Chapter Fourteen #2
“The north corridor, Your Grace,” Mrs. Croft said, appearing behind her with the silent efficiency that was her professional signature. “His Grace prefers it closed.”
“Why?”
“I am not at liberty to say, Your Grace. It has been closed for some years.”
“Some years,” Jane repeated. “Since before I arrived.”
“Yes, Your Grace. Well before.”
Jane looked at Mrs. Croft. The housekeeper’s expression was smooth and practised, but the practice itself was revealing.
A woman who had not been asked this question before would have looked surprised.
Mrs. Croft looked prepared, and preparedness was the fingerprint of a question that had been anticipated.
“Thank you, Mrs. Croft.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
Jane did not press. She filed the locked door in the same place she filed all the things about Thomas she did not yet understand.
The drawer was becoming, with each day, more crowded, and the locked door sat in it beside the silence and the shawl he had kept and the questions he asked but never explained.
The evening brought a small domestic supper, just Jane and Thomas in the dining room with candles and the quiet that settled between two people who were learning how to inhabit the same house.
The food was Mrs. Vale’s work, precise and excellent, and Jane ate it with the appreciation of a woman who understood exactly how much skill each dish represented.
Thomas ate quietly. He had been quiet since the afternoon, quieter than the wedding breakfast had suggested he was capable of being, and Jane understood that the sociability he had displayed at the bakery had cost him something.
He had spoken more that morning than he usually spoke in a week, and the speaking had been worth it, but the effort was visible now in the careful, measured way he moved through the evening.
“You are tired,” Jane said.
“I am not accustomed to conversation.”
“You had a great deal of it today.”
“I did. It was worth it.” He paused. “Though I may require several days of silence to recover.”
“I will try to be quiet.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“It does, rather.”
The exchange was small and warm and exactly the right weight for an evening when both of them were tired and the day had been long and important. Jane found she did not need the evening to be more than it was. The candles and the food and the quiet and the man sitting across from her were enough.
“A servant mentioned something today,” Jane said, as the plates were cleared. “A Mr. Bennister called at Louisa’s London house, asking about your matrimony.”
Thomas’s hand paused on his glass. The pause was brief, controlled, and instantly corrected, but Jane saw it.
“Hubert,” Thomas said.
“Your cousin.”
“Yes. My nearest male relation.”
“And your heir, if I am not mistaken, until you have children of your own.”
Thomas looked at her. The directness surprised him. She could see it in the slight widening of his eyes, the recalculation of a man who had expected the question to approach obliquely and had received it head-on instead.
“You are not mistaken,” he said.
“Then his interest in your matrimony is not familial concern.”
“It is nothing of the sort, whatever the letters pretend.”
“It is financial.”
“Among other things, and the other things are worse than the money.”
“What other things?”
“Hubert has built his expectations, his credit, and his social position on the assumption that I am destined to end my days in solitude.” Thomas set down his glass.
“A wife troubles those expectations. A child destroys them. It is not affection that prompts his curiosity, but a desire to gain intelligence.”
Jane studied his face. The candlelight caught the angle of his jaw and the guarded quality of his eyes.
She understood, sitting at his dining table on the first full day of their marriage, that the locked corridor and the cousin’s enquiry were connected.
There were rooms in this house and rooms in this man that she had not yet been permitted to enter.
Admission was inevitable, yet it would occur only when Thomas himself deemed the hour fitting.
“Is he dangerous?” she asked.
“Not directly. Hubert does not act. He arranges.”
“Like Piers Garrick.”
Thomas looked at her, and the look carried confirmation that he had not expected to give. She had drawn a line between two names he had not yet connected for her, and the drawing told him she was further along in her understanding than he had assumed.
“We will discuss this further,” Thomas said. “When I have more to tell you.”
“You will tell me,” she said. “When you are ready.”
“I will tell you all of it, in time, and I would rather you heard it from me than pieced it together from servants and cousins.”
“And I will not ask again until you do.”
“You will not need to. I am learning, Jane, that the things I do not tell you take up more space than the things I do.”
She reached across the table again and placed her hand over his.
He turned his palm upward and laced his fingers through hers, and the lacing was new, and the newness of it was tender in the way that all new things between two people who are learning each other are tender, fragile and warm and worth protecting.
Jane went to bed that night in the beautiful, intimidating room with the heavy curtains and the walnut-framed mirror.
She lay in the dark and thought about the shawl and the vows and the muffins and the locked corridor and the name Hubert Bennister, and she understood, with the clarity that came from a day of discovering things, that Thomas was not asking questions to judge her.
He was asking because he wanted instructions.
Instructions on how to be a husband. Instructions on how to share a house.
Instructions on how not to hurt the woman he cherished, because hurting her was the thing he feared most, and the fear was older than their matrimony and deeper than their courtship and connected to whatever lay behind the locked door on the north corridor.
She would wait. She would sort pears and drink tea and learn the geography of her new country, and she would wait for Thomas to be ready, because patience was a form of affection she had not known she possessed until she had entered into matrimony with a man who needed it.