Chapter Eighteen
She had been ten days mending before he asked her to walk out with him, and he asked badly, which was the only way he knew to ask for a thing he wanted.
“You are to have air,” he said from the doorway of the small parlour, where Mrs Pike had installed her in a chair with a rug over her knees, a treatment she endured for the old woman’s sake and no one else’s.
“The physician says air. There is a sheltered place I can take you where the wind does not reach. You need not talk. You need only be out of that chair, which I can see you have come to hate.”
He stopped. He was arranging her again.
“If you would like it,” he added, making himself put the choice back into her hands. He had been practising the habit in the privacy of his own mind like a man learning a foreign grammar. “Only if you would like it.”
She looked at him for a moment, and something crossed her face that he could not read.
“I should like to be out of the chair.”
It was not quite a yes to him, but it was near enough to one, and he found he could work with that.
He took her out by the south door and round the long way, slowly, her hand on his arm weighing almost nothing.
At the door, the cold met them, and she lifted her face into it as a plant turns towards a window.
In the flat winter light, he could still see the fever in her, the wrist worn thin within the loose cuff.
He said nothing of it. He did not fuss over her wrap or decide for her how far she might walk. He merely matched his pace to hers and let that be the whole of what he did.
They came at last to the high wall at the west end of the gardens, its bricks softened and rose-coloured with age. A green door stood in it, locked though it had no business being so within his own grounds.
He took out his keys.
He carried a great ring of them and always had: keys to rooms he never entered and presses he never opened. Elowen had seen them on him a hundred times and never once asked what they were for, which was one of the many things he had lately come to understand about her.
He found the key without looking.
He had carried it for most of his life and never once put it into this lock. His hand was not entirely steady now. She saw that, he thought, but said nothing. She only waited, as though she had all the time in the world to give another person and no claim of her own upon a moment of it.
The lock resisted, then yielded. The door swung inward.
It was his mother’s garden.
The gardeners kept it. He paid men to tend a garden he had not entered since he was a boy, and they tended it well, not knowing why, under a standing order that had outlived his father and might have outlived him: the box hedges clipped, the gravel raked, the stone seat cleared of moss, the borders cut back for winter and the clean bones of the place laid bare beneath the hard January sky.
Nothing was neglected. Nothing was loved.
It was the most carefully preserved dead place in England. He had ordered its care and never once come to see it.
He led Elowen through the green door and stood there for the first time since childhood, with a woman upon his arm, and for a moment could say nothing at all.
“It was my mother’s,” he managed.
Elowen did not call it beautiful or ask him a question merely to fill the silence.
She released his arm slowly, testing whether she could stand without it, and walked a little way along the gravel.
There she stopped with her back half turned to him, giving him what he had not known to ask for: the freedom of not being watched while he tried to speak.
“She made it,” he said. “All of it. She was forever altering something; moving this, changing that, sending to London for roots that died. She wanted things, my mother. I told you that in the conservatory. She wanted them loudly, all day long: windows opened, dogs admitted, the wrong people invited to dinner. She wanted this garden more than any of it, and my father gave her the ground and the men and the money, thought he had answered her, and returned to his accounts.”
He looked towards the stone seat.
“The only thing that ever truly took in these beds was the heartsease. She could not keep a rose alive, but the little wild pansies seeded themselves all along the south wall and would not be dug out. She loved them beyond all reason, common as they were. She used to say they were the only things in the garden with the wit to grow where they were happy instead of where they had been put.”
The memory came upon him more sharply than he had expected.
“She rang her bell all day. You may have seen it on the board below stairs, painted over now. ‘The Duchess.’ From morning until night, it went. Something was always to be fetched or carried or altered, and the household complained of it. I complained of it. I was a boy, and I thought my mother a great deal of noise over very little.”
His voice remained level. He had found that, if he kept it so, he could continue.
“Then, the spring I was nine, she fell ill. And she went quiet.”
Elowen had grown very still beside the border. She did not turn.
“You cannot think what a relief it was,” he said.
“I have never admitted that to anyone. The bell stopped. The house was quiet for the first time I could remember, and it was like a headache lifting. My father said she was resting at last, that we ought to be glad she had grown so peaceful. And we were. We were all relieved that she had ceased wanting things of us.”
