Chapter 30 #2
Mary laughed. Charlotte laughed, too, and the laughter carried through the nursery and woke Tommy, who blinked at them both with startled indignation.
“And on Sundays,” Charlotte continued, lifting Tommy from the crib, “we will walk along the Seine. William says there are booksellers lining the riverbank, and cafés where you can sit for hours, and no one asks you to leave. He says Paris does not care who you were in England. You can simply be who you are.”
“That sounds like heaven.”
“It sounds like a beginning.” She settled Tommy against her shoulder, and he grabbed her collar, and the motion was so familiar that Mary’s heart clenched. “Will you visit? In the spring, perhaps? I want Tommy to know his aunt. I want him to grow up hearing your voice.”
“Try to keep me away.”
“I want a life that belongs to us,” Charlotte said. “Not arranged by Papa. Not managed by society. A life that William and I build together, for Tommy, where the only opinions that matter are the ones inside our own walls.”
Mary pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her finger and focused on the small, sharp pain. Charlotte was describing everything Mary wanted. A home built on love. A partnership. A husband who wrote three drafts of his wedding vows because getting it right mattered more than getting it done.
And Mary had that man. He lived in this house. He had defended her family, arranged passage to France, threatened lords at ballrooms, and told a fox story to a baby in the dark. He had kissed her in corridors and carriages and a kitchen at three in the morning…
But he could not give her what Charlotte had. He could not cross the distance between wanting and choosing. He could not tear down the walls he had spent fourteen years building, not even for her.
“Mary.” Charlotte’s voice was gentle. “What is it?”
“Nothing. I am happy for you.”
“You are happy for me, and you are sad for yourself. I can see both.”
Mary looked at her sister. Charlotte picked Tommy up and held him on her shoulder and watched Mary with the same clear-eyed perception that had always defined her, the ability to read a room, to read a person, that Mary had described to Isabella weeks ago.
“It is Evander,” Mary said. The name tasted different now. Tender and bruised, like a word she had said too many times.
“You love him.”
“I love him. And he cannot love me back. Or he will not. I am no longer sure which it is, and I am not sure it matters.”
Charlotte shifted Tommy to her other shoulder and reached for Mary’s hand. “Tell me.”
Mary told her. Not all of it. Not the kitchen kiss or the carriage or the bedroom.
But the shape of it. The walls. The distance.
The offer that gave her everything except the one thing she wanted.
The word whispered against her mouth that she had thrown back at him because hearing it without believing it was worse than not hearing it at all.
Charlotte listened without interrupting. When Mary finished, the nursery was quiet except for Tommy’s breathing and the distant sound of Evander’s study door opening and closing somewhere below them.
“He is afraid,” Charlotte said.
“I know he is afraid. I have known that since the night he told me about his father. But knowing why someone keeps you at arm’s length does not make the arm’s length shorter, Charlotte. It only explains the bruise.”
“No.” Charlotte’s grip tightened on Mary’s hand.
“But here is what I know about fear, Mary. I know it better than anyone in this house, because I spent five months hiding from it. Fear tells you that running is safer than staying. Fear tells you that being alone is better than being hurt. And fear is wrong. It is always wrong. It kept me from you for five months, and it cost me the first weeks of my son’s life, and I will never get those back. ”
Mary’s eyes burned.
“Evander’s fear is older than mine,” Charlotte continued.
“It started when he was a boy, and it has had years to harden. But fear that old is also fear that is tired, Mary. It has been holding those walls up for a very long time, and walls that have been standing for fourteen years do not need a battering ram to fall. They need a reason.”
“And if the reason is not enough?”
“Then you will have been brave, and you will have been honest, and you will know that you gave him every chance to choose you.” Charlotte pressed Mary’s hand against her own cheek.
“William came back for me. He crossed a country and returned to London and walked into this house because he loved me enough to be afraid and do it anyway. Evander is already in the house, Mary. He does not need to cross anything except a corridor.”
Tommy fussed. Charlotte rocked him, and Mary watched her sister soothe the baby she was about to take to France, and the grief and the gratitude tangled together inside her chest, and she let them coexist because separating them was beyond her.
They sat in silence for a while. Charlotte hummed to Tommy, a melody Mary did not recognize, something she must have learned in the village during the long months of hiding.
It was sweet and simple, and Tommy settled against her shoulder, and the nursery held the three of them in the afternoon light, and Mary let the quiet stretch because the quiet was easier than the questions pressing behind it.
Charlotte smoothed Tommy’s blanket. “You are thinking about after.”
“I am trying not to.”
“But you are.”
Mary traced the edge of the rocking chair arm with her finger. “When do you leave?”
“Evander says the arrangements will be finalized within the week. We sail for Calais as soon as the apartment in Paris is secured. Come to the dock. I want your face to be the last thing I see in England.”
“I will be there,” Mary said.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
Charlotte leaned over and pressed her forehead against Mary’s. They sat like that, foreheads touching, Tommy between them, and the afternoon light fell across the nursery floor, and Mary held on to the moment because the moments were running out.
That evening, Mary passed Evander in the corridor outside the dining room. He stepped left. She stepped left. They corrected. He stepped right. She stepped right.
“Sorry,” they said at the same time.
Evander pressed himself against the wall to let her pass. Mary walked through the gap, and the sleeve of her dress brushed his chest, and the brief contact sent a current through her body that settled low and warm and refused to leave.
She kept walking. She did not look back.
She went to the nursery and held Tommy until Mrs. Bridwell gently took him for his evening feed, and Mary sat in the rocking chair and pressed her hands against her knees and stared at the ceiling and thought about corridors and kitchens and a word whispered in the dark.
Charlotte was right. Evander did not need to cross a county. He needed to cross a corridor.
But Mary could not force him through it. She could not batter down his walls or argue him out of his fear or love him hard enough to make him choose her. She had told him what she wanted. She had been brave and honest and clear, and the next move belonged to him.
All she could do was wait.
Waiting, Mary was discovering, was the hardest kind of courage.