Chapter Seven
“The lane is impassable,” Whitlock announced, appearing in the kitchen doorway with rain on his shoulders and the expression of a man delivering military intelligence. “The lower field has flooded. Ferris says the gig cannot get through. You are staying at Aldermere today, Miss Rennet.”
Jane looked up from the pastry she had been rolling. The rain had been falling since before dawn, steady and heavy and showing no intention of stopping. The kitchen windows were streaked with water and the courtyard beyond them was a grey wash of puddles and drowned gravel.
“I will walk,” Jane said.
“You will not walk. The lane near Merton’s farm is ankle-deep, and Mrs. Vale has most positively prohibited me from allowing you to come to any watery harm on your way home.”
“Mrs. Vale has no authority over my perishing in the waters.”
“Mrs. Vale has authority over everything that occurs within the boundaries of this estate, including the drowning of apprentices. Her words were, and I quote, ’If Miss Rennet walks home in this weather and catches her death, I will be short-handed for the Thursday preserves, and I do not have time to train a replacement. ’”
“That is touching concern for my welfare.”
“Mrs. Vale’s concern is always practical. It is one of her more reliable qualities.”
Jane set down the rolling pin. The afternoon stretched ahead of her with an unfamiliar emptiness.
She had not been idle at Aldermere since the afternoon she arrived.
Her days had structure, purpose, a rhythm set by Mrs. Vale’s schedule and the kitchen’s demands.
An afternoon without work was an afternoon without shape, and Jane did not know what to do with shapeless time.
She cleaned her station. She helped Ruth with the evening bread.
She reorganised a spice shelf that had no need of reorganising, and polished copper pans that had no need of polishing and gleamed obligingly all the same.
By two on the hour she had exhausted the available busywork and was standing at her station with clean hands and nothing to do with them, and the nothing was intolerable, because Jane Rennet’s hands had not sat idle during waking hours since she was old enough to hold a rolling pin.
By three on the hour, the kitchen work was genuinely finished, and Mrs. Vale dismissed her with the expression that meant Jane’s helpfulness had crossed the line into interference.
“Go,” Mrs. Vale said. “Read something. Walk somewhere dry. Stop rearranging my cinnamon.”
“The cinnamon was not in alphabetical order.”
“The cinnamon was in the order I placed it, which is the correct order, because I placed it there. Go, Miss Rennet, before I find you something unpleasant to clean.”
Jane went.
Aldermere was a different house in the rain, the corridors darker and the windows grey, the whole of it turned inward against the weather while the steady drumming on the roof muffled the ordinary sounds of the household.
Jane wandered through rooms she had never lingered in, past Thomas’s study with its door ajar and no sound behind it, and found the library at the corridor’s end, a wide door opening onto leather and paper and the warmth of a fire that had plainly been burning some while, lit, she suspected, by Whitlock, whose grasp of the household’s needs ran several steps ahead of the household itself.
She moved along shelves that climbed all three walls, trailing her fingers across novels and histories and sermons and a surprising quantity of books about sheep, until she came to a row of poetry near the window seat with spines cracked from reading.
She pulled a volume of Cowper, and it fell open the way a door falls open on a worn latch, to a passage the binding had clearly been bent to many times, a passage about solitude and gardens and the particular quiet of a place where a person has chosen to be alone, where the choosing is the whole of the point and the peace is one no other person’s presence can supply.
She understood, holding it, exactly why the page had been returned to, and exactly who had been doing the returning.
“You found Cowper.”
Thomas’s voice came from the doorway. Jane did not jump, because she had been at Aldermere long enough to expect Thomas in doorways.
She turned and found him standing at the threshold with a cup of something in his hand and the look he wore when he had come to a room for one purpose and found a different purpose waiting.
“I found Cowper,” Jane said. “Someone has been reading this page rather often,” she remarked, tracing the spine, “for the binding is quite worn by the frequency of its consultation.”
“The binding is worn in the way a thing is worn when it has been held by the same hand many times. The page falls open of its own accord.”
Thomas entered the library. He sat in the chair by the fire, which was positioned at an angle that suggested it was his usual chair, and the sitting had the ease of a man returning to a familiar place.
