Chapter Twenty-Four
His aunt sent for him the next afternoon.
He found her by the fire with a patience game spread across the little table before her.
“You have been avoiding me,” she said.
“I have been thinking.”
“So I supposed.” She laid another card. “Has it helped?”
He did not answer.
She looked up then. “You know what you did.”
“Yes.”
“And you know why.”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you still here?”
Lucian looked into the fire.
“Because if I go to her now, I shall only do it again.”
Seraphina waited.
“I spent months arranging her life without asking her what she wanted. If I ride to Larkwell now and put myself before her, I make myself one more demand upon her peace. One more great house arriving to settle her future. I have done enough.”
His aunt was quiet a long moment.
“No,” she said at last. “You have arranged enough.”
He looked at her.
“Everything you have ever given that woman came wrapped in an arrangement. Employment. Protection. A settlement. A future chosen for her before she had spoken a word of her own. You have never once gone to her with nothing in your hands.”
He said nothing.
“You mistake asking for arranging because you have never truly done the first.”
“And if she refuses me?”
“Then she refuses you.”
The words were spoken almost mildly.
“For the first time in her life, she will have been left entirely free to decide what happens next. Can you not see the difference?”
He looked away.
“I do not know how.”
“No.” His aunt smiled sadly. “That has been the whole trouble.”
She gathered up the cards.
“So I shall make it very simple for you.”
She counted upon her fingers.
“You will not write. You will not send money. You will not promise her a house, or a title, or a future.”
He said nothing.
“You will go to her exactly as you are,” she went on, “with empty hands, and you will tell her you were wrong.”
The room was very quiet.
“And then?”
“And then,” said Lady Seraphina, “you will stop talking.”
He almost laughed.
It came nearer to tears.
“You have spent your whole acquaintance answering questions she never asked,” she said. “Try, for once, asking one of your own, and leaving enough silence for another person to answer it.”
He drew a breath.
“She is at Larkwell,” he said at last.
“She is.”
He stood a moment.
“Thank you.”
His aunt dismissed the gratitude with one dry movement of her hand.
“Do not thank me.”
She reached again for her cards.
“Go and give Miss Vane the one thing no one ever has.”
He paused at the door.
“And what is that?”
“The choice.”
He left before she could say anything more.
***
Larkwell was everything Mr Pelham had promised her.
That, in the end, was the trouble.
She had been three weeks in Mrs Carne’s rooms above the parlour, and they had been good weeks.
The rooms were small, warm and hers. The school wanted her in the mild way a school wants a steady hand: an hour of letters, an hour of sums, a knot untied or an ink-stained cuff rescued, and then it released her. No bell followed her home.
Mrs Carne poured the tea and refused to be argued out of it.
In the evenings, no one’s comfort depended upon Elowen remaining awake to provide it.
She sat beside her own fire with her hands empty and discovered that rest was not idleness, nor selfishness, nor a debt she must repay as soon as she had strength enough to rise.
It was simply rest.
She needed it. She was grateful for it.
And still, beneath the quiet, something in her remained unfinished.
She noticed it first in small ways. She passed entire days without wanting anything beyond what stood before her: the warm cup, the orderly copybooks, the fire Mrs Carne had laid.
There was ease in that, but there was also safety of another kind.
Nothing in Larkwell asked her to risk herself.
Nothing required her to say aloud that she wanted more than peace.
She had spent so long believing that happiness must be the absence of demands that she had never considered whether it might also contain desire.
Larkwell had given her the first.
It could not, merely by being kind, give her the second.
Near the end of the third week, on a grey afternoon, she took out the heartsease.
It had travelled for years in the bodice of one gown after another, pressed flat and brown, its purple long since faded. It was the only thing she had ever carried that no one could use: a small, useless token of a wish she had never permitted herself to finish.
She turned it carefully between her fingers by the window.
She had kept it because it belonged to no account and answered no need but her own. Yet she had hidden it so thoroughly that keeping it had become another form of denial. A flower shut away from the light was safe from harm.
It was also unseen.
Mr Pelham came to her one afternoon and made certain they were quite alone before saying what he had come to say.
He stood with his hat in his hands. Elowen understood before he had spoken three words, and because he had been honest with her from the beginning, she allowed him the honesty of finishing.
“When you came to Larkwell, I told you I offered nothing but the parish. I meant it.”
He turned the hat once between his hands.
“I find I did not know myself quite so well as I believed. I have watched you teaching the sevens, untying knots and drinking Mrs Carne’s tea, and I cannot keep to what I said.”
He looked at her then.
“I would have you for my wife, Miss Vane. I have no grand life to offer you. Only my house, my company, and what kindness I am capable of giving consistently. You would be free to do as much or as little as you chose, and nothing beneath my roof would be yours to carry merely because no one else would take it up.”
