XVI The First Hour
XVI
The First Hour
She was his.
For a handful of seconds, he did not speak.
He could not. He was standing two feet from her in the dark with her hands still in his, and he had just heard her speak vows she had not been able to find the words for — heard her voice catch on the second whatever, heard her cast about after what he had said because she had nothing of her own to reach for.
She had been shaking since the door opened. She was shaking still. He had known her for nearly a year and had never seen her tremble at anything in her life, and the reason she was trembling now was him.
He pitched his words very low. He had rehearsed the whisper in this room for a fortnight, spoken into the dark until it came without effort. “Are you cold?”
A second of silence. “Yes.”
“Will you come with me?” He tightened his grip on her hands very slightly — not a pull, only an indication — and stepped half a pace back.
She did not move.
He felt it before he knew it — her arm locked, her whole body locked, her hands rigid in his, the refusal coming out of a place that had not paused to be consulted.
She was standing in a bedchamber with a man she had never seen, who had just called himself her husband and had asked her to come with him, and her body had done what her body could do.
“Only to the table,” he whispered. Low, flat, as plain as he could make it. “Mrs MacLeod laid supper before we came in. I want to take you there and put you in a chair. Nothing else.”
Her hands did not relax. But after a moment, her feet moved. He released one of her hands so she might walk beside him.
He went slowly. He counted the steps for her without saying so — eight to the table from where she had stood — and when they were two paces away, he said, “Two more. The chair is on your right.” She put her free hand out and found the back of it.
Over it, draped, was a folded wool blanket — her fingers closed briefly on it before they found the wood.
He let go of her other hand so she could lower herself. She sat.
He took the blanket from the chair back, shook it open, and brought it around her shoulders — not settling it on her, not letting his hands rest there, only drawing it forward until the edges met at her collarbone and then letting it go. The weight of the wool fell into place on its own.
“The fire was not lit tonight. The room will not warm itself.”
He reached to take her hands. He missed — his knuckles caught her forearm through her sleeve, and he pulled back.
“Forgive me.”
“You cannot see, either.”
“No.” He found her hands on the second attempt, took them in his. “I cannot.”
He had practised this in the dark all week — where the plate would be, where the silver cover, where the knife, where the glass — and he knew the arrangement of the table as surely as if he had laid it himself. Her hands had been the variable.
He brought her right hand down to the rim of the plate and let her fingers rest there. He was leaning over her, close enough that she would have felt the warmth of him if he had been any nearer.
“The plate is directly in front of you.”
He brought her hand out and to the right, to the knife.
He let her fingers close on the handle. “Your knife.” He brought her hand back across, past the plate, and set it on the fork.
“Your fork.” He brought her hand up and to the right again, and held her fingers against the base of the wine glass, which he braced with his other hand so it would not tip.
“Your glass.” He brought her hand across to the far corner of the table.
“There is a candle here in a shallow dish. A flint beside it. When you are alone, you may light it.”
He released her hand. He lifted the silver cover himself, set it aside on the table, and the warm smell of the food came up into the dark between them.
“There is roast beef at the back edge of the plate. Potatoes to the left of it, roasted with herbs. A Yorkshire pudding on your right — Mrs MacLeod had not made one before. I asked her to try. It is a dish, I understand, that is common in Hertfordshire. It may not be quite as you are used to. I hope you will forgive her, and me. There is bread if you prefer it.”
Her hands were very cold, and the tremble in them had dropped from the surface to something deeper as he worked — not gone, only moved inward.
Her hands went still on the table. “Why did you mention Hertfordshire?”
He had been waiting for it. He had not been able to decide, in the planning of tonight, whether to offer the information ahead of her question or to give it when she asked, and on the whole, he had thought better to let her ask.
Answering it took nothing from him, and it gave her the sound of her own voice in the room asking a question and receiving a plain reply, which he thought she would find useful.
“I had your family enquired after before I made the offer. Thoroughly. This is not the sort of arrangement a man should propose without taking care. I wanted to be sure of your character and your circumstances. I learned what I could — what any gentleman making such a proposal would learn — and on the strength of what I learned, I sent the solicitor.”
There. That sounded plausible.
“If you would like, in the coming days, to know what I was told and what I asked after, I will give you the whole of it. I will not keep that part from you.”
“I have my fork,” she said.
He smiled in the dark. She had heard everything he said and was choosing not to take any of it up, and was letting him know she had chosen, and was doing it by declining to speak about anything larger than her cutlery. It was the most like herself she had sounded all evening.
He straightened. He moved around the table and took the chair across from her — not beside her. He had thought about this too. She should have the table between them, a known distance, something she could feel.
In the quiet, he could hear her — the small shift of her weight against the chair, the faint clink of her fork on the plate, the catch of cloth as her elbow brushed the table and she adjusted for it.
He was listening for her breath. He had been listening for it since he straightened away from her shoulder, pitched his ear towards any change in the rhythm that would tell him whether she was easing.
Her fork came down on the plate with a clatter that was louder than the ones before it. He heard her go still, heard the short breath she drew and let out, and then she spoke.
“You said…”
She stopped. He waited.
“I suppose you did not say I may ask any questions I liked. But I am going to ask them, and I assume you will not object.”
He did not at once answer. She had been in this house less than an hour. She had been his wife for less than half that. She was sitting three feet from him, shaking under a borrowed blanket, and she was already testing the boundaries of the thing. He would have expected no less of her.
“Ask whatever you wish.”
“What rooms do I have the use of?”
“The entire house. All but the upper floor. The solar above this room, south-facing. The library on the second floor — three walls, floor to ceiling. There is an upper floor that is mine alone. The door from the stairwell will always be locked. You will not encounter me there, and I will not be anywhere else in the house during daylight hours. You have my word on that.”
“And by night?”
“By night — I had hoped, if it is agreeable to you, that we might take supper together here. In this room. It is yours. It is private. It can be dark. And it has a lock, which you may employ at any time. I will not challenge it.”
“You… you are telling me I may lock you out?”
“I am telling you that you may. Tonight, or any night. Without explanation.”
She swallowed so hard, he heard her throat working. “But that… That is not what I was led to expect.”
“Would you prefer that I did not respect your privacy?”
She made a garbled sort of half-snort, and he heard her picking up her wine-glass rather than answering. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its held-back edge.
“Will… will you tell me about the library?”
She was trying to be herself — already, before her hands had warmed, before she had half a glass of wine in her. A lesser woman would be silent and quaking still. He loved her more in that stumble than he had thought himself capable of loving a person he could not touch.
He had known this would be near the first of her questions. He had arranged the library for her over the last two weeks, half of them spent not knowing whether she would come. He had the whole of it by heart.
“Three walls, floor to ceiling. South-facing, so the light is on the books most of the day. The fourth wall is a bank of windows that looks towards the sea — there is a window seat along it, deep enough to lie down in if one wished. Two chairs, one by the fire and one by the south window. A writing desk under the east window with paper and ink that are yours. I have not filled the shelves. The top is bare. I thought you might like to choose what goes there. More books can be ordered, if you wish.”
“I will require my own supply of candles in my rooms. I assume the existing… arrangement… applies only to our shared company?”
“Your rooms are entirely your own. You may have as many candles as you wish and light the chamber like a ballroom when I leave. I believe there is already a good stock laid in for you.”
“And I may write to my sister?”
“At any time. As often as you wish. Mrs MacLeod will see the letters sent.”
“Daily?”
“If you write daily, it will go daily.”
He heard her breath change. He knew what that word meant to her. What her sister meant to her, because her presence here was the proof of it.
“I may have visitors?”