The cold seemed to settle more deeply into the garden.
“But she had not ceased wanting them. She had ceased being able to ring the bell. She lay upstairs for months, growing smaller and quieter and easier to please, and we praised her for it. How patient she had become. How little trouble she gave. Not one of us went close enough to understand that quiet was not the same thing as well.”
He looked towards the bare south wall.
“There was a Sunday in May when they let me go up to her. She asked me, very mildly, whether the heartsease had flowered. I was nine and eager to be gone. I said I did not know and ran back to my own affairs. I did not trouble to find out and return to tell her. She had grown so easy that there seemed all the time in the world.”
His hand closed around the keys.
“It was the last whole thing my mother ever asked of me. By the time the physician understood how ill she was, there was very little time left. She had been dying through that peaceful spring, in plain sight, in a house full of people who loved her, and we did not see it because she had stopped asking us to.”
The wind moved somewhere above the wall but did not reach them. He had built the account sentence by sentence, and each one had cost him, but he was not finished.
“I took the wrong lesson from it,” he said.
“I watched my mother want things loudly, watched her be disappointed, and decided wanting was the danger. A man who asked for nothing could not be refused. He could not burden a household or make everyone in it rise and fall upon his moods. So I learnt to want nothing aloud. I wrote wishes in margins. I arranged matters so thoroughly that no one need ever be troubled by what I wanted.”
He turned towards her, towards the set of her shoulders and the darned cuff at her wrist.
“I made silence into a virtue because it spared me the risk of asking. And I was wrong.”
She turned then.
Her guard was gone. Her eyes were wet, and her hands hung quite still at her sides, but she did not tell him that it was long ago, or that he had been a child, or that he must forgive himself. She knew better than to offer him a comfort that would make nothing true.
“The lesson was not that wanting is dangerous,” he said. “It was that a person may disappear in front of you while you congratulate yourself upon how peaceful they have grown. That you must look most closely at those who have stopped asking, because silence does not always mean contentment.”
“And now you look closely,” she said.
“Now I am trying to learn. I have begun very late, and I am very bad at it.”
She looked towards the bare south wall.
“I stopped ringing mine a long while ago,” she said. “There was never anyone at the other end. After a time, one forgets one has a bell at all. It is a great deal more restful.”
She spoke without self-pity, as though describing the ordinary weather of her life, and it went into him more deeply than tears could have done.
He took one step towards her on the gravel.
The green door stood open behind them. His keys were still in his hand, the key to the garden warm now within his grip among all the cold ones.
“Elowen. I brought you here because there is something I have wanted to say since a night in the rain, and I have been a coward about it. In the particular manner of cowardice natural to a man like me, I would rather arrange another person’s life than risk asking for a place in it.”
He was close to her now.
He had the words. They stood ready, plain and unmanageable.
I have loved you since the teapot at one in the morning. Do not go to Larkwell. Do not go anywhere. Stay. Be my…
Then the old terror closed its hand upon him: the boy’s conviction that to want a thing aloud was to lay the whole weight of that want upon someone else. Upon a woman who had carried everyone and been carried by no one.
The words altered in his mouth.
“I do not want you to return to a house, or a brother, or a life that spends you and calls it being valued. You have a place at Marcombe for as long as you wish one. A place of your own, not borrowed from anyone. I ought to have said it weeks ago. That is what I brought you here to tell you.”
It was true. It was generous. It was shelter offered freely, with no condition attached.
And it was a position in a household.
He watched the offer reach her and saw the precise moment she understood that the Duke of Marcombe had unlocked his mother’s garden and laid the most guarded part of himself before her, only to offer her, at the last, a situation.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said.
At the foot of the warm south wall, a frost-stunted clump of heartsease had seeded itself between the stones. Its small purple faces remained open even in the cold: his mother’s flower, growing where no one had put it.
Elowen’s gaze went to it and stayed.
She did not stoop to touch it. She said nothing more, and neither did he.
The word he had failed to say stood between them in the cold, bare garden as plainly as though he had carved it into the wall.