What the Door Knows

"I am not listening through the door, Mrs Holt. I am standing beside it. There is a considerable difference, and I would be grateful if the distinction were maintained below stairs." — Jameson

The breakfast tray that Jameson carried to the library corridor at half past seven was not the tray that Mrs Holt would have prepared for the dining room. That tray — the proper morning tray, with its full complement of covered dishes and the small rack of toast and the pot of Oxford marmalade that Charles Killerton had taken with his breakfast every morning for as long as Jameson had been at the manor — was set at the head of the dining room table at eight o'clock precisely, as it was every morning, and Charles would descend for it at eight o'clock precisely, as he did every morning, and the dining room would perform its function as the dining room with the ordered reliability that Charles expected of every room in his house.

The tray Jameson was carrying now was a different matter. He had assembled it himself, without consultation, in the brief window between Mrs Holt's attention being directed toward the range and Agnes being sent to the morning room with the fresh flowers. It was a plain tray — the everyday one, not the silver — bearing a pot of coffee, a cup and saucer, two slices of bread with butter, and a small dish of the marmalade, because whatever else was true about the present situation, Francis had been raised in this house and in this house marmalade was what accompanied bread in the morning and Jameson saw no reason why unusual circumstances should require a man to do without the things he had grown up with.

He carried it along the rear passage with the unhurried steadiness he brought to everything, the tray level, the coffee pot not rattling, his footfall quiet on the polished boards.

The line of light was still beneath the library door.

This was not, by this point in the morning, a surprise. It was, however, a confirmation — of what, precisely, Jameson would not have said aloud, but the interior ledger noted it with the same dispassion it noted everything else. He had trimmed and filled four lamps yesterday. He would trim and fill four lamps today. The household accounts would reflect an unusual expenditure on lamp oil for the month of July, and if Mr Charles examined the accounts in detail, which he did on the first of each month with the thoroughness of a man who had built a professional practice on the understanding that the numbers told you things the people involved preferred not to, then there would be a conversation. That conversation was not Jameson's to initiate. It was, however, his to manage the approach of, and he was managing it.

He set the tray down on the side table — the blue-and-white vase moved to one side, the tray positioned squarely in its place — and knocked.

A single knock, unhurried, the knock of a man who is not uncertain of his right to knock but is uncertain of the welcome it will receive and has adjusted its character accordingly. He waited.

From within the library, silence. Then movement — the particular sound of a wooden chair shifted on a bare floor, and then footsteps, and then a quality of stillness very close to the door that suggested Francis had come to it and stopped, and was standing on the other side of it in the way that a person stands on the other side of a door when they have not spoken to another human being since the previous afternoon and are recalibrating, at short notice, for the requirement of doing so.

"Leave it outside, Jameson." The voice was Francis's, recognisably, but with a roughness at its edges that four nights of inadequate sleep and prolonged silence had given it. Not distress, precisely. More the quality of a voice that had been used for a purpose other than conversation — reading aloud, perhaps, or dictating to itself — and was adjusting back to the register of ordinary address.

"Yes, sir," Jameson said.

He did not move. He stood beside the tray with his hands at his sides and listened, and what he heard, as the footsteps on the other side of the door retreated from it and the quality of silence shifted back to the interior quality of a man returned to his work, was Francis's voice resuming.

It was not a conversation. There was no second voice, no pause for reply, no interrogative cadence. It was continuous and deliberate, the words too low through the door's thickness to resolve into meaning, but the manner of them entirely clear — the manner of a man reading aloud, carefully, testing each phrase as it left his mouth as though the spoken version of a thing revealed properties that the written version concealed. There was an interval, perhaps half a minute, and then the voice shifted — faster now, less measured, the rhythm of someone no longer reading but thinking aloud, following a line of reasoning at the pace it was generating itself rather than the pace of a prepared text.

Jameson stood in the corridor for a moment that was, by the standards of his professional conduct, a moment longer than strict necessity required.

He was not listening, precisely. He was a man of considerable discretion and had been so for long enough that the habit was no longer something he maintained consciously but simply something he was. He was not listening. He was registering, which was a different matter, and what he was registering was that the voice on the other side of the door was not the voice of a young man who had returned from an expedition somewhat overstimulated and required a few days of quiet to restore himself to his ordinary proportions. It was the voice of a young man in the grip of something that had its own momentum, its own requirements, and its own timetable, none of which appeared to have made any provision for the ordinary expectations of a Boston household in July.

He picked up the tray. He set it back down again. He looked at it.

