Chapter Fifteen
“Will you walk with me?”
Thomas asked the question in the corridor outside the library on a Tuesday morning, and his question had the quality of something that had been rehearsed.
Jane could hear the preparation in it, the way the words sat in his mouth with the careful balance of something that had been weighted and measured and found adequate.
Thomas Bennister did not ask casual questions.
Every question was a construction, and this one had been built for a purpose she could not yet see.
“Of course,” Jane said.
The orchard was at the south end of the grounds, beyond the kitchen garden and the herb rows where rosemary grew faster than Mrs. Vale could use it.
The morning was warm, the kind of warmth that settled into the skin without effort, and the apple trees were heavy with unripe fruit that would be ready by autumn.
Jane walked beside Thomas on the gravel path and waited for him to explain why they were walking, because Thomas did not walk without purpose any more than he spoke without it.
He did not explain. He walked in silence for several minutes, and the silence was different from his usual silences.
His usual silences were controlled, the silences of a man who had chosen quiet as a discipline.
This silence was uncertain, the silence of a man who had something to show and was not sure how it would be received.
They reached the stone bench beneath the largest apple tree. Thomas sat down and drew a leather-bound book from the inside pocket of his coat, and Jane recognised the book because she had seen him carrying it on three separate occasions and had assumed it was a journal or an estate record.
“I should like to show you something,” he said. “You may find it alarming.”
“That is not a reassuring preface, Thomas.”
“No. I could not think of a better one.”
He opened the book and held it out to her, and Jane took it and looked at the first page and went very still. It was a sketch, in ink, quick and confident, a basket of muffins tilting with the oilcloth sliding to one side, the courtyard flagstones suggested in a few lines.
“This is the morning I arrived,” she said. “The basket falling. You have drawn it as though you remembered every angle of it.”
“I did remember every angle of it. I have found that the things I do not say aloud, I keep instead in some other form. That morning I kept in quill and ink before the day was out.”
She turned the page, and found her own hands shaping pastry at her station, the left hand leading as Mrs. Vale had taught her, the flour on her forearms indicated with a few pale marks that somehow caught both the texture and the light.
The page after held the bakery sign, Rennet’s in the lettering she had known since childhood, the letters not quite accurate.
“You have drawn the sign from memory,” she said. “The letters are wrong, just slightly. You were remembering it rather than copying it.”
“I have only seen it once, from the lane. I drew it as I had kept it, which is not the same as how it stands.”
She turned on, slowly now, through her own profile at the kitchen window, the herb garden shears Mrs. Vale kept in their precise row, the lemon water glass with its two slices and never three. At that one she stopped.
“Two slices,” she said. “You drew the water with two slices, which means you knew about the water long before I asked Mrs. Croft who had been leaving it. It was you the whole time.”
“It was me the whole time.” He said it simply, watching her face rather than the page.
“I asked her three times whose hand it was. She told me furniture migrated in old houses and that I would be surprised what arrived in a kitchen without anyone owning to it.” Jane heard the edge come into her own voice and did not entirely trust where it came from.
“You let me wonder for a fortnight, Thomas, when you might have simply said it.”
“If I had said it, you would have thanked me and then drunk less of it, out of a sense of owing me something.” He met her eyes.
“I did not want you to owe me. I wanted you to be less thirsty. The two are not the same, and I could only have one of them if I said nothing, so I said nothing. Turn another.”
She turned to a drawing of the lower gate at dusk, the lantern lit, a small figure on the lane that was unmistakably herself, walking away, seen from the exact distance he had kept every evening as he watched her go.
“You watched me leave,” she said quietly. “Every evening. The lantern was never household management at all.”
“The lantern was the one thing I could give you without declaring myself, and I drew the leaving because I could not stop you doing it.”
“From which window?”
“The study. It faces the lower gate, which I had never once thought a virtue of the room until you began walking out through it at dusk.” He said it evenly, as though reporting the weather, and the evenness was what made it land.
