Chapter Twenty
“You are being distant with me, and have been since Lady Wexcombe’s, and I have decided that the way through a distant wife is a map, since it is the only ground on which I have ever known you to forget to keep your guard.”
He had spread them out across the long table in the Tour room, the mended map first among them, the one she had pieced back together on her first morning in his house when it was torn and he was a stranger and the room was shut.
The coins were out of their case, and the shutters stood open.
The dead room had become, somewhere across the year, the most alive one in the house, and he had brought her into it on purpose, because a map asked nothing of her and gave her somewhere to put her eyes that was not him.
“Rome, then,” he said. “Tell me how we go. And before you ask, Theo comes. Theo conducts a tour of his own through the long gallery, I am told, and charges his nurse a button for admission. He will not forgive us a real one without him. We go as three, or we do not go at all.”
“As three,” she agreed. “I should not know how to want a country he was not in.”
She came to the table despite herself, as she came to all maps, and her finger found the boot of Italy by feel, without looking, the way another woman’s finds the keys of a piano.
He watched the route she drew and not the map, and that was the first sign of the day that the journey was not the thing he had truly come into the room for.
“Down through France. Then over the mountains, where your mule Achille shall have a cousin to spite us with. Then down, and I should want to stop at every place the books lie about, to check the lies in person. Florence, where you bought the saint. Venice, which I am told smells, and which I should like to smell for myself rather than take it on the word of poets. The bay at Naples in the evening, which every book lies about in the very same direction. And Rome last, not first, because a person ought to earn Rome.” Her finger rested on the city.
“I want to see the world, Nathaniel. I have wanted it so long and so quietly that the wanting has become a kind of furniture in me, a thing I stopped noticing I was sitting on. And now there is a map on a table and a man saying: “tell me how we go”, and I find I do not quite trust it. I do not know why, and it is spoiling the one thing I have wanted my whole life, which I cannot forgive, and which is why I have been distant, since you asked, and would not say.”
“I did the whole of it once and saw none of it.” He put his finger down a careful distance from hers, on Florence, on the saint.
“That is the thing I have been wanting to tell you and have made a hash of approaching. I performed the entire Grand Tour. I stood in front of the correct paintings, said the correct thing, bought the correct frauds and corrected the incorrect guides. I came home with three hundred objects and not one memory, because a memory is a thing you can only make by being present, and I was never once present. I was performing sophistication in an empty room. You have collected more of Italy from a cold attic with a borrowed book than I collected from the actual country with my actual eyes, because you wanted it and I only catalogued it. I do not want to take you to the world, Elinor. I want to go to it for the first time, beside the only person I have ever met who knows how to be there.”
He had not meant to say so much of it. The words came the way a confession comes through a wall, surprising the man who makes it. He let them stand, because calling them back was the old habit, and he had buried the old habit in a churchyard he had promised her he would not visit.
“That is a very pretty speech.”
“It is not a speech. I am incapable of speeches, you have remarked on it, at length, in a gallery. It is the truth said badly, which is the only way I have ever been able to say it. What is wrong, Elinor? You have wanted the world your whole life, and I have laid it on a table, but you are looking at it as though it might bite. Tell me. I have been three weeks watching you hold it behind your teeth, and I have run entirely out of patience for being married to a closed door, having worked so hard to open all the others.”
And she told him, in the wrong order, the way the true things always come.
He did not move while she told it. He kept the width of the map between them, because she had set the distance and it was hers to close, and he watched the colour come and go in her face and held himself still on his own side of Italy.
“There was a footman. That was the absurd centre of the whole catastrophe, that it turned on a footman with a coal scuttle. I was at the library door with the seating plan in my arms, three days before the wedding, and the door stood open a hand’s width, and Lady Cassandra was inside it telling you what I was.
A vacancy. A convenience. A second duchess, who learns in the end what she was for. And I heard you answer her.”
“You heard me answer her.”
“I heard you say I am not looking for a second duchess. And then the footman came round the turn with his scuttle, and I could not be discovered at a door listening to my own marriage weighed like a horse at a fair, and so I moved. And I did not hear another word of it. I took the half I had for the whole of the answer, and carried it up the stairs, and married you on it.”
“You married me on half a sentence.”
“I married you on half a sentence. I stood in a borrowed church in my mother’s pearls believing I had been written in where a duchess was wanted, the way a clerk enters a name in a ledger to stop a blank from showing.
And three nights past, in a cloakroom, your defeated rival told me to my face that you had chosen me over her with your eyes open, and I could not hear the word chosen without hearing the word selected underneath it.
Because no one has ever chosen me, Nathaniel.
They have only selected me. The cheaper of two adequate carriages.
I lost the trick of hearing the word said straight so long ago that I no longer knew it had another way of being meant. ”
Nathaniel stood very still on the other side of the map.
“You left,” he said. “Before the end of the sentence.”
“There was a footman.”
“You left three words early.” Something was happening in his face that she had not seen before, a thing arriving all at once in a man who did everything slowly.
