Chapter 22
“Elias Talbot has written,” Albina said, appearing in the sitting room doorway at nine o’clock with a note in her hand. “He would like to walk this morning.”
Temperance had been in the sitting room since half past eight. She had written a letter, reorganized a shelf, and looked out the window at the garden twice. She had not been to breakfast.
Where Harper was. In her mind, she told herself that she simply was not hungry. But in reality, she was avoiding him.
She took the note from her mother's hand.
“Tell him yes,” she said.
Albina looked at her for a moment. “He will be here at ten.”
“Good,” Temperance said, and went back to her letter.
Elias arrived punctually, as he always did, and they set out from the house with Albina between them, which had not been the plan but had become the arrangement when Albina appeared in the entrance hall in her walking dress and said she fancied some air.
“How are you finding London this season?” Elias asked, as they turned onto the main path. “Better or worse than last year?”
“I didn’t come last year,” Temperance said.
“Better then, by default,” he said pleasantly.
“Something like that.”
“I find it exhausting by May,” he said. “Every year I tell myself I will leave earlier and every year I am still here in June wondering how it happened.”
“Why do you stay?” Albina asked.
“Obligation mostly,” he said. “And the food at my club, which is better than anything I have in Dorset and which I am not too proud to admit influences my decisions.” He paused.
“Also my sister lives here and she would never forgive me if I left before her garden party, which she has been planning since January.”
“What is she like?” Albina asked.
“Terrifying,” Elias said, with great affection. “She has opinions about everything and she shares them whether you have asked or not. We get along very well.”
“She sounds wonderful,” Albina laughed.
“She is,” he said. “Though I would never tell her so. She does not need the encouragement.”
Temperance smiled and looked at the path ahead and let her mother carry it.
Albina asked him something about Dorset and Elias turned toward her with easy warmth, and they talked about his estate and a garden he had been redesigning for two years, and Temperance walked beside them and listened and thought about very little.
They seemed to have more to talk about, which Temperance did not mind in the slightest.
“You must come and see it when it is finished,” Elias said, turning to Temperance. “Both of you. The east garden especially. I think you would find it interesting.”
“When do you think it will be finished?” Albina asked.
“Autumn, if everything goes to plan,” he said. “Which it probably won’t. But I find it is better to be optimistic and disappointed than pessimistic and miserable.”
“A very sound philosophy,” Albina said.
“I have a few,” he said. He looked at Temperance again, with the comfortable, undemanding attention he always brought to her.
Still, it made her feel nothing.
She thought that he was a very good man and that she was fortunate and that she wished. If only fortunate were enough.
“We would love that,” Albina said.
“Yes,” Temperance said. “Lovely.”
There was silence between them again, and Temperance found herself thinking of the duke once more. How annoying was it that even when she was trying to avoid thinking of him, he still appeared in her thoughts.
“We are having a ball,” she said as a way to distract herself. “At Wilmington. At the end of the season and I wanted to invite you personally.”
“I would be very glad to come,” Elias smiled politely.
“It will be a small occasion,” she said. “Just something to close the season properly.”
“Those are often the best kind,” he said.
“They are,” Albina agreed, and glanced at Temperance briefly with the look she had when she was noting something she was not yet going to say.
They walked on. Elias talked about the concert season and a book he had started and was not yet sure about, and Temperance listened and smiled and contributed where it was natural to contribute, and all of it was pleasant and easy and asked very little of her.
She thought that this was perhaps the most honest thing she could say about the whole arrangement.
It asked very little of her.
They reached the gate. Elias stopped and turned to them both.
“Lady Wilmington,” he said, “it has been a genuine pleasure. Thank you for your company.”
“The pleasure was entirely mine,” Albina said, warmly. “You must come to dinner before the ball. I insist.”
“I would like that very much,” he looked at Temperance then. “Miss Hosmer. I look forward to the ball.”
“As do I,” she said.
He bowed, correctly and without ceremony, and went.
Temperance watched him go and stood for a moment at the gate with the morning around her.
“Shall we go?” she said to her mother, rubbing her arms awkwardly.
“Yes,” Albina could only smile. Temperance knew that she had more to say but was stopping herself.
They were quiet for a while as they walked but Albina broke the silence when they were halfway home.
“He is very kind,” she said. “But you spent the entire morning letting me talk to him. Is it because it was easier than doing it yourself?”
“Oh, nothing of the sort,” Temperance tried to reason but it felt short.
“I noticed,” Albina said. “I want you to know that. What were you thinking about?”
“About Elias, of course,” Temperance replied, “and the ball, and all that is related to it.”
“That is not what you were thinking about,” Albina said.
“Mother,” Temperance stopped too and turned to look at her.
