CHAPTER SIXTEEN #3
Then she put her hand on the handle, and turned it, and waited for the resistance of his bolt on the far side, the resistance that had been there, she had always assumed, every night for four months.
There was no resistance.
The door gave under her hand and swung in toward his room, silent on its hinges, and she stood on the threshold with the candle behind her throwing her shadow long across his floor, and understood, in a slow turning-over of everything, that his bolt was not drawn.
That it had not been drawn. That somewhere in the four nights since the garden, without a word to her, without a card or a message or a servant to carry it, he had gone to his side of this door and drawn back the bolt and left it so, and said nothing, and waited, because opening the door was the most that a man taught what he had been taught could do, and the rest, the asking, the crossing, he had had to leave to her.
He was standing by his own cold hearth, still dressed, a book in his hand that he had plainly not been reading, and he turned when the door moved, and saw her on the threshold in her nightgown with the candle behind her, and neither of them said anything at all for the space of several breaths.
“You unbolted it,” she said.
“Four nights ago.” His voice was low and not steady.
“I could not knock. I have tried, four nights running, to make myself knock, and I could not, because knocking is asking, and I have never in my life learned how to ask for a thing I wanted this much. So I drew the bolt instead, and left it, and hoped you might one day try the door and find it open, and understand from that what I could not find the courage to say across a dinner table.”
“You might have waited forever. I never tried it. I thought it was locked against me. I have thought so for four months.”
“I know. I have lain awake on the other side of it every one of those four nights knowing exactly that, and not able to do the single small brave thing that would have ended it.” He set the book down.
“I am not a brave man, Ellen, whatever the world has been told of me. I am brave about every other thing under the sun. About this I am the greatest coward you will ever meet.”
“Augusta told me about your grandfather.” She said it quietly, still on the threshold, the candle warm at her back.
“The old duke. And your grandmother, and the twenty years he sat alone in one room of a shut house. And your father after him, and your mother. She told me what the house taught you. That to cherish something in the open is to be flayed in front of everyone the day you lose it.”
Something crossed his face, half relief that she knew and half the old fear of being known.
“Then you understand precisely what you would be crossing that threshold toward. A man who believes, in the very marrow of him, that this ends in catastrophe, because every soul in his blood who ever cherished in the open was destroyed by it in the sight of the world.”
“I understand it. And I am going to cross it anyway.” She did not move yet.
“Because the other thing Augusta told me is that you are not cold. That you are a man who feels too much and was taught to keep it pointed at the floor. I spent four months thinking I had wedded a closed door. I would rather spend the rest of my life finding out I wedded the opposite.”
She crossed the threshold.
She did it slowly, and on her own two feet, by her own choice, the first thing in the whole of this bought and bargained matrimony she had chosen entirely for herself, and she crossed his cold floor to where he stood by the cold hearth, and she put the candle down on the mantel, and she looked up at him, and she watched the fear and the wanting war in his face and watched the wanting win, slowly, the way a fist opens.
“Then be a coward,” she said. “I will be brave enough for the both of us tonight. I have had four months’ practice at being braver than I feel.”
He lifted his hand, and touched her face, the first time he had touched her with no duty and no rescue in it, only this, and his hand was not steady, and she turned her cheek into the unsteadiness of it and felt the whole of his held breath go out of him at once.
He bent his head slowly, giving her every chance to step away, and when she did not step away he kissed her, and it was nothing at all like the dutiful dark of the wedding night, because there was no duty in it and no dark and no part of him held carefully off at a distance.
There was only a man who had been afraid for years discovering, with great care and very little skill and an honesty that undid her, that the thing he had guarded against the whole of his life was not, after all, a loaded gun, but only this, only her, only the warmth of being at last on the same side of a door as the person he was devoted to.
And then she reached behind her, without looking, and found the edge of the door, and pushed it slowly shut, and the latch went home with a small sound in the quiet, and on her side of it the candle she had set on the mantel burned low and steady and lit the rest for no one but the two of them.