The coffee would be cold within the hour, untouched in the corridor. The bread would dry at its edges and join its predecessors in the contribution to the birds that was becoming, at this rate, quite a substantial ornithological benefaction. The marmalade would sit in its dish with the patient futility of marmalade placed outside a door behind which a man had no present interest in marmalade.

Jameson straightened. He looked at the library door. He looked at the tray. He looked at the door again.

Then he knocked a second time, differently — not the considerate knock of a moment ago but the knock of a man who has something to say and intends to say it, brief and unambiguous and carrying in its two short raps the full accumulated weight of four mornings of cold trays and untouched food and lamp oil and Agnes's barely suppressed curiosity and the knowledge that at eight o'clock Charles Killerton would sit down to his breakfast at the head of his dining room table and might, before the morning was out, require a report on the condition of his son.

The footsteps came back to the door. A pause.

"Jameson." Not a question. An identification, and within it a faint note that might, in a man less carefully governed than Francis Killerton, have been impatience.

"Sir," Jameson said. "I have brought coffee and bread. The coffee is hot at present and will not remain so indefinitely. I would be grateful if you would take it while it is of some use."

A silence. Jameson waited it out with the equanimity of a man who has waited out silences of considerably greater duration and significance and has learned that the productive response to a silence is almost always simply to remain in it.

"Set it down," Francis said, at last. "I will take it presently."

"I have set it down, sir," Jameson said. "I set it down some minutes ago."

Another silence, shorter this time, with a quality to it that Jameson — who had known Francis since Francis was three years old and learning to walk on these same polished boards — identified without difficulty as the silence of a young man registering, with some small degree of sheepishness, that he has been managed, and that the management has been both entirely appropriate and slightly more thorough than he had noticed at the time.

"Thank you, Jameson," Francis said. The roughness in his voice had modulated slightly, as though the brief exchange had reminded it of its more usual register.

"Sir," Jameson said. And then, because the opportunity was present and because it was his considered view that an opportunity of this kind, once passed, did not always return at a convenient moment: "Your father breakfasts at eight, sir, and has mentioned on two occasions this week that he hopes to find you in better health before the month is out." He paused. "I mention it only so that you are aware of the general sentiment of the household."

The silence on the other side of the door was of a different quality from its predecessors. Jameson would not have described it as chastened — Francis was not, and had never been, a young man much given to chastening — but it was attentive. It was the silence of someone receiving information and placing it accurately in context.

"I am aware of my father's sentiment, Jameson," Francis said, carefully.

"Very good, sir," Jameson said. "The coffee will be best taken in the next quarter hour."

He turned and walked back along the rear passage toward the kitchen with the same measured step he had arrived with, his hands at his sides, his face arranged in its customary configuration. Behind him, from within the library, he heard the brief resumption of movement — the chair again, the particular sound of a coffee cup being lifted from a tray — and then, after a moment, the voice resumed its low, deliberate progress through whatever it had been working through when he had interrupted it.

Jameson permitted himself, in the privacy of the rear passage with no one to observe it, a breath that was not quite a sigh.

He had four lamps to see to before noon. He had Agnes to manage, and Mrs Holt's studied neutrality to maintain, and at some point before the end of the day he would need to determine whether the tray this evening should include something more sustaining than bread, on the grounds that a man could not think his way to a grand vision on bread and marmalade alone, regardless of how compelling the vision or how absolute the present indifference to ordinary appetite.

He had also, though this was not an item he would have entered on any household ledger, a growing and not entirely comfortable awareness that whatever was happening in the Ashwood Manor library was not the kind of thing that was going to resolve itself quietly and return the household to its ordinary arrangements within any timeframe that Mr Charles's patience was likely to accommodate.

He turned the corner into the kitchen corridor and nearly walked directly into Agnes, who was coming the other way with an empty flower vase and an expression of alert innocence that Jameson had seen on faces of her particular type and age often enough to be entirely undeceived by it.

"The morning room flowers are done, Mr Jameson," she said, with a brightness that was perhaps one shade brighter than the occasion strictly required.

"Thank you, Agnes," Jameson said. He stepped to one side to allow her to pass. "The drawing room curtains on the east side need straightening. The lower hem has been crooked since Tuesday and I would be grateful if you would attend to it this morning."

Agnes looked, fractionally, as though the drawing room curtains were not the direction in which her morning had been intending to take her.

"Yes, Mr Jameson," she said.

"Good," said Jameson, and went to see about the lamps.