Chapter Five #2
He heard her before he saw her, a low half-conscious humming that drifted through the cracked door, the sound a person makes when they believe themselves alone and have stopped keeping watch for an audience.
He paused with his hand on the door frame, and the sound did something to him he could not have explained, some recognition that the woman making it was comfortable here, in his house, comfortable enough to forget herself in it.
He should have walked on, as Louisa’s warning required and four years of practised restraint demanded.
He got six steps down the corridor before he turned and came back, and the turning was the most honest thing he had done since the morning he caught her muffins in the courtyard. He pushed the door open.
Jane was labelling preserves, her back half-turned, a quill in one hand and a row of jars aligned before her on the shelf, her sleeves pushed up past her elbows and a smudge of ink on her wrist. The last of the evening light came through the high window and caught the loose hair at her temple, and he stood in the doorway and wanted, with a force that startled him, to hear her say one thing that was not careful.
“What were you humming?” he asked, and the question was out before he had weighed it, unfiltered, and the sound of his own voice in the quiet room surprised him very nearly as much as it surprised her.
She turned, her eyes widening, the quill dipping to leave a dot of ink on the shelf she would notice later, and for two or three seconds she looked at him with the unguarded face of a person caught in the middle of being herself and not yet able to assemble anything more suitable.
“I am sure I cannot tell,” she said, honest in the way people are honest before they have decided whether honesty is wise.
“Something my mother used to sing in the kitchen when she thought none of us were listening. I don’t think it has a name, and I don’t think she would admit to it if you asked her outright. ”
“Why would she not?”
“Because it isn’t a proper song, Your Grace. It’s only a thing she does when the bread is rising well and the kitchen is warm and nobody is asking anything of her. I have sometimes thought it is the one moment in her day when she is not turning over something practical in her head.”
“And you have caught the habit from her.”
“I suppose I have, