Chapter Seven #3
Jane looked at him. The word was enormous, and the quietness with which he gave it made it larger. He had never, in all his life, sat in a room with another person and felt this, and the plainness of the admission undid her.
When she finished the poem, the silence that followed was not empty. It was the silence Cowper had written about, the silence between two people who did not need to fill it.
“Thank you,” Thomas said.
“You are welcome.”
“The rain will stop soon.”
“It will.”
“When it stops, Ferris will bring the gig.”
“I am aware.”
“I would prefer,” Thomas said, and then stopped, and the stopping was the edge of the acknowledgement again. It was that delicate boundary where absolute sincerity was forced to reckon with discretion, and where discretion, unhappily, was wont to prevail. “I would prefer the rain to continue.”
Jane looked at him. The admission was so small and so enormous that she did not know how to hold it.
He would prefer the rain to continue. He would prefer her to stay.
The preference was the closest thing to a declaration she had heard from him, and it was offered as a comment about weather, because Thomas Bennister could not yet bring himself to say the word stay aloud, though he could say that he wanted the rain to last.
“So would I,” Jane said.
The rain lasted another hour. They did not speak for most of it.
Jane read more Cowper, silently this time, and Thomas sat in his chair and looked at the fire and occasionally at her, and his gaze possessed a warmth so entirely devoid of disguise that it betrayed the secret understanding which neither had yet dared to name.
When the rain stopped, Ferris brought the gig.
Jane returned the Cowper to its shelf, though she placed it spine-out so she could find it again.
The gesture was small, the arrangement of a book on a shelf, but the arranging was a claim, the first physical mark she had left in a room that was Thomas’s, and the mark left was deliberate.
Thomas walked her to the courtyard. The evening air was cool and washed and smelled of wet stone and green things. The gravel was dark with rain and an array of puddles stood in the low places where the courtyard dipped, reflecting the grey sky.
“Goodnight, Miss Rennet.”
“Goodnight, Your Grace.”
“The library is open whenever you wish to use it.”
“You have said that three times today.”
“I am aware. Repetition is, according to Cowper, the sincerest form of emphasis.”
“I do not think Cowper said that.”
“He should have. It is the kind of thing Cowper would approve of.”
Jane climbed carefully into the gig, and with Ferris taking the reins, they set off.
Though the lane was wet, it was perfectly passable; the hedgerows glistened with the recent rain, and the fields beyond were washed in a vibrant green, transformed from the gloomier shades of the morning.
She sat with her hands in her lap and the word unprecedented turning over in her mind, the quietest word he had given her and therefore, in Thomas, the most honest, since his most important words were always his quietest ones.
It meant the long silence had been a silence without whatever this was, and that whatever this was had walked in carrying a basket of muffins and was now reading Cowper aloud in a voice that did not perform.
She could not afford it. The lease, the bakery, her family’s position, every implication Piers Garrick had let hang in the air, all of it told her plainly that a baker’s daughter could not afford to feel what she was feeling in a gig on a wet lane.
She wanted it regardless, and it was the most honest thing she had felt in weeks, and the fear that came with it was only the proof that it was real.
The gig turned onto the Millcombe road, and the bakery came into view, warm and golden against the grey evening, as Jane gazed upon it, her heart filled with a profound admiration and thought of a library four miles behind her where a book of poetry now stood spine-out on a shelf because she had set it there on purpose.
The gig came to a stop and she carefully climbed down. She found Lottie waiting at the door.
“Your appearance is remarkably singular today.” Lottie said.
“I am wet.”
“You seem both indisposed and wet and your disposition is not due to your being wet.”
“Goodnight, Lottie.”
“Goodnight, Jane. Whatever happened today, I approve of it.”
“Nothing happened today.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
Jane went inside and closed the door and stood in the hallway of her family’s bakery and thought about a man who had been reading Cowper alone in a library for four years and who had just heard another voice read the words for the first time, He had not sought sleep, but the pleasure of listening with closed eyes, discovering therein a serenity that, upon his unguarded face, looked vastly like true peace.
Outwardly the afternoon had held nothing at all, a borrowed book and a little poetry and the rain, and yet she stood in the familiar warmth of the bakery as a woman to whom something enormous and unspoken had quietly happened.