Chapter Twelve
Twelve
The morning was clear and cool, with a light that had the particular quality of late September—not the full warmth of summer, but not yet resigned to autumn, as though the season had not quite decided what it intended.
The south walk at Rosings was dry underfoot, the gravel raked to a precision that suggested it was attended to daily, and the borders on either side had been cut back to their late-season severity, the roses reduced to hips and thorns, the lavender grey and woody at the stems.
Fiona was already there when James came out.
She was standing at the far end of the walk, near the stone bench that looked out over the lower garden, with a sketchbook open in her hands and her attention directed at something beyond the yew hedge—the angle of the light on the wall, perhaps, or the shadow the sundial cast across the gravel.
She had not heard him come out. He paused for a moment at the top of the steps, watching her, and thought that she had the quality—rare in anyone, and particularly rare in a young woman in her situation—of being entirely herself when she believed herself unobserved.
He descended the steps and walked toward her.
Miss Eliot heard his footsteps on the gravel.
She turned, and the expression on her face in the moment before she composed it was not alarm, exactly, but a kind of careful attention—the expression of a person who has learned to assess a situation quickly and quietly before committing to a response.
“Mr. Bennet,” she said. Her voice was steady. She closed the sketchbook.
“Miss Eliot.” He stopped a few feet away, at a distance that was neither too close nor too formal. “I did not mean to interrupt. I was told the south walk was pleasant in the morning.”
“It is,” she said. “Lady Catherine walks here before breakfast. I have borrowed the habit.” A pause, brief and not uncomfortable. “She has gone in. You are not interrupting anything of consequence.”
He nodded. There was a moment in which either of them might have said something easy and inconsequential and moved on, and neither of them did.
“I wonder,” James said, “whether you would object to company.”
She looked at him for a moment—that same careful, direct look he had noticed in the hall, and again at dinner, the look of a person who does not answer questions before she has considered them. Then she moved slightly to one side, making room on the bench, and sat down.
He sat beside her, at an entirely proper distance, and for a moment they both looked out over the lower garden in silence. The sundial cast its shadow to the left. A wood pigeon called somewhere beyond the yew hedge and fell quiet.
“I imagine,” Fiona said at last, “that this is not entirely accidental.”
“No,” James said. “It is not.”
She received this without surprise. “Lady Catherine mentioned this morning that you had given your answer. She did not tell me what it was, but she was in very good humour at breakfast, which I took to be informative.”
James looked at her. “And how did you receive that information?”
She was quiet for a moment, her hands resting on the closed sketchbook in her lap.
“With a good deal of feeling,” she said, “and rather less certainty than I would have liked.” She said it simply, without self-pity or performance, and he found it the most honest thing anyone had said to him since he arrived in Kent.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that certainty is perhaps too much to ask of either of us at present.”
“Yes.” She turned to look at him directly. “What I should like to ask—if you will permit it—is something rather more practical.”
“Ask whatever you wish.”
She considered for a moment, as though choosing the words with some care. “What manner of man are you, Mr. Bennet? Not your family, not your estate, not your connexions. I know something of those already. I mean—what manner of man.”
It was not the question he had expected, and he found that it required a genuine answer. He looked out over the garden for a moment.
“I am the eldest of five brothers,” he said.
“Which means I have spent most of my life being responsible for things before I was entirely ready for them, and have learned to manage that gap between readiness and necessity with something that passes for composure. I am not given to strong expressions of feeling, which some people mistake for an absence of feeling. I am not ambitious in the way that word is usually meant—I do not want more than I have been given, but I am very determined to use well what I have.” He paused.
“I am honest, sometimes to an inconvenient degree. And I find— ” he stopped, and then continued, because she had asked a direct question and deserved a direct answer —“I find that I am not indifferent to you. Which was not something I expected to be able to say when I came to Kent, and which I thought you should know.”
Fiona was very still for a moment. The wood pigeon called again, closer now.
“That is a great deal to say,” she said at last.
“You asked a great deal.”
The corner of her mouth moved—not quite the full smile he had seen in the hall, but something in that direction, something that arrived and then was carefully contained.
“I did,” she agreed. She looked down at the sketchbook in her lap, and then back at him.
“I should tell you something in return, I think. In the interest of honesty, you mentioned.”
“Please.”
“I am not—” she began, and then stopped, and began again.
“I am not the person I was a year ago. I do not say that to invite sympathy, and I ask that you not offer it. But I think you should know that whatever you may have been told about the circumstances—and I do not know precisely what you have been told—the person you are looking at now is not the person those circumstances were made by. I have had some months to think, and I have thought a great deal, and I am—” she paused, and chose the word with precision—“resolved. I am resolved to be useful, and honest, and not a burden to anyone who does not deserve one. That is the most I can offer at present. I am sorry it is not more.”
James looked at her for a long moment. The light was moving across the gravel as a cloud passed, and the shadow of the sundial shifted slightly and then settled.
“It is considerably more than most people offer,” he said. “And I find I value resolution very highly.”
She looked at him—the direct, careful look—and this time she did not look away. “You are not what I expected,” she said.
“What did you expect?”
“Someone older,” she said. “Someone more—” she considered—“transactional. Someone who would be kind in the way that people are kind when they are being careful not to be unkind, which is not the same thing at all.”
“And instead?”
“Instead,” she said, “you asked what manner of man you were, and then answered it honestly, which is a thing I have not seen done very often.” She paused. “I find I am—less afraid than I was yesterday.”
He said nothing for a moment. The cloud had passed, and the light was full again on the gravel, on the stone bench, on her hands resting on the sketchbook.
“I am glad of that,” he said. “I should like—if you are willing—for us to be honest with each other. Not about everything at once, and not more than is comfortable. But as a general principle.”
“As a general principle,” she repeated, and there was something in her voice that was not quite amusement and not quite relief, but occupied a territory somewhere between the two. “Yes. I could agree to that.”
They sat in silence for a moment that was, for the first time since James had arrived in Kent, entirely comfortable—the silence of two people who have said something real and are not in a hurry to cover it with something easier.
“May I see the sketch?” James asked.
She looked at him and then opened the sketchbook and held it out. It was a study of the sundial—not the sundial itself, but the shadow it cast, the way the shadow fell across the gravel in a long diagonal, precise and patient, marking time without comment.
“It is very good,” he said, and meant it.
“It is only a shadow,” she said, which was the kind of remark that sounds modest and is not, quite.
He looked at her. She was looking at the sketch when she looked up and found him looking at her, and the colour rose to her cheeks—that honest, unconcealed colour—and this time she did not look away, and this time the smile arrived fully, without being contained, and stayed.
“Shall we walk, Mr. Bennet?” she said.
“Yes, Miss Eliot,” James replied. “I think we shall.”
He rose and offered his hand, and she took it. They walked together to the end of the south walk and back again, and spoke of the garden, and the citadel, and the particular quality of the light in Kent at this time of year, and said nothing of consequence, and said everything that mattered.
***
They came in from the south walk a little before noon, and found Lady Catherine and Lady Caroline in the morning room.
It was a room that received the midday light well—south-facing, with two tall windows that looked out over the very walk they had just left, and furnished with the particular combination of comfort and consequence that characterised every room at Rosings: good chairs, good proportions, nothing superfluous, nothing accidental.
Lady Catherine was seated at the writing table near the window, a letter open before her, though she had not been reading it.
Lady Caroline sat on the sofa opposite with her embroidery frame, and she looked up when they entered with the expression of a woman who has been waiting for exactly this and has been careful not to appear to be doing so.
Lady Catherine turned from the window.