Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Ihave been very patient,” Helena said. She was not sitting still.
She had been circling the morning room since Annabelle arrived, her skirts making their own argument at every turn of the carpet.
“I have said nothing for a very long time, because you are not the sort of woman who requires someone to pick apart her feelings for her, and I try not to insert myself where I am not asked. But I am asking myself now, and the answer I am getting is that I have been patient for too long.”
Annabelle sat in the chair by Helena’s window, her gloves still on, her bonnet in her lap.
She had walked the two streets from Silverford House without a destination and arrived here, and Helena had taken one look at her face, and the embroidery had gone onto the side table, and the bell for tea had been rung with more velocity than it required.
“You don’t need to—”
“I do need to.” Helena turned at the corner.
“I was there the night of the garden. I was there the morning of the wedding. I have watched this since April, Annabelle—this man getting close and retreating, getting close and retreating, until I am half convinced he does it to see what you will do. And now, a week. A full week in the same house, and nothing? That is absolutely abhorrent.”
“He speaks at dinner when James is present,” Annabelle said. “He is not unkind.”
“I know he is not unkind.” Helena sat down abruptly.
“I would find it considerably easier to despise him if he were. He is never unkind, and never quite present, and never quite gone, and somehow that arrangement never becomes simpler no matter how many months pass.” She looked at her hands. “What happened? Before the week began.”
Annabelle turned her gloves over in her lap. She had not planned to say any of it aloud, but Helena was looking at her with the expression she saved for serious things, and the morning room was private, and she was tired of carrying it alone.
“I asked him something,” she said. “About the future. About whether we might—” She stopped. “He has an answer he will not change. I understand the reasons for it, or I believe I do. What I do not understand is why the answer requires him to vacate every room I am in for the next week.”
Helena looked at her steadily. “Because he is afraid of what the conversation cost him,” she said.
“He gave you an honest answer, and honest answers leave him exposed, and exposure frightens him, so he removes himself. He has done this every time he has said something real to you.” She paused.
“I am not making excuses for it. I am only naming what I see from where I am standing.”
“I know the pattern,” Annabelle said quietly. “I have been standing inside it.”
“Then you know it does not improve on its own.”
Annabelle looked at the window. The street below was quiet at this hour. A housemaid was crossing the square with a basket, quick-footed, her cap pressed forward against a small wind.
“He came to my door,” she said. “The night after. I heard him stop in the corridor.” She paused. “He was there, and then he was gone.”
Helena looked at her.
“He didn’t knock,” Annabelle said.
“Did you open it?”
Annabelle said nothing.
“You are as bad as each other,” Helena said, with the tone of a woman who had been holding this observation at some distance and had finally set it down.
“I know that,” Annabelle said. And she did.
She knew perfectly well that she had sat on the other side of that door and not moved, and the knowledge only sharpened the anger that had been sitting behind her sternum since Tuesday.
“But I am the one who went to his study and said what I said. I have been the one, every time, who has walked the distance. At some point he has to walk some of it himself.”
“Yes,” Helena said. “He does.” She stood up. “Right. We are going out.”
Annabelle looked up. “Where?”
“There is a morning market near Craven Street. Mrs. Alderson told Mama about the ribbon stalls last week.” She was already at the bell pull, already in motion.
“We are going to walk about and look at things and you are going to think about nothing useful for one hour. I am going to buy something entirely frivolous to justify the excursion.” She glanced back.
“Your gloves are already on. We only need your bonnet.”
They came down Helena’s front steps at half past eleven, Helena still tying her bonnet ribbons, Annabelle half a step behind with her umbrella not yet raised against the thin morning drizzle.
Dominic was on the pavement.
He was twenty feet along the street, on his way somewhere else—his coat buttoned, his hat on, his gaze traveling the far end of the road when the door opened above him. He turned at the sound of it. He saw them both.
Two seconds passed. Perhaps three.
“Miss Thrupton.” He inclined his head.
“Your Grace.” Helena’s voice was entirely pleasant. “Good morning.”
He looked at Annabelle. “Your Grace.”
