Chapter Eleven.
“You cannot take me as your wife because people have misunderstood your kindness.”
Jane said the words before she was fully through the parlour door, before Thomas had risen from the chair by the window.
She had come to refuse him. She had rehearsed the refusal on the lane from Millcombe, working through the sentences with the same careful attention she gave to pastry.
The letter was folded in her pocket, read four times, with the force of her grip visible in its creases.
The refusal was reasonable, dignified, and correct. It acknowledged his generosity, preserved his honour, and protected her family from the appearance of ambition. It was the right thing to do.
She was furious about it.
“Miss Rennet,” Thomas said, and he was on his feet now, standing by the chair with the careful stillness she had come to know. His expression held something she could not read, though this morning the unreadable thing was closer to the surface than she had ever seen it.
“You wrote that you will protect my name regardless of my answer.” Jane’s voice was steady because she had practised it being steady. “Which is generous, and kind, and exactly the sort of thing a man says when his proposal is an apology.”
“That is not what the letter says.”
“It is what the letter means.”
“You are telling me what my letter means?”
“I am telling you what it sounds like to a baker’s daughter reading a duke’s proposal two days after the duke defended her on a public lane.” She took a breath. “It sounds like obligation, Your Grace. It sounds like a man solving a problem he accidentally created.”
Thomas looked at her. The parlour was quiet. The morning light came through the window in a long, bright rectangle that fell across the carpet between them.
“May I speak?” he asked.
“You may speak. You have been speaking more this week than in the previous four years combined, from what Whitlock tells me.”
“Whitlock talks too much.”
“Whitlock is the only person in this household who talks enough.”
A faint impression of a smile hovered for a momentary space upon Thomas’s countenance, only to disappear before it was fully conceived. He looked upon her with an expression wholly unmasked, quite devoid of that cool, deliberative air she had long since learned to expect from him.
“They have not misunderstood it,” he said.
“What?”
“You said the county has misunderstood my kindness. They have not. The county has understood it precisely.” He paused. “The problem is not that they misread me. The problem is that you did.”
The sentence landed with a weight that pushed the air out of the room. Jane stared at him. The refusal she had rehearsed, the careful, dignified, correct refusal, cracked down the middle and fell open and left her standing without the support she had built to protect herself.
“Sit down,” Thomas said. “Please.”
“I would prefer to stand.”
“You would prefer to stand because standing feels like a position of strength, and you believe you need strength for this conversation.”
“I do need strength for this conversation.”
“Then sit down, because what I am about to tell you will require a different kind.”
Jane sat. She did not know why. Thomas remained standing, which broke every rule of Regency courtesy regarding a gentleman and a seated lady, and the breaking was deliberate, because it gave her the higher position and him the vulnerability of speaking upward.
“I asked you questions,” Thomas said. His voice was slower than usual, deliberate rather than uncertain, each word chosen and tested for load.
“I asked whether you preferred pastry or sugar work. You told me you were competent in both. What I heard was that you were afraid to have a preference in front of me, because preferences are personal and personal things are dangerous when you owe your position to the person asking.”
Jane said nothing, because he was right, and the rightness was worse than the anger.
“I asked whether you were sleeping well. You told me you were reading about roux. What I heard was that you would rather describe productivity than admit vulnerability, because admitting vulnerability to me felt like giving me power over you.”
“Your Grace, I do not think you understand.”
“I asked what you missed when you were at Aldermere. You said ’the bakery, sometimes.’ And the word ’sometimes’ told me everything the rest of the sentence did not.”
“Stop,” Jane said, and the word came out unsteady, because every sentence he spoke pulled away one of the explanations she had spent weeks arranging around herself.
Professional concern. Household management.
Patronage. The careful words she had hidden behind were coming off her like a coat in a warm room, and she was not ready to be seen underneath them.
“You are describing me as though you have been keeping notes.”
“I have been keeping notes,” he said, without apology, and held her eyes while he said it. “The questions were courtship. Every one of them. I wanted to know what pleased you. I wanted to know what pride cost you. I wanted to know what I had taken from you by bringing you here.”
“You took nothing from me.”
“I took you from your family’s kitchen and placed you in mine. The exchange was not equal, and I needed to understand what the difference cost you.”
“It cost me nothing.”
“Jane, do not tell me it cost you nothing. I have watched you too closely to believe it.”
To hear her own name uttered in his quiet voice, in the very brightness of that room, dissolved the last of her defences.
It was an effect born not so much of the intimacy of the address, however deeply felt, as of its absolute truth.
Honesty from Thomas Bennister was the rarest, most costly tribute he could command, yet he offered it to her now without condition
“It cost me some certainty,” she said. “And some sleep. And a great deal of confusion about your intentions.”
“I was courting you clumsily, in the only language I knew, and I meant every clumsy word of it.”
The admission sat in the room between them, plain and true and offered without the smallest attempt to dress it up as more than it was, and it pulled the whole of the past months into a new shape in front of her.
The lemon water with its two slices. The gravelled lane.
The French vocabulary in a hand she could not place.
The stool that had appeared at her station the first evening.
Every kindness she had filed under patronage had been a man saying a thing he had no practice saying, and she had answered each one carefully instead of honestly because the careful answer was the safe one.
Jane pressed her hands flat against the arms of the chair. The refusal was gone, and she sat in the strange light place its absence left, exposed and unsteady and no longer certain whether the unsteadiness was fear or the want she had refused for weeks to call by its name.
“How long?” she asked, and her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be.
“Since the courtyard, the very first day.”
“The very first day I walked through your gate?”
“That day, yes. I have been certain of it ever since, however long it took me to find the words for it.”
“I called you a secretary.”
“You called me a secretary. And you apologised to a tray of tarts. And you told me you were going to stop talking and then did not stop talking.” Thomas’s voice had changed.
It was still quiet, still careful, but there was something underneath it now that had not been there before, something that sounded like relief.
“And I stood in the courtyard after you left and held your burned shawl and knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That something was altered between us. That you were the cause of it. That I could not undo your work, nor did I wish it undone.”
“You kept the shawl.”
“It is in my desk drawer. It has been there since the day you arrived.”
Jane closed her eyes. The picture arrived whole and merciless, Thomas alone in the kitchen she had fled, stooping for a scorched scrap of wool, folding it, carrying it up to a desk where it had lain for months while she explained his every kindness away as something safer.
It was so exactly like him that the last of her resolve gave, quietly, the way a seam gives under a strain it was never built to hold.
“I read your letter four times,” she said, and her voice was not steady anymore. “I read it on the lane and in the kitchen and in my bedroom with the door closed and Lottie knocking. Every time I looked for the obligation, because obligation was the thing I knew how to answer.”
“Did you find it?”
“No. I found affection, which is considerably more difficult to answer.”
“You do not have to answer it.”
“I do, actually. That is rather the point of a proposal.”
Thomas looked at her, and the almost-smile arrived again, closer this time, steadier. “That is true.”
“If I accept you matrimonial proposal,” Jane said, and the shift from refusal to condition happened so quickly she felt it move through her body before her mind caught up. “If I wed you, I will not be managed like a household problem. I will not be gravelled and vocabulary-listed into contentment.”
“No. I would not insult either of us by attempting to do so.”
“I will have opinions. They will be loud. They will occasionally be wrong. I will not apologise for the volume.”
“I would not ask you to.”
“You will attempt to manage me. You have spent four years solving problems with silence and arrangements, and you will try the same with a wife.”
“Almost certainly.”
“It will not work.”
“I expect not.”
“Then correct me when I attempt it,” Thomas said.
“I intend to.”
“I am beginning to suspect that.”