The cup turned out to be coffee, which he drank black and without sugar, which Jane had noticed weeks ago and filed away in the same place she filed all of his preferences, which was a mental drawer that was becoming crowded.
“Do you read poetry?” Thomas asked.
“My mother read to us when we were children. Cowper, mostly. Some Crabbe. A great deal of Watts, because Watts was considered improving, though I never understood what precisely it was meant to improve.”
“And now?”
“Now I do not read as much as I should. The bakery takes the hours that reading requires, and the hours do not return willingly. A loaf does not care whether you have finished your chapter.”
“Bread is a tyrant of that particular kind,” Thomas said. “It keeps its own hours and will not be reasoned with. I have watched Mrs. Vale negotiate with dough as though it were a foreign power, and I have never once seen the dough concede a point.”
“You have been watching the kitchen a great deal, for a man who keeps to his study.”
“I keep to my study less than I did.” He turned the coffee cup in his hand. “You are welcome to this library. Any time at all.”
“Thank you.” Jane turned the Cowper over in her hands. “You read poetry.”
“I read Cowper. I would not claim a wider range.”
“Why Cowper?”
Thomas stared deeply into at the fire. The question was a doorway, and Jane could see him deciding whether to walk through it.
The deciding was visible in the way his jaw tightened and then released, the way his hands settled on the arms of the chair with the deliberate placement he used when he was steadying himself.
“Cowper writes about solitude as though it were a choice rather than a punishment,” Thomas said.
“When I stopped speaking, solitude became the condition of my life. Cowper made the condition bearable, because Cowper understood that a man alone in a garden is not necessarily a man in pain. He may be a man in thought.”
“And were you in thought? For four years?”
“I was in something. Thought is generous. Thought implies direction. I was in silence, which has no direction. It simply exists, and you exist inside it, and eventually the inside becomes the whole of your geography.”
Jane turned the book in her hands. “That sounds lonely.”
“It was not lonely. Loneliness requires the awareness of absence, and I had trained myself not to be aware. The library helped. Cowper helped. The garden helped. Mrs. Vale’s kitchen helped, because a kitchen is never truly silent, even when the people in it are.”
“Is that why you visited the kitchen?”
Thomas looked at her, and the looking held the faint surprise of a man who had just been understood in a way he had not anticipated.
“Yes. The kitchen had sound even when I did not contribute to it. Pans and water and Mrs. Vale’s instructions and the oven doors opening and closing.
The sounds were not directed at me, which meant I could exist among them without participating, and the existing was enough. ”
“Until it was not.”
“Until you arrived. And then the sounds changed, because your sound was different from the kitchen’s sound. The kitchen hummed. You talked.”
“I talk too much.”
“You talk precisely enough. The day you arrived, you apologised to a tray of tarts and told me you were going to stop talking and then continued for another four sentences. I stood in the courtyard afterward and realised the silence had been interrupted, and I did not want it restored.”
“That is a great deal to lay at the feet of a woman who set your kitchen on fire within the hour.”
“You did not set out to mend anything. That is rather the whole of it. People have spent years arranging their faces and lowering their voices around my grief, and you walked in and did neither, because you did not know to, and the not knowing was the kindest thing anyone had done in this house in a very long while.”
“And now that I do know?”
“Now that you know,” Thomas said, “I find I would still rather you carried on exactly as you are, and said the things you say, and filled the rooms the way you fill them. The arranged faces never helped. Yours, which arranges nothing, has helped more than I have the words to tell you, which is its own small irony, given how few words I have ever had.”
Jane’s throat tightened. The confession was delivered in Thomas’s usual measured tone, as though he were reporting on the condition of the gravel or the state of the roof.
But the content was not a report. It was the most personal thing he had said to her, offered in a library on a rainy afternoon with the fire between them and Cowper as the excuse.
“Cowper also writes about companionship,” Jane said, because she needed to say something and the something needed to carry the weight of what he had just told her without collapsing under it.
“The passage you return to is about solitude, but the poem it comes from is about the value of a companion who understands when to speak and when to be quiet.”
“You have read the full poem.”