Chapter Sixteen
“I have something to tell you, Theo, and I am going to tell it to you in the middle of the morning with the curtains open and the door wide, because it is the sort of thing that ought only ever to be said in daylight.”
“Is it a bad thing, Papa? You have your daylight face. You only open the curtains for bad things.”
“I have been doing that, haven’t I? That is going to change.
” Nathaniel sat down on the small hard chair that was made for a boy and not for a duke, because he had decided that this was a conversation to be had at the boy’s height and not from above it.
“It is a good thing. It is the best thing I have arranged in seven years, and I arranged it on purpose, gladly, with both eyes open, and I want you to hear it from me and not through any door. I am going to marry Miss Wrenfield.”
Theo went very still, the still of a child who had learned that good news is the kind that gets taken back.
“She is not going away?”
“She is not going away. She is staying here, in this house, with us, for the rest of all our lives, and she is staying because I asked her to and because she chose to say yes, and not because anyone made her. Do you understand the difference? It matters that you understand the difference.”
“She chose to.”
“She chose to. She had the choice of leaving, and a very good reason to take it, and she stayed instead. People do not stay for you unless they choose you, Theo. Remember that your whole life. It is nearly the only useful thing I know.”
“Did you choose her, or did she choose you? You said both and that cannot be right, it has to be one.”
“It has to be both, as it happens, which is the part nobody warns you of. I chose her, very badly, in my study, and she said no, because I had done it like a man settling an account. Then I chose her again, better, in your schoolroom, and that time she chose back. You only have a thing worth keeping when both of you have done the choosing. One person choosing is just a purchase.”
“Was the no part frightening?”
“It was the most frightening thing that has happened to me since your fever, and I have decided to be glad of it, because a yes that costs nothing is worth exactly what it costs.”
“Will there be cake?”
“There will be a great deal of cake. There will be cake enough to founder a smaller boy, and music, and Mrs Coombe weeping into the soup, and your grandmother’s empty chair if she chooses to leave it empty, and you in a coat that you will complain about.
It is called a wedding. People survive them, mostly, and some of us are even improved. ”
“I have thought of a word. For Miss Wrenfield. I shall not tell you what it is, because it is mine and hers and not anyone else’s, and you said the good ones take time, so I shall tell her when it is ready.”
“Quite right. Some words are not for fathers. Go and not tell her at once, before you burst with it.”
The boy launched off his small chair and into his father without warning, a thing he had never once done in seven years.
Nathaniel caught him as he had caught him out of the mud, and held on.
Over the sandy head he found the open door he had insisted upon, the daylight lying honest across the schoolroom floor, and thought that perhaps he had got one thing right at last.
“Will she be my mother?”
He had known the question would come. He had not known it would arrive against his collarbone in a small fierce whisper, which was how the hardest ones tended to come.
“What would you like her to be?”
“I do not know. I had a mother. I do not remember her, but I had one, and there is a picture, and on Sundays you used to look unhappy near it. I do not want to do a wrong thing to the picture.”
“You cannot do a wrong thing to the picture. The picture is safe. Your mother is yours, and she stays yours, and nothing that happens in this house will take a single inch of her away from you, because love is not a coat that only fits one person at a time.” Nathaniel was working it out as he said it, which was the only honest way he had ever worked anything out.
“Miss Wrenfield will be whatever the two of you decide she will be, in your own time, and there is no hurry, and there is no correct answer. You may call her Miss Wrenfield for ten years if you like and she will not mind. She told me so herself. She said the only thing she would mind was being hidden, and so we are not going to hide her, and that is why the curtains are open.”
“I should like to call her something that is only ours. Not Mama. Mama is in the picture. Something that is only mine and hers.”
“Then you shall invent it, and it will be the best word in the house, because the two of you will have made it. Take your time over it. The good words take time. You named the stag beetle Hector inside a morning and you have regretted Hector ever since.”
