Chapter 8 #2
He was, he had always been, very good at knowing what needed to be done.
It was perhaps the quality he had most relied on across thirty-five years, which was the ability to assess a situation clearly, without the distortion of feeling, and identify the correct course of action and pursue it.
It had served him in the management of his estates, in the navigation of his title, in the single most difficult decision he had ever made, standing at a lakeside with his son in his arms and understanding with absolute clarity what had to happen next.
He looked at the chair and the teacup and the half-finished letter, and he found, with a discomfort he had no precedent for, that he did not know what needed to be done.
That the correct course of action was not presenting itself with its usual obliging clarity.
That something in the calculation had a variable he had not accounted for and could not, at present, seem to find the value of.
Joseph’s voice came back to him. The only fun I had. In a long time.
He picked up the ledger he had come in for, tucked it under his arm, and left the library.
He did not feel better for leaving. He had rather expected that he would, and he did not, and he filed this information away with the dissatisfied precision of a man who has been given an answer that does not fit he question and suspects the trouble is with the question.
He went to his study.
He sat at the desk and opened the ledger and looked at the numbers and they meant nothing to him, which was unusual.
Numbers had always been reliable. They did not shift depending on context or change their meaning based on the expression on someone’s face.
They were simply what they were, and he had always found this quality restful.
He closed the ledger.
He looked at the window. The east lawn was visible from here, the groundskeeper moving along the back wall with the deliberate pace of a man who had a great deal of work ahead of him and was not in any hurry about starting it. Harper watched him for a moment and then looked away.
The only fun I had. In a long time.
He had not expected that. He had expected the usual Joseph, careful and composed and precise, the boy who had learned to want things quietly and justify them practically.
He had not expected the confession, delivered without any of the usual scaffolding, just the plain fact of it sitting there in the library.
He thought about what he knew of Joseph’s days at Sedgewick.
The Latin before breakfast and the geography primer and the correspondence practice and the riding lessons and the ledger exercises.
The long, ordered procession of hours that he had constructed with the best intentions, the hours of a boy being prepared for the life he was going to have.
He had thought it was sufficient.
He picked up his pen and put it down again.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he said, and it was Mrs. Peel, which he had not expected.
She came in with the composed purposefulness she brought to everything and set a cup of tea on the corner of his desk without being asked, which was not something she normally did.
“Mrs. Peel,” he said.
“Your Grace,” she said, and did not immediately leave, which was also not something she normally did.
He looked at her. She looked at him with the expression of a woman who had something to say and was deciding whether it was her place to say it.
“Is there something you needed?” he said.
“No, Your Grace,” she said. “I only wanted to mention that Miss Hosmer has not eaten since yesterday evening. I left something outside the library door this morning but I don’t believe she touched it.”
Harper looked at her.
“I thought you might wish to know,” Mrs. Peel said, in the tone of someone who had delivered their information and was now returning responsibility for it to its rightful owner.
“Thank you,” Harper said.
She nodded and went out, and he sat with the information she had left behind, which was small and specific and sat in his chest in a way that was neither small nor specific.
She had not eaten.
He looked at the window. The groundskeeper had reached the far corner of the east wall and was crouching to examine something at the base of it, and the morning was going on around all of it with its usual indifference, and Harper sat at his desk and thought about three days and a library and a woman who had looked at him with the pleasantest expression he had ever seen and given him absolutely nothing behind it, and he thought about what it cost to maintain that, how much of a person it required, and he thought that he knew, because he had been doing something similar for considerably longer and from the inside it was not comfortable.
He stood up and did not have a plan. This was unusual for him.
He generally did not move toward things without a plan, without having assessed the situation and identified the correct approach and prepared for the most likely responses.
He found operating without a plan deeply uncomfortable, and he was operating without one now, and he went down the corridor anyway.
She was not in the library. The chair was empty and the teacup from earlier had been taken away and the room was simply a room again, with no particular quality to it.
He checked the sitting room. Empty.
The small garden door at the end of the east corridor was open a crack, which meant someone had gone through it recently, and he pushed it open and went out.
She was on the bench under the apple trees.
She had a book, because she always had a book, but it was closed in her lap and she was looking at the garden with the particular quality of attention that was not really looking at anything.
She heard him coming across the grass and looked up, and the pleasant, unrevealing expression arrived on her face with the practiced speed of a reflex, and he thought about what it cost and felt something tighten in his chest.
He sat down on the other end of the bench.
She looked at him. He looked at the garden.
“Mrs. Peel tells me you have not eaten,” he said.
“Mrs. Peel worries excessively,” she said.
“She worries appropriately,” he said. “There is a difference.”
Temperance said nothing. She looked back at the garden, and the bench was long enough that there was a reasonable distance between them, and the morning was quiet and the apple trees were doing what they always did, which was stand there and be old and unconcerned.
“I handled it badly,” he said.
She did not say anything.
“Not only Alford,” he said. “The whole of it, from the beginning. I arrived here and I told you what was going to happen as though the decision had already been made, which it had, in my mind, before I had any understanding of the situation. I made assessments without information and acted on them as though they were facts.” He paused. “That was wrong.”
She was looking at the garden. He could not see her expression from this angle.
“I am not saying this to ask you to be less angry,” he said. “I am saying it because it is true and because you deserve to hear it said plainly.”
A long pause.
“I am not angry,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
She turned to look at him at that, quickly, and he met her eyes and held them, and the pleasant unrevealing expression had slipped slightly, just at the edges, and he could see what was underneath it, which was not anger, which was something considerably more complicated than anger, and he sat with it and did not look away.
“That is the problem,” she said, quietly. “I should be.”
He said nothing.
She looked back at the garden. The book was still in her lap, closed, and her hands were resting on it, and she sat there in the morning light under the apple trees and he sat beside her and neither of them said anything for a while.
“Thursday,” she said eventually. “Lord Fenwick.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I will be ready at eight.”
“I know you will,” he said.
She looked at him sideways at that, briefly, and something moved in her face that was not the managed version, just the real one, there and gone before she could do anything about it.
He stood up.
“You should eat something,” he said.
“I will,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment, sitting on the bench with her closed book and the apple trees and the morning around her, and he thought about the library and the teacup and the half-finished letter, and he thought about Joseph’s voice.
The only fun I had. In a long time.
He went back inside.
He did not feel better about leaving this time either. But it was a different kind of not better from the kind in the library, and he thought, without being able to articulate precisely why, that the difference mattered.
He went back to his study and sat at his desk and opened the ledger, and this time the numbers made sense, and he worked through the afternoon with the focused efficiency he always brought to things that needed doing, and he did not think about the bench under the apple trees or the expression that had slipped at the edges or the particular quality of the morning light on the garden.
He did not think about any of it but was not especially successful.