“Your Grace,” Annabelle said.
The distance between them was twenty feet of wet cobblestone, and neither of them crossed it. He had not looked away from her. She could not tell, at this range, what his eyes were doing with the looking.
“You are well?” she asked, because something had to go into the gap.
“Well. And you?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“Indeed.”
The maid on the far side of the square had stopped sweeping. Helena, beside Annabelle, drew a breath through her nose.
Then Helena’s hand closed around Annabelle’s wrist.
She had already turned them toward her carriage—already walking, already pulling—when she stopped. She looked back over her shoulder.
“Your Grace.” Her voice was entirely without warmth. “If you continue to break my friend’s heart, this will be the last time you see me taking her away from here. Next time, I will not be so courteous.”
“Helena!” Annabelle gasped, but her friend was having none of it.
“Hush,” Helena said, and kept walking.
Annabelle kept her eyes forward as they passed him, afraid to look either left or right. Six steps. Eight. Ten. Then, because she could not help it, she turned.
He had not moved from the pavement and was watching them go. His hands were at his sides, and his jaw was set, and his face, at this distance, gave her nothing at all.
Of course. What else had she expected? She turned back around and walked.
The market ran along both sides of the lane near Craven Street: a fruit seller, a ribbon stall with bolts wrapped in brown paper, a woman with pressed flowers in small frames, a barrow of household tools that had also, through some logic of its own, accumulated three copper warming pans and a set of ornamental tongs.
A man sold chestnuts from a brazier at the corner, and the smell of them carried down the lane in the grey morning air.
Helena went straight to the ribbons.
“This green,” she said, holding a bolt up toward the grey sky. “Or this one.” She held up a second, a shade darker. “I am trying to decide whether I want to look like spring or like a hedge.”
“The first one,” Annabelle said.
“You didn’t look.”
“The first one is always better.”
Helena put the darker green back. “That is a philosophy, not an answer.” She unrolled a length of the lighter shade across her wrist. “What do you think of this with ivory? My new morning dress has ivory trim and Mama says it will clash, but Mama said the blue pelisse would clash with everything and I have worn it three times this week without incident.”
“It won’t clash.”
“Are you looking at it?”
“No.”
Helena rolled the ribbon back onto the bolt and set it down. She looked at Annabelle. “You are ruining your own disposition, Annabelle. Do not be such a spoilsport.” she said.
Annabelle sputtered. “A spoilsport?”
“Yes, a spoilsport.” Helena insisted, not backing down. “I brought you here so you would forget that infuriating husband of yours for a while, and you are not even trying.”
It…it wasn’t as though it was easy to forget the stone-cold expression on his face, either. He had not even tried to stop her from leaving.
She had not expected him to soften in the middle of Craven Street.
She had not expected anything, which was not entirely true—she had expected, if she was being honest, something other than that particular flatness.
Some acknowledgment in his expression of the week that had passed between them, of what had preceded it.
But his face had been entirely still, and she had turned back around, and that was that.
Seven days in the same house with their dinners served at the same table, and their candles snuffed at approximately the same hours, and they had arrived here. Two people who asked after each other’s health on the pavement and called it a conversation.
James had noticed. He had said so, four days into it, at supper—seated beside Annabelle with his soup spoon in hand and his eyes on the empty chair opposite, and then on her: “Uncle Dominic’s chair has been empty since Sunday.
Is this the arrangement now?” She had told him no.
She did not know whether that was still true.
She stopped at a stall of small decorative pins and trinkets.
Helena had already moved three stalls further on.
Annabelle was alone at the table with its rows of small things, none of which she particularly needed, and the anger that had been building since Tuesday came in now in a way it had not been able to when she was in Helena’s morning room, arranging her voice as precisely as she touched pianoforte keys.
She was his wife. In the complete sense of that word. She had lain awake in the dark and counted his breathing when he woke from the nightmare. They had already lain with each other. Several times!
Did he not want even that from her now? Not the conversation, not the proximity, not the other things that living in the same house had gradually and quietly become?