Chapter Eight #3
“I told him I did not think comfort was something you would show me even if you felt it,” Mrs. Croft continued. “Because you are careful, Miss Rennet, and careful people do not display comfort in houses where they feel they must earn the right to stay.”
“I do feel I must earn it.”
“I know. That is what I told him.” Mrs. Croft smoothed her apron with both hands. “He looked, if you will forgive me for saying so, rather stricken by the information.”
Jane did not respond. Mrs. Croft nodded, as if the silence were answer enough, and left.
Jane stood alone in the kitchen with the proving cloths and the early morning light and the knowledge that Thomas had asked Mrs. Croft about her comfort, and Mrs. Croft had told him the truth, and the full conviction of the truth was forced upon his understanding.
She thought about Whitlock saying “he is not very good at this” and Lottie saying “he has taken a liking to you” and Margaret saying “Lottie is right.” She thought about the cold store and the squinting and the ankle and the sleeping.
The pattern she had read as inspection rearranged itself in front of her into something else entirely, a clumsy, methodical, persistent devotion from a man who had forgotten how to care for anyone and was teaching himself again through the only tool he had, which was questions.
She proceed to walk to her station and began working furiously.
The afternoon brought Thomas to the herb garden.
She was cutting rosemary, in the fragrant warmth of the garden, where a rich variety of herbs and flowers thrived in sweet profusion. Jane had been among the herbs for ten minutes, thinking about nothing except the angle of the cut and the effort of not thinking about Thomas Bennister.
He appeared at the end of the path and walked toward her. He stopped at a distance which, while perfectly consistent with propriety, was yet a shade closer than absolute politeness required.
“The rosemary is good this year,” he said, which was the kind of observation a person made when working toward a different sentence.
“Indeed, Your Grace. Mrs. Vale uses it in nearly everything.”
“Mrs. Vale is not what I came to discuss.”
“No, Your Grace. I did not think she was.”
He looked at her. The garden was warm and the rosemary was sharp, and neither of them spoke. The silence between them had become a thing that communicated more honestly than most people’s speech.
“May I ask you something?” he said.
“You have been asking me things for weeks. One more will not alter the pattern.”
“This one is different.”
“How?”
“Because I do not intend to do anything with the answer.”
Jane looked at him. The sentence was strange and precise and more honest than anything he had said before. It acknowledged, without naming it, that his previous questions had been tools rather than conversations. The honesty of the asking deserved an honest answer.
“Ask,” she said.
“What do you miss,” Thomas said, “when you are here?”
The question was different from the others.
Jane could feel the difference in the way he held it, carefully, as if chosen with more than his usual precision.
The others had been practical, answerable with facts.
This one could not be answered safely. The honest answer was “home,” and another honest answer, rising behind the first, was becoming “you.”
“The bakery,” she said, because it was the closest thing to true that was also safe. “I miss the bakery, sometimes. The smell of it in the morning.”
Thomas looked at her with the quiet attention of a man listening for what she had not said. “Sometimes,” he repeated.
The repetition turned her safe answer into an unsafe one. “Sometimes” implied other times when she did not miss it, and the question of what had replaced the missing was written between them.
“Sometimes,” Jane confirmed, and her voice was not steady.
Thomas heard the unsteadiness. For a moment they stood among the herbs and the bees with a silence that was full rather than empty.
“Thank you,” Thomas said, and left.
Jane stood with her shears in one hand and her heart in a place she had not authorised it to go, turning over what Mrs. Croft had told her that morning, about Thomas asking whether she was comfortable and being stricken by the answer, and the word “sometimes” and the silence that had followed it, and the way he had just asked her something and done nothing with the answer except hold it.
The holding had been the kindest thing he had done yet, because it was the first time he had not tried to solve her.
The questions had been a courtship all along, conducted by a man with nothing but questions to offer, and she had spent weeks giving the safe answers because the true ones frightened her. She was beginning to think she had been frightened long enough.
She picked up the rosemary, gathered her basket, and walked back to the kitchen through golden afternoon light, while somewhere in the house Thomas Bennister sat in his study with her answers held in his careful memory, and she understood, for the first time and with a clarity that frightened her, exactly what she had been refusing to let herself want.