CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
“You decided.” The two words came out of her like something breaking.
“You decided what I needed to learn. You decided I needed to be taught, and you arranged the lesson, and you stood in the dark and watched it taught to me. You let a man put his hands on me and terrify me nearly out of my senses, all because you, in your supreme judgment, had concluded it would serve my greater good. Do you hear yourself? Do you hear what you are telling me, in your own dining room, with your hand still warm from holding mine?”
“I hear it.” He did. It was worse, said back to him in her voice, than it had ever sounded inside his own head. He began to say her name and got no further than the first sound of it, because she was already speaking again.
“Did you know about him before?”
“Before?”
“Before we wedded. You investigated him, you have just told me you had a report. Did you know, before you wedded me, what Vance was? That he had abandoned me over for a fortune. That he was a fortune-hunter who would have left any woman without ten thousand pounds standing in a ballroom. Did you know that before our wedding, while I sat beneath your roof, mourning him like a maid at a graveside, wasting my devotion upon a man who had bartered me away for gold, in the very same manner as my brother? Were you aware?”
The room was very quiet. The folded pamphlet sat on the cloth between them.
“Yes,” he said. “Pearce had it within a week of the betrothal. Vance had jilted you the previous autumn the moment your brother’s debts became known, and offered, the very same season, for a banker’s daughter with a great deal of money, and been refused, and gone back to his regiment poorer than he came out of it.
I knew it before our wedding. I knew it on our wedding night.
I have known it every day of our matrimony. ”
“Why.” Her voice cracked on the single word. “Give me the reason. You have a reason for every other thing, you have just handed me a whole architecture of reasons for the folly, so give me the reason you sat on this one for four months while I grieved.”
“Because telling you would have been cruel, and would have looked like jealousy, and I could not for the life of me think how to say to a grieving girl that the man she wept for had weighed her at ten thousand pounds and found her wanting, without it sounding like a husband clearing a rival off the field.” He did not look away from her, and the not looking away cost him.
“And because, since I am evidently giving you the whole of it this morning, some part of me did not want you to stop grieving him. A wife in mourning for another man wants nothing from her husband. She asks him for nothing. She keeps to her own rooms and her own garden and leaves the wall exactly where he built it. While you wept for Vance you were no danger to me at all. I did not put it to myself in those words. But it was there, underneath the kindness, the same as it is always there underneath my kindness, the small cold sum that keeps me safe.”
“At least that is honest.”
“It is the most honest thing I have ever said aloud. I am discovering this morning that I have a great backlog of it, and that it has all chosen to come due at once.”
“And you never told me.”
“No.”
“You let me grieve a man you knew to be worthless. You let me carry a torch for a fortune-hunter for four months under your own roof, when three sentences from you would have put it out. You watched me do it. You let me keep my one comfort, which was that somewhere there had been a man who wanted me for myself, and you knew the whole time that the comfort was nothing but a falsehood, and you let me keep it, the way you let me keep everything, by deciding what I was strong enough to be told and doling out the truth in meager portions, as one might nourish a babe or a helpless sickbed patient.”
“I thought,” he began, and she did not let him reach the end of it.
“I know what you thought. You thought you were being kind.” She was crying now, and furious, and the two together were terrible.
“That is the worst of it, Theodore. You were not being cruel. A cruel man I could leave and feel clean about. You did every single one of these things believing it was affection. You hid Vance from me out of affection. You let me walk into the folly out of affection. You built your wall and your violets and your unsigned cards and your gamekeepers in the trees all out of affection, and the sum of all that affection is that I have been managed and decided and arranged for by you exactly as I was managed and decided and sold by my brother, the only difference being that Henry did it for money and you did it for my own good, and I am no longer certain which of you I find harder to forgive.”
That landed where she had aimed it, which was the center of him.
He should have left it there. He had no business reaching for the next thing, and he knew it even as the old reflex, the wall, reached for the one defense it had ever owned.
“You know why I am the way I am. Augusta told you the whole of it. The grandfather, the house, the thing kept pointed at the floor. You stood on that threshold five nights ago and told me to my face that you understood it.”
“Do not.” Her voice came down like a blade laid flat.
“Do not you dare hand me your grandfather as a receipt for this. I felt for that boy of nineteen who sat down and reasoned his way to being safe. I felt for him standing on the threshold of your room with my heart in both my hands. But there is a difference between a wound and a licence, Theodore, and you have spent the whole of your life mistaking the one for the other. Your grandfather’s grief explains why you are frightened.
It does not give you leave to arrange my life behind my back to soothe the fright.
A great many people are frightened. They do not, all of them, get to engineer another person’s ruin in order to feel a little safer in their own skin. ”
“That is fair.”
“I am not trying to be fair. I am well past fair.” She dashed the back of her hand across her cheek and did not stop.
“I am telling you that I will not be the thing you do to keep from feeling your own fear, the way the violets were, and the wall, and the four months of silence. Those were all things you did to a frightened place in yourself, and you used me to do them with, and I have only just this fortnight discovered that I am a person and not a poultice, and I find I am not willing to hand that discovery back to you because you have at last decided to be sorry for it.”
She picked up the folded pamphlet from the cloth and looked at it, and gave a small terrible laugh with no humor anywhere in it.