Chapter Fifteen #3
The dessert course arrived then, and it featured a tart Mrs. Vale had made from Jane’s own recipe, which Jane declined to mention, since naming it would only have handed her neighbour a fresh blade.
The party withdrew to the drawing room, and there Mrs. Whitchurch turned to the Aldermere grounds, asking after the gardens in a voice that sounded horticultural and felt like a survey of territory she had expected to find unoccupied, and Jane answered each question with the unhurried pleasantness she had learned from Margaret across twenty years of difficult customers, and gave away nothing at all.
By the time the last carriage departed, Jane’s composure was intact and her jaw ached from the effort of maintaining it. Her dress felt heavier than it had at the start of the evening, as though the hours of careful performance had added physical weight to the fabric.
Thomas found her in the upstairs corridor.
“I should have defended you,” he said.
“You did not know I was being attacked.”
“I knew when you stopped smiling properly.”
Jane looked at him. The corridor was dim and the candles were guttering and Thomas was standing three feet away with the expression of a man who was angry at himself for failing to protect her from something he had not seen coming.
“You noticed.”
“Very little about you escapes me, Jane. The sketchbook should have made that clear.”
“Did you want to speak? During the fish course.”
“I wanted to speak during the fish course, the meat course, the dessert, and approximately four of Mrs. Whitchurch’s observations about the refreshing qualities of your background.”
“Then why did you not?”
Thomas paused, a moment of unaffected honesty that spoke more than words. “Because I was not certain you wanted me to. And I have learned, badly and recently, that doing things for you without asking is not always what you need.”
Jane’s chest ached. The answer was so exactly right, so precisely the lesson he had been learning since Louisa told him he was solving her, that the rightness of it undid her more than any intervention would have.
“Did you want me to speak?” he asked.
Jane considered the question with more care than she had given anything all evening. “Not then. But I wanted you to see me.”
“I did.”
“I know. I could feel it. When Mrs. Whitchurch said the word ’humble,’ I could feel you watching from the head of the table, and the watching was what kept me from quailing.”
“You did not quail.”
“I wanted to. I wanted to very much. She is skilled, Thomas. She does not insult. She positions. She places words like ‘humble’ and ‘refreshing’ and ‘industrious’ where they will do the most work, and the work is to remind me that I do not belong here.”
“You belong here.”
“I am learning to believe that. The learning is slower than I would like.”
Thomas took her hand. The gesture was quiet and deliberate, his fingers closing around hers in the dim corridor with the dying candles and the house settling.
“You told a story about saffron buns and made a table of strangers laugh, and you did it while a woman twice your age was trying to make you feel small. That is not the behaviour of someone who does not belong.”
“That is the behaviour of someone who has spent one and twenty years in a bakery learning to manage difficult customers.”
“Then Mrs. Whitchurch is a difficult customer, and you managed her, and the management was more impressive than anything I could have done by speaking.”
“What would you have said?”
“Something brief and devastating and probably unwise.”
“I should have liked to hear it.”
“I should have liked to say it. But you needed the victory to be yours, and it was.”
Jane’s throat tightened. He was right. If Thomas had spoken during the fish course, the table would have seen a duke defending his wife, and the defence would have been his, not hers.
By staying silent, by watching without intervening, he had given her the space to defend herself, and the defence had been more powerful for being her own.
“Was it sufficient?” he asked.
“It was sufficient.”
She placed her hand on his arm. He covered it with his own. They stood in the dim corridor with the candles dying and the contact small and warm and exactly what both of them needed.
“Mrs. Whitchurch arrived with a Garrick cousin,” Jane said, after a moment.
Thomas’s hand tightened on hers. “Which cousin?”
“I did not catch the name. But she spent the evening observing you with an attention that felt less social than strategic. And she left before the others, which suggests she had seen what she came to see.”
“What do you think she came to see?”
