Chapter Ten Jealousy
CHAPTER TEN
Jealousy
A week later, on Tuesday morning, the gardener rumor returned with a basket of damaged pears.
Mary Beth was in the walled garden when it happened, standing beside a row of espaliered trees that had taken more punishment from the rain than any sensible fruit tree deserved. Two limbs had split. Another leaned away from the brick as if trying to escape the estate entirely.
The head gardener held one of the pears in his palm and turned it toward her. The skin was bruised brown along one side.
“Wind took half the crop from this wall, ma’am. We can save the rest if I cut the damaged branches back hard.”
“Then cut them.”
He hesitated. “It will look ugly until spring.”
“Blackthorn has survived uglier things than a pruned pear tree.”
The gardener’s mouth twitched. He had worked at the manor long enough to know when she meant herself and when she did not.
Mary Beth took the pear from him. “What about the south wall?”
“Better. The shelter held there. I would leave it alone.”
“Good. And the path behind the glasshouse?”
“Still soft. I put boards over the worst section.”
“Keep the maids off it until the ground dries. Mrs. Bell’s ankle is bad enough without giving her another reason to limp.”
The gardener nodded and turned toward the espalier.
Mary Beth became aware of Ambrose only when his shadow crossed the gravel.
He had come through the gate from the north field without his coat, sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the cool morning. Mud marked one knee of his trousers. A folded drawing protruded from his waistcoat pocket.
For the better part of three weeks, the sight of him crossing any part of Blackthorn had produced a private, ridiculous warmth in her chest.
This morning the warmth arrived as usual.
Then she noticed his expression.
“You have found another catastrophe,” she said.
“Only a stubborn culvert.”
“That hardly deserves that face.”
“What face?”
“The one suggesting you have discovered treason beneath the turnips.”
The gardener bent over his work, suddenly very interested in a pruning knife.
Ambrose’s gaze moved from Mary Beth to the man beside her and back again.
“I need your approval for a change in the drainage run,” he said.
“Then you had better show it to me.”
She handed the pear back to the gardener and followed Ambrose out through the gate.
He waited until the brick wall hid them from the garden.
“You are on easy terms with him.”
Mary Beth stopped.
“I beg your pardon?”
Ambrose seemed to hear the sentence after it had left him. He winced almost imperceptibly.
“Nothing.”
“No. You have already chosen something. Finish it.”
He unfolded the drawing instead. “The culvert first.”
“Ambrose.”
“Mary Beth.”
She studied him.
The north field had taught her the difference between his professional irritation and his personal temper. Professionally, he became precise. Personally, he became quiet.
He was very quiet now.
“You are jealous,” she said.
His eyes came to hers.
“That is absurd.”
“It is also true.”
“I have no cause.”
“You do not require cause. Jealousy is rarely so disciplined.”
He refolded the drawing with unnecessary care.
“One of the men said something this morning.”
Mary Beth felt the warmth in her chest disappear.
“About me?”
“Yes.”
“How novel.”
“I told him to keep his opinions to himself.”
“And afterward you came to inspect my gardener.”
“I came to speak to you about the culvert.”
“While staring at him as if you intended to measure him for a grave.”
Ambrose gave a short breath that might have been a laugh under different circumstances.
It did not improve her mood.
“What did the man say?” she asked.
Ambrose let the question sit between them.
Mary Beth waited without helping him out of the silence.
“If you are going to punish me for gossip, I should at least be permitted to hear the charge.”
“I am not punishing you.”
“Then tell me.”
His voice lowered. “He said the gamekeeper was not the only man employed at Blackthorn who had been invited through a private door. He mentioned the gardener.”
The old story had surfaced again, dusted off and carried into another morning.
Mary Beth turned toward the north field.
Beyond the trees, men moved along the new drainage trench. The rebuilt section of retaining wall had begun to rise in rough courses of pale stone. Work continued because stone had no interest in scandal.
She envied it.
“The gardener story is false,” she said. “I already told you that.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
Ambrose rubbed a hand across the back of his neck.
“Because I saw you with him and for one stupid second I wondered.”
Mary Beth turned back slowly.
“Wondered what?”
He said nothing.
“Whether I had lied to you?”
“No.”
“Whether I had forgotten to include him in my inventory?”
His face changed. “That is not fair.”
