Chapter Twenty #2
He sank to his knees upon the stones, his hand still extended, his eyes burning with tears he had denied himself for years.
Why? he thought in silent desperation. Why can a stray creature learn to trust me, when my own wife cannot?
What am I doing so very wrong?
***
Eleanor watched from the window of her sitting room.
She had not intended to observe him. She had been seated at her desk when movement in the garden drew her glance upward, and she saw Benjamin slip through the narrow breach in the crumbling wall that led to his concealed courtyard.
She ought to have looked away. Ought to have returned at once to her correspondence and pretended she had not noticed. Yet something compelled her to rise and cross to the window—some impulse too strong to resist.
From that angle, she could not see into the courtyard itself, but she could see the gap in the wall. She waited—though she scarcely admitted to herself that she was waiting—until at last he reappeared.
His face was turned aside, his shoulders bent in a posture she had never before witnessed in him.
Even at that distance, she knew something was amiss.
Go to him, some part of her whispered. Whatever has happened between you, he is in pain. You could ease that pain. You have done it before.
But the voice was fainter now than it had been a week earlier. The instinct to comfort, to bridge the gulf she herself had created, still existed—buried beneath layers of wounded pride and hard-won self-protection—but it diminished with each passing day.
He does not want you, she reminded herself sternly. He wants a practical arrangement. A wife who will not expect. A woman who can endure without asking for more.
You are giving him precisely what he said he required.
She turned from the window and resumed her work.
***
The library, once their shared sanctuary, now felt like a mausoleum.
Eleanor avoided it whenever she could, yet the estate ledgers were housed there, and she could not, in perpetuity, dispatch a servant to fetch them on her behalf. On the sixth day of her retreat, she gathered her resolve and entered.
Benjamin was already there.
He sat in his customary chair by the hearth—though the fire lay cold in deference to the warmth of the evening—with an open book resting in his lap, which he was plainly not reading. He looked up at her entrance, and the expression that crossed his face made her chest constrict with painful force.
Hope.
Unvarnished, undisguised hope, kindled by nothing more than her presence.
“Eleanor.” He set the book aside and rose at once, an eagerness in his manner that was almost unbearable to behold. “I was hoping you might come. I thought perhaps—”
“I only need the tenant ledgers from 1815.” She kept her voice brisk, professional. “I believe they are on the third shelf. I shall not disturb you long.”
The hope in his face dimmed. “You do not disturb me. I was, in fact—I wished to ask—”
“I must return directly to my work.” She moved to the shelves, presenting him with her back, her hands less steady than she would have liked as she searched for volumes she did not truly need. “The merchant contracts demand reply before the week concludes.”
“Eleanor.”
Something in his voice stilled her. It was not anger—he had never once spoken to her in anger since their marriage. It was something far worse. Something perilously close to despair.
“Pray,” he said quietly, “tell me what I have done.”
She closed her eyes briefly. Nothing, she thought. You have done nothing but be precisely the man you told me you were from the beginning. The fault lies with me, for imagining you might become more.
“You have done nothing,” she replied. “I am simply occupied with work.”
“That is not so.” His voice had drawn nearer—he had crossed the room, though he halted several feet away, scrupulously preserving the distance she had imposed. “Something altered. A week ago, you sat beside my bed. You held my hand. You promised to come if the dreams returned. And then—”
“Circumstances alter.” She found the ledger she ostensibly sought and drew it from the shelf, clasping it to her chest as though it were a shield. “We both possess duties that claim our attention.”
“Is that what I am to you? A duty?”
The question struck more deeply than she had anticipated. She turned to face him, and the raw anguish in his eyes very nearly undid her resolve.
Tell him, some part of her urged. Tell him what you heard. Give him the chance to explain.
Yet to explain would be to confess that she had overheard him. It would mean admitting that his words had wounded her—and that admission would betray how deeply she had cared. It would mean rendering herself vulnerable once more, when vulnerability had so often been rewarded with devastation.
“You are my husband,” she said with measured care. “That remains unchanged.”
