Chapter 6 #2
“No, Your Grace.” She turned then, and her eyes when they came up were not angry, which was worse than angry.
They were certain, with the terrible flat certainty of a person who has had four years to be sure.
“Not uncertain. Empty. There is a difference, and I have had a great deal of time to study it. Uncertain is a letter that might come tomorrow. Empty is the morning you stop going down early to meet the post, because you have understood at last that the going down is the only part of it that was ever yours.”
He had nothing to say to that. The shape of it took the breath out of him, the picture of her going down early, morning after morning, for how long, a season, a year, before she taught herself to stop, and all of it while he sat in the rain in Spain telling himself she was angry and had cause and the letters would keep.
The rain decided it then, as the rain in that country always seemed to decide things, coming up out of the west in a grey wall that had not been there a quarter hour before. The first of it spattered the dust of the lane in fat dark coins.
“There,” he said, pointing. “The folly. Run.”
They ran, the three of them, Melody with one hand holding her bonnet and Sarah gathering her skirts and Cole bringing up the rear like a man herding the only thing he cared about towards shelter, and they gained the little open garden folly at the top of the rise as the sky came down in earnest. It was a small round stone structure, a summer whim of some former Carrow, open on three sides to a view that the rain had erased, with a bench within and just room enough.
Sarah tucked herself under the spreading lime at the path’s edge, near enough to see, far enough not to hear, miserable and dutiful and getting wet.
Cole stood at the open arch of the folly with the rain at his back and Melody behind him on the bench, which put a yard of stone between them and his body between her and the weather, and was as much propriety as the situation could be made to hold.
Thunder came, not overhead this time but rolling in from the hills, and behind him he heard the small caught breath, and he did not turn, because turning would have made it a thing observed, and he had cost her enough of being observed for one lifetime.
“You are counting,” he said, to the rain.
“I am doing nothing of the kind.”
“One, and two, and three. You always reach four before you will admit the storm is leaving. You did it on the church porch. You did it the summer I left, in the orchard, when it came on while we were arguing about Wellington.”
“Do not.” Her voice was low and even and it shook very slightly at the bottom of it, the way a held note shakes.
“Do not catalogue me. Do not stand there with your back turned being gentle and remembering my habits as though four years were a single afternoon you stepped out of. Do not look wounded, either, when you turn round, because I can hear that you mean to. You were not the one people watched.”
“No.” He kept his eyes on the grey ruin of the view. “I was the one absent while they did.”
The rain filled the silence. It came off the dome of the folly in a curtain on every side, and the world shrank to the round stone room and the smell of wet lime and old rain in old stone, and somewhere under the lime Sarah sneezed, and neither of them laughed, though in another life they would have.
“I have spent the day,” Cole said, “looking at letter-books. Where the post went in those years. Through whose hands. There are gaps in it I do not like. A winter you spent away from home. A house in town my mother kept during the mourning, through which my letters and yours would both have passed. I have no proof of anything. I want to be honest with you that I have no proof, because you have had enough of men who were sure of things they could not show you.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because if you received nothing.” He stopped, and made himself say it level, made himself say the whole of it.
“If you truly received nothing, after I wrote until my hands cramped, then there is more wrong between us than pride. Pride I could mend with an apology. This is not pride. This is something done to us, by someone, and I find I would rather it were my own fault, because a man can repair his own faults, and he cannot repair what was done in a house he was four hundred miles from.”
He turned round then, because he could not help it.
She was looking at him, and the certainty had gone out of her face, and in its place was something far more dangerous to them both, the beginning of a question, the first hairline crack in four years of settled grief.
She wanted to believe him. He could see her wanting it, see her standing at the edge of believing him the way she had once stood at the top of the lane with a book against her hip, and he understood, with a soldier’s clarity for the moment a thing turns, that this was costing her more than her anger ever had.
Her anger had kept her safe. The question would not keep her anything.
The question would only open the door her mother had begged her to leave on the latch, and on the other side of it stood either the man who had wronged her or the proof that no one had, and she did not yet know which, and the not knowing had taken the colour from her face.
“That frightens you more than the other,” he said quietly. “Believing me.”
She did not deny it. She looked at him across the yard of wet stone with the rain coming down on every side, and she said nothing at all, and the nothing was the most honest thing she had given him since he came home.