“Be honest with me.”
“If you really must know,” Temperance sighed, “then I don’t know what the real one is anymore.”
“Yes you do,” Albina said simply. “You are just choosing not to look at it.”
They began walking again, slowly.
“He is everything I was looking for,” Temperance said, after a while. “Kind and sensible and he respects me and he would never try to manage my life. The practical arrangement would be a good one.”
She paused for a moment.
“He is exactly what I was looking for.”
“And?” Albina said.
“And I feel nothing,” Temperance said, and then corrected herself. “Not nothing, I mean I do feel fondness and respect. I suppose I am glad he exists but that is the extent of it.”
It was the first time that Temperance had admitted such a thing out loud, and it felt oddly freeing.
“Can I tell you something?” Albina said.
“Yes.”
“I spent thirty years married to your father,” she said.
“And I knew, before I married him, that I did not feel love for him. I knew it clearly and I told myself the same things you are telling yourself now. That fondness was enough and a sensible arrangement was worth more than feelings that were uncertain and inconvenient.” She looked at the street ahead.
Temperance found herself suddenly invested in whatever her mother had to say, and listened closely.
“I was not entirely wrong. Fondness is worth something, as is respect. But I will tell you what thirty years of a sensible arrangement taught me.”
Temperance listened.
“A life without love is always slightly cold,” Albina said. “No matter how warm the room is. You can be in the same house as someone for thirty years and still be entirely alone in it. And you know it every day, and you get very good at not showing it, and that costs more than you expect.”
They had reached the end of the street, and now the house was visible from here. Both of them slowed down to keep the conversation going just a little bit longer.
“I am not saying Elias Talbot is your father,” Albina said.
“He is clearly not. He is a good man and your father was not, and that matters enormously. But a good man who does not make you feel the passion that comes with love will still leave you cold. I know what that feels and would not wish it on you.”
Temperance looked at her mother and thought about thirty years and a dining table and a woman sitting in a window looking at something nobody else could see.
“What if it cannot go anywhere,” she said quietly. “Love…. What if the person I feel it for is not…”
“Have you told him?” Albina said, as though she was already privy to what Temperance felt like was her best guarded secret.
“No.”
“Then you do not know that,” Albina said. “You are deciding something based on an assumption you have never tested.”
“It is not that simple.”
“I know,” Albina said. “But the alternative is a life that is always slightly cold. And I think you are brave enough to choose something harder than that. I hid what I felt for thirty years because I was afraid and told myself I was being sensible. Do not make the same mistake.”
They stood outside the house. Temperance looked at the familiar door and the garden wall that needed repointing on the left side and the window of the sitting room where she had spent the morning not being at breakfast.
“He might not feel it back,” she said.
“He might not,” Albina agreed. “That is possible.”
“And then I will have lost Elias and still be exactly where I am now.”
“Yes,” Albina said. “But you will not have spent thirty years finding out.”
She went inside after saying that.
Temperance stood on the step for a moment and then followed, and the house was warm around her, and she went upstairs and sat on the end of her bed and looked at nothing for a long time.
Instead, the only person on her mind was Harper.
The green dress had been in the wardrobe since the night it arrived.
Temperance had put it there herself, on the left side behind the blue silk, and she had been choosing other things ever since. The morning of the ball she opened the wardrobe and stood there for a moment and then took it out.
Mary, the housemaid, came in twenty minutes later to help with her hair and stopped in the doorway.
“Oh,” she said.
Temperance looked at her in the mirror. “What?”
“Nothing, miss.” Mary came forward and began unpinning her hair but her eyes kept moving to the dress in the mirror, and after a moment she said, “It’s just that it’s a very good color on you.”
“Thank you,” Temperance said.
“I don’t mean it the way people say it to be polite,” Mary said. “I mean it’s exactly right, like it was made for you specifically.”
Temperance looked at herself in the mirror.
“It was.”
Mary said nothing. She pinned a section of hair with careful concentration and then met Temperance’s eyes in the mirror briefly.
“Whoever chose it,” Mary said, “chose well.”
Temperance looked at the dress.
It was a practical thing, yes? Nothing more to it.
Mary finished her hair and stepped back and looked at her in the mirror with the satisfied expression of someone whose work was done.
“You’ll be the finest one there tonight, miss,” she said, and went out.
Temperance sat alone at the dressing table and looked at herself for a long time.
She thought about a shop on Regent Street.
About him seeing something in a window and thinking of her before he had decided to think of her.
About a dress the color of her eyes that fit exactly, which was not an accident and had never been an accident, and which she had been calling practical for months.
There was nothing practical about it and it was time that she stopped lying to herself about it.