Chapter Twenty-Six
“She has gone to the village,” said Louisa. “With Rosalind. For ribbon.”
“I see.”
“They will be an hour at the least. Rosalind takes a long time over ribbon, because she has opinions about every colour of it, and the shop has only so much patience in a day.”
“She does have opinions.”
“You could wait,” said Louisa.
He looked at her, and she looked back with the whole of her attention.
“Yes, I could,” he said.
“You finished with the pen,” she observed. “It was scratching for days. I heard about it.”
“You cannot have heard it from the nursery.”
“I heard that it had finished. That is different from hearing it.” She set a wooden animal down with great precision. “When you give her the thing you were writing, do it where I can see. I have been managing the pair of you since November, and I should like to be there at the end of it.”
“It is not a performance.”
“Everything is a performance to somebody,” said Louisa, who was nearly five and went back to her animals.
He had not given her the letter the previous night, so he waited outside her chambers longer than any purpose warranted, unwilling to be in her rooms without her knowledge. Then, unwilling to spend a further half hour in a corridor, he knocked on the open door and went in.
The conservatory plans hung on the wall above the fireplace. He had known they were there, but had not, until now, stood in the room and seen them.
She had not taken them down.
He crossed to the bedroom door because Louisa had told him the trunk was there and opened it.
It stood on the bed. Battered at the corners, the leather worn through, the clasp with its unreliable hinge.
Open, and not fully packed, which was worse, because half-packed was not panic, nor anger, nor a thing done in the heat of a moment.
Half-packed was a plan. Her blue everyday dress folded inside with the care she gave anything she valued, the smaller notebook, a book that had been her own from before, and a letter tucked in the corner that he left unread. The wardrobe behind it was still full.
Something in him broke, and not gently, none of the managed quality of a man taking in a difficulty and filing it where it belonged.
It broke with the force of a thing held under pressure for a long time, that had found in the image of a half-packed trunk on a made bed the one weight it could not bear.
For over twenty years, he had spent afraid of precisely this, of having a thing and losing it, and had built his whole life on the principle that the surest way not to lose was not to have, and she had come to Aldenmere and made the principle ungovernable in five months.
He sat down on the edge of the bed beside the open trunk.
A sound came from the door. Louisa stood there, arrived on whatever errand of supervision had brought her up, and looked at him beside the open trunk without the smallest surprise, which was a verdict of its own.
“You found the box.”
“I did.”
“Are you going to fix it?”
“I am going to try.”
“Do not close it,” she said, having weighed him and the trunk against some private standard known only to herself. “She has to close it. Or leave it open. It is hers to do.”
“How do you know that?”
“I do not know it. It only seems true.” Then she turned to go, and stopped, and looked back at him with the whole of her attention.
“I am glad it is you sitting there. I did not want the room to be empty.” And she went down to her account and left him with the trunk, the plans and the thing she had said.
He would wait. She would come up from the village with her ribbon and whatever Rosalind had decided about it, and find him here beside the trunk.
It was perhaps not the conventional opening to such a conversation, but it would be honest, and honesty was the only approach he had ever found worth the trouble.
The January light moved slowly across the floor, winter light, in no hurry at all.
Below the nursery, he could hear Louisa, the rise and fall of an account being delivered to an audience that may or may not have requested it.
The plans were on the wall. The trunk stood open beside him, the lid he would not let himself close, because the closing of it was hers to do and not his, and he found, sitting there in the cold clear light, that he had nowhere else in the world he wished to be.