“I have survived my grand adventure, as you see,” she reassured him.
Learning that her cousin was one of the commissioners for the Equivalent raised a question that had played within my mind since Robert Moray had first put it there this morning. “Did your cousin say why the commission decided to move Mrs. Graeme’s claim from their hands into ours?”
Helen said, “No, my cousin was not there, regrettably. I did, though, have a lovely visit with his wife. We dined, and talked. She’s well acquainted with the backgrounds of the families of the nobility and gentry, and it was from her I learned the details of your Robert Moray.”
She told me what she’d learnt. I had not known he had a young son, though I’d known of course that he was married. I had sent that letter to his wife by an express this evening, and my pocket was a pound Scots lighter for my effort, but I’d reasoned, had I been a prisoner with a wife, I would have wished to put her mind at peace as soon as possible.
I naturally said none of this to Helen.
She’d lost interest in the Morays and was speaking now about her cousin’s wife. “…a generous woman, and deserving of the happiness she has in life. I don’t believe she found such happiness in her first marriage, for her late husband had been married before as a young man, to a Frenchwoman, and half his heart was always held by his first love. Leastways, that’s how my cousin’s wife felt. As though she could be no more than a substitute, for he’d already found his matching half.” She very kindly caught herself, apparently remembering that I was not as widely read as she was, and explained, “That comes from Plato. His Symposium, in which he claims that every person has one—that we all were made originally whole, then sliced in half like flatfish, so we now must search the world for the one person who completes us.”
A matching half. It was a most romantic notion. My mind filled with memories of moments when my heart had overruled reason—a night that still lived in my dreams from my youth with the girl with the tumbling hair, and a day when I’d truly believed I had seen my own soul mirrored back to me in a girl’s eyes, both of them overlaid now by the steady, blue gaze of a widow who’d looked at me yesterday morning and quietly asked of me, “Shall we begin?”
MacDougall spat into the hearth. “That’s heathen nonsense.”
Helen asked, “Have you ever been married, MacDougall?”
“I have not.” He said it in a tone that implied that was a deliverance of sorts, which I privately agreed it was, for the woman. “But,” he added, “if God should send me a woman, she’d not be mistaking herself for a flatfish.” Straightening, he faced me with a challenge. “Were ye going to take your papers off the table at any time, or will I be serving ye breakfast tomorrow atop that confusion?”
I had, admittedly, been reading through my few notes after supper, but had ordered everything as best I could before I’d gone out for my walk, and would have told him so had Helen not stepped smoothly in to take my part.
“’Tis clear you need a better place to do your work,” she said, and bade me gather up my papers and my new-bought books and follow her.
She led me to a room that I’d not yet discovered, being that it lay behind the kitchen where I very rarely ventured, since that was the maid’s domain. But entering this small room was, to me, like finding sanctuary.
“I do believe that it was once the scullery,” she said, “but when we took these rooms we also took the furniture, and from this it is obvious the former tenant used this as his writing chamber, so my husband does the same. I’m sure he would be pleased to have you use it also, while you hold his place in this inquiry.”
“I might not leave a room like this,” I warned her.
Everything had been designed to make a masculine retreat. An ebony-cased eight-day table clock ticked out the hours in comforting measure on top of a walnut-tree bookcase with locking glass doors. Above the open hearth that waited only for a fire, a brave ship sailed forever just before the storm across a seascape in a heavy frame, with candle sconces gleaming from the wall to either side.
The most impressive piece of cabinetry in the room was the scrutore. It was fashioned of walnut-tree also, inlaid with veneers set in circles and starbursts. Fully three feet broad, it stood as tall as me, with drawers below and a fall-front square panel which, when let down upon its hinge, became a level writing surface. Helen unlocked this and let it down now, revealing cleverly made inner drawers and pigeonholes behind and, at their center, a compartment with its own small door.