. And a man of good understanding who has decided that the most useful thing he can do with his life is haunt it." She heard him go still beside her. She had gone too far. She always went too far; it was the flaw her father most despaired of, and she had long since stopped trying to mend it. But when she made herself look up, the Earl of Wexcombe was not angry. He was looking at her with an expression she had no map for at all — something raw and almost grateful, the look of a man who has been spoken to as a person and not as a wound for the first time in years. "My sister used to talk to me like that," he said quietly. It was the first time he had mentioned her. Honora had the sense, sharp and certain, of a door opening somewhere far off in the house. "Used to," she repeated. Gently. The way you would step onto ice. "There is a room in the east wing, Miss Vane." He was not looking at her now; he was looking at the shaggy green hedges, the ruined garden, the whole wide evidence of his retreat from the world. "It is the only room in this house that is exactly as it should be. Everything else I have let go. That one room I keep. Dusted. Aired. The fire lit on cold days, though no one sits by it." He drew a breath. "You said my map would be a lie because of the hole in it. You were right. I find I do not like, any longer, being a lie. Finish your survey of the grounds. And then — if you still cannot leave a question alone — I will show you the hole." He walked back to the house without waiting for her answer. Honora stood a long time in the cold garden with her field-book open and unmarked in her hands, and discovered that for the first time in her professional life she did not want a thing finished. She wanted, very much, for it to go on.