Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
The carriage was ready to leave, with Rachel’s trunk secured to the boot and Alice’s hamper wedged beside the seat.
Kenneth had watched from the portico as Alice held her sister, her palm pressed flat against Rachel’s belly.
Freddie waved until there was nothing to wave at. Charlie stood close to Alice without touching her, close enough that the choosing was visible. George shook Kenneth’s hand at the step, his grip firm, his bow brief.
“The headmaster is a fair man,” Kenneth said. “If he proves otherwise, write to me.”
The wheels crunched over the gravel. The dust settled. Alice stood on the drive with her arms crossed and her face turned toward the empty road.
Kenneth did not go to her, because going required crossing through what he could not say, and the distance between what he wanted and what he could offer had been narrowing for weeks.
The house emptied around them.
By supper, he could no longer tell whether the quiet was the absence of guests or the weight of everything he was not saying.
Alice sat across from him in the small dining room, and the candlelight moved in her hair and along the line of her mouth.
Kenneth felt the treacherous warmth at the center of his chest, the pull that had not diminished since the attic.
“The baby will arrive before Christmas,” Freddie announced between bites of roast mutton.
“I have calculated the weeks. Aunt Rachel said four months, and four months from now is December. I believe it will come on Christmas Day, which would be inconvenient for the baby because it would receive only one set of presents instead of two.”
“Babies do not receive presents, Frederick,” Charlie said.
“They ought to. They have done the most work.”
Alice’s mouth curved. The candlelight caught it, and Kenneth’s chest tightened, the pull of gratitude and hunger and something older than either.
“A cousin will be a fine thing,” Alice said.
“A brother would be better,” Freddie said.
Kenneth’s hand stilled on his glass.
“Or a sister,” Charlie added quietly. His green eyes held the measured attention that preceded his most precise observations. “You and Papa could have a baby, too. Could you not?”
Kenneth’s thumb pressed against the base of his wineglass, and the pressure registered in his knuckles and his wrist and the edge of his jaw. He held it there because it gave his body something to do while eight years of containment strained against its borders.
“Eat your supper, Charles,” he said.
He could feel Alice’s gaze, sharp and searching. She had been given another piece of the text she had been assembling for months.
“Freddie, Charlie.” Her voice was warm. “Which chapter tonight? We left the dragon in rather dire straits, if I recall correctly.”
Freddie pivoted with immediate and total enthusiasm. Charlie did not. He watched his father a moment longer, quiet and searching, and then returned to his plate.
Alice tried to meet Kenneth’s eyes, but he avoided her gaze entirely. It took everything she had in her not to huff out a breath or scream at him.
Three days ago, he had pressed her against the shelf of folded sheets in the linen closet, put his mouth to the hollow at the base of her throat, and felt her pulse kick against his lips, before pulling away and apologizing.
Two days ago, his thumb had traced the inside of her wrist beneath the breakfast table, slow and deliberate, and she had turned her hand palm-up in his, and he had not accepted it.
Yesterday, he had stood close enough in the corridor to catch the scent of her hair, verbena and warmth, and she had looked up at him expecting what the attic had promised. But he had stepped back, and her expression had moved through something he would rather not have caused.
Alice did not fail to observe patterns.
Miss Leyton collected the boys at eight. Alice said goodnight and left, and Kenneth tracked her footsteps down the corridor and up the stairs, each one measured, and the tracking said more than he intended.
The knock came at half past ten. He had been sitting in the chair beside the window with a book open to a page he could not have identified under oath.
“Come in.”
She opened the door. Her cotton nightgown was buttoned to her throat—intended as modesty, he suspected—though the fabric fell over the full curve of her hips and the dip of her waist. It was enough to give his imagination what it needed to fill in what the cotton concealed, and the imagining was becoming a discipline he was losing.
She closed the door and stood with her back against it. “Kenneth.”
“You should sleep.”
“You have been pulling away from me.” She said it with composure she must have been rehearsing since supper.
“You held my hand beneath the table and left the room before the dishes were cleared away. You stood so close in the corridor that I could feel your breath on my temple, and then you stepped back. You kissed me in the linen closet, and then you apologized. And then at dinner, you couldn’t even look at me.
