Chapter Nineteen
“Clara. Good grief, Clara, your face. No, do not stand out there explaining, come in.”
Anne had the door open before Clara had finished knocking, and one look at her seemed to be all the account she required; she drew Clara over the threshold and into the small warm vicarage parlour and pressed her down into a chair by the fire, all without a single question, which was very nearly Clara’s undoing.
She had held herself together over three miles of road by main force.
Kindness was the one thing she had no defence against.
“I am sorry to come like this,” Clara managed. “I had nowhere… I did not know where else to—”
“You will never need to know anywhere else. You will always come here. Now hush, and let me look at you.” Anne knelt and took up Clara’s bandaged hand, and her brisk gentleness faltered as she began to unwind the linen. “When did you last have this dressed?”
“I don’t… two days? Three. There has not been much… time.”
The last of the bandage came away, and Anne went still.
“Oh, Clara.”
“Is it…” Clara made herself look and wished at once that she had not.
The cut had not closed as it ought. The skin around the stitches had swollen tight and shining, an angry red that ran out in streaks beneath the surface, and the whole of it was hot to the air, and weeping. “Oh,” she said weakly. “That does not look as it did.”
“No. It does not.” Anne’s voice had changed; the warmth was still in it, but something careful had come up underneath.
“This is the beginning of a bad inflammation, and it is not to be trifled with. I am not nearly clever enough to manage it on my own. We are going to Mr Pettigrew. Now. This minute. No, do not argue with me. I have not the patience for it, and neither, I think, has your hand.”
Mr Pettigrew, the apothecary, was a small, dry, elderly man with spectacles pushed up into his white hair. He took Clara’s hand to the lamp, turned it this way and that, and made a low, displeased sound in his throat that frightened her more than any words could have.
“Hm. Hm. And how much have you been using this hand, young lady, since it was stitched?”
“I… Every day. There is a great deal of… I have my work.”
“Your work.” He said it as though it were a species of folly he had encountered too often to be surprised by. “You have been carrying and gripping and writing and wringing this hand out like a dishcloth, with a wound like this in it, because you have your work.”
He set it down and looked at her over his spectacles.
“Then hear me, for I will say it but once. This stops today. No carrying. No writing. No gripping, no wringing, no work of any kind with this hand until I tell you otherwise, and I do not care a straw whose invitations go unwritten. Do you understand me?”
“I… yes. But I am not sure that I can—”
“You will make sure.” He had begun, very gently for so brusque a man, to clean the wound, and Clara hissed and held still.
“I have seen where this road goes when it is not stopped. I have seen a healthy young woman lose the use of a hand to a cut no worse than this one, because she would not rest it. A hand once lost does not come back. So you will rest it, or you will lose it. Those are the two doors. There is not a third.”
He bound it up fresh and clean, patted it once, and his voice gentled by a degree.
“There. Poultice it morning and night, keep it dry, and come to me in three days. And eat something, the pair of you. You look like a brace of ghosts.”
***
The light was going long and golden over the moor as they walked back, and for a while, neither of them spoke at all.
Clara held her newly bound hand against her like something borrowed that she was afraid of breaking, and turned the apothecary’s two doors over in her mind, and saw no way to walk through the rest-it door without losing her place, nor through the other without losing her hand, and the smallness of the trap, after everything, made her want to laugh, or weep, she could not tell which.
“It is not the hand,” Anne said at last, quietly, watching the road ahead. “Not only the hand.”
Clara said nothing.
“You have been carrying something far longer than three days,” Anne went on, more gently.
“And whatever it is, I think it is hurting you worse than the cut.” A small pause.
“Will you not set it down? Only for the length of this road. There is no one here but me and the sheep, and I am very discreet, and the sheep are famously poor correspondents.”
Clara had meant to say, I am only tired. She had meant to say anything but the truth. But her mouth opened, and what came out was the thing itself.
“I think I am in love with him.”
The words seemed to hang in the golden air between them. She heard them as though someone else had spoken.
“There,” she said, with a small, humourless breath of laughter.
“I have said it now. I am in love with the Duke of Farenwoode. A companion, with no fortune and no consequence, in love with a duke. It is absurd. It is the worst kind of novel, the kind one hides under the cushion when anyone comes into the room. And I knew it. I have known it, and still I...” Her voice failed.
She pressed her lips together until it returned.
“I told myself I would not. I was so sure I would not.”
“I know,” Anne said softly.
Clara looked at her.
“I do not mean I knew all of it. But I guessed enough. At Hale, when Lord Hale spoke of Jupiter, and you looked at him before you could stop yourself.” A faint, sad smile touched her mouth. “I recognised the look. I had been wearing one very like it all through luncheon.”