“I told myself I was making certain you reached the lane safely. By the second week I had stopped pretending that was the reason, and I lit the lantern anyway, and I drew you anyway, and I did not let myself think too closely about why a man watches the same woman walk away every evening and minds it more each time.”
Jane looked at the small figure on the page, at the care in the few lines that made it unmistakably her, and found she had nothing steady to say to it. “There are two more, you said.”
“There are two more, if you can bear them.”
She turned, and found a sketch of her hands alone, nothing else, the knuckles flour-dusted and the wrists bare, more carefully rendered than anything before it, and then the last page, smaller and lighter, her own face caught three-quarters in the moment before she had noticed him watching, her expression entirely unguarded.
“You have drawn my hands as though they were worth a whole page,” she said, and her voice was not steady. “They are the most ordinary part of me.”
“They are the part of you I watched longest, and there is nothing ordinary about them.” He looked at the last sketch over her shoulder. “That one I drew from memory as well. You did not know I was looking, which is the only reason I caught your face as it truly is.”
“You have been watching me a great deal, Thomas,” she said, and her voice was not entirely steady.
“I have watched you a great deal, yes, and I have set down most of what I watched in this book.”
“Should I be scandalised by that?”
“You would be within your rights, and I would not blame you for it in the least.”
“Are you sorry?”
He hesitated. The pause was a genuine one, the deliberation of a man weighing the security of a polite falsehood against the hazard of candour. Jane watched him choose the latter, an effort quite visible in one for whom truth demanded far greater fortitude than silence.
“For the impropriety, yes,” Thomas said. “For the looking, no.”
Jane closed the sketchbook, and her hands were careful with it, because she understood now what she was holding.
Months of him, set down in ink because he could not set it down in speech, and handed across a stone bench to the one person it was about.
For a man who rationed every word, it was as near to undressing in public as he was capable of coming.
“You draw well,” she said.
“I draw what I see.”
“You see a great deal.”
“I have had four years of practice in seeing. It is one of the skills silence teaches.”
Jane handed the sketchbook back. Their fingers brushed during the exchange, briefly, and the brief contact moved through her with the same quiet force that his thumb on her knuckles had carried in the parlour.
Thomas looked at the place where their hands had touched and then at her face, and his expression held that mixture of wanting and restraint she had come to know as the most sincere thing about him, the wanting always there and the restraint always winning, though by a narrower margin each time.
“What did you want,” Thomas asked, “when you were a young girl?”
The question surprised her. She had expected more questions about the kitchen or the house. She had not expected a question about the past, and the unexpectedness opened something in her that the domestic questions had not reached.
“I wanted the bakery to be famous enough that my mother could rest on Sundays,” Jane said.
“She has not rested on a Sunday since I can remember. She bakes before dawn and serves until noon and cleans until evening and plans until she falls asleep. I used to watch her hands while she slept, and they moved, Thomas. Even sleeping, her hands kneaded.”
“And the second?”
“London. Once. Not to live there. To see it. I have never been further from Millcombe than the county town. I wanted to know what it looked like when there were more streets than a person could walk in a day and more people than she could count.”
“We could go to London.”
“We could. But I wanted London as a girl who had never seen anything larger than a market town. As a woman, I find I want different things.”
“What things?”
“I want to be good at this,” Jane said, and the honesty of the answer surprised her. “At being a wife. At being here. I want to be good at it the way I am good at pastry, where the work is honest and the results visible and the standard clear.”
“And the third?”
“Pastry training. Proper training, from someone who knew more than my mother, which felt disloyal to want and necessary to admit.”
“Mrs. Vale has taught you those things.”
“Mrs. Vale has taught me most of them. The rest I am still learning. There are always things left to learn. That is the nature of a craft.”
“And the fourth?”
Jane looked at him. “A room with morning light. I have always worked better in morning light. It makes the flour look warmer. It makes the kitchen feel as if the bread has already decided to rise.”