Chapter Sixteen #2
“Cold, mostly. A boy stands in a doorway when he has worked out that the room will not have him and the corridor will not keep him.” He turned his hand over on the coverlet.
“You set a place and poured a cup and were looked through like a window. I stood at the edges of my own house and was stepped around like a draught. We have arrived at the same loneliness, you and I, by opposite roads. Either a great comedy or the only reason this matrimony has a hope of working. I have not decided which.”
“Both, I should think. The best of things are generally both.” She was quiet a moment. “Tell me one thing you wanted, as the boy in the doorway, and did not get. Not the large thing. A small one. The small ones are always the truest.”
“A second helping.” He surprised himself with how readily it came.
“There was a rule in a cold house, my mother deceased and the place run by people who were not paid to be fond of me that a boy did not ask twice at table. Alaric asked three times and was indulged for it. I learned to be full on a single helping as a matter of policy, and I am one and thirty years old, and I still cannot ask for more bread at my own board without first rehearsing the sentence.”
“Then I shall set the bread by your hand before ever you have to ask for it, every morning, for the rest of our lives, and you will not rehearse the sentence again.” She said it simply, as a fact already arranged.
“It costs nothing, and asks nothing, and settles no account. Your settlement could never have caught a thing so small. That is exactly why it is worth the giving.”
“That is the first time in my life anyone has offered me a thing I did not know how to want until it was already held out.” He had to look at the coverlet to say it. “You will have to go slowly with me, Renae. I am a grown man learning to be wanted, and it is undignified, and I find I do not care.”
“Nine years I set his place every evening, and he never said the food was good. I do not think he tasted it. He certainly never tasted a single thing that I had touched. The cruelty people imagine, the shouting and the rest of it, I could have named that and fought it. There is no fighting a man who simply does not see you are in the room. You begin, after a while, to wonder whether you are. I used to move a chair an inch from where he liked it, only to find out if he would notice it had been touched by a living hand. He never did. He had the chair put right by a servant and never knew the question had been asked.”
“I taste everything.” It was out before he had weighed it, the saying new.
“It is the curse of one given nothing. He notices every crumb he is finally handed. You will find me an embarrassingly attentive husband, Renae, in all the small ways no one ever taught me were beneath a duke’s heir to mind. ”
“The duke’s blessing. Let the warmth into the house. I have been turning it over since the vicar read it out. It is a strange thing for a father on his death bed to ask of a wedding, when most of their kind ask only for grandsons to secure the succession, and a strict adherence to propriety.”
His hand went still on the coverlet. “He asked the same of me the night before, in fewer words and a harder voice. He told me not to make you pay for what I was never given. I did not ask how he knew there was a bill to pay. A man learns to see the shape of a thing, I expect, once he is preparing to leave this world and has given up pretending about the rest of it.”
“And will you? Make me pay.”
“I will try not to, and I will fail at it now and again, in the wrong order and a day late, as I fail at everything that was not taught me young. The failing is not the danger. The danger is whether I notice it in time to mend it, and whether you will tell me plainly when I have not. That is the fifth of your terms, and the one that frightens me most, for it asks you to go on watching me closely enough to catch it.”
“I have spent ten years watching men closely enough to catch what they wanted before they had named it themselves. It is the one skill my first matrimony left me that I have never once resented.” There was the ghost of the old dryness in it.
“I shall turn it on you, my lord, and you will discover it is a great deal less comfortable to be read than it ever was to be obeyed.”
“I find that I want to be read. It is the most alarming single discovery of a thoroughly alarming day, and I have signed a matrimonial settlement in the course of it.”
She drew the nightgown closer at the throat. “May I tell you the thing I am most afraid of, since you have been so free with yours tonight?”
“It seems only fair, and there is nowhere I would rather be than at the foot of this bed hearing it.”
Her voice went very even, the voice she kept for the books.
“That I shall grow used to being seen, and come to need it, and that then you will revert. Men do. The attentive ones above all. They are attentive while a thing is new and a campaign to be won, and then it is won, and they put it away in a drawer with the other won things, and the woman in the drawer may not complain, having been won so very attentively. I survived being invisible the first time because I never once let myself be truly seen. I am not certain I should survive it twice, having been let out into the light and grown fond of it.”
“Then we have come to the true bargain at last, and it is a deal harder than the one Fenwick drew up.” His hands stayed at his sides, though keeping them there cost him.
“You are asking me never to win you. To go on courting a wife I already hold, every grey morning, with no prize waiting at the end of the courting but the courting itself. It is the only labour anyone has ever set me with no figure attached to its completion, and I find, to my very great alarm, that it is the only work I have ever actually wanted to do.”
“Then we shall both be working, my lord, at the one trade neither of us was ever apprenticed to. I make you no promise that I shall be good at being seen. I have unlearned a very great deal of practice at it.”
“We shall be ungainly together, then, and tell no one, and go on presenting a flawless front to the county, who would not believe either of us capable of ungainliness in any case. It is the one mercy of a fearsome reputation. Nobody troubles to look behind it for two frightened people learning, rather late, to share the one fire, and very likely to quarrel before long about which of us has drawn the chair nearer to it.”
When the candle had burned to a stub she leaned towards him, and he met her the rest of the way, and the kiss was the first thing either of them had offered the other with no clause set behind it and no debt laid before it.
It was brief, and unhurried, and tasted of nothing he could have entered in any book.
Then she lay down, and he lay down beside her, above the coverlet, still in his shirt, and held the hand she gave him, and neither reached for anything further, because the further was not the point and they were both, for once in their lives, in plain possession of the point.
***
He woke before her in the grey. The rain had come and gone again in the night, and the light through the curtains was the colour of pewter and just as quiet, and she slept turned towards him with one hand still loose in his and her face open in a way the waking woman would never have allowed.
He watched her sleep. Any sensible man of business would have called it an idle use of a morning, and he found instead that he wanted many mornings precisely like it, a long grey row of them, useful for nothing he could name and worth more than all the rest of the books together.
The old terror of the wanting was still there.
It had been his companion so long he half expected it to sign his letters.
He turned it over in the pewter light and discovered it had shrunk in the night to a thing he could close one hand around without quailing, and that he would, given a little time and a long patience of staying, learn at last to set it down.