Chapter Eighteen
“You needn’t stand by the door as though you are waiting on a coach in the rain. You live here. You have lived here a year. Only the room has changed.”
“The room has changed a great deal, Your Grace.”
“It is the very room you have walked past three hundred times carrying my son’s washing and my correspondence.
It has a bed in it, which I grant is new to our acquaintance, but the bed is not going to do anything.
Beds are the most passive furniture in the house.
It is only the people in them who get ideas. ”
“You are trying to make me laugh.”
“I am trying to make you stop standing like that, and laughing was the nearest tool to hand. Did it answer?”
“A little. You are not to tell anyone. It would ruin us both.”
“Nathaniel. We have been married since eleven o’clock this morning, and you managed it in the gallery, and I will not have you retreating up the wall again on our first night under the same roof in any official sense. Say it.”
“Nathaniel.” She said it from beside the door, where she had stopped on coming in and had not moved since.
Her hair was down out of its wedding pins.
Her mother’s pearls lay already on the dressing table, set aside the moment she could manage it, as though even they had been a costume she was glad to be out of.
The fire had been built up too high by a maid who believed romance required heat, and the room was close with it.
Elinor stood in the middle of all that warmth as cold and braced as a woman on a doorstep in February.
Nathaniel had spent seven years not noticing the people in his own rooms, but he did not at all like what he noticed now.
“Come away from the door,” he said. “Or stay by it. I am not going to instruct you across your own bedchamber on your wedding night. It would set a tone I should regret for thirty years. But tell me one thing honestly, because we have agreed, you and I, that this is the house where the true things are said. Why do you stand like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a soldier. Mrs Garnett used the word this morning, and I have not been able to forget it. Like someone braced to be marched somewhere unpleasant and resolved to bear it well.”
She did not answer for a moment, but he waited, because he had learned at last that waiting was a thing he could do for the people he cared about.
“I am waiting to be told what is wanted of me,” she said.
“That is all. It is a wedding night. There is a customary thing, and I am not a fool, and I have read more than is good for a governess. I would rather you simply tell me what is expected than stand here being kind to me first, because the kindness makes it worse. The kindness makes me hope, and I have had a very tiring three weeks of hoping, and I should like, tonight, to know what my position requires and to do it well, the way I have always done what a position required.”
“You have read more than is good for a governess. What did you read on this particular subject, I wonder, that has you standing to attention in February?”
“Enough to know that the kind nights and the unkind ones arrive at the same place by morning, and that the kindness is only the road there. I have lost the trick, this last year, of telling the real roads from the painted ones. So let us skip the road. Tell me the place. I will walk there on my own feet and spare us both the pretence of a stroll.”
Nathaniel stood very still in the over-warm room and understood that something was badly wrong.
It was more wrong than wedding nerves, more wrong than any maidenly fear, and he could not put a name to it.
He had married a woman who used the word position about the inside of their own marriage, as though she were describing a place she had been hired into and expected, in time, to be let go from.
“What your position requires,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“Elinor. Look at me, not at the fire.” She looked, and her eyes were dry, steady and braced, which was worse than tears would have been. “Are you afraid of me?”
“No.”
“You answered that too quickly to have weighed it. Try it again, slowly, and tell me the true one, since we are in the house where we tell the truth.”
“I am not afraid of you.” Her chin did the thing it did when she had decided to be brave at her own expense.
“I am afraid of being a duty. I have been a great many things to a great many households, Nathaniel, and I have done each one of them well, and not one of them was glad to have me, only relieved. There was a house in Bath where the mother thanked me, on the day I left, for having been no trouble. No trouble. As though the highest thing a woman like me might earn was to have been easy to forget. I have been no trouble in six houses. I should like, once before I die, to be a great deal of trouble to someone who was glad of it, and I do not dare to hope that this is the house, because hoping it and being wrong would cost me more than I have left to spend. And I find that I can bear to be your duty. I have borne worse, but I cannot bear to be made to hope first that I am something else and then be quietly informed, with the lamp out, that I am the same useful thing I have always been, only better dressed. So please. Spare me the kindness and tell me what is wanted, and I will give it, and we will both have done our part, and I will not hope.”
“Who told you that you were a duty?” he said, very quietly. “Those were not your words days ago. Someone has put them in your mouth these three weeks, and I should like the name, because I find I have a letter or two of my own still to write and I am developing a taste for the work.”
“No one told me anything I had not already known for four-and-twenty years.”
“That is not an answer. That is a door closing. I have shut enough of them to know the exact sound.” He waited, as he had taught himself to wait. “What reached you, Elinor?”
For a moment she was on the very edge of it; he could see the words crowding up behind her teeth, a cracked door and a library and whatever she believed she had heard through the one about the other, the whole of it nearly spilling.
Then she swallowed it back, and the door he had heard closing closed the rest of the way.
“Nothing reached me. I am tired, over-warm, newly married, and talking foolishly. Tell me what is wanted and let me sleep.”
He crossed the room then, slowly, the way a man crosses ground toward a horse that has been badly handled by someone before him. He stopped at arm’s length, which was a distance he had taught himself, and he did not reach for her.
“Here is what is wanted of you tonight,” he said.
“Nothing. No thing is customary in this room that I require, expect, or I am owed, or will so much as mention again unless you raise it first, on a night of your own choosing. It may be tomorrow or may be a year from tomorrow and will make no difference to your position, because you do not have a position. You have a husband. The two are not the same, and I will spend as long as it takes teaching you the difference, since it appears no one ever has.”
