THE CORNER

CHAPTER 5 - THE CORNER

LUCIAN

I asked him on the third day.

I had meant to ask on the first, and the second, and each time I had got as far as the threshold of the study and lost my nerve. It isn't easy to walk into a room and ask a man what he saw in a corner. It sounds like the start of a joke, or a threat.

But on the third morning Marcus drove me up Halloway Hill, and the gates opened before we'd slowed, and the house sat grey and quiet against a sky the colour of pewter. I climbed the three flights of stairs. The man in the dark suit knocked once and opened the door without waiting.

Elias was at the window again. The books were stacked differently, I noticed. Someone had been reading one of them and left it open face down on the sill.

"You've been thinking," he said, without turning.

"How can you tell?"

"You stand differently when you've been thinking. Your weight goes back onto your heels." He turned. "Sit down, Lucian. You're making the carpet nervous."

I sat. I didn't speak yet. I'd decided on the car that I would wait until he had finished being the one who spoke, because it was the only advantage I could be sure I had.

He poured two cups of tea from a pot that had already gone cold, poured them both anyway, and put one in front of me without asking.

"Ask," he said.

"What did you see in the corner?"

He didn't answer right away. He lifted his cup and looked at me over the rim, and for a long moment I couldn't read him at all.

"A boy who was waiting for someone to tell him he could leave," he said at last. "Nobody did. So he stayed exactly where he was, and waited to be forgotten. And every person in that room kept glancing toward the corner anyway, because they could feel him there, even though not one of them could have described him." He set the cup down. "That was what I saw."

I didn't trust my voice, so I held onto the cup.

"Is that why you chose me?"

"No." A pause. "That's why I wanted to see you again."

"Those aren't the same thing."

"No," he agreed. "They aren't."

In the afternoon, a letter came.

It was delivered by hand, to the front gate, and Marcus brought it up to the study on a silver tray that looked as if it had been borrowed from a museum. Elias read it standing at the desk. He read it twice. Then he folded it along its creases and put it in the drawer without a word.

"From my father's house?" I asked.

He looked at me. "Why would you think that?"

"Because you've gone very still."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "It's from your father," he said. "He'd like you home for dinner on Sunday. He believes that a family should sit together before a wedding."

"And?"

"And he's asked me to be there."

"Will you go?"

"I've been invited to many dinners by men who wish to be seen with me," Elias said. "I've turned down most of them. I'm curious what he'll do with his hands when he has to pass me the salt."

I didn't laugh. But I came closer than I had in fifteen years.

"He won't say anything about the slap," I said.

Elias's gaze sharpened, quick and cold. "What slap?"

I realised too late what I had said. The bruise had faded to nothing by then, but I could still feel the place where it had been.

"Nothing," I said.

"Lucian."

"It was a long time ago." It had been two days. "It's not important."

He didn't press. But he didn't look away from me either, and I understood that he had filed it, the way my father would have filed a debt. The difference was that Elias didn't seem to want anything for it.

"If anyone in that house raises a hand to you again," he said quietly, "I want to know. Not because I'll hit them. Because I'll stop doing business with them, and I'll enjoy it."

Peter came to the gate the next morning.

I saw him from the car, standing on the far side of the iron bars in an old grey coat, his hat in his hands, looking as though he had walked up Halloway Hill on foot and was not entirely certain the gates would open for him. Marcus slowed. I told him to stop.

"He's our butler," I said. "He's looking for me."

"Not for you," Marcus said. "He's looking at the car. Waiting to see who's in it."

I got out before he could tell me it wasn't a good idea.

Peter's face did something complicated when he saw me. Relief, first, quick and unguarded. Then he straightened his shoulders and became the man who had poured tea for my father for thirty years.

"Master Lucian."

"Peter. You shouldn't be out here."

"No," he agreed. "But you weren't meant to be in there either, and yet here you are." He glanced past me up the drive. "They've let you in, then."

"They've let me in."

"Good." He took a breath. He looked older than I remembered, and smaller, and when he reached into his coat pocket I thought for a moment he might be carrying something heavy. What he took out was a small paper bag, neatly folded at the top, the way he always folded the bread rolls he saved for me on nights I was sent to bed without supper.

"I know it's not much," he said, and pressed it into my hand. "But it's warm still."

I couldn't speak. The bag was warm. It smelled of butter and cinnamon.

"Peter, why are you here?"

He looked back toward the house on the hill, then down the road toward the city, then at me.

"Because your father sent for the silver this morning," he said quietly, "and the silver was not on the list of things he meant to keep. And because the girl Evelyn has been in the kitchen since dawn, asking the cook about the Lawrence house. Asking whether there's a back way up the hill."

The cold came up through my shoes.

"What is she planning?"

"I don't know," Peter said. "But I know that she was crying again last night, and that she was not crying the way she used to cry, when she was small. She was crying like someone who has made a decision." He put his hat back on. "I wanted you to hear it from someone who loves you, Master Lucian. Not from a letter."

He turned and walked back down the road, shoulders straight, his coat flapping in a wind I couldn't feel.

I stood at the gate with the warm bag in my hands until Marcus cleared his throat.

That night I couldn't sleep, so I went to the window.

From the top of the hill you could see the whole city laid out beneath me, the lights of the harbour and the long dark ribbon of the river and, far off to the east, the road that led out past the orphanage where I had spent my first nine years and where no one had ever come looking for me.

Somewhere down there, Evelyn was awake too. Maybe planning. Maybe packing. Maybe standing at the foot of our father's stairs, waiting for someone to tell her she was worth more than she had been given.

And somewhere down there, Vivienne was with a gardener's son, on a road I would never see, living a life nobody had arranged for her.

I thought about what Elias had said. A boy who was waiting for someone to tell him he could leave.

I had not left. Not once. Not in fifteen years.

But I had walked out of that house on the morning of my own choosing, with a bag and a navy coat, and I had come up this hill and signed my name on a contract I had read to the last line. And a man who had seen me in a corner for four minutes had told me he wanted to see me again.

The paper bag was on the desk. Still faintly warm.

I picked up a roll and held it for a moment, the way you hold something you're not yet sure you're allowed to eat, and then I ate it, standing at the window, watching the lights of a city I had never once been invited to join.