XXXIII Five Minutes #2
Her thumbs moved against his hands. Her breathing slowed. “You promised me,” she said, and the voice was wet and unsteady and very near him, “when you offered. You said that if at the end of a year I asked to go, you would let me go.”
He was a long way past the careful instrument the whisper had been an hour ago. He was not sure what was holding it together at all.
“Yes,” he said. “By Scottish law, with every protection it allows. The contract is in your favour. It would be honoured to the letter. You would not be forced to stay, and you would not be destitute if you choose to leave.”
“After a year?”
The cold of it went through him. She was making it real — not in argument, not in anger, only the small, near voice in the dark setting the terms of the door he had built her.
His own hand had gone cold inside hers, and because she would feel it and would know what it meant, he made himself answer before she could ask him a second time.
“I would not have you wait the year. The year was never a condition. It was the longest stretch of your life I believed myself entitled to ask for. If you ask it sooner, you have only to say so. And —” he had to make himself draw the breath for it — “should there prove to be a child, the same is true. Provision will be made. For both of you. Whatever you choose, neither of you will be left.”
Her hands had tightened on his at the sooner. They tightened again at the child. He had given up trying to read her feelings in the dark months ago and was only now, sitting at her knee in this room, learning what it was to be without her face when he needed it.
“Then why?” Her voice was not the voice he knew.
“If you would let me go for the asking, why bring me here at all? Why marry me? Why three months of suppers and a fire screen and a dog and my father’s book and every careful evening you have given me, if any of it could be undone by my asking? What is this for?”
He tried to begin twice. He did not know how to answer her without naming what he could not name.
“When I was made aware of your situation, I was made aware of the marriage you were being forced into.
I had the means to give you another door.
I had no honourable way to do it but the one I chose, and I could not…
I could not know what was about to be done to you and do nothing.
It was enough that I could prevent it. The year was so that you might have time to discover whether you could bear me, and a way out if you could not.
“What you have given me since has been more than I have any honest claim to. I do not know how to tell you what three months at this table have been for me. I am not asking you for an answer tonight, Elizabeth. I am only asking that you not think it was a transaction. It has never been a transaction to me.”
She sniffed. “I am not going. There is nothing for me to go to. My sister thought she was loved, and she was being used. I have been wearing this ring for three months, and I have not had one hour at this table that I would call a lie. The strangest thing that has ever been done for me has been the kindest. I am choosing you.”
A sound came out of him that he had not given permission for.
It left him before he heard it, and then he heard it — low, broken, more breath than voice — and then her hands closed on his with something that was not quite holding and not quite shaking, and he knew that she had heard it too, and what she had taken from it.
“But I cannot be alone tonight. Not after this. Not with what Lydia thought was love and what it turned out to be. I need…” She stopped.
There was a broken sniff, and one hand left his to dash away something from her face.
“I need whatever you can give me. Whatever love you are capable of. Not to be left at the door another night. I need you to stay.”
The whisper broke in his throat. “Elizabeth—”
“Do not tell me it is unwise.” Her voice was fraying. “I know the arguments. Tonight I cannot bear them.”
He twined his fingers through hers. There was one way he could justify this to his own conscience.
One way he could absolve himself in the morning, if she kept on in this way.
He had nothing with which to resist her if she insisted, but there was one thing he had to know.
“Do you think,” he asked, “that you could love me?”
She was quiet. He waited.
“I hardly know you. I know your hands. I know—I think I know the shape of your mind beneath the whisper, and what it costs you to say as little as you do. I know how you argue and what makes you nearly laugh, and what you will not say rather than say it wrong. I know that you arranged a hundred kindnesses no one else would have thought to do, and I cannot account for one of them. I am coming to care for the man those things belong to. I cannot promise more than that because there is more of you than I have been given, and I do not know yet what it holds.”
She turned her hands in his, gripping rather than being held. “But please. Let me hold what I have. It is all I have. I cannot discover tonight that it amounts to nothing. Tell me it is not nothing. Tell me that what you have given me is real.”
He could not speak.
Real? He had nearly emptied his emergency accounts and exposed himself beyond any rational measure, and she wanted him to assure her that his love for her was real?
He had been loving her since Hertfordshire, since Rosings, since every dark evening at this table when he had rationed himself to six feet and called it sufficient.
He could not give her the history of it without the name.
But the fact of it… that much he could give her. That much was true without condition.
“My heart beats moment by moment for you. Whatever else is withheld — that is yours. Everything I can give you is yours.”