Chapter 23
They stayed in the window seat a long while afterward, in a heap that would have finished her mother. Leonora rested her cheek against his shoulder and thought that no Thursday had ever pleased her half so much.
“So, the week is up tomorrow,” she murmured.
“So you observed.”
“And I think we have made a great deal of progress.”
Colin looked down at her, at the shift twisted around her thighs and her disheveled hair, and raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”
“Stop that.”
“I said nothing.”
“You said it with your face, which is worse, and you know it.” She was laughing. But then she stopped laughing, because the question she had been carrying since the treehouse had bubbled up her throat and she had discovered that she was going to say it. “But…”
“But…?”
“But I don’t think I can fall in love with a man I know so little about.”
He did not move at all.
“You know what matters,” he pointed out.
“I know what you’ve let me see. It isn’t the same, and it isn’t enough.
” Leonora sat up and straightened her shift, because she could not have this conversation half undressed and had a horrible suspicion that he was counting on it.
“I know you have a cat. I know your housekeeper has a bad hip, I know your brother’s handwriting, and I know your daughter’s opinion of pears.
I know that you go up into the treehouse at four in the morning, but I do not know why, and when I ask you about it, I get sent away. ”
“You don’t need love to want me, wife.” His voice had gone light in a way she had learned to distrust. “I should say we’ve established that by now. Twice.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t be clever.” She twisted around on the window seat to face him.
“Colin, you have had your mouth on me twice in daylight with my skirts round my waist and my hands in your hair, and I let you, and I would let you again this afternoon before the clock strikes. And I have never once seen your face without the eyepatch.”
The room’s temperature dropped immediately.
Colin got up and crossed to the fireplace, which put eight feet of Turkish carpet between them. He stood with his back to her and his hand on the mantel.
“That is a kindness to you,” he said.
“I don’t want it.”
“You’d want it if you’d seen it.”
“You have no notion of what I would want, since you have never asked me, not once.” Her voice was rising, and she let it.
“What is under there that is so much worse than everything else? You told me you were responsible for your father’s death.
You told me that on the floor of the treehouse as though you were reading the shipping news, because you wanted me to run, and I did not run.
What could possibly be worse than that?”
“You might weep,” Colin said.
She stopped.
“You might look at it and start crying,” he continued, still facing away from her, “the way Katherine did every morning for a fortnight. And then you would tell me it was nothing, be very kind about it, and go on being kind about it for forty years, and I would have to watch you do it. That is what’s under there, Duchess. That is the whole of it.”
“But Katherine has stopped.”
“Katherine is six months old and has nothing to compare it to.”
“Katherine put her hand on it and then patted your cheek and went to sleep on your shoulder, and you smiled in a way I have not been able to stop thinking about since,” she reminded him. “If a baby can do it within a fortnight, then surely you can trust your wife to do it in a day.”
He turned around. “Have you forgotten what I told you? That I am responsible for my father’s death?”
“No. It has not left my mind since.” She stood up.
“But that isn’t what you said, and I have gone over the words a hundred times.
You said responsible. You did not say you killed him.
So tell me what you meant, and I promise you on anything you want that I will not run, that I will not weep, and that I will not be kind about it afterward, because I don’t think you could bear that. ”
Colin curled his fists at his sides.
“We were arguing,” he began.
“Yes?”
“He fell.”
“And…?”
“And that’s the whole of it, and it isn’t, and you can’t see why.
” He took two steps toward her and stopped, as though there were something on the carpet hindering him.
“Can’t you understand it, wife? Whatever was in my father is in me.
I have his temper and his hands and his face, or half of it.
I could not care for you and be certain.
And if I were wrong, it wouldn’t be me who paid for it.
It would be you. Or Mrs. Pike. Or a child who has just this week decided I am safe. ”
“You would never—”
“You cannot know that. I cannot know that, and I have had fifteen years to mull it over.” His voice cracked straight down the middle. “So, no, I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.”
A heavy silence followed.
Leonora stood there in her rumpled shift, with the morning sun all around her, and understood that she had lost, and that she was going to have to be extremely careful for about the next thirty seconds.
“I see,” she muttered.
“Leonora—”
“I think I would like to lie down.” Her voice came out perfectly level, which she was proud of. “I feel as though the fever is coming back.”
It worked exactly as she had known it would. He was across the room before she had finished the sentence, with his hand at her elbow and his face changed entirely, steering her to the bed as though she were made of eggshell.
“Is it?” Colin asked, putting the back of his hand to her forehead.
“Yes,” Leonora said.
It was the first lie she had told him, and she lay there and let him send for barley water and put another log on and shut the curtains against the sun, and hated herself the entire time.
Marina arrived at three o’clock in a hired chaise, in her riding habit, having ridden as far as the posting inn and abandoned her horse there.
“I have four hours,” she said, coming up the stairs two at a time. “I have told Mama that you are contagious, that the doctor used the word miasma, and that she would very likely die of it, so she has gone to lie down with a cloth on her head and will be no trouble to anybody until Tuesday.”