“But something has changed. Something you will not name, and I do not know how to—” His hands clenched at his sides. “I do not know how to reach you. You have withdrawn to some place beyond my grasp, and I cannot fathom why.”
Because I heard you describe me as a practical arrangement, she thought. Because I heard you say you needed someone who would not expect, and I have been foolish enough to expect everything.
“There is nothing to reach,” she said quietly. “I stand before you.”
“No.” The word broke from him. “No, you do not. You are farther from me now than you have ever been, and I—”
He turned abruptly away, pressing his scarred hand against his eyes. She saw his shoulders tremble once—twice—before he mastered himself.
“Forgive me,” he said roughly. “I did not intend—I shall leave you to your work.”
He passed her and made for the door, and each measured step felt like a fresh wound.
Stop him, the voice inside her screamed. Stop him, tell him, let him explain—
But she did not move. She did not call his name. She remained where she stood, a ledger clutched against her breast, while the man she had begun, against all caution, to love walked away from her.
The door closed with a soft click that echoed like a knell.
***
That night, Eleanor dreamed of her mother.
They stood in the drawing room of her childhood home—the very chamber in which Arabella had spent so many silent hours gazing from the window at a world in which she no longer truly dwelt.
Yet in the dream her mother turned, and truly looked at her, with eyes clear and present in a way they had not been for years before her death.
“You are doing as I did,” Arabella said softly. “You are disappearing.”
“I am protecting myself,” Eleanor replied. “It is not the same.”
“Is it not?” Her mother’s smile held a tender sorrow. “I told myself I was protecting my heart as well. From the pain of being unloved. From the slow grief of watching affection fade. I built walls so high that nothing could wound me—not sorrow, but not joy either.”
“He does not love me.”
“How can you be certain?”
Eleanor parted her lips to answer, yet no words came. How could she be certain? She had overheard fragments of a conversation. Had filtered those fragments through the lens of old wounds. Had assumed the worst, because assuming the worst had always kept her safe.
But what if she had been mistaken?
“You heard what you feared to hear,” her mother said gently. “You heard what your old hurt instructed you to hear. But fear is not truth, Eleanor. And shielding oneself from pain is not the same as living.”
“I cannot—”
“You can.” Arabella reached out, her hand warm against Eleanor’s cheek—warmer than Eleanor ever remembered it in life. “You are stronger than I was. Braver. You possess the courage to contend for what you desire, rather than simply fading from it.”
“What if I contend and lose?”
“Then you will have lost.” Her mother’s eyes were kind. “But you will have tried. And trying, my darling, is what distinguishes the living from the dead.”
Eleanor woke with tears upon her cheeks and her mother’s voice lingering like an echo in her ears.
***
The seventh day dawned grey and chill, an unseasonable cold that seemed to reflect the temper within the house.
Eleanor rose early, as had become her habit, and dressed for another day of diligent occupation—labour that served chiefly to distract her from the emptiness she herself had fashioned.
She had perfected the routine: rising before the household stirred, taking her tray in solitude, burying herself in correspondence until the ache within her breast dulled to something bearable.
Yet when she opened the door of her sitting room to retrieve the breakfast tray the maid would have placed outside, she found something unexpected awaiting her.
A single rose.
It lay upon the silver tray beside her tea—a flawless bloom from the gardens Benjamin’s mother had cherished, its petals the deep crimson of claret. There was no accompanying note, no explanation. Only the flower, offered in silence.
Eleanor regarded it for a long moment.
He left this, she thought. He came to my door at dawn and left me a rose, even after all I have done to push him away.
Why?
She knew why. In the part of herself she had struggled so fiercely to silence, she knew that Benjamin was not a man inclined to surrender easily.
He had fed a wary cat for months without reward.
He had borne guilt that might have broken a lesser man.
He had endured fire and battle and loss—and yet emerged with his capacity for kindness intact.
He was striving for her. In the only manner that felt natural to him—not through eloquence, which had never been his gift, but through deed. Through presence. Through steady, patient care.
The marriage was necessary, she heard in her memory. I required someone who would not expect—
But what if those words did not mean what she thought they meant?