Chapter 16 #2
“I think he is controlling,” Temperance said. “He has decided that he knows best and he is acting accordingly, which is entirely consistent with everything I have observed since.” She said it in the even tone she had developed for this particular subject.
“And?” Charity said.
Temperance was quiet for a moment.
“It bothers me less than it should,” she said finally.
“That is the and. The redirections and the selectiveness and all of it, I know what it is, I have named it accurately, and I am bothered by it less than I was two months ago. But I cannot entirely account for the difference, which bothers me more than the thing itself.”
“It sounds like you’re in a hard place.”
“The thing is,” Temperance said, after a moment, “it doesn’t matter.
What he does or doesn’t mean by things. What I feel or don’t feel about things.
My mother’s situation is what matters. If I marry, I will have a household and an income and the ability to make choices for her without needing anyone’s permission. ”
“And if you could make your own choices entirely freely?” Charity asked. “Without the practical considerations. What would you choose?”
Temperance looked at her.
“That is not the situation I am in,” she said.
“You should tell me, still.”
Temperance looked back at the room. She could see Harper from here, across the ballroom, talking to someone she didn’t recognize.
Even from this distance and behind the mask he had the particular quality of stillness that she had catalogued over weeks.
She had found it arrogant in the beginning but was not entirely sure what she found it now, which was itself a kind of answer to Charity’s question.
“He is looking over here,” Charity observed.
“I know,” Temperance said. She did not look back. “He is not happy that I am standing here instead of making the most of the suitors he has so carefully curated.”
“He looks concerned,” she said finally. “More than annoyed.”
“Perhaps,” Temperance said, “I will ignore him for now.”
She found him by the windows an hour later, or he found her, she was not entirely certain which, only that she had drifted toward the quieter end of the room and he had materialized at her side.
The music behind them had slowed into something that encouraged conversation, and the crowd had thinned somewhat.
“You are not circulating,” he said.
“I circulated,” she said. “In fact, I spoke to three separate people I did not know but I am now resting from the effort.”
“Lord Ashby? I saw you speak to him.”
“He was perfectly pleasant,” she said. “And I was perfectly pleasant in return, and the dance was perfectly pleasant.”
“You should have spoken to me first,” he said, seeming annoyed. “I would have approved them for you.”
“Harper,” she said quietly. “You cannot keep doing this, it’s like you’re trying to control me,”
“I am being selective on your behalf,” he said.
“There is not a very large difference,” she said, “from where I am standing.”
They stood together at the window for a while without speaking. It was the comfortable version of silence, the one they had developed without meaning.
“You are being possessive,” she said. “You know that, don’t you.”
It wasn’t really a question, and he seemed to understand that, because he didn’t answer it immediately. He looked out at the garden with the expression he got when he was deciding which version of a thing to say.
“I have more experience of the world than you do,” he said finally. “Using that experience on your behalf is not possession. In fact, I would say that it is the only sensible thing to do with it.”
“You make it sound very reasonable,” she said. “But I still believe it is form of control.”
He looked almost angry at that.
“Do you even know what you’re getting yourself into? I know what a bad marriage looks like,” he said, “I will not watch you walk into something equivalent, knowing how draining it can be.”
She looked at him, and suddenly felt a strange feeling in her chest.
“You never do talk about your marriage you know,” she said softly.
“There’s nothing important in it for you to know,” he shrugged off the topic. “Why talk about something that is not applicable anymore?”
“If only for advice,” she said and then added, “or if only to make yourself feel better.”
“I feel fine, please,” he said and she could almost see his walls come up.
She knew that it was best to retreat from the topic at this point, but she did not want to go back and have more small talk.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“You will regardless,” he said, and she smiled despite herself. “So go on ahead, already.”
“Well, it’s about Joseph. How old was he when it became just the two of you?”
Something shifted in his expression.
“Four,” he said. “Nearly five.”
“That is very young.”
“Yes,” he said.
She waited for him to continue on, not wanting to push him.
