Chapter Fifteen #2
“Thank you,” he said, low enough not to wake anyone.
“Of course.”
The fire took the new log, the room warmed a degree, and they sat in the light of it with three sleeping children between them and the storm outside.
The quiet was not the library’s quiet; it had more in it.
It was past midnight, and they had told each other the truth about very nearly everything except the things that mattered most, and she found she was tired of the exception.
“Tell me”, she said, very quietly, “about the fire.”
He was still for a moment. She had not planned to say it, or had planned it only as one plans a thing long circled without ever admitting to the circle.
“My father drank,” he said at last, flatly, the words worn smooth with how often he had said them to himself. “Not every night. Enough of them that a boy learned which evenings were the ordinary kind.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven. I had gone up to his study to show him a drawing. I was always drawing. There was a candle on the corner of the desk, and he was not careful with it that evening. The carpet caught fire, and then the curtains, and I was between the fire and the door.”
She made herself ask it plainly, because he had earned a plain question and not a flinching one. “And he brought you out.”
“Eventually. It was neither quick nor gentle, and that is the kindest account of it I can give.” His voice had nothing in it at all, which she thought the truest part of the telling.
“I spent a long time mending, to the degree it mended. And when it had, he looked at me, and what was in his face was not grief. It was disgust.”
She held his eyes and let the silence stand, but after a moment, he went on.
“He sent me here afterwards. Aldenmere, for the country air, he said, for the recovery. He did not come, but he wrote now and then. He told the physicians, and I was not meant to hear it, but I did, that I was not to be brought to London, that the appearance of the thing would not do. And he told me himself, in the voice he kept for practical matters, that no one would ever again look at me without flinching.” He was watching Louisa’s sleeping face rather than the fire.
“I was eleven. He appeared to believe he was handing me a useful fact for later life.”
She held very still, and looked at the left of his face in the firelight, the pale irregular skin, the jaw and the line of it running down into the open collar, the whole record of the night a man had been eventually careful with his son.
What rose in her had nothing of pity in it, nor of sorrow, only something direct and unsoftened that went straight from her across the small space between them to him.
“Your father was wrong about you,” she said. “About all of it. Every part of it. He was wrong.”
He looked at her.
“About all of it,” she said again, more quietly.
He looked at her with the grey eyes gone dark in the low light and entirely fixed on her, the way he had looked at her in the chapel when the ring went on. A man who had stopped looking away because he had decided some time ago that looking away was no longer a position he would take.
“You are the only person who has ever said that to me,” he said very low.
“Then everyone else was wrong as well, and you have spent more than twenty years giving them more credit than they ever earned.”
He was quiet for a moment. “It is a difficult thing to be told, at five-and-thirty, that one has spent the better part of one’s life believing a lie about oneself.”
“It is a more difficult thing to go on believing it. You have made a beginning tonight, which is more than most men ever trouble to do, and you have three witnesses asleep in this room who will spend their whole lives unlearning the very same lesson, if you let them watch you unlearn it first.”
He looked at the sleeping children and then back at her. “You make it sound nearly possible.”
“It is entirely possible. It is only slow, and you have, as it happens, a great deal of time, and rather more help than you have been in the habit of counting on.”
Something moved across his face that was neither the almost-smile nor the careful warmth she had been cataloguing, but something far more unguarded, there for a moment and then held, kept rather than buried, because he was not yet certain what he was permitted to do with it.
The storm, without announcing it, had begun to gentle, the wind settling from frenzy into mere weather.
She carried Louisa up to bed, slow and careful, the dark curls against her shoulder and the small weight entirely trusting, Bartholomew coming along by the ear.
She settled her without waking her, and stood a moment in the doorway watching in the particular silence of a child safely asleep.
Then she took the other two girls to their beds, and when she came back, the drawing room was empty.
He had gone, the chair vacant, the glass on the table beside it, Rosalind’s book set on the side table with its pages carefully unmarked.
The blanket she had left across the settee had been folded and set square on the arm, in the precise quiet way of a man doing a small right thing because it was right and because no one would see.
Sleep came late to her that night, and thinly, and what kept her from it was not any kind of unhappiness.
***
In the morning, the storm had blown itself out entirely and left the world scrubbed, dripping and very bright; the sort of hard, clean light that comes after a bad night to pretend nothing happened.
A beech had come down across the lower lane, Mrs Fenn reported at breakfast with grim satisfaction, as though the tree had been asking for it for years and had finally got its comeuppance, and one of the henhouse shutters had gone to splinters.
But otherwise, the house had held, as the house always did.
Gideon came down to breakfast, which he did not always do.
He took his coffee and said good morning to each of the children by name, and to Cecilia, and there was nothing in the words a stranger would have marked.
But he had come down. He had put on the cravat again, the collar high and correct, the night put away where the night belonged, and he had come down to the table where the family was, and sat at it, and stayed.
“There was a tree,” Louisa told him urgently, the news of the morning.
“A whole tree, down in the lane, Mrs Fenn says it is the biggest one that has ever fallen, and the men cannot move it until this afternoon. Bartholomew slept through the entire storm and is very proud of himself, which I told him was nothing to be proud of, because sleeping is not bravery; it is only sleeping.”
“A sound distinction,” Gideon said. “Though I have known grown men claim a great deal of credit for surviving difficulties they slept through entirely. Bartholomew is in respectable company, at least.”
“May we see the tree?”
“After your lessons, and only as far as the gate, and you will hold someone’s hand the whole of the way, because a lane the morning after a storm is full of things that have come down in the night and would like very much to come down on a small girl who is not looking.
” He said it to Louisa, and over her head his eyes went to Cecilia for the briefest moment, and there was in them the whole of the night before, and an almost-smile that was, this morning, very nearly the whole one.
“You will come and see it as well,” Louisa decided on his behalf.
“I will come and see it as well,” he agreed, and drank his coffee. He stayed at the table while the children finished, which was a small thing, and which Cecilia added, without ceremony, to the account she had been keeping since September of the things he did.