Chapter 11 #2
The wonder in her, as she turned a long-fixed truth over and found she could let it go, lodged itself somewhere in his chest without his leave.
He was not certain what to do with it. He pressed his lips to her temple instead, tasting salt and candle smoke and the faint sweetness that belonged to her alone.
Then, unlooked for, she turned further into him, tucking her face against the curve of his throat, deliberate about it, a decision rather than a search for comfort.
Her hand settled flat against his chest. He felt her exhale slowly, and the tension that had lived in her spine every waking hour he had known her eased entirely away for this one moment.
He held her and did not speak.
They stayed that way long enough that the fire wanted tending again, and neither of them moved to see to it. After a while she stirred against him, tilting her head back, and he saw some new question forming behind her eyes before she gave it words.
“You never speak of yourself,” she said. “Not once, in the past days, have you told me anything.”
He considered this. It was, he supposed, true, though he had never caught himself doing it before she pointed it out.
“What would you like to know?”
“Why you never married before now.” She said it without artifice. “You are five-and-thirty. Men in your situation do not generally wait so long. Men of business least of all, who like their accounts settled.”
He was quiet a moment, considering the question with his usual care, determined to give her an honest answer rather than a convenient one.
“There was a woman, once. At university.” He said it without inflection, testing how the words felt aloud, since he had never spoken them to anyone before her.
“A rector’s daughter. Clever. Fond of Virgil, of all things, and largely unimpressed by everything else.
” He paused. “My father died before I had finished being young, and I went home to the mill instead of going back for her. I told myself there would be time enough later to repair the hurt my absence had caused.”
“And was there? Enough time?”
“There was not. She married a curate within the year. Sensibly, I have always thought. I gave her no reason to wait, and she was under no obligation to.” He said it without bitterness, an old ledger long since balanced and closed.
“I did not think of it again, not for a long while. I built the mill instead. It required rather less of me, in certain respects, than a wife would have. Or so I told myself at the time.”
“And now?”
“Now I find the accounting was never so simple as I made it out to be.” He glanced down at her. “I have spent fifteen years telling myself I had no leisure for wanting things for their own sake. It was, I begin to suspect, a convenient lie, and a fairly thorough one.”
Josephine studied him a long moment. Her expression softened, though there was no pity in it. “You are very poor at this,” she said.
“At what?”
“At admitting you want a thing simply because you want it. It has taken you several days, and one full confession from me, before you would own to it yourself.” The corner of her mouth curved, faint but genuine.
“I begin to suspect you would negotiate your own feelings down to better terms, if you thought you could manage it.”
A short laugh escaped him, surprising them both. “I have been told as much before.”
They sat a while longer in silence, her head returned to rest against his shoulder, his hand tracing slow, absent circles against her arm. The fire popped and settled low. Rain kept up its patient work against the windows.
“Tell me one more thing,” she said, drowsy now, her voice softened by the hour. “What did you want, before any of this? Before the mill needed you, before Fortunestone needed you. When you were young enough that wanting a thing did not yet feel like a luxury you could not afford.”
He thought about it honestly, which took him a moment, since he could not recall the last time anyone had asked and expected a true answer rather than a creditable one.
“An ordinary life, I think. A wife. Children underfoot.” He paused. “I assumed, for a long while, that I had traded the chance of it away for good, and I made my peace with the trade.”
“And now?”
“Now I find I may not have traded it away after all. Merely delayed it a while, and by a route I would not have chosen, had anyone troubled to ask me in advance.” He pressed his lips to the crown of her head. “I find I do not mind the route, in the end. Only that it took so long to arrive.”
He had meant to keep a certain clarity of mind about all of this. A man of his temperament could feel a great deal without losing his head over it.
But Josephine had gray eyes and chamomile in her hair, and she had just spent the better part of an hour drawing out of him things he had never told another living soul.
He was discovering that clarity of mind was a great deal easier to hold when not in her presence, yet he could not stand the notion of her absence either.
He gathered her more securely against his side, and she settled there, her hand curled loosely at his ribs, her hair spread across his shoulder and chest like spilled honey in the firelight, her breathing beginning, by slow degrees, to lengthen and even.
He stared at the dark shelves across the room while his mind, never truly quiet even now, drifted back toward its usual work, gentler about it than usual.
The grandmother would need settling before London, that much was certain.
Beckwith wanted sufficient authority in his absence, Josephine clear instructions and the standing to use them, the girls firm proof that nothing would revert the moment his carriage cleared the gates.
His mother wanted a letter he had been putting off since his arrival, and Charlotte would find the whole business enormously entertaining once she heard it.
And London waited behind all of it, the Hollingford contract still to be secured, the figures that would not sit still on the page because so much else depended on them, the mill’s whole future bound up in a handshake he had not yet gone to make.
He needed that contract. He needed London which was why he would leave soon, but not gladly.
Josephine’s breathing had gone slow and even against his chest now, the last of the evening’s weight finally spent. The rain kept on, its rhythm unbroken, patient and thorough in the way of Yorkshire rain in March.
He would have to wake her before long and see her safely back to her own room before the house began to stir. But not yet. Let the rain have this hour too.
He pressed his chin to the top of her head and let the accumulated weight of the day carry him, at last, some way toward sleep himself.