“Whether I would fail. Whether the baker’s daughter would embarrass herself at her own dinner table and give the county a reason to question the duke’s judgement.”
Thomas was quiet. “And she saw you succeed.”
“She saw me tell a story about saffron buns. Whether that constitutes success depends on what she reports to the Garricks.”
“It constitutes success, Jane. You disarmed her with a stroke of wit, and dissolved the table into genuine mirth. That is not the response of a woman who does not belong here.”
Jane longed to believe him. The desire was so acute, more like a powerful yearning toward that happier version of herself who might gracefully preside over a dinner-table, captivate an assembly with her wit, and feel entirely at home amidst the heavy draperies and walnut-framed mirrors of a grand house.
The impulse was formidable, her defenses far more fragile than they had been in the past and though this yielding was a faltering progress, and it was honestly felt.
***
The letter arrived the following morning.
It came from Garrick House, addressed to the Duchess of Aldermere, which was itself a provocation, because addressing the letter to Jane’s matrimonial title rather than to her husband’s household suggested that the Garricks considered the duchess, not the duke, the appropriate recipient of their concern.
The stationary was of the finest quality, the hand formal and the matter exceedingly brief.
The lease renewal for the premises currently occupied by Rennet’s Bakery is being reconsidered due to reputational concerns. A meeting between the relevant parties is suggested at their earliest convenience.
Jane read the letter twice. The phrase ‘reputational concerns’ sat on the page with the same pleasant, deniable malice that Piers Garrick’s smiles carried in person.
The letter did not specify whose reputation was concerned.
It did not need to. The concern was Jane’s, and the concern had been manufactured.
She folded the letter and placed it inside the recipe book she kept in her rooms, between the scrap of paper that said ‘good’ and the folded refusal she had never delivered.
Three documents in one book, and the three of them together told a story about a woman whose life had changed faster than her ability to protect the people the changing affected.
She did not show the letter to Thomas. Showing it would lead to action, and Thomas’s action would be swift and generous and would involve purchasing the building or confronting the Garricks or arranging something that removed the problem without consulting her parents.
She could not allow that. The bakery was not hers to save.
It was her parents’ and Margaret’s, and the salvation, if it were truly demanded, would have to be wrought by their own hands.
She hid the letter in the recipe book and went downstairs to breakfast.
Thomas was at the table. He poured her tea without asking how she took it, because he had memorised the answer months ago. He set a banana muffin beside the cup. He looked at her face with the quiet attention that meant he was reading her the way he read everything, carefully and completely.
“You are troubled,” he said.
“I had a poor night’s sleep.”
“You slept well. I heard you. The house is quiet enough that I can hear when you are restless, and you were not restless.”
Jane looked at him and understood that lying to Thomas Bennister was going to be one of the more futile endeavours of her matrimonial life. “I am thinking about something I am not yet ready to discuss.”
“Does it concern the letter which arrived this morning?”
“You saw it?”
“I saw you read it. I saw your expression change. And I saw you put it in the book you keep in your rooms, between two other pieces of paper that you have never shown me.”
Jane set down her cup. “You are very observant, Thomas.”
“Where you are concerned, I miss almost nothing. The sketchbook should have established that.”
“I will tell you about the letter when I have decided what to do about it.”
“And if you decide to do something alone that would be better done together?”
“Then you may say so, and I will listen, and we will argue about it in the manner that has become customary between us.”
Thomas nodded and did not press her, holding back the questions with the same hard-won restraint she had watched him practise since Louisa’s diagnosis, and the holding back cost him visibly, the effort plain in the set of his jaw.
He wanted to ask and to solve and to fix, and for once he did none of it.
Jane drank her tea and ate the muffin, and the letter sat in the recipe book upstairs and in the space across the table between them, and she felt the space widen by the width of one folded sheet she would not yet hand him.
Since the courtyard that distance had only ever closed.
This was the first morning it had moved the other way, and she had done it herself, with her own silence, and she did not yet know how she meant to undo it.