Chapter Fifteen #2
Thomas listened without interrupting. He did not reach for his quill.
He did not make a note. He did not immediately offer to provide all four things, which was what the Thomas of three months ago would have done.
The restraint was growth, visible and deliberate, and Jane recognised it because she had been watching him the way he had been watching her, with an attention that exceeded professional interest.
“You are not going to arrange for any of those things,” Jane said.
“I am not going to arrange for any of those things.”
“Even though you want to.”
“Even though I want to. Very much.”
“That is progress, Thomas.”
“Clumsy progress, and I make no claim otherwise.”
“Clumsy and honest, which you have persuaded me is the only progress worth the name.”
He almost smiled. The echo of the parlour sat between them with the weight of shared history, and the weight was warm.
They walked back through the orchard in a silence that was comfortable for the first time.
Not the controlled silence Thomas used as discipline.
Not the uncertain silence of a man deciding what to show.
The simple, undecorated silence of two people who had run out of things that needed saying and were content to walk without filling the space.
Jane noticed, as they passed through the house, that Thomas adjusted his route.
He turned left where the corridor branched, taking the longer way around the first floor rather than passing through the passage that led to the north corridor.
The adjustment was small, natural enough that a less attentive observer might have missed it.
Jane did not miss it. She had been in the house long enough to know its geography, and the geography of Thomas’s avoidance was becoming as legible as the geography of his affection.
He knew she had found the locked door. He knew she had not asked again.
He was avoiding the corridor when she was near.
Steering them both away from the question that lived behind the locked door.
He was not ready to answer it and could not could not endure the burden of deceit.
The only remaining option was to pretend the corridor did not exist.
Jane let him pretend. She would not let him pretend forever, but she would let him pretend today, because the sketchbook had been enough honesty for one morning and she understood that Thomas’s honesty came in portions he could manage, and managing was not the same as withholding.
***
The dinner was on Saturday.
Jane had been preparing for it the way she prepared for everything, thoroughly and with anxiety she did not show.
Mrs. Croft, who understood formal dinner protocol the way Mrs. Vale understood pastry, had spent two afternoons coaching Jane on the order of precedence, the placement of glasses, and the careful vocabulary of compliments that the gentry used when they meant the opposite of what they were saying.
“If someone tells you the house looks ‘well-maintained,’ they are complimenting your husband’s income, not your taste,” Mrs. Croft said, arranging place cards on the dining table with surgical precision.
“If they say the food is ‘interesting,’ they did not like it. And if they say you look ‘well,’ they are surprised.”
“Surprised by what?”
“By the fact that you do not have flour in your hair. The county has decided what the baker’s daughter looks like, Your Grace, and your job on Saturday is to be recognisable but unexpected.”
“That is a great deal of pressure to place on a dinner.”
“All dinners are a great deal of pressure, Your Grace. That is why we have Mrs. Vale.”
The guest list included local gentry, a baronet and his wife, the vicar and his daughter, a retired colonel who had served with Thomas’s father, and a Mrs. Whitchurch. Mrs. Croft described her as “well-connected.” Whitlock described her as “the sort of woman who could cut glass with a compliment.”
Jane dressed carefully. The dress was new, provided by Louisa from a London modiste who had measured Jane by letter and produced something elegant without being presumptuous.
Jane studied herself in the walnut-framed mirror and beheld a woman who appeared, in three parts, a duchess, and in the fourth, a baker’s daughter who had merely borrowed the finery.
The dinner began well. Jane managed the introductions with the composure Mrs. Croft had coached her through.
The baronet’s wife was kind. The vicar was nervous.
The colonel was deaf in one ear and compensated by speaking as though the entire table were equally impaired.
Thomas sat at the head and spoke when addressed and watched Jane with the quiet attention she had come to understand was a form of support rather than surveillance.
Mrs. Whitchurch arrived late, which was deliberate, and was seated to Jane’s left, which was unfortunate.
She was a handsome woman of fifty with silver hair and a smile that did not extend past her cheekbones.
She wore amethyst earrings and an expression of elegant assessment, and she spent the first course studying Jane with the focused attention of a jeweller evaluating a stone.
“How refreshing,” Mrs. Whitchurch said, during the fish course, “to have a duchess who understands kitchens.”
The remark was delivered with a smile and received by the table with the particular silence that falls when something has been said that sounds like a compliment and is not.
Jane’s hands went still on her fork. The heat that stole into her cheeks was the certain herald of a blush.
With mere moments to decide whether she should succumb to mortification or muster her defenses, she chose neither course. Instead, she embarked upon a narrative.
“My mother once attempted to teach the vicar’s wife to make saffron buns,” Jane said, and her voice was steady because she was making it steady with every ounce of the composure Mrs. Vale had taught her.
“The vicar’s wife was an enthusiastic student, but she confused the saffron with the turmeric, and the buns came out a shade of yellow that my father described as ‘aggressive.’ The vicar ate three of them without complaint and said they were the finest buns he had ever tasted, which was either Christian charity or an impaired sense of colour. ”
The entire table dissolved into laughter, not the hollow mirth of duty, but the unaffected delight of those who have been gifted a tale and captivated by its charm.
The baronet’s wife laughed loudest. The colonel, who had heard approximately half of it, laughed anyway. Even the vicar’s daughter smiled.
Jane let her gaze travel up the table to Thomas, because she could not help it, and found him already watching her.
He did not laugh, of course. He did something better and more private, a single small lift at one corner of his mouth that no one else at the table was positioned to see, meant for her and aimed with the precision of a man who spent his words and his expressions as though both were rationed.
It lasted perhaps a second. It told her plainly that he had seen exactly what she had done and exactly what it had cost her, that he was proud of her and amused by her in equal measure, and that he intended to say so the moment they were alone.
The look went through her warmer than the wine and steadied her more than the laughter had, and she turned back to her left-hand neighbour with the distinct sense of having been kissed across a crowded table without a single soul the wiser.
Mrs. Whitchurch did not laugh. Her expression performed a small recalculation, the adjustment of a woman who had expected Jane to falter and was revising her assessment. The revision did not produce warmth. It produced a different kind of attention, sharper and more careful.
“I understand your mother still operates the bakery,” Mrs. Whitchurch said, during the meat course.
“She does. With my father and my sister Margaret.”
“How industrious. One so rarely meets a duchess whose family is in trade.”
“One so rarely meets a duchess at all, Mrs. Whitchurch. We are not a common species.”
The baronet’s wife smiled into her wine glass. The vicar’s daughter, who had been quiet all evening, looked at Jane with something that might have been admiration.
“I meant no offence,” Mrs. Whitchurch said.
“None was taken. My family’s bakery has served Millcombe for three generations, and I am proud of every loaf.”
“As you should be. Pride in humble origins is always admirable.”
The word humble settled on the table between the silver and the crystal, and Jane let it sit there a moment, because the surest way to make a word like that grow was to swat at it.
“I have never thought of bread as humble,” she said pleasantly.
“Everyone at this table will eat some tomorrow, and a good deal of it the day after, which is more than can be said for most things we are taught to admire. My father would tell you there is no humbler trade than one the world cannot do without, and no prouder one either.”
“Well said,” declared the colonel, who had caught the last of it and approved on principle, and the baronet’s wife inclined her head toward Jane with the small private smile of a woman enjoying a contest she had not expected to find at dinner.
Mrs. Whitchurch’s mouth thinned by a fraction. “You are very ready with an answer, Your Grace.”
“I have served behind a shop counter since I was twelve, Mrs. Whitchurch. One learns to be ready, or one learns to be trampled, and I found the first the more agreeable habit of the two.”