“The first year was the hardest,” he said, after a moment. “He would ask questions I did not know how to answer.”
“Like?”
“Small ones, really. He wanted to know where the sun went at night. He wanted to know….” He stopped himself for a moment, “He wanted to know if I would always be there.”
“He needed someone who could just be easy with him sometimes and I didn’t know how to do that. I knew how to keep him safe and how to educate him and how to make sure he had everything he needed, but the rest of it.” He stopped for a moment. “I think I made him too careful.”
“He will grow into his personality, surely.”
“He asked me last week if we could get a dog. At Sedgewick, when we go back.”
She looked at him. “And?”
“I said yes but the thing is, he has never just asked for something before, and he always justifies everything, always has some practical argument ready, and this time he just said he wanted one.” He shook his head slightly. “Six years and that was the first time.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You are good with him,” Harper said, after a moment. “I want you to know I recognize that. What I said before, about staying away from him, that was wrong and I knew it was wrong and I said it anyway, which is not something I am proud of.”
“Why did you say it then?” she asked.
He took a moment with the question, which she appreciated.
“Because you walked in and found him straightaway,” he said. “In a way I had been trying to for years. And instead of being glad about it I felt threatened by it, which is not something I would normally admit to anyone.”
“You are right quite often,” she said. “That is part of the problem. It makes you overconfident about the times you are not.”
He looked at her sideways. Something moved in his expression that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one. “That is the most accurate criticism anyone has made of me in recent memory.”
“I have had a lot of time to observe,” she said.
“You have,” he agreed. And then, after a moment: “What mask am I wearing tonight?”
She looked at him. He was looking at the garden again, and the question had been asked in a tone she recognized, it was the one he used when he was asking something he actually wanted to know and was covering it with lightness to make it easier to ask.
She thought about it honestly.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that you are wearing the mask of a man who has decided that control is the same as care.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“And you?” he said. “What is yours?”
“The same, probably,” she said. “In different ways.”
He turned to look at her, and she turned to look at him, and they were close enough that she was aware of him with a specificity she had stopped pretending to manage, and his eyes were very dark behind the mask, and the music behind them shifted into something slower.
Then Alethea appeared at her elbow, Oliver a step behind, and the moment dissolved back into the ordinary.
“There you both are,” Alethea said, “We have been looking for you everywhere.”
“We were talking,” Temperance said.
“I could see that,” Alethea said, and said nothing further, which was somehow worse than if she had said a great deal.
Oliver shook Harper’s hand and said something about the Countess’s garden being apparently remarkable in summer, and Harper responded in the level, composed way he had, and Temperance turned to Alethea and found her friend watching her with the quiet, perceptive expression that had always, since the nunnery, seen more than Temperance intended to show.
“Are you all right?” Alethea said, very quietly.
“Perfectly,” Temperance said.
Alethea looked at her for a moment. Then she looked at Harper, who was talking to Oliver now.
“He looked at you,” Alethea said, “when you laughed. Just now. I saw it from across the room.”
“We were talking,” Temperance said again.
“I know,” Alethea said. “That is rather what I mean.”
Temperance opened her mouth to say something that would close the subject, and found, unusually, that she did not have anything ready.
She closed it again. She looked at the dark garden beyond the glass, at the small separate lights that did not quite reach each other along the path, and she thought that Charity was right and Alethea was right and they had both been right for longer than she had been prepared to admit.
She was not going to admit it tonight. Tonight she was going to go back into the masquerade and be pleasant to the remaining suitors and dance if asked and come home at a reasonable hour and be sensible.
But being sensible about him was a problem. She was becoming, she thought, slightly less good at it than she used to be, which was either a problem or something else entirely, and she did not yet know which.
She turned back to the room.
“Shall we?” she said, to Alethea, in her ordinary voice.
“Of course,” Alethea said, and took her arm, and they went back into the warm bright noise of the evening, and Temperance did not look back.
She was fairly certain that he watched her go.