“Marina.”
“I know. I’m going to hell. Where’s the baby?”
“Asleep. Mrs. Pike has her.”
“Where’s your husband?”
“I don’t know,” Leonora replied.
And then she sat down and cried until she could not breathe.
Marina did not say anything for a long time.
“Is he cruel to you?” she asked. “I have to ask it once. If I don’t ask it once, I shall lie awake all night.”
“No.”
“Nora.”
”No.” Leonora lifted her head. “He has never raised his voice at me but once, and I had earned it, and he was appalled at himself before the door closed. He carries me around like a parcel, and I loathe it. He does it because he thinks I’ll not sit down otherwise, and he is right.
If he were cruel, I would have moved back to Huntington House, and you know it. ”
“I do.”
“Then don’t ask again.”
“I shan’t.” Marina wiped her sister’s face with her thumb, which was something she had done since they were six.
“Good. Now I can be furious with him properly, which I have been wanting to do all morning and have been keeping in, in case he turned out to be a monster after all, in which case I’d have had to be sensible, and I am extremely bad at that. ”
She climbed up onto the bed and wrapped her arms round her sister, and Leonora let her.
“He’s been kind to me every day,” Leonora croaked into her shoulder. “That’s the worst of it. If he were cruel, I could hate him and go home. He carried me through the house. He washed my hair.”
“He did what?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
“He does everything a man in love does, and then he stands in front of the fire and tells me he can’t.
And he means it, Marina. That’s what nobody understands.
He isn’t playing with me. He genuinely believes there’s something in him that will come out one day and hurt us all, and he’s arranged his whole life around keeping us safe from a thing that has never happened. ”
“And you’re in love with him.”
Leonora froze.
“Don’t,” she muttered. “Don’t say it. I have been very careful not to say it for a reason, and if you put it in words in this room, I shall have to look at it.”
“Nora.”
“I care for him. That is what I have allowed myself, and it is quite bad enough.” Her voice hitched. “Because the moment it is anything more than that, I shall want him to say it back, and he cannot. And then it stops being a marriage I can bear and becomes one I am waiting out.”
Marina was quiet for a moment.
“When did you start caring for him?”
Leonora was quiet for long enough that her sister turned her head.
“On our wedding night,” she said. “I told him to wait, and he took his hands off me before I had finished saying the word, and then he stood there and asked me to explain. That was the whole of it, Marina. Eleven days ago, in a bedroom, in about a second and a half.”
“You have never said one word about this.”
“Because I did not know what it was at the time. I knew it a week later, when he came out of that lake with his boots full of water looking thoroughly cross and put five wooden balls into my hands.” She pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes.
“And I have thought about very little else since, and I would be obliged if you did not make me finish that sentence.”
“Does he know?”
“No. And he isn’t going to.” She sat up and pushed her hair back.
“Because the moment he knows, he’ll do the arithmetic and decide it’s dangerous, and he will put himself out of my reach so gently and so reasonably that I won’t be able to argue with a single word of it.
So I shall simply have to go on as I am, be his wife, be pleasant at the opera, and wait. ”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nora, that isn’t a plan. That’s a sentence.”
“I know,” Leonora sniffed.
Colin was on the landing.
He had come up to ask his wife whether she wanted a tray sent to her room, which was a thing he could have sent a maid to ask. He had reached the turn of the stairs and heard his own name and stopped, and then it was too late to leave without being heard leaving.
He heard all of it.
He heard a sound come out of Leonora that he had not known she was capable of making, and he stood there with his hand on the newel post and understood that he had done it that morning, in a sunlit room with his hand on the mantelpiece and every good intention he possessed.
I have hurt her. I have spent a fortnight protecting her from the harm I might do her one day, and I still did it to her this morning before breakfast.
He went down the stairs very quietly and was almost at the door.
“Your Grace.”
Mrs. Pike was standing by the long-case clock with her cane in her hand. He understood at once that she had been there for a while.
“I’m going out.”
“To the treehouse?”
“Yes.”
“For the night?”
“Yes.”
“Your Grace.” She did not move out of his way. “May I speak?”
“You have never once asked me that in thirty years.”
“I have never once needed to.” Mrs. Pike drew herself up to the whole of her five feet one.
“That girl has been in this house for six days and there are candles lit in rooms that have been dark since your father died. Your daughter laughed. The kitchen laughed. I laughed, and I could not have told you the last time before that. And you are walking out the door with your coat over your arm to sit up in a tree in the dark.”
“I’m aware of how it looks.”
“You are not aware of half of it, and I am too old to be careful with you.” Her chin came up. “Go, then. But send for me when it stops working, because it will stop working, and I should like to be there when it does.”
Colin stood with his hand on the doorhandle. “Send for me if anyone needs anything.”
“You mean if Her Grace does.”
“Anyone,” he said, and stepped out into the evening.