Chapter Fifteen
Gavin came up the dark corridor in his shirtsleeves and stopped outside the east-room door with his hand against the wood. “Elizabeth. Open the door.”
A pause.
“I have come to say the thing,” he said. “If I stand out here long enough to think on it, I will go back down the corridor. And if I go back, you will hear it from everyone but me. From Renwick. From the county. From every mouth that wants to make it uglier than it was.”
The door opened. She had not been asleep. She stood in her wrapper with a candle and her hair down, with the look of a woman who had been sitting up with a decision and had not yet come to the foot of it.
“You crossed the corridor,” she said.
“I did.”
“That is new.”
“I know.” He looked at her steadily. “Let me in, Elizabeth. Or I shall say it from the passage, and by breakfast the servants will have improved it beyond recognition.”
She stepped back.
He crossed the threshold, and the room seemed smaller for it and more dangerous.
“Yes,” he said.
Her fingers tightened around the candle.
“You asked me in the library whether I wanted you while Thomas lived, and I could not answer. I have come to answer now. Yes. I wanted you in Spain. I wanted you while he lived, and after he died, and all the years between. I governed it. I did not touch you. I did not write to you. I did not speak one word of it to any living soul. But I wanted you.”
He drew a breath.
“And the part I am ashamed of is not the wanting. Perhaps it ought to be. I have tried for four years to make it be. But it is not. The shame is that I let silence stand where truth should have stood, until men like Renwick could take that silence and give it whatever name suited them.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“For years,” he went on, “I told myself the thing was decently buried. Then a column printed us in a stable yard, and your name became the price of my silence. I married you to stop the world from saying a true thing in the ugliest possible way, and I called even that provision. A name. A settlement. A roof.” He held her gaze.
“I did not let myself see that, in the same stroke, I had got the one thing four years of discipline had failed to kill. You. Under my roof, at my table, forty feet down a corridor I built so I would never have to be honest about why I wanted you nearer.”
“Gavin…”
His name in her mouth did something to him. He pressed on before it could unman him entirely.
“Pray let me finish. I had spent so many years teaching myself you were a closed account, and then you walked into my hall and turned in the candlelight, and the account was open again before I had my coat off.”
“You signed the leave-clause without an argument.” She had not moved.
“Yes.”
“That is the most generous act anyone has ever committed against me, Gavin, and the most cowardly, and I cannot yet tell which it weighs the more of.”
She set the candle down on the chest, very carefully.
“There is more. You said there were things about the river crossing I did not know. You tried to give me the death this afternoon because it was easier than giving me yourself. You have given me yourself now. So give me the death honestly, and not as a substitute. I have earned the whole of it.”
“You have.”
He had not said the next of it aloud in four years.
“The order was to hold the near bank until the guns came up. I gave it myself. Hold, and do not advance. Thomas heard it. So did every officer on that line.”
Elizabeth did not move.
“Then Renwick went down the bank. I saw him stop at Thomas’s company. I was too far off to hear what he said. I have had four years to imagine it, and not one version has been kind. Whatever it was, Thomas looked once towards the French and once back at Renwick. Then he took his men forward.”
“He disobeyed the order,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes.”
The word altered the room.
“He went forward across open ground before the guns were in place. The first volley took half the front rank. The second took him.” Gavin kept his eyes on hers.
“Every word of the dispatch was true. He led them bravely. He fell at the head of them. He did not turn back. But it was not the whole truth.”
“And Renwick?”
“Goaded him. I cannot prove the words. I can prove the pattern, and Briggs can prove more of it than Renwick knows. But I saw enough. Renwick found the one place in a brave, proud man that would not bear pressure, and pressed.”
“Why?”
Gavin was quiet.
“Because Thomas had seen me look at you.”
Her face changed.
“Because Thomas knew?”
“I think so. I think Renwick knew he knew. And I think Renwick understood what use might be made of that in front of Thomas’s men.”
Elizabeth drew one breath, carefully.
“You saw him go.”
“I saw him go.”
“You could not call him back?”
“I could have tried.” The answer cost him. “I have told myself for four years that it would have broken the line. Perhaps it would. Perhaps it would not. I do not know. What I know is that for one half-second, no more than that, I stood still.”
He looked at her then, with nothing left held back.
“That is the thing I have carried. Not that I killed him. I did not. The order was sound. The goad was Renwick’s.
The choice was Thomas’s. But there was a half-second in me that did not move quickly enough, and I will never know whether it was command, shock, or the ugliest part of a man who had envied him. ”
Elizabeth was very still.
“And the dispatch?”
“I wrote it the next morning. I made a broken order into a gallant charge because a gallant charge is something a widow can carry. A broken order is disgrace, inquiry, lost pension, and a dead man’s name dragged through the mud for the satisfaction of men who were not there.
” His voice roughened. “I did it for Thomas’s name.
I did it for the life you would have to live after him.
And I did it because it was the only honest thing I could still give you from a distance dishonesty had made necessary. ”
He stopped.
“No. Not honest. Kind, perhaps. Useful. Necessary. I have stopped trusting myself with the word honest.”
For a long while, she said nothing. The candle threw both their shadows up the wall, his the larger and meaning nothing.
“He died because Renwick knew where to put the knife,” she said at last.
“Yes.”
“And because Thomas could not bear being made to feel small before his men.”
“Yes.”
“And because you loved me.”
He closed his eyes.
“Yes.”
There it was. The word again, not hidden this time inside wanting, or silence, or duty.
Elizabeth looked down at her hands.
“I do not know what to do with that.”
“I understand.”
The words settled between them. Then another woman’s silence entered the room, quieter than either of theirs and older than this marriage.
“And Helena?” she asked.
He looked down.
“She deserved better than the courtesy I gave her.”
“She knew?”
“I do not know. That may be the worst of it. Perhaps she knew and was too proud to ask. Perhaps she only lived beside the absence without ever being told its name.” His voice lowered. “My aunt has never quite forgiven me for the quiet I made in that marriage. She is right not to.”
Elizabeth put one hand over her mouth, then took it away again.
“You have given me a great deal at once,” she said. “I do not know yet which part of it I am grieving.”
“I am not asking you to decide tonight.”
“That is wise of you.” She drew a careful breath. “I will not pretend to know what I think, only to be kind. You have finally stopped being kind in the false way, and I will not begin it now to spare you the waiting.”
He accepted that with a slight inclination of his head.
“But I do know one thing,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“The silence is broken. Whatever else is unsettled, and a great deal is, that cannot be made untrue. You crossed the corridor, Gavin, and you told me the truth. Late as it was, and hard as it was, you told it.”
He looked at her then as though the sentence had put something in his hands and he did not yet dare close his fingers around it.
“Go back to your room tonight,” she said.
He stilled.
“Not because I want you gone from this one. Because if you stay, with all of this still warm between us, we will reach for comfort before we have learnt what to do with truth. And I think truth has cost us too much tonight to be hurried past it.”
He bowed his head.
“Goodnight, Elizabeth.”
“Goodnight, Gavin.”
He went because she had asked it, and because she was right.
The corridor lay before him, dark and narrow and familiar. But it was not the same corridor he had crossed some minutes past.
Now, the silence was broken.
He had broken it himself, on his own feet, in his own voice, in a room with no clause in it. Whatever came next, whatever Elizabeth decided in the long unmapped country now lying open between them, a thing said aloud could not be put back into the man who had carried it.
For the first time in four years, he did not try.