Eliza waited. When she spoke, it was as if nothing else mattered. “What do you need?”
He swallowed. “It has to be perfect. No mistakes. The funeral, the notices, the legal—” He stopped, unable to summon the next word.
She leaned closer, her shoulder nearly brushing his. “You have never made a mistake,” she said.
He wanted to protest, to tell her that the whole of his life was an improvisation, a patchwork of errors disguised as certainty. He wanted to confess how desperately he feared the future, how utterly unprepared he was for the finality of loss.
Instead, he shut his mouth and squeezed his hands together until the knuckles ached.
She took a clean sheet from the stack and smoothed it before him. “Tell me what to write,” she said.
He stared at the paper. The line of his jaw quivered.
“Tell me,” she repeated.
He did. He dictated the letter to his sisters, the one to the family solicitor, the note for the village.
When they had finished, she said, “Is there anything else?”
He shook his head, but she saw the lie in it.
She waited, the silence vast and kind.
He wanted to ask her not to leave. He wanted to say that the world was ending and that he was afraid to face it alone.
He said none of it.
She stood, tidied the papers, and left them stacked in order on the blotter.
Just before she reached the door, she looked back at him. He expected a look of pity or triumph. Instead, he found only understanding.
She left, the door shutting without a sound.
August sat at the desk for a long time after, the list complete, the world unchanged.
He did not move.
He will probably not survive the month,he recalled, and for the first time since he was a boy, August Vestiere wished someone else would take charge.
August had not sat for hours, not even when the clock on the mantel struck one then two then the dull, accusing stroke of three. He stood at the side of his father’s bed with his hands behind his back.
Eliza sat by the window, the only patch of gray in the dimness, her presence so unobtrusive that August sometimes forgot she was there—until, of course, he remembered, and the recollection struck him with something perilously close to gratitude.
Albert had been in and out of consciousness for most of the night. Once, he had opened his eyes and demanded a glass of port which August fetched and held to his lips. Albert drank, coughed, and muttered that if he were to die, he would do it properly fortified.
In the small hours, Dorothy Vestiere had drifted in and out, her energy spent after a long siege of tears. Now, only August and Eliza stood vigil. The nurse dozed on a low stool by the hearth, her head bobbing in time with the fire’s dying light.
The hour grew close and tight, the way time does when one is waiting for disaster. August stood so still that his own pulse began to pound in his ears.
Then, quite suddenly, Albert opened his eyes.
He squinted at August, as if seeing him from a great distance. “You there,” he croaked, “come closer.”
August stepped forward, bending until his face was in the shadow of the old man’s. “I am here, Father.”
Albert’s gaze slid past him then returned. “Not you. My father. Where is he?”
August’s spine went rigid. “He is gone, Father,” he said, reverting instinctively to the role Albert always cast him in at these times. “You are the head of the house now.”