“Was it so plain?”
“Only to someone committing the same folly across the table.”
“But you and Edward... there is a bridge there, however narrow. He is a baron, yes, but you have your father, and the vicarage, and the whole parish knows who you are. You belong somewhere, Anne. There is no bridge from where I stand.”
“There may be more of one than you think.”
“No.” Clara’s voice dropped. “And the worst of it is not even that it is hopeless. The worst of it is that I think he...” She stopped, frightened by the words.
“That sometimes he looks at me as though it might not be. And that is worse, Anne. Can you not see that it is worse? Because it makes me want to hope. And I cannot. I cannot afford to.”
Anne had stopped in the road. “Why not?”
“You know why not.”
“I know the sensible reasons. Tell me the true one.”
The thing she had never said aloud rose in Clara’s throat then, sharp-edged and terrible. She looked away, across the darkening moor.
“My mother,” she said, and stopped.
Anne waited.
“You know what everyone says of her. That she was clever, and devoted, and that the two of us were so close.” Her injured hand had closed without her meaning it to, and she made it open again.
“She sold everything, Anne. After my father’s affairs went wrong.
The telescope, the instruments, my grandmother’s things.
The observatory we had lived half our lives in.
All of it carried away in sacking to pay a dead man’s debts.
And she never told me how bad it was. Not truly. ”
“Oh, Clara.”
“She let me believe we were only reduced. Only being careful. And she smiled, and kept me close beside her, her clever girl, her companion at the eyepiece, I could not do without you, Clara, and I thought—”
Her voice broke, and she had to wait.
“I thought it was only love,” she said, when she could.
“Or rather, I never thought to ask what else it was. She loved me. I know she did. I do know that. But now I am six months on the other side of her death, and everything has altered shape in the looking back. I wonder whether she kept me so close because I was her daughter, or because she had no one else beside her. Whether she wanted me near, or needed me there, and whether I have any right to be hurt by the difference when perhaps there is no clean difference at all.”
“Clara—”
“And I hate that I think it,” she said, the words coming wet and furious now. “She is dead. She cannot answer me. She was good to me in a thousand ways, and I loved her more than my own life. What sort of daughter takes love apart after the grave has closed over it, looking for the selfish thread?”
“A grieving one,” Anne said.
The answer was so simple that Clara had no defence against it.
She covered her mouth with her sound hand and looked away.
“If I cannot be sure of that,” she said at last, very low, “if even love can be tangled up with need and fear and loneliness, then how am I to trust it from anyone? How am I to believe that a man wants me, and not only what comfort I give him, or what loneliness I keep away? I do not know how to believe it. I have tried, and I cannot find the place in myself where such a belief would go.”
She had run out of breath and words alike. She stood in the road with her injured hand against her chest, her face wet, and waited for Anne to say something kind and useless.
Anne did not.
She came to stand beside her, close enough that their sleeves touched, and for a moment said nothing at all.
“I do not think,” she said at last, slowly, “that loving someone and needing them are so easy to tell apart. Not always. Perhaps not often.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” Anne said. “It is not. I wish I had a better one.” She looked out over the moor.
“Your mother needed you. I expect she did. Very much, perhaps. But I do not think that means she did not love you. It may only mean that she was frightened, and human, and less perfect than a daughter has a right to wish her mother had been.”
Clara shut her eyes.
“And as for him,” Anne said more softly, “I cannot tell you what the Duke feels. I would not pretend to know. But I can tell you this: refusing to hope will not keep you safe from being hurt. I have tried that method myself, and it is a very poor one. The hurt comes anyway. Hope or no hope.”
She took Clara’s good hand in both of hers.
“So I think I would rather be hurt with my hands open than with them shut. At least then there is some chance of catching something. Refusing to hope does not keep grief away, Clara. It only makes certain one is lonely while waiting for it.”
Clara looked at her friend’s kind, frightened face, and had no words.
They walked the rest of the way without talking, the sun sinking red behind the moor and the first of the rooks going home.
Somewhere in that last gold mile, though she could not have said the moment, Clara felt the smallest, most terrifying thing shift open in her chest: not hope, quite, not yet, but the bare, unbarred door of it, left for once upon the latch.
It frightened her more than anything had for a very long time.
She did not know, as Farenwoode’s grey towers rose at last against the dimming sky, that while she had been learning on a country road to leave one door open, another was being quietly prepared for her; and that there were those within those walls who had marked exactly which threshold she would not be able to keep from crossing.