Chapter Eleven. #2
Jane looked at him. The morning light had moved while they were talking and now fell across Thomas’s shoulder and the side of his face.
His expression held something she had never seen in it.
Not the careful stillness. Not the guarded neutrality.
Something warm and undefended and terrified.
The expression of a man who had asked for everything he wanted and was waiting to learn whether the asking had been enough.
“Yes,” Jane said.
Thomas did not move, and for a moment he did not seem to breathe.
The stillness in him had nothing of his old practised composure in it.
It was the held breath of a man braced for the word to be taken back before he could believe it.
She watched the effort it cost him to simply stand there and let it be true, his hands very slightly closing at his sides, his jaw working once around something he did not trust himself to say, and the sight of the great composed Duke of Aldermere undone by a single word was more than she had bargained for when she rehearsed her refusal on the lane.
“Yes,” she said again, gentler this time, because he plainly needed it twice before he would believe the first. “I will enter into matrimony with you. The lane has nothing to do with it, and neither does the gossip, and neither, in the end, does the letter, though it was very well written, and you should know the seventh attempt was evidently the correct number.”
“You know about the first six?”
“I know about you, Thomas.” She said his name deliberately, for the first time, and the sound of it in her own voice was strange and warm.
“I have been watching you for weeks. I have been watching you fail at conversation and succeed at kindness and try, again and again, to say things your voice has not practised.” She met his eyes.
“Your effort has been the bravest thing I have ever seen.”
Thomas looked at her. His eyes were bright and his hands were at his sides and his composure, which had held through four years of grief and silence, was letting go.
“Thank you,” he said, and the words were too small, as his words always were. Jane understood that for Thomas Bennister, two syllables of gratitude contained the same weight other men put into speeches.
“You are welcome. And you may call me Jane, since I appear to have agreed to become your wife.”
“Jane, then,” he said, trying the name as though testing whether the room would allow it.
“Yes, though not in front of Mrs. Vale. In front of Mrs. Vale I am Miss Rennet until the wedding, and Your Grace after it, and Mrs. Vale’s standards on the matter are not open to negotiation.”
“I have never won a negotiation with Mrs. Vale.”
“No one has, and I have long since stopped expecting to be the first.”
Thomas stepped forward. The step was small, careful, and closed the distance between them by exactly the amount that allowed him to extend his hand. His hand hung in the air, open and waiting.
Jane looked at his hand.
Then she removed her glove.
Slowly. One finger at a time. The gesture was deliberate and unhurried and entirely too intimate for a parlour at ten on the hour in the morning.
She knew it, and she did it anyway, because Thomas had spent weeks trying to reach her through the barriers she had built.
The least she could do was remove one herself.
She placed her bare hand in his.
His fingers closed around hers. The grip was warm and steady and careful, and the contact moved through Jane with a force she had not anticipated.
Her hand was rough from weeks of pastry work, from flour and butter and cold water and hot ovens.
His hand was larger. His palm was calloused in places she did not expect, as if dukes who did not speak also did things with their hands that the household did not discuss.
The roughness of his skin against the roughness of hers was not what she had imagined a duke’s hand would feel like. It was better, because it was real.
His thumb brushed across her knuckles, once, and the brush was not accidental. It was the first deliberate touch between them that was not rescue and not protection. It was a man touching a woman because he wanted to, and she had granted him the privilege of doing so.
Thomas raised her hand. He looked at her, asking permission with his eyes. Jane did not pull away. He pressed his lips to her knuckles. The kiss was brief and light and trembled at the edges. When he lifted his head his eyes were full and he had not yet found his way back behind his own face.
They stood in the morning light with her hand in his and the distance between them narrower than it had ever been. Jane could feel his pulse in his fingertips, or perhaps her own. The distinction did not matter. The trembling belonged to both of them.
Thomas’s hand tightened on hers, very slightly, and the tightening was involuntary and communicative.
He did not want to let go. Jane could feel his reluctance in the way his fingers pressed against her knuckles, and the feeling produced in her a warmth that was not the morning light and not the fire in the grate and not anything she could explain in language she had practised.
She did not let go either.
“Thomas,” she said, because she could say it now, and the saying of it was still new enough to feel like a gift she had only just unwrapped. “I am going to be a terrible duchess.”
“You are going to be the only duchess who has ever set herself on fire in her husband’s kitchen.”
“Is that a distinction or a warning?”
“It is a fact. I am learning to be comfortable with facts.”
“That is progress, of a clumsy and entirely honest sort.”
“The only sort I have ever managed, as you well know by now.”
He smiled again. The smile was steadier this time, more certain of its right to exist on his face.
Jane looked at it and thought that a smile from Thomas Bennister, earned and genuine and given without performance, was worth more than every careful, controlled expression she had watched him produce in weeks of proximity.
The smile was the courtship’s first real success, and it had taken weeks of patient failure to produce it, and she intended to earn more of them.
She squeezed his hand once and released it and stepped back, because if she did not step back she was going to say something even more honest than what she had already said, and the parlour could only hold so much honesty before the furniture began to object.
“I will see you tomorrow, Your Grace.”
“Thomas, if you please. You have just agreed to become my wife, and the title sounds absurd between us now.”
“I will see you tomorrow, Thomas. We can discuss the details when I am not standing in your parlour with one bare hand and the remains of a refusal I no longer intend to deliver.”
“The remains suit you.”
“Goodbye, Thomas.”
“Goodbye, Jane.”
She left the parlour and walked out into a morning that had no business being so bright, one hand bare and one still gloved, and somewhere past the lower gate she took the refusal from her pocket and unfolded it.
‘Your Grace, I must respectfully decline.’ The line might have been written by a stranger.
She folded it small and pushed it into the spine of her recipe book, where it came to rest against the scrap that said ‘good’, the two of them keeping the whole of the story between them, and walked on toward Millcombe with her heart doing something it had never done before and no intention of being talked out of it.