Chapter Eight
“Then tell me,” Clara said. “If you wish to. I am not going anywhere.”
She did not press him. She did not arrange her features into the soft, expectant sympathy that people put on when they wished to be told a tragedy, and which had always made Cedric want to leave the room.
She simply set the unlit lantern down upon the table, and drew the wing chair a little nearer to the empty hearth out of long habit, and sat, and waited, with the stillness of a person who had learned that some things would only come out if one looked away from them.
So he looked away from her, at the dark, and he found that the words were there after all, where he had thought there were none.
“Her name was Eleanor.”
It was strange to say it aloud. He had not spoken her name in years; he had built his whole silence around the not-speaking of it.
“My mother made the match. It was a good match: her family old, her portion handsome, her temper sweet. Everyone agreed we should do very well. And she was…” he searched for the truth of her, past years of guilt that had worn the memory smooth “… she was nineteen, and full of feeling, and she had read a great many novels, and she believed that marriage was the beginning of a great romance. She wanted to be adored, Miss Ellsworth. She wanted poetry, and declarations, and a husband who would tell her twenty times a day that she was the sun and moon to him.” He paused. “I could not do it.”
“Could not?”
“It is not in me.”
The old shame rose, familiar as a tide.
“I do not know how to say such things. They feel like lies in my mouth even when they are not. I tried, truly, those first months. I would compose the words in my head, the things she wanted to hear, and I would come to say them, and they would turn to ash before I could get them out, and I would give her… a new mare, instead. A settlement for her sister. I had the east rooms done over because she had said once that she liked the morning light.” His hands had closed on nothing.
“I thought that was love. I thought, if I cannot say it, I will build it, I will pay it, I will do it. And she would look at the mare, and the rooms, and thank me very prettily, and I would see in her face that it was not the thing she wanted, that it was never going to be the thing she wanted, and that I had failed her again in the one currency she could spend.”
Clara said nothing. But she had turned her face toward the fire, away from him, exactly as he had needed her to, and the gift of that small mercy loosed the rest of it.
“She decided I despised her. It was the only sense she could make of me: a man who would not say a tender word could only be a man who felt none, and so she reasoned that I had married her for her blood and her portion and found her wanting, and nothing I did could argue her out of it, because the only argument she would have accepted was the one I could not make.” He heard his own voice level out, the way it did over things he could not afford to feel.
“She grew thin. She stopped singing. She used to sing, in the mornings, and then she did not. For two years, I watched her decide, by degrees, that she had ruined her life by marrying a stone, and I could not reach her, and I did not know how to try in any language she could hear.”
“And then she was with child,” Clara said quietly, still to the fire.
“And then she was with child, and for a little while, she was happier, and I let myself…”
He could not say the word; he went round it.
“I told myself a child might mend it. That there would be a thing, at last, that we both…”
He stopped. When he went on, it was lower. “She died of it. In the spring. The boy lived two days, and went after her.”
For a moment, he did not say anything at all.
“The last clear thing she said to me, before the fever took her sense, was that she was sorry. That she had been such a disappointment to me.” His voice had gone flat, the way it did when the thing beneath it was past bearing.
“She died believing I had never loved her. And the worst of it, Miss Ellsworth, the thing I have said to no one, the thing I climb this hill to be rid of, is that I have never once been able to swear to myself that she was wrong. That perhaps I did not love her. That perhaps there is only what the whole county says there is, a cold hollow where the heart should be, and that she saw it plainly, and it killed her by inches, and they have all of them had the right of me from the first.”
The silence after that went on for a long time. He did not look to see what Clara’s face was doing. He had said the unsayable thing, and he sat in the wreck of it, and waited for the pity that would make it unbearable.
It did not come. What came instead was her voice, and there was no pity in it at all, only a plain, level seriousness, as though she were correcting an error in a column of figures.
“That is a great deal of guilt,” she said, “built upon a foundation that will not bear it. May I tell you where I think it gives way?”
He turned, then; he had not the power to keep from it.
“You have confused two things that are not the same,” Clara went on, meeting his look steadily.
“You have decided that because you could not give Eleanor the particular love she wished for, you are therefore incapable of love altogether. But those are different failures entirely, Your Grace, if either of them is a failure at all, which I am not at all sure of. A man may be unable to write poetry and still be able to read it. You and your wife wanted different languages, that is all. She wanted to be told; you could only show. Neither of you was wrong to want what you wanted. You were only… ill-suited. And being ill-suited is a misfortune. It is not a crime, and it is most certainly not proof that there is a stone where your heart should be.”
“You did not see her face,” he said. “When she looked at the mare.”
