Chapter Twenty #2
“Splendid. Chasing never warmed a cold man. Standing still where he can find you when he is ready, that is the thing, and it is the work of real patience, and it asks a great deal more of a woman than running ever did.” Beatrice took her hand.
“Stand still, my dear. He is his father’s son, and his father came to it in the end, only a lifetime too late.
The boy has the chance to be early. Leave him the room to take it, and do not fill the room with your chasing, for there will be no space left in it for him to walk back into. ”
***
He found her in the old nursery on the third floor, the day after that.
She had gone up only to look at it, the long disused room under the eaves where, the staff said, the duke had hidden as a small boy from his brother’s noise.
It was shrouded and grey, the furniture under dust sheets like a roomful of patient ghosts, the window so filmed the afternoon came through it the colour of weak tea.
And something in her, the same something that had folded lawn linen season after season against a child who never came, refused to leave it so.
The sheets came off one by one, the window went up with a complaint of old sash weights, and she was standing in a flood of hard clean light, dust to her elbows, when his step sounded on the stair.
“Wells told me you had been coming up here.” He stopped in the doorway with the look of a man who had walked the length of a great house to reach one room. “You moved your things out of our chamber.”
“I moved a hairbrush and a book. I left you the greater part of the furniture.”
“You moved your things out of our chamber, and I stood in it this morning and could not find the smell of you anywhere in the air, and I have spent the day learning that I am losing you by inches and seem to have agreed to it without anyone consulting me, least of all myself.” His voice was not steady.
She had never in her life heard it lose its footing.
“You did it so quietly I did not mark it for a day. Your first husband would not have marked it for a year. I marked it in a day and did nothing, and a day is not so much better than a year, when a woman is carrying herself out of a room by inches.”
“It is a little better. I will allow you the day.” She stayed where she was, across the room from him.
“What I am doing up here, since you have not asked, is opening a room. It has been shut a very long time. It has good light, when one troubles to let the light in, and it seemed a waste to leave it grey. I thought it might do, one day. For a child, if we are lucky. For a room a child need not be afraid to be loud in, which I am told this one was not, once, a long while ago.”
He took in the bright stripped room, and the raised window, and his wife standing in the middle of it grey to the elbow and wholly unafraid of a future she had every reason to have given up on.
Something came apart in his face then that she had not seen come apart in him before, not at the altar and not at his father’s bed.
“You still believe there is to be a future worth the trouble of airing a room for.”
“I have always believed it. It is the most stubborn thing about me, and it has outlasted far worse than you, so I would not wager against it if I were you.”
The words came out of him then in a rush, as though a wall built to hold them had let go all at once.
“I thought if I gave you safety, it would be enough. I know now it is not enough to be safely alone. I have been safe my whole life, Renae, kept and provided for and entirely alone for very nearly every hour of it, and I never called the thing by its name until I watched you carry your belongings out of our room and felt the house go cold in exactly the manner I spent thirty years pretending I did not mind. You have captivated my heart completely. I have feared the mastery you hold over my heart, but I will no longer suffer that cowardice to rule me.”
She crossed the nursery to him over the bare scrubbed boards, set down the cloth in her hand, and took his face in both her dusty palms, holding it where there was not a column of figures in the world for him to look at instead.
“You are an impossibly foolish creature,” Her thumbs moved along the bone of his jaw.
“I gave you my heart at the pond, when you carried me there over your shoulder and set me down firmly. I gave you my heart when you talked about the brave young boy who defied all common sense and jumped in to save a drowning dog when nobody else dared to move. Usefulness was never what I was waiting for. It was only ever you. It was only ever going to be you.”
“I have been a great simpleton.”
“You have. I find, on balance, that I do not mind, provided you have finished.” Her eyes had spilled over and she made no move to hide it.
“Have you finished, Declan. Tell me you have finished being afraid in the next room, because I have a great quantity of being unafraid stored up and nowhere to spend it, and I should very much like to begin.”
“I have finished.”
“Then come and help me with this window before you kiss me, because it sticks, and a duke ought to be good for something.” She was laughing through the tears now, a sound she had nearly forgotten she owned.
“I find I should like the first thing we do in this room to be a small ordinary thing done together, rather than a grand one performed at each other across the floor.”
“I am not certain I know how to do small ordinary things.”
“You will learn them. You managed the hard one, and the small ones come easier after, or so I am assured by people who began in the proper order, which neither of us did, and never mind that now. Take the left sash.”
He took the left sash. They got the old window up another inch between them, and only then, with the work done and the light pouring in, did he kiss her in the flood of it.
It was not the careful, offered thing of a wedding night but a question answered fully on both sides.
When she drew him down the stair to the chamber she had so lately half abandoned, it was she who closed the door, and he who, for the first time in his guarded life, let himself be freely needed within it.
Neither stood across a door from the other again.
***
In the grey of the morning he was still there. She marked it before she opened her eyes, by the unfamiliar weight of a husband who had not risen at dawn to be useful elsewhere.
“Stand up with me,” he said, when he saw that she was awake.
“Not behind me, and not as something I am shielding from the room, and not as an ornament a duke is expected to acquire on his way up the aisle. Beside me, where I can see you and the county can see that I do. The Duchess of Carrington in the one way the title was ever worth the having, which is what you asked me for in a cold library two months ago, when I was too great a coward to give it to you. Stand beside me, Renae. I am asking you properly this time, and I find I am not afraid of the asking.”
She held his eyes a long moment, this man who had learned, very late and at great cost, the one sentence that had been wanting all along.
She gave him the answer she had held ready since a pond, since a library, since the first cold morning she walked into his house and decided, against all the evidence, that it might still be warmed.
“Try and make me stand anywhere else,” she said.