Chapter 1 #2
Temperance looked at her for a moment. Then she tucked her mother’s arm more securely through her own and began walking again, slowly, toward the quieter end of the garden.
“All the same,” she said, “perhaps we limit it to two glasses, just for my peace of mind?”
Albina leaned her head briefly against her daughter’s shoulder.
“You are very bossy for someone who claims not to want any power.”
“I want peace for us, I believe that is different.”
“Is it?” Her mother straightened and gave her a sidelong look, the familiar glint of mischief already returning to her eyes. “Speaking of which… Lord Aubrey was asking after you earlier. Perfectly respectable man. Very earnest and dreadfully handsome, if only in a forgettable sort of way.”
“Mother,” Temperance groaned, as if to say not this again.
“I am simply reporting what I observed and I only wonder,” Albina said lightly, “whether you might consider… just consider, mind you, no obligations attached…. allowing one of these perfectly respectable, very earnest, dreadfully handsome gentlemen to pay you some attention. You are twenty-five, my darling, not ninety.”
Temperance was quiet for a moment. Above them, the afternoon sky was going pale gold at the edges and it felt like it was the kind of moment that invited honesty, and she supposed she had never been very good at lying to her mother anyway.
“I do not want a husband,” she said.
“At all?”
“At all.” She said it without apology, because there was none to give.
It was simply true. She had spent twenty-two years in a place that ran on rules and obligation and she had come out the other side with a very clear sense of what she valued.
Her freedom and the particular peace of a life that belonged, for the first time, entirely to herself.
“I have you and that is quite enough for me.”
Albina was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its lightness.
“You cannot spend your whole life looking after me, Temperance.”
“I am not looking after you. I am enjoying your company. Now, please, let us not make this conversation so heavy…”
“You are a terrible liar.”
“I learned from the best.” Temperance smiled at her sideways. “Besides. The new heir has not even shown his face after years. As long as he stays wherever he is, we want for nothing. We are perfectly fine as we are.”
Albina studied her for a moment with those shrewd, fond eyes that saw considerably more than Temperance usually intended to show. Then she sighed, patted her daughter’s hand, and allowed herself to be led back toward the house without further argument.
Albina was quiet for a moment after Temperance said it. They walked slowly, the garden path curving ahead of them toward the quieter end of the grounds, and the sound of the party faded behind them until it was just the two of them and the evening air and the pale gold sky above the hedges.
“You say that as though it is very simple,” Albina said finally.
“It is simple,” Temperance said.
“It is not simple,” Albina said, pleasantly but firmly. “It is what you have decided, which is different. Simple things do not require deciding.”
Temperance looked at the path ahead. “I have never wanted a husband. That has not changed.”
“I am not talking about a husband specifically,” Albina said. “I am talking about what happens in ten years. Twenty. I am talking about what your life looks like when you have built it entirely around someone else’s.”
“I have not built it around someone else’s,” Temperance said. “I have built it with you. There is a difference.”
“Is there.” Albina said it without the rising note of a question, just as an observation she was setting down between them.
Temperance did not answer immediately. They had reached the stone bench at the far end of the garden path, the one that sat under the old elm that nobody had ever got around to cutting back, and she stopped without meaning to and looked at it for a moment.
“I spent twenty-two years,” she said, “being told what my life was going to look like. Who it was going to belong to. What was expected of me and what I was permitted to want.” She paused.
“I came home and for the first time in my life I have a life that is actually mine. That feels like mine. And I am not in any hurry to hand it over to someone who will have opinions about how I conduct it.”
Albina looked at her for a long moment.
“That is fair,” she said quietly. “That is more than fair.” She reached over and straightened the edge of Temperance’s shawl with the absent, practiced gesture she had, the one that still caught Temperance off guard occasionally, the ease of it, the naturalness of a mother doing a mother’s small thing.
“I only want you to leave room for the possibility that life can surprise you. That is all I am saying.”
“Life has already surprised me considerably,” Temperance said. “I found you. I did not expect that.”
Albina looked at her, and the expression on her face was the warm, private one, the one that Temperance had catalogued over three years and still found, every time she saw it, the most extraordinary thing she had ever been given.
“No,” Albina said softly. “Neither did I.”
They stood there for a moment, the two of them under the old elm in the fading afternoon light, and then Albina tucked her arm back through Temperance’s and they turned toward the house, and nothing more was said about husbands or the future or the things that life might yet surprise them with.
For now, at least, this was enough.