” Her arms crossed, pressing the cotton against her ribs.
“And I can still feel it, Kenneth. Your mouth on my throat. I have been feeling it for three days, and you have been across every room from me, and I cannot…” She stopped. Her jaw closed on the rest.
The flush that climbed her neck was visible even by candlelight, and he watched her gather herself with a care that cost her.
“Something is wrong.” Her voice was steadier now. “I would rather you told me what it is than continue to wonder whether I am the cause.”
“You are not the cause.”
“Then tell me.”
He set the book down and looked at his hands, because looking at her was not possible while he said what he was going to say.
Hands that had held his sons on the day they were born and closed his first wife’s eyes and lifted Alice from a chair in an attic and set her down with a care that frightened him.
“Theresa was well when she conceived,” he began.
Alice went still at the door.
“The physician found nothing to concern him. She complained of tiredness, and the tiredness became something else. I did not attend to it properly until attending was no longer sufficient.” He paused.
His voice had the staleness of something not spoken aloud in eight years.
“The labor lasted two days. The physicians told me the presentation was wrong, that there were two babies, that the situation had become dangerous. I stood in the corridor outside her door and listened to her for the better part of a night and could do nothing except stand there.”
The candle flame leaned in the draught from the window.
“She was dead before dawn. The boys were alive. I held them both in one arm because they were so small, and she was in the room behind me with the door still open.” His voice was steady, but the effort was audible.
“The first thought, before the grief or the guilt or anything I learned to carry after, was: I put her there.”
He breathed out.
“I will not risk it.” He looked up. She was still at the door, her eyes bright, her hand gripping the fabric of her nightgown. “I cannot put you in that room. I cannot stand in that corridor again and listen and know that I am the reason.”
His jaw tightened, and the pressure of it registered in his temples, the cost of saying a thing he had arranged his entire life around not saying.
“And I will not bring another child into a house where their father locks himself in his study because he does not know how to be in a room with the people he loves without governing them.”
She was very still.
“I will not have more children, Alice.”
Alice’s face did not crumple. He had braced for it. Instead, she held very still, and something rapid and private moved behind her eyes. When it settled, the expression that remained was steady.
The steadiness was worse than tears, because she was rebuilding herself around what he had said using his own materials and his own method, and seeing his construction turned against him was a reckoning he had not anticipated.
“I understand,” she said.
“Alice.”
“I am not angry.” Her voice was level and very careful.
“I would not ask for what you cannot give. But you should know that when Charlie asked that question at supper, the first thing I felt was not surprise.” She paused, and her composure thinned.
“The first thing I felt was want. And the want was not abstract, Kenneth. It was a child with your eyes and my hair in a house where the banisters are already worn from small hands. I did not know I had built that picture until you told me it does not exist.”
She reached for the door handle behind her.
“You have been honest with me tonight. I owe you the same.” Her voice was quiet, steady in a way that was worse than breaking, because steadiness at this cost was something she had learned from him, and they both knew it. “I need to be somewhere else before it shows.”
The latch caught behind her.
Kenneth sat in the chair with his book face-down on the table and the candle burning toward its end and did not follow her, because following required offering something he had just finished explaining he could not give.
He sat until the candle went out. What remained of the night passed without sleep, and when the grey light filtered through the curtains, he rose and dressed and descended to the carriage and carried nothing with him except the weight of what he had done.
They returned to London that morning.
Alice sat with her face turned toward the window and spoke when spoken to with a warmth that touched nothing beneath it. Kenneth sat opposite and managed the silence by attending to its components, and the strategy did not serve him.
Freddie filled the quiet with noise: the dragon, Dorset, whether they might get a dog. Kenneth understood his son knew what he was doing, because noise was the only weapon Freddie possessed.
Charlie sat beside Alice with his hands in his lap. Midway through the journey, he reached over and placed his hand on her arm without speaking. Alice looked down at the small fingers, then at the boy, and her throat bobbed. She covered his hand with hers and held on.
Kenneth watched from across the carriage. The borders held.
For the first time, he was not certain that he wanted them to.