Chapter Ten #2
“What do you want to do?” Louisa asked, and the question was not professional. It was the question of a sister who had watched her brother disappear into silence for four years and was watching him, now, in the early stages of finding his way out.
“I want to propose to Jane Rennet,” Thomas said. The sentence came out with more certainty than anything he had said in four years. “And I want to do it for the right reasons.”
Louisa looked at him. “Then do it for the right reasons. But do it quickly, because the gossip will not wait for you to find the perfect words.”
***
Thomas retired to his study after Louisa and Philip went upstairs. He sat at his desk and pulled a sheet of paper toward him and picked up his quill.
He had done this before. He had destroyed every version. The difference now was that the stakes had changed. Before, the proposal had been a possibility. Now it was a necessity, and the necessity stripped away the luxury of time and the luxury of cowardice.
Dear Miss Rennet, I write to ask for your hand in matrimony.
The address was lacking in ceremony.
Miss Rennet, the events of recent days have made clear that your position requires a degree of protection.
This was intolerably transactional. It read as a legal instrument, and should Jane cast her eyes upon it, she would hear exactly what he feared she would; the cold demand of obligation.
Miss Rennet, I have admired you since the afternoon you arrived at my kitchen and told me I had a secretary’s coat.
Too specific, too revealing. The sentence laid bare months of careful watching, and the laying bare of it felt like standing in the open without shelter.
Miss Rennet, I have spent weeks asking you questions I already knew the answers to, and one question I did not, which is whether you would consent to be my wife.
He stopped. The sentence was honest, and the honesty was precisely the problem, because honest proposals from dukes to baker’s daughters sounded, on paper, indistinguishable from the kind of obligation Jane had spent months protecting herself against.
He destroyed the fourth attempt and the fifth and the sixth.
The seventh began differently. It began with a statement rather than a question.
Thomas understood, sitting alone with six ruined sheets beside him, that the question was not the difficult part.
The difficult part was what came before the question.
The difficult part was telling Jane Rennet why he was asking.
He went to Louisa.
She was in the morning room, reading a letter from Philip’s mother with the expression of a woman performing a duty she considered unnecessary. She looked up when Thomas entered and set the letter aside with undisguised relief.
“If I offer,” Thomas said, “she will think it duty.”
“Is it?”
“It is nothing of the kind, and we both know it, which is precisely the difficulty.”
“Then say that to her, in those words.”
“I do not know if I can.”
Louisa studied him. “You spoke on a lane in the dark to a man who had put his hands on her. You said five words that the entire county heard. You are telling me you cannot say three words to the woman you said them for?”
“The five words were anger, and anger has never been difficult for me. The three words are another matter.” He stopped. “The three words require a kind of honesty I have not practised in a very long time.”
“Then practise it now, with me, where it costs you nothing. Say it.”
“You are relentless, Louisa, and I have never once been grateful for it until this moment.”
“Say it, Thomas.”
Thomas looked at his sister. The morning room was bright with late-summer light, and Louisa was watching him with an expression that held no judgement and no impatience. Only the steady attention of a woman who had been waiting for her brother to say the thing he had been circling for months.
“My heart is entirely in her keeping,” Thomas said.
The words came out quietly, as his words always did.
They sounded, in the bright room with the light on the carpet, exactly as he had feared.
Insufficient. A man who had called his brother a coward and lost him, who had spent four years weighing every word, and could not make those syllables sound sufficient.
The words were too small for what they carried.
Louisa’s eyes were bright. She did not cry, because Louisa did not cry in front of people unless she chose to, but her eyes were bright, with her unshed tears.
“Then write that,” she said. “Not the proposal. Not the obligation. Write the truth, and let her decide what to do with it.”
***
Thomas returned to his study. He wrote a seventh letter. This one he did not destroy.
For an hour he laboured over the letter, delayed not by a difficulty of words, but by the trial of his own soul. Every phrase compelled him to choose between a prudent security and a stark honesty; he chose honesty invariably, and each choice was made at no small expense to his peace.
He set down the apprenticeship and why he had offered it, the questions and why he had asked them, the lane and why he had spoken there.
The sketchbook he left out, since it was private and would stay so for now, yet the substance of it ran through every sentence, everything he had watched and wanted, translated out of the language of looking and into the language of asking.
The final paragraph was the hardest. He wrote it and crossed it out and wrote it again and crossed it out.
The third time, he left it standing. The third version was not perfect or elegant.
It was not the kind of prose that a duke’s proposal ought to contain.
But it was true, and true was the only standard that mattered.
The letter went to the Rennet family by Aldermere’s own messenger that afternoon.
It was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. William Rennet.
It was formal in structure and honest in content.
It contained the proposal, the terms, the assurance that Jane’s position at Aldermere was not contingent on her answer, and a single sentence that Thomas had written last because it was the hardest.
I will protect her name regardless of her answer.
The sentence said what the proposal itself could not, that the offer carried no condition, that her reputation would be defended whether she accepted him or refused him, that his protection was no kind of leverage and his proposal no kind of rescue, and that his affection, if she could bear to call it that, came without terms attached.
He had written the word affection in the letter, as he had yet to find the opportunity to convey it by word of mouth.
To set it down in writing was to pass a boundary from which there could be no retreating, and indeed, he harbored no desire to return.
Thomas set his quill down. He cleaned the nib and set it in its holder and stacked the ruined drafts and placed them in the fire and watched them burn.
Six attempts had suddenly been reduced to ash.
The seventh was on its way to Millcombe in the hands of a messenger who did not know what he was carrying and would not have understood its weight if he had. There was nothing left to do but wait.
He went to the parlour. He sat in the chair that faced the window, the chair from which he could see the lane, and he waited.
Jane would come tomorrow. She would come to Aldermere because the letter invited her, and because Jane Rennet, whatever else she was, was not a woman who avoided difficult conversations.
She would come, and Thomas would have to speak, which would require him to say aloud what he had only been able to write, and the prospect was more frightening than anything Hubert Bennister or Piers Garrick could arrange.
He sat in the parlour with the evening light fading and the lane empty, knowing he must speak or lose the right to be understood, and his mind went to his brother, to the word that had taken Henry’s life Henry and the silence of all the years since, and then to the woman who had walked into his kitchen and burned her shawl and filled that silence with a sound he had long forgotten existed.
The shawl was still in his desk drawer, folded beneath the sketchbook.
The muffin was long gone, eaten by Mrs. Croft one morning when the study was being cleaned, but the shawl remained.
The first proof that Jane Rennet had entered his life and left something behind, and now he was sitting in a parlour trying to find the courage to ask her to stay.
Louisa found him there an hour later, in the dark, with the lamp unlit.
“You need not light the lamp on my account, Louisa, I have been managing the dark very well.”
“You have been managing the dark for four years, Thomas, and at some point a man must admit that managing the dark is only another word for hiding in it.”
“It has always been avoidance. I have simply been better at disguising it. Tomorrow I will speak.”
“Yes. You will.” Louisa stood in the doorway for a moment, and her silhouette was dark against the corridor light, and her voice was gentler than it had been all day. “She is worth it, Thomas. Whatever it costs you to say the words, she is worth the saying.”
She left. Thomas sat in the dark and believed her, and it did not make the prospect of tomorrow less frightening, but it made it necessary, and necessary was enough.
He did not sleep that night.