“Hector is a dignified name.”
“Hector is a beetle in a jar with delusions of empire, and you know it, and you are too kind to admit it. Choose better for Miss Wrenfield than you chose for the beetle. That is all your father asks.”
The boy laughed, which was the sound Nathaniel had walked into the schoolroom to buy and had not been at all sure of his price.
He set the boy back on his feet and looked at him gravely, one man to another.
“There is one more thing, and it is the grown-up part, so attend. Your grandmother wrote to say you must leave us. To go to Estbury, or to a school, until the talk in this house was put right.”
“She wanted to take me away.”
“She thought she was protecting you. People do a very great deal of harm under that flag, your father chief among them, for seven years. But yes. She wanted to take you away, and I have written back this morning to tell her you are staying, and that a duke with a duchess keeps a house no soul in England may call unfit. I told her that she may come to the wedding or stay at Estbury and be as cross as she pleases, but that she will not have you while I am above the ground.”
“You said no to a marchioness. For me.”
“I said no to a marchioness for you, and I shall do it again as often as required, and you are to remember it on the days you are sure no one chose you, because I am tired of you believing that and I mean to drown the belief in evidence.”
***
He found Elinor in the gallery in the late afternoon, which had stopped being a place he found her by accident. She was standing in front of the long window with a parcel he had left with Mrs Garnett unopened in her hands.
“You have not opened it.”
“I did not know if I was permitted to. I have never been given a parcel in this house. I have given a great many. It is a different posture entirely, receiving, and I find I am out of practice.”
“You may open it. It will not improve with age, and neither, the physician assures me, will I.”
She unwrapped it carefully, saving the paper, as she did everything, and inside was a book bound in blue leather, soft and unmarked, its pages empty. She turned it in her hands and did not understand it, and he watched her with more pleasure than he had taken in anything for a long while.
“It is empty.”
“It is a travelling journal. The kind a person carries to write down what they see. The shops are full of them, full of empty pages waiting for the Alps and the Forum and the bay at Naples.” He had to clear his throat to get the rest out, because the rest was the part that mattered.
“I have written one line in it. On the first page. The rest is for you.”
She opened to the first page, and read it, and went still in the particular way that he had learned, was the opposite of indifference.
For the places already known by heart, and not yet seen.
She read it, and read it again, her thumb moving over the words as a person touches a thing to be sure it is solid, and she said nothing for long enough that he began to fear he had got it wrong.
“No one has ever given me a future before. Only positions. A position is all present tense, the same Tuesday over and over until they no longer require you, with no after in it anywhere. This is nothing but after.”
“You said you learned Italy in a cold room by wanting it,” he said, to the window, because it was easier than saying it to her.
“I have spent a great deal of money seeing places I did not want, in order to come home and refuse to look at them. You have spent nothing and wanted all of it. One of us has been doing it correctly, and it is not the one who is speaking right now.”
“You are giving me an empty book and calling it a gift.”
“I am giving you the most expensive thing in the house, which is the only blank page in it. Everything else here has been written on by dead people. That one is yours. I should like, when we are married, to take you to the places that go in it. The real ones. I should like to stand in the actual Forum beside the only person I have ever met who knows what it was for.”
“It is smaller than the engraving, I am told. The Forum. Everyone says so. They go expecting Rome, and they find a field with some broken columns in it and a great many cats.”
“Then we shall go expecting a field with cats, and be the only two travellers in the history of the Grand Tour who are not disappointed, because we shall have wanted the right thing.” He almost smiled, which on that face was a considerable event.
“The journal comes before the journey, in any case, but the wanting came first.”
“Where would you take me first?” The wanting was in her voice now, plain and undisguised, the wanting she had spent an entire career keeping folded inside other people’s children.
“Rome. It is the place you have always wanted to visit. Then Greece, and you would scold me the whole road there for putting Rome before it, but I should have the novel pleasure of being corrected by an authority instead of by a fool.”
