The Wine Breathes #2
“I should think he does. He has been calling on her for months without saying a word about it to anyone — twice, three times, quietly and properly, nothing announced. He has had ample opportunity to assess her temper.”
“I meant the family.”
A small breath came out of her — the breath of a laugh she had not let go entirely.
“I trust my uncle has been thorough.” She drank again.
“Peele is reportedly undeterred, though Mama did insist on giving him what she calls a comprehensive account of Mary’s accomplishments, and he survived that, so we may take him to be made of stern material. ”
“Stout fellow.”
“Quite.” She drank. “Uncle Gardiner will make him a junior partner when the business is steadier, and Mary’s settlement will go towards that.
” Her voice had the cast it took on when she was genuinely moved and was not going to say so directly.
“She never said a word to anyone. She simply went on making up her own mind until it came out as she wished.”
“Your sister has more patience than she is generally credited with.”
“She has always had it. Nobody ever noticed because it did not look the way patience is expected to look.”
He picked up his glass and reached across the cloth, found hers, and clicked the rim of his against it.
“To Mary.”
“To Mary.”
They drank.
“That is well arranged,” he said after a moment, and then — “Elizabeth, there is something I—”
“Lydia is still in Norwich.”
He stopped. “Indeed?”
“She has lodgings. Decent and respectable, Jane says. She is not in want of anything.”
“Norwich.”
“Yes.”
“Of all places.”
“Of all places.” She drank. “There is a solicitor in Norwich who arranged it, and the funds came from somewhere Jane has stopped enquiring into.”
She lifted the bottle. He heard her find his glass with the back of her finger and pour, the trickle steady, then her own. It did not take quite as long to fill hers as it had his. He drank. She drank.
“She says she has developed rather a talent lately for not asking questions, and she cannot imagine where she learned it.”
“Your sister is generous.”
“Jane is generous to a fault, but in this case, I think she is principally exhausted. Lydia in Norwich, decently lodged and out of trouble, is the most peace any of us have had in a year. She is not going to look the gift over.” She lifted her glass again. “Wise of her, I think.”
“Wise of her.” He drank. “Elizabeth, we must speak about something of a serious — ”
“Mr Wickham was arrested.”
That sharpened his attention. So, she had heard of that, had she? “Was he?”
“Gaming debts, unsettled accounts — Jane did not have every particular. He is detained. Indefinitely, it seems.”
“What a shame.”
“A great shame. I confess I cannot summon very much sorrow over that.” She drank, the swallow audible in the dark.
“Nor should you.”
She tipped the bottle into his glass and then her own. The trickle came out a little less steady than the previous pours. The trickle into her glass, again, sounded less generous. He noted it without remarking on it.
“My uncle Gardiner has also had some encouragement,” she went on. “An investor approached him last month, through an intermediary. Very generous terms. Very quietly arranged.”
She set her glass down with a small click and lifted it again at once, wanting something to do with her hand. “Uncle says he has not felt so hopeful since before last spring.”
“That is good.”
“It is.” She drank, so he did, too. The wine was sitting warm in him now, deeper than he had reckoned.
“An anonymous investor?”
“Anonymous.” She drank again. “The intermediary would not say more. My uncle Gardiner has, of course, every reason to be discreet, and is not asking.”
“Of course.”
She tipped the bottle and poured for them both, slower this time. “Have you any view on it, George?”
“On what?”
“On anonymous investors who appear at remarkably opportune moments and offer remarkably generous terms?”
He drank. “I have no particular view,” he said, “on the conduct of strangers.”
“No. I supposed you would not.”
“Are you displeased about it?”
“I am…” She lifted her glass and drank deliberately. “I am very glad of it. My uncle deserves better than the year he has had.”
“Then I am glad of it as well.”
“Are you?”
The question was mild. He could hear that it was not.
He had stopped, some while back, attending to how much of the wine he had drunk.
It was very fine wine, and she had a remarkably steady hand for the pouring of it in the dark, and the second observation seemed to him to belong somewhere in the same ledger as the first without his being able to say quite how.
“There is something,” he said, “that I have been meaning to raise with you. Something that cannot be deferred much longer, and I think tonight—”
He heard her lift the bottle. The deliberate pour.
Then the pad of her finger touched his lips — wet with wine, she had been measuring the level in the dark, one finger inside the rim — and she drew it slowly across his mouth and pressed it lightly between his lips, and the cold shock of it went through him to his marrow and every word he had been about to say dissolved entirely.
“Providential,” she whispered. “Do you not think so? All of it. Mary, Lydia, and Uncle Gardiner.” She withdrew her finger and refilled his glass properly, the click of rim against rim. “One extraordinary coincidence after another. I have given up trying to account for it.”
“Elizabeth—”
“I am simply grateful. That is all. I have decided to simply be grateful and not trouble myself with the rest of it.”
His throat tightened. She would not let him speak. Very well. He would listen. Soak her in, let her share her fill. Wait his turn.
She refilled her own glass, the touch of it light against the cloth. “Kitty has taken up drawing.”
He took a sip of wine as he waited for more.
“She is dreadful at it,” Elizabeth said.
“Truly, spectacularly dreadful. She sent me a sketch of Falstaff drawn from my own description of him — last week’s letter — that bears more resemblance to a small building than to a dog.
” She laughed. “I have had it pinned above the writing table since it came. It is the silliest thing anyone has sent me.”
She reached across the table and found his hand. Her fingers laced into his, unhurried, and he let them.
“She is desperately lonely without Lydia.” Her voice had dropped now, gone gentler. “They drove each other to absolute distraction, and they have not the faintest idea what to do without each other.”
He should say something. He should pull his hand back and say what he had come downstairs to say before the wine and her voice and the warmth of her fingers made the words impossible to find.
“And what else?” she said, with the air of recalling something she had almost forgotten, “Oh, Mama is learning piquet.”
“Is she?”
“She is insisting it is a matter of great intellectual stimulation, but I believe she is principally interested in beating Uncle Gardiner, who learned it at school and considers himself rather good.” She was quiet a moment.
“She is apparently making excellent progress. Uncle Gardiner has stopped letting her win.”
The wine was in his limbs now, deep and warm.
Her hand was in his, her thumb moving in slow circles against the back of it, and the sentences he had rehearsed all afternoon were gone from him entirely — had been gone since the wine on her finger and the laugh over Kitty’s drawing.
What remained in their place was the dark and her voice and the warmth that had been building in him since she first took his hand, not urgent, something slower than urgency, the kind that takes hold in the bones and stays there.
He was not thinking about the sentences anymore.
He was thinking about the curve of her shoulder and how she said his name in the small hours, and he had given up entirely on being sensible, and he knew it, and she knew it, and her thumb kept moving, and she went on talking and he held her hand and listened to her voice with the contentment that comes when a man has stopped arguing with himself.
She lifted the bottle one more time, and the trickle that came out was small and stopped quickly. She gave him what was left. When she set it down, the bottle sounded empty.
“There,” she said. “I am afraid we have come to the end of it.”
“More is the pity.”
“We shall have to find something else to do.”
He turned her hand over in his and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Can we not talk without the benefit of wine?”
“The very idea!” she scoffed. “Mr Carlisle, I begin to suspect you might be a revolutionary.”
“No, upon my word, my interests are far more domestic.”
“That is just what I was hoping to hear.”
She took his face between her palms and pressed her lips to his forehead and held them there, and he closed his eyes, and the answer his whole body had given to the question of the sentences was already plain to him, which was nothing, not tonight, and he could not summon a single objection to it at all.
“Come to bed,” she said, against his brow.