Chapter Thirteen #2
“My daughter is not a woman who asks for things. She provides them. She arranges them. She carries them.” William’s voice was even and measured, the voice of a man who was choosing his words with the same care he gave to his bread.
“If she needs something, she will not tell you. She will manage it herself and tell you afterward that it was nothing. Do not believe her when she says it was no bother.”
“I will not believe her, Mr. Rennet. You have my word on it.”
“Then we understand one another.” William sat back, and the conversation was finished, having held no threat and no condition in it, only a piece of knowledge handed across the table with the care of a man who understood his daughter better than anyone alive and had decided to trust another man with the understanding.
Sam climbed onto the bench beside Thomas and looked up at him with grave, wide-eyed attention. “Do dukes eat crusts?”
Thomas looked at Sam with equal gravity. “Only under supervision.”
Jane laughed. The laugh was bright and sudden and filled the bakery the way her voice had filled his kitchen on the afternoon they met.
Thomas turned to look at her. The expression on his face was the one he had been carrying under the careful surface all day, with nothing guarded or controlled left in it.
It was joy, undecorated and entirely visible.
“The supervision is important,” Sam said, nodding seriously. “Margaret says crusts are character.”
“Margaret is correct about most things,” Thomas said. “I have learned this.”
Margaret, who was carrying a tray of bread and had overheard, did not smile, but the set of her shoulders suggested she considered the remark acceptable.
***
The carriage to Aldermere was quiet after the noise of the bakery. Jane sat beside Thomas with the new shawl around her shoulders and the plain gold ring on her finger and the giddy lightness that came from having done something irrevocable and being glad of it.
Through the carriage window, the lane was familiar.
The hedgerows she had walked past every morning, the curve near Merton’s farm where Piers had intercepted her, the lower gate where Thomas had stood watching.
The geography of their courtship passed outside the window, and Jane watched it the way a person watches a landscape they know they are seeing for the last time in its current form.
She would walk this lane again, but she would not walk it as Jane Rennet.
She would walk it as the Duchess of Aldermere, and the lane would be the same and she would not.
“You are quiet,” Thomas said.
“I am thinking.”
“About the lane?”
“About the fact that I have walked this lane a hundred times and never once imagined I would travel it in a carriage with the man who owns the house at the end of it.”
“I do not own you, Jane.”
“I know. But the lane does not know that, and the county does not know that, and I am going to spend the next several months explaining the distinction to people who would prefer not to hear it.”
Thomas was quiet for a moment. “You will not explain it alone.”
“No?”
“I took my marital vows with you in front of the county. If the county requires further explanation, I will provide it in a louder voice should the necessity arise.”
“Loudly?”
“Relatively loudly. By my standards.”
Jane smiled. “Your standards of loudness are not the county’s standards of loudness.”
“Then the county will learn to listen more carefully.”
“I am afraid,” she said, and the admission arrived between sentences, unplanned and honest.
Thomas looked at her. “Of me?”
“No. Of becoming someone I do not recognise.” She turned the ring on her finger, a new habit already forming. “I have been Jane Rennet for one and twenty years. I know how she walks and what she says and how she measures flour. I do not know how to be a duchess.”
Thomas was quiet. The carriage moved through the afternoon light. The lane that led to Aldermere was the same lane she had walked a hundred times, but the direction had changed. She was not going to work. She was going home.
“Then we shall not let them take Jane Rennet from you,” Thomas said. “Whoever ’them’ turns out to be.”
“It may turn out to be you.”
“Then you will correct me. You have been very clear about your intention to correct me.”
“I have. Frequently and in advance.”
“I have noticed, and I have come to depend on it.”
Jane looked at him, and the afternoon light caught the side of his face, where the territory smiles lived in had quietly become occupied, as it did more and more often now.
Sitting in a carriage beside a man she had entered into matrimony with two hours before, she thought that every smile she drew from Thomas Bennister was a door opening in a house that had stood closed a very long time.
Aldermere Hall in the late afternoon was the same house Jane had entered as an apprentice and an entirely different one, the copper pans still hanging in the kitchen and the herb garden still smelling of rosemary, yet her rooms were upstairs now, beautiful and intimidating in the way rooms are when they have been prepared for someone important and you are not certain you are the someone.
The walnut mirror on the dressing table showed her a woman in white muslin with flour-scarred hands and a plain gold ring who looked, to her own uncertain eye, as though she had been set down in the wrong painting.
On the pillow was a note, in Thomas’s hand. ‘No expectations tonight. Sleep as you wish. Whenever you want me, you have only to come.’
Jane read it three times and held it against her chest, because it said everything Thomas could not yet say aloud, in the language he had been learning for months, which was the language of care offered without the smallest pressure.
He had set the choice in her hands and stepped back from it entirely, the way he had stepped back from her ankle in the kitchen and her grief in the garden, and the door he had left open mattered more than any threshold he might have crossed for her.
She lay a long while in the lavender-scented dark and did not sleep.
The house was quiet around her, his house, hers now, and through the wall she was aware of him the way one is aware of a fire in the next room, a warmth with a direction to it.
She thought of the note, and the steadiness of his hand when he wrote it, and the cost to a man like him of writing ‘whenever you want me’ and then leaving her to decide.
She thought that she had spent months letting him reach for her across the distance she kept, and that the distance had been her doing, and that tonight, for once, the reaching could be hers.
She rose, and took up the single candle, and crossed the cold floor on bare feet, and the corridor between her rooms and his was shorter than she had let herself believe.
She did not knock. She had agreed to wed him in a parlour full of morning light and she had no intention of asking permission now to do the rest of it.
When she opened the door he was awake, sitting up, the lamp still lit, a book unread in his hands and his eyes coming to her with a question in them that he was too careful to ask aloud.
“You wrote that I had only to come,” Jane said, and her voice was steadier than her hands. “I have come.”
Whatever he might have said, he did not say.
He set the book aside and rose and crossed to her, and took the candle from her unsteady fingers and set it down so that it would not fall, and that small care, even now, even with his own hands not entirely steady, was the thing that undid the last of her fear.
He drew her in, and the door fell quietly shut behind her, and the lamp burned low, and the house that had stood silent for so long kept, that night, the oldest and most private of its secrets.