CHAPTER TWELVE
“It was on the floor when I came in to do the fire, Your Grace. Pushed under the door, and no one saw it brought.”
The maid held it out, a folded paper with a wafer of red wax, and Ellen took it with a hand that was steady until she saw the writing on the front, and then was not.
She knew the hand. She had not seen it since the last of the September notes in London, the small slanting confident hand that had once made her heart turn over in a morning room, and it turned over now, from old habit, before her sense could stop it.
“Thank you, Bess. That will be all. I shall ring when I require you.”
She waited until the door closed, and broke the wax.
I have no right at all to write to you, and I find I cannot help myself.
The old voice, the ardent one, rose off the page and into her like warmth into cold hands.
I have been a simpleton and a coward, and I have thought of you every day of this summer, and I have not had one moment’s peace since I saw you in the street and could not say a hundredth part of what was in me.
I beg you, only once, to allow me to say it.
The little folly at the south of your park, tonight, at ten.
I will wait until eleven and no longer. If you do not come I shall understand, and I shall trouble you no more, and that will be the just punishment for a man who deserves no better. It was signed with a single letter.
She read it three times.
She sat down on the edge of the bed with the paper in her lap and read it a fourth, and a cold clear voice somewhere far back in her, the voice that had run a ruined household on nothing and was not in the habit of being untruthful to her, said plainly that this was wrong, that her husband was downstairs in his own house, that no honest woman received such a letter from such a man and did anything but hold it to the candle, and that she knew all of this perfectly well.
She did not hold it to the candle.
She carried it to the fire once. She stood with the corner of it almost in the flame, near enough that the paper warmed and the wax began to soften and run, and the cold clear voice told her to open her fingers, that a single second’s courage now would spare her a great deal later, and she stood there feeling the heat against her knuckles and could not make her hand let go.
She drew it back. She told herself it was only that she wished to read it once more, and she read it once more, and the flame had had its chance and she had not fed it, and some part of her that stood a little apart and watched understood that the not-burning had already settled everything that came after, whatever fabrications she told herself in the hours between.
She told herself she would only go to refuse him.
She resolved that she would speak her mind, the very sentiments she had been unable to utter at the draper’s window with Mrs. Selby hanging upon her sleeve and be done with him forever, and come home, and that there was a kind of courage in confronting a thing rather than fleeing it.
She told herself a great many things, sitting on the edge of the bed, and not one of them was the true thing, which was simpler and worse.
She had spent two months feeling like a chair in another person’s house, a useful piece moved from room to room, and tonight a man had written that he could not help himself, and the part of her that was still twenty and had been promised a different life wanted, just once, to be the one who could not be helped, the one worth a letter and a folly and a fool’s risk in the dark.
And there was the other thing, the thing she pushed down because it spoiled the story she wished to tell herself, which was that the cold house had lately stopped being quite so cold.
There was a mare in the stable bought without a reason given.
There was a wall around her she had only just discovered, built quiet and high by the very man she was about to deceive.
There was a voice on a ridge giving her three flat words about his parents, and a garden that was hers, and a good-night the other evening in a tone she had not heard from him before.
She knew all of that too. She set it down beside the note and found, to her shame, that the note felt the warmer of the two, because the note flattered her and the wall did not, and a girl of twenty will choose the thing that flatters her over the thing that keeps her safe very nearly every time, which is the whole quiet tragedy of being twenty.
She folded the note and put it in the bottom of her workbox under the silks, which was the first dishonest thing she had done in her own matrimony, and she went down to dinner.
Dinner was very quiet.
She made her answers when they were wanted and let Augusta carry the rest, and the food might have been ashes for all she tasted of it, and twice she caught the duke’s eyes resting on her, level and unhurried, the look of a man reading a page, and she felt the note in the bottom of the workbox three floors up as though it were sewn into her bodice.
“You are not eating again, child,” Augusta said.
“I walked too far this afternoon. I am only tired.”
“You walked too far yesterday by that account, and the day before.” Augusta’s eyes moved over her with something that was not quite suspicion and not quite worry.
“If you go on at this rate I shall have the apothecary out, and you will not thank me, for he bleeds on the slightest excuse and has the conversation of a damp wall.”
“Tell me what you did with your afternoon, then, that has worn you so thin.”
“I walked the kitchen garden. Coyne and I are settling the spring beds.” It was true, the early part of the day, and the truth of it steadied her voice. “And I rode.”
“You have always ridden. You did not always come to dinner looking as though you had swallowed a key.” Augusta set down her fork. “Ellen. If something is the matter, you have only to say so.”
“Nothing is the matter. I am tired, and poor company, and I shall be the better for an early night.”
Theodore, who had said almost nothing, set down his glass. “You had letters today.”
The question went through her like cold water down the spine. “Letters? Nothing of any moment.” The fabrication came out smooth, which frightened her worse than a stammer would have. “Bess brought up the post. Two bills, and a note from Mrs. Aldous about the parish school. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. You seemed elsewhere all evening.” He returned to his plate without looking at her. “I wondered whether some news had carried you there.”
“Only the spring beds,” she answered, furthering her fabrication and loathed how easily it came out of her mouth.
Theodore said nothing further the whole of the meal, which was usual, and watched her once more over the wine, which was not, and when she rose at the usual hour and made her good-nights she felt both their gazes follow her to the door, and did not dare to wonder what was in them.
She did not undress. She sent the maid away early, sat by her fire in her gown, and watched the clock on the mantel walk toward ten with a slowness that was its own kind of torment.
Twice she half rose to go down and find her husband and tell him the whole of it and let him do what he would.
Twice she sat back down, because telling him meant giving up the one hour in two months that was to be hers, and because she could not have borne the level reading look turned on this, and because the part of her that had not burned the letter had never had the smallest intention of telling anyone anything.
The fire sank. The clock found the quarter, and then the half, and the small dishonest thing she had become went and fetched the cloak.
At a quarter to the hour she took the dark traveling cloak from the press and put it over the gown and drew the hood up, and she went down the back stairs in her stocking feet with her shoes in her hand, and let herself out by the small side door that gave on the kitchen garden, the door that was hers, that she had come and gone by a hundred times with her baskets, and the irony of using it for this did not escape her and did not stop her.
She looked back once from the edge of the lawn.
The house stood black against the stars, every window dark but one, and the one was the study, low and gold at the corner of the ground floor, where her husband sat up over his papers as he sat up most nights, six feet of wall and a shut door from the bed he never came to.
She stood on the cold grass and looked at that single light, and the wrongness of what she was doing rose in her so strongly that for a moment she nearly turned and went back in and burned the letter after all.
Then she thought of the draper’s window, and the three weeks, and two months of being a useful chair carried from room to room, and she drew the hood lower and went on.
The night was cold and clear and the moon a thin paring of itself, and the park lay silver-grey and enormous, and it was full of small sounds, an owl somewhere over the home wood, the river a faint cold rumor at the foot of the valley, her own breath loud inside the hood.
Twice a branch cracked in the dark and her heart stopped and started again.
She went down through the silver toward the black mass of trees at the south where the folly stood, half a mile that felt like five, afraid, and under the fear, winning against it, something she had not felt in two months, the high reckless lift of a person who is for once doing rather than being done to, and she told herself with every step that she went only to end a thing and never to begin one, and her feet were soon wet through, and she did not turn back.