“You began this morning by asking why I am on easy terms with a man who has worked on my estate for eleven years. Do not lecture me about fairness.”
Ambrose’s mouth flattened.
Mary Beth felt anger gather with a speed that surprised her. Perhaps because it was not really about the gardener. Perhaps because she had begun to trust him with the one part of herself everyone else treated as public property.
“Would you like the whole list again?” she asked. “Shall I write it down this time? The widowed gamekeeper. The gentleman from York. A few kisses that amounted to nothing. No gardener. No musician. No stable boy hidden behind the hay. Would that make you comfortable?”
“Stop.”
“Why? You are the one who wants an account.”
“I do not.”
“Then what exactly do you want?”
The question landed between them harder than she intended.
Ambrose did not answer.
That hurt more than it should have.
Mary Beth stepped around him.
“Show me the culvert.”
He caught her wrist, not hard enough to restrain her, only enough to ask her to stop.
She glanced down at his hand.
He released her at once.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“For which part?”
“For making you feel as though you owe me an explanation. You do not.”
“No, I do not.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I am trying to make it true inside my own head as quickly as it is true in principle.”
For a beat, her anger lost its footing.
It was an infuriatingly Ambrose answer. Too honest to dismiss, not tidy enough to forgive immediately.
“You liked me better when my past was theoretical,” she said.
“That is not true.”
“You liked being the man who did not judge me. It made you feel very broad-minded.”
Color rose under his cheekbones.
Good.
“Then you saw me laughing with a gardener and discovered your principles had limits.”
“My principles are intact. My temper is another matter.”
“How reassuring.”
“Mary Beth.”
“No. You do not get to admire my independence when it excites you and resent it when it frightens you.”
That silenced him.
She walked toward the field.
This time he let her go.
The culvert problem was real, which made the next half hour particularly unpleasant.
Ambrose showed her where the new western drainage line met an older stone channel beneath the lane.
The old channel narrowed abruptly at a bend, creating a place where silt and roots would collect.
If they connected the new work without widening the throat, the estate would be rebuilding the same failure for another generation.
Mary Beth listened, asked three questions, and approved the additional excavation.
They spoke with professional courtesy.
She hated it.
Ambrose hated it too. She could tell from the way he kept his attention on the drawing even after there was nothing left to explain.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“The cottage chimney repairs are finished. Both families can return tomorrow if the weather holds.”
“Good.”
“The quarry road needs another cartload of gravel.”
“Take it from the south stockpile.”
“I already told the foreman.”
“Then why ask me?”
“I did not.”
“Of course.”
His mouth tightened again.
Mary Beth turned away before she said something designed only to wound him.
She spent the rest of the morning in the estate office.
Three tenant accounts required correction. The hospital committee had sent a second note confirming its meeting on Friday. A merchant in York, who had refused to extend Blackthorn’s account six months earlier, now wrote with elaborate courtesy to offer improved terms.
Respectability, apparently, came with better credit.
Mary Beth read the letter twice and disliked it more each time.
At luncheon she ate alone.
Ambrose did not appear.
By three o’clock she had convinced herself that this pleased her.
By four she had stopped lying about it.
Before going to the north field, she crossed the walled garden again. The head gardener had moved on to the south wall, where two boys were sorting sound fruit from windfalls. He lifted his hat when Mary Beth passed and asked whether she wanted the bruised pears sent to the kitchen for preserves.
That was all.
They exchanged no secret glance or remembered touch, nothing to betray the history beneath an ordinary conversation.
Mary Beth stood beneath the glasshouse eaves after he had gone and tried to remember when the rumor had begun.
She thought it might have been the autumn after the gamekeeper left.
A pane had blown out during a storm, and she had spent half an hour helping the gardener move potted citrus away from the broken glass while rain drove under the roof.
A deliveryman had arrived. Someone had seen her skirt soaked to the knee and the gardener without his coat.
By supper, one of the kitchen maids had heard that Mary Beth had been shut in the glasshouse with a man.
By Sunday, the man had become her lover.
She had laughed then. The story had seemed too stupid to deserve correction.
Perhaps that had been a mistake.
No, she decided. The mistake was believing correction would have mattered. A woman with one true scandal was expected to accept every false one that followed, as though truth had forfeited its right to distinguish itself.