“You will get tired of the teaching. Men are patient with a thing until they own it, and you own me now. The register says so in a clerk’s good hand.
Tomorrow, or next month, the patience runs out, and the duty is quietly reinstated with the lamp turned down, and I would rather have it now, plainly, than learn to trust the kindness and be corrected later. ”
“Then we have found the one subject on which you are a poor scholar, which heartens me, for it leaves me a thing to teach the cleverest woman in three counties. I will not get tired of it. I am tired of the other man, the one who took, owned and stood at windows. I am tired of him so thoroughly that he nearly cost me my son. I have no appetite left for being him. You are entirely safe from him. He is dead, and I dug the grave myself, and I do not mean to visit it.”
“You married me.”
“I married you. I did not purchase you. There is a word for a person a man takes because the law, the church and the wedding breakfast have told him he may. You are a person, Elinor. You are not a privilege. You will never, in this house, be a thing that is taken because it is available. I would rather lie awake the rest of my life beside a wall you have not chosen to take down than knock one brick of it loose myself and call the rubble a marriage.”
“You are very certain, for a man who married me eleven hours ago.”
“I am certain because I became certain slowly, over the harder part of a year, against my own habit, which is the only kind of certainty I have ever learned to trust. The fast kind I distrust entirely. I was fast and sure at four-and-twenty and bought a forged saint with it and hung it on my wall a full year. I am slow and sure now, and I married you, and I have noticed the two facts arrived in my life by the very same door.”
“That is a pretty speech, for a man who claims never to say a thing twice.”
“It is not the speech I am keeping back, and you know it is not. You will have marked that I still have not said the thing you stood in the gallery and asked me for three nights ago. And I have marked that you have not asked me for it a second time. I think we are each waiting on the other to be brave first, which is an absurd treaty between a duke of four-and-thirty and the cleverest woman in three counties, and I do not know tonight how to break it. So, I shall do the one brave thing within my reach, which is to ask nothing whatever of you, and to mean it down to the ground.”
She was looking at him now with something he could not read, but her eyes had stopped being dry, and she did not seem able to speak.
“You are crying.”
“I am not.”
“You are. It is the third time I have seen it, and I have a handkerchief somewhere about me at all times now, as a policy.” He did not produce it.
Instead, he did the other thing, the small permitted thing, lifting his hand at last to touch only her face, his thumb at the wet corner of her eye, the way he had touched the boy’s fever and the turned ankle; a man being careful with the most breakable thing he owned.
“Do not be a duty tonight. I have no use for a duty. I have a great deal of use, it turns out, for a person who learned Italy in a cold room and corrects me at dinner and tells the truth in galleries. That one I should like to keep. The duty may go and find another house.”
He kissed her then, for the first time, which neither of them had done in months of careful inches, and it was neither a claim nor a duty.
It was only the truth arriving by the one road that did not require him to find the words.
Her hands came up and held the front of his coat the way the boy had held the lesson cloth, as though it were the one solid thing in a dissolving world.
For a moment the over-warm room was exactly as warm as it ought to have been, and not a degree more.
“Why are you being like this?” she said into his coat, and it was not an accusation but nearer a plea, the voice of a woman whose one firm belief was being gently taken apart and who had nothing prepared to put in its place.
“Like what?”
“Careful. No one is careful with the help. Careful is for the things that matter, and you keep being careful, and I cannot make it fit the thing I was told you were.”
“Then stop trying to make it fit, and let it teach you a different thing instead. That is the whole use of careful. It is the slowest argument there is, and the only one I have ever known to change a person’s mind against her own will.
I mean to make it to you every day, without one word in it, until the old thing falls off you for sheer want of evidence. ”
Then he made himself step back, because stepping back was the entire point of it, and rested his mouth against her forehead instead, which asked nothing and promised the whole of everything.
“There,” he said, against her hair. “That is the size of what is required tonight, and it is already done, and you did it perfectly. You may stop bracing, because the unpleasant march is not coming. Sleep. I will be on the far side of a very large bed, entirely useless to you in every customary particular, and in the morning, you may begin to decide what you wish me to be.” He held the kiss to her hair a moment longer, until his hands were steady, and only then did he let her go.
She lay down on her own far edge, and he on his, the absurd cold acreage of the ducal bed laid out between them, and for a while neither of them spoke into the dark.
“Nathaniel.”
“Yes.”
“If I am still a duty in the morning. If the kindness was only the road after all, and the place is where I always knew it would be. Will you tell me plainly, and not let me find it out alone and slowly across years?”
“You will not be a duty in the morning. But yes. If I ever become the man you came in here braced against, you have my word I will tell you to your face, but you have my word that he is not coming. I am aware those two promises sit badly together, but I am too tired and too newly married to make them sit better tonight. Sleep, Elinor. The morning is on our side for once. We may as well wait for it together.”
She slept, in the end, turned toward him across the wide cold middle of the bed with one hand still loosely caught in his sleeve, the way the boy slept when the fever broke.
Nathaniel did not sleep. He lay in the dark beside his wife and turned the evening over, the word position, the dry braced eyes, the speed of the no, and could not make it come right.
Somewhere in these three weeks a thing had reached her that told her she was a duty.
He had said everything he had against it, everything but the one word that might have closed the matter for good, the word with no use in it that frightened him worse than any other.
She had not asked for it a second time, and he had not found it on his own.
And so, it sat in the dark of the over-warm room between them, the last locked door in a house he had believed he had finished opening.