“No. But I have seen yours, these minutes past, telling me of it.” Her voice gentled by a fraction, though it did not soften its argument.
“Cold men do not keep four years of vigil on a freezing hill out of grief for a woman they never loved. Cold men do not torture themselves nightly over whether they were kind enough. A man with a stone where his heart should be would have buried his wife, and married again for an heir within the twelvemonth as everyone told him to, and never lost a wink of sleep over any of it. You have done the opposite of all of that. Your grief is not the evidence of your coldness, Your Grace. It is the proof, the plainest proof imaginable, that you were never cold at all. You loved her as much as you were able. She simply could not read the only hand you knew how to write in. That is a tragedy. But the tragedy was hers and yours together. It was not your crime alone, and it was never, ever a verdict upon your heart.”
Cedric discovered that he could not speak.
What was happening in his chest he had no precedent for, a kind of breaking that was not painful, a great settled weight beginning, impossibly, to shift.
For four years, he had carried a single sentence chained to him, you could not love her, therefore you cannot love, and this plain, quiet, clear-eyed young woman had simply taken the chain in both hands and shown him where the link was fractured.
You and she wanted different languages. It had never once occurred to him.
In all the time of turning the thing over in the dark, it had never once occurred to him that the fault might not have been in his capacity to love, but only in the translation.
“You speak,” he managed at last, unevenly, “as though you have given the matter some thought.”
“I have given a great deal of thought to the difference between being loved for oneself and being valued for what one provides.” It came out of her with a quiet weight he did not fully understand, and she looked away from him as she said it, as if she had let slip more than she meant.
“It is a subject I have some acquaintance with.”
He wanted to ask her what she meant. He found he wanted to ask her a great many things, and that the wanting was itself a kind of vertigo, the ground he had stood on so solidly for so long tilting underneath him.
And because he did not know how to ask any of it, he did the only thing he knew how to do, which was the thing he had done his whole life in place of the words he could not find: he offered her something instead.
***
“Come again,” he said. “When the sky is clear. As often as you like.”
The words were out before he had decided to say them, and he heard the recklessness in them and did not call them back. She had moved to draw her shawl closer, and at this she went still.
“Your Grace…”
“I know what I am asking.”
He did know; that was the alarming part.
He knew exactly what it was, a duke and his mother’s companion meeting alone in the dark with no chaperone and no purpose the world would credit, and he knew what it would mean if it were known, and he found that the knowledge did nothing whatever to unsay the invitation.
“I am not in the habit of offering this. I do not believe I have ever offered it. But the work is better for your being here, and I am…” the truth again, costing him “… I am better for your being here, and I have been a long time without anything that could be called better. Come again. If you wish to.”
He watched her weigh it. He could see the whole calculation move across her face, the danger to her position, the impropriety, some further reckoning he could not read that seemed to cost her more than either, and he understood that the sensible answer, the answer that protected her, was no, and that she knew it as well as he did.
“I ought not,” she said.
“No.”
“It is not wise. For me especially. You can have very little notion how unwise.”
“No,” he agreed. “I daresay it is not.”
She was quiet a moment longer. Then she drew the shawl about her shoulders, and lifted her face, and there was a look in it that was half resolve and half surrender and wholly, he thought, the bravest thing he had seen in a long while.
“I think… I shall come anyway,” she said.
“Mercy on us both. Goodnight, Your Grace.”
She took the lantern this time without being offered it, and let herself out into the dark, and he listened to her footsteps go away down the hill until the night had swallowed them entirely.
***
He did not go down to the house for a long while.
He stood in the cold dome with the seam of it open to the wheeling stars, and he tried, as he tried with everything, to reduce what had happened to its parts and set them in order, and he could not.
The sentence that had bound him for four years lay broken on the floor, and he could not seem to pick the pieces up again, and a part of him, a part he had thought long dead, did not want to.
He felt unhoused. He felt as though someone had walked through the fortress he had spent four years building and opened every window he had so carefully shuttered, and the night air was pouring in, cold and enormous and alive, and he had not the smallest idea how to close them again, nor whether he wished to.
You should not have asked her to come back.
That much, at least, was clear and true and useful.
He knew the danger of it, knew it for her far more than for himself, knew that he had nothing to offer a woman that any sane woman should want, knew that the surest way to ruin Clara Ellsworth was to let himself need her.
And he stood there in the ruins of his own composure and understood, with a clarity that frightened him more than anything Eleanor’s ghost had ever managed, that knowing the danger had not in the smallest degree lessened his wish to see her come up that hill again tomorrow.
He had been so safe. For four years, he had wanted nothing, and a man who wanted nothing could lose nothing, and he had called that peace.
He was not at peace now.