His voice remained steady.
“It is not a brilliant offer, but it is an honest one. I make it gladly, and I shall not trouble you with it twice.”
It was the gentlest proposal she had ever imagined receiving.
That was why she would answer it with equal honesty.
“Will you sit down, Mr Pelham? I cannot answer you properly while you stand there holding your hat like a boy called before the master.”
A faint smile passed over his face, and he sat.
Elowen sat across from him. She did not fold her hands or arrange her expression. He was too good a man to be given the smooth thing.
“You have offered me a life I have wanted for a very long time,” she said. “I need you to know that before I refuse it.”
He lowered his eyes briefly, but said nothing.
“A house in which I might choose what to answer. Work that ends when the work is done. Kindness that does not demand repayment. I have dreamt of such a life more often than other women dream of carriages.”
She drew breath.
“But I cannot take it from you merely because I am tired. I could be comfortable with you. I could be grateful to you every day. I might even persuade myself, for a time, that gratitude and peace were enough.”
“They might be enough,” he said quietly. “For some.”
“Yes. And honourably so.”
She met his eyes.
“But they would not be enough for me. Not now that I know there is something else I want.”
He was silent for a moment.
“You are in love.”
Elowen looked down at the pressed flower in her hand.
“Yes.”
The word was scarcely louder than the settling of the fire, but once spoken it did not frighten her.
Mr Pelham placed his hat upon his knee.
“I thought you might be.”
“You knew?”
“I suspected. There are looks a person carries away from a place and looks they leave turned towards it. Yours was the second kind.”
There was no bitterness in his face. Only the quiet acceptance of something he had half known before asking.
“He does not want me,” Elowen said before she could stop herself. “Or so I have come to think. He arranged that I should be free of him and called it kindness. There is very little sense in loving a man for that.”
“There is seldom much sense in it at all.”
Despite herself, she almost smiled.
“He does not know,” she said. “And I have told no one else.”
“I shall keep it.”
Mr Pelham’s tone made the promise simple.
Elowen looked at him across the small room.
“I am sorry.”
“So am I,” he said. “But not that I asked.”
He turned the hat once more, then stilled it.
“There is comfort in having offered honestly and been honestly refused. Wondering is a poor companion. I have kept too much of it in my life already.”
He rose.
“You will not remain at Larkwell, I think.”
“Not for long.”
“Because it is too quiet?”
“No.” Elowen considered the question. “Because I came here to escape a choice made for me. Larkwell has been good enough to give me the strength to make one for myself.”
Mr Pelham nodded.
“That seems a fair use of the parish.”
He took up his hat and became, before her eyes, once more the kind neighbour had shown her there was a place for her at Larkwell without ever insisting that she remain.
“The school will be sorry to lose you. Mrs Carne will be sorrier. I shall be sorriest of all, though I promise to bear it with dignity whenever anyone is looking.”
This time she did smile.
At the door, he paused.
“For what it may be worth, Miss Vane, a man who loves you properly will not ask you to become less troublesome to the world. He will be glad that you want things of your own, even when what you want is inconvenient to him.”
Elowen’s fingers closed around the heartsease.
“And if he does not?”
“Then he is not the life you want either.”
He opened the door onto the grey afternoon.
“Come to the school on Saturday. Sukey has mastered her capitals and means to display them. I will not have her disappointed merely because two grown people have conducted themselves with painful good sense.”
Then he was gone, walking down the lane through the cold: an upright, quiet man who had asked for something, received his answer, and lost none of himself by having been refused.
Elowen remained in the empty room after him.
She did not weep. It was not a weeping matter.
Something had returned to her that she had laid aside so long ago she had forgotten its weight. It was not comfortable. It was not peaceful.
It was hers.
She had chosen.
She had refused a good man and a good life, not because either was too little, but because neither was hers to take under a false name.
She wanted Lucian.
She wanted him plainly, foolishly and without any assurance that the wanting would ever be returned. He had released her because he had not understood the difference between giving her freedom and choosing a future without her.
Perhaps he never would.
But she would rather bear the truth of wanting him than accept another man’s kindness and call the compromise contentment. The wanting was her own, neither useful nor sensible nor permitted by anyone else.
For once, that was reason enough to keep it.
She did not know that, three miles away, a horse had been ordered for the morning.
That evening she banked Mrs Carne’s fire and set the heartsease upon the window ledge, where the fading light could still find it. Then she went to her narrow bed and lay awake, no longer hiding from what she wanted and no nearer knowing what she ought to do with it.
Three miles away, frost settled over the house she had left.
In it, a man waited for the light.