She led him testily upstairs and began to draw a bath. Sunlight streamed in the bathroom, and from the window Morgan watched the two figures in the gazebo.
—Mrs. Hallows, he asked, is something wrong with the Bishop?
—There is nothing wrong with His Grace. Only the last thing he needs is to be disturbed by helter-skelter visits from Master Jamie and ill-mannered boys who are nothing to do with him.
Her surliness was not mere unsociability, then. His behavior offended her. His behavior offended even himself. She mumbled something about His Grace not exerting himself.
—Has His Grace been unwell?
—His Grace last month suffered a heart attack, she declared. He’s only home from hospital a fortnight.
—Crikey! I mean, I’d no idea. Dr. Sebastian didn’t—
—He wouldn’t. And neither would His Grace. Impossible, the pair of them.
She got him down a towel.
—Doctors tried to send him to Wight to recuperate, but His Grace wouldn’t have it. The Dean took a strong line, but best they could get was His Grace’s blessing to take on more curates and his promise to rest at home until Michaelmas. Of course, he’s still buzzing over his archdeacons like heaven-knows-what, but Miss Lucy fends them off when she can, and I do my best. Lord knows it’s a poor lookout.
Having delivered herself of this, Mrs. Hallows turned off the taps and announced she would leave him in peace. He would find lunch in the conservatory when he was ready. He thanked her, and she left exuding motherliness for the first time.
He lowered himself into the water. She’d made it cool enough for summer, but not so cool as to chill his muscles, which had tightened after two runs. He leaned forward and rubbed his calves.
The Bishop, who had seemed a titan of strength, far more robust than Morgan felt himself, was actually in poor health. He was supposed to be resting, not taking on desperate cases. How then had he managed to grip Morgan’s wrist so hard? Hard enough, in fact, that he’d left a mark. (Or had that been Droit?) (Could Droit leave a mark?)
He didn’t know what to think, so preposterous was the line of inquiry. There he was in the bath with Droit again. Of course, physically he was alone in the bath, yet somehow Droit inhabited it, too. Not quite inside him, but perhaps after all …
He needed to stop treating fancies as reality. He’d fallen into the habit and it was confusing him. He was not, like Laurie, an artistic character. He did not even hold eccentric attitudes, like Mr. Grieves. All told, he considered himself a realist and an entirely ordinary specimen of English boy—man. Though if he was a man, why had he been abducted from school, and why was he now incarcerated as a child in the Bishop’s house? He could feel his mind whizzing down this line of argument. (He wouldn’t be treated that way!) (Yet plainly he was.) (He would resist!) (To what end?) (Soon people would come to their senses and he would be allowed to return to ordinary life.) Although he knew all the ways and reasons he should reject what had happened today, most especially what had just happened in the summerhouse (Nothing! Nothing had actually happened!), he kept coming back to the Bishop’s holding his gaze as he had held his wrist.
He was exhausted; that was why such thoughts seemed attractive.
But, oh, to be always weak. To have no recourse against that atmosphere, to be free to indulge in it, or compelled to submit to it—was there so much difference between the two? Certainly, he ought not to indulge, even now beneath the bathwater, in the memory of the Bishop’s … what to call it precisely? Not exactly his gaze or his touch or his words, but some thickness in the air when he turned all three upon Morgan, as if emitting an electrical-magnetical field.
He needed to pull himself together and stop bandying metaphor with a clergyman who was (a) unwell, (b) abrupt, (c) by profession steeped in grand ideas, (d) too quick to form attachments to strangers, and therefore (e) to be avoided. Morgan knew everything he needed to do. If he was to survive all of this intact, he needed to stop being a child and get on with it—it meaning what he needed to do!
The layers of muscle refused to flex. The bath cooled. A mantel of bereavement swept across him, scraping against everything he had lost, and everything he had now to renounce. He felt small, eyes full, chin weak. He got out of the bath and dripped on the mat.