“Elinor. You heard me say I am not looking for a second duchess, and then there was a footman, and you went, and you did not hear the rest of it, and you have been married to half of my sentence for three weeks. I will tell you the half you did not stay for. I have been carrying it about ever since, with no one to give it to, because the one person it belonged to had walked off down the corridor with the wrong half in her arms.”
“You do not have to.”
“I am aware I do not have to. That is rather the entire point of it. I do not have to, but I want to. After I said I am not looking for a second duchess, I said the next part, into the room, to Cassandra, who did not want to hear it any more than you wanted to miss it. I said, I am choosing a wife. And she asked me, the way you would have asked me, the way you asked me in the gallery, what is the difference. I told her, and you were halfway up the stairs and did not hear that either, so I will tell you now, on the map, where you cannot mistake it for an arrangement.”
He came round the table at last, past Florence and the saint and the whole catalogue of his expensive failures, and he did not stop at the careful arm’s length he had kept between them for a year. The map lay behind him now. There was nothing left on this side of it to route.
“I did not choose a duchess. The house wanted a duchess, the boy wanted a mother, and the county wanted quiet, and all three had a great many qualified applicants, and Cassandra was the most qualified of them, but I turned her down. I did not turn down a qualified applicant because I had found a better-qualified one in you. You are not better qualified. You are a governess with one box, a temper and an attic full of borrowed Italy, and by every sensible measure she was the correct choice, and you were the foolish one. I chose the foolish one with both my eyes open, on purpose, gladly, because I did not want a duchess. I wanted Elinor Wrenfield. The specific woman. The one who pieced my dead wife’s map back together on a wet morning before she had any reason to be kind to me, and told the rector’s wife she learned Italy by wanting it.
The one who tested me in a gallery instead of taking the easy yes, and refused my proposal because it was a rescue and not a choice, and has been breaking my heart by inches for three weeks across a very large bed because she could not believe she was wanted for herself, having never once in four-and-twenty years been wanted for herself by anybody.
You are no one’s second anything, Elinor.
You are the first thing I have chosen in my life that I did not need, and the only thing I have ever been glad I could not give a sensible reason for. ”
He had got it out, all of it, badly, and it had cost him visibly, and that was the part she would weigh afterwards and find sound.
A performance does not cost the performer.
This had cost him the whole of his composure, in daylight, with the shutters open, and he had paid it without once looking away from her, which from that man was the size of the thing entire.
“You could not have known,” she said. “Those words. I am choosing a wife. I never told you that I heard the first half of that sentence. I never told one living soul. You could not have mended that to fit me, because I never gave you the shape of it to mend.”
“No. You gave me a footman, and a closed door, and a thing that reached you and would not be named. You did not give me the words. I am the one giving you the words.” He said it slowly, so it could not be missed a second time.
“That is the whole difference between mending a sentence a person hands you and going to find the one she dropped on the floor. You set me that exact test in the gallery, and you told me I would fail it, and I have only this minute understood that the way to pass it was to hand you back a thing you never knew I held. I have held it the whole time. I went and found it where you let it fall, on the library floor, three weeks ago, and I have carried it about since, looking for the woman it belonged to.”
She was crying, and she was not hiding it.
“You said it badly,” she managed.
“I said it badly. I shall say it badly every day, if you will let me, until the badness is its own proof, for a man who is performing does not stammer, and I have stammered through the whole of it like a boy at his first recitation.”
“Say it again. The badly part. I find I should like to hear it stammered a second time, only to be certain the first was not a performance after all.”
“Greedy woman.”
“For the first time in my life, yes. You have made me greedy, and I have been so careful and so cheaply satisfied for so long that I did not know the appetite was in me at all, and now that it is I should like to be greedy without apology.”
He took her face in both his hands, the careful man being careless at last, on purpose, on the one occasion that had earned it.
“I am collecting this. Do you understand me? Right now, your face, in the dead room with the shutters open. This is the first memory I have made on purpose in my life, and I intend to make a great many more, in France slowly, and in Florence, and in the bay at Naples in the evening, and in Rome last, because you are quite right, a person should earn Rome, and I have only just this minute begun to.”
And then he kissed her, freely, with nothing reined in and nothing stepped back from and no door in his mind he was keeping any count of.
The wall she had built brick by careful brick over a year of careful inches came down all at once, and the house did not fall with it after all.
The dead room held the two of them, and was not, in any sense, any longer, a dead room.
“Where would you like to go first,” he said, against her mouth.
“Nowhere. Anywhere. Here.” She set her hand flat on the mended map, the one she had repaired the morning she came, when the room was shut, the man was a stranger, and she had no notion she would ever be permitted to draw a route across it.
“The map can wait until morning. The blue book can wait until France. They are only the wanting written down, and you have just handed me the thing the wanting was for, which I had begun to think did not come to people like me at all.”
The last shutter, the one that had never been in the room, stood open now, and the light that came through it was nothing the map could chart, and he found he did not in the least mind that he had no name for the country it let in.
She was laughing now, through the crying, which he decided on the spot was the finest sound the dead room had held in seven years.
“You have a great deal of being present to make up, Your Grace, and I find I should like to begin the arrears tonight, in this house, before we trouble any other country with us at all.”