“I should want the bay at Naples in the evening. Every book I have read lies about that bay, and they all lie in the same direction, which is how I know there is a truth underneath the lie. I should like to stand in the middle of the lie and find out which part of it is the truth, and write that part down, in the blue book, and never tell anyone but you.”
“Your Grace.” The steadiness had gone out of her voice, and she did not chase after it, which was new.
“That is the other thing.” He turned from the window. “You are going to be my wife in three weeks, and you cannot call me Your Grace across a pillow. It would be absurd, and we shall both laugh and ruin everything. My name is Nathaniel. You may use it.”
“I cannot.”
“You can. It is four syllables. You have managed Italian ones far longer and far stranger in front of fourteen people at dinner.”
“Those were not yours.” She held the book against her like a shield that had stopped being needed.
“I have called you Your Grace for the whole of my acquaintance with you. It is a wall, and I built it carefully, brick by brick, because it was the only thing keeping me on the right side of my situation. You are asking me to take it down all at once in a gallery on a Tuesday, and I find the bricks do not come away as easily as you put them up.”
“You built a wall of two words to keep yourself employed, and now I am asking you to be unemployed, which is a great deal to ask of a careful woman in a single afternoon.”
“It is.”
“Then do not take it down all at once. Begin with one.” He came closer, and stopped at the distance a betrothed man was permitted and not an inch nearer, because the distances still mattered to him and he wanted her to see that they did.
“One letter. N. It is a beginning, and beginnings are the one thing I have ever been any good at. The middles defeat me, and the staying nearly killed us both, but beginnings I can manage. Try it. Only the letter.”
“N,” she said, and the saying of it cost her something visible, and she paid it.
“There. One brick. The house is still standing, you will note, and the county has not heard the crash. You may put it back tomorrow if you find you cannot bear it. The offer does not expire.”
“You are being very patient. It does not suit you. I have watched you frighten an entire dinner table, and now you are standing in a gallery negotiating over a single consonant as though it were a treaty, and I find I trust the patient version of you a great deal less than the impatient one, because I do not yet know what it wants.”
“It wants the rest of the name, in your own time, and it is prepared to wait years for it, which is a sentence I could not have spoken last autumn.” He looked at the blue book held against her.
“And it wants, more immediately, to be permitted a thing that betrothed people are permitted, which I will not take without asking, having taken a great deal in this house already by simply assuming I had the right.”
“What thing?”
“Your hand. Only your hand. I am aware of every door in this gallery and so are you, and I would not have you uneasy on your own ground.”
“There. The wall is one brick down. The house has not fallen.” He held out his hand, palm up, an old and formal gesture, the gesture a man makes to a lady at the head of a set. “May I?”
She put her hand in his, and he closed his fingers around it slowly, a man closing them on a thing wanted long enough that he had stopped expecting to hold it.
He bent over it and kissed the back of the hand. Then he did the one thing that was nowhere in the permitted gesture at all. His thumb moved up to her wrist and came to rest there, on the place where her pulse was running a great deal faster than her face would own to.
He straightened, but did not let go at once, and she did not take the hand back. The two of them stood in the long gallery light with the thing between them at last unhidden and unhurried and entirely their own.
“I have called you Your Grace eleven hundred times,” she said.
“I counted, once, in a temper. It kept me safe. It kept me employed and unfoolish, and on the correct side of a line I could not afford to cross. I am about to be on the wrong side of every line I ever drew, in a church, in front of the county, with your name on the register beside mine, and I find I am not nearly so frightened of it as I was an hour ago, which I lay entirely at the door, an empty book and a thumb that did not know its place.”
“It knew exactly its place. That was the difficulty with it.”
“Yes,” Elinor said. “I noticed.” She turned the blue book once in her free hand, and looked at the inscription again, and then at him, and gave him the brick herself, whole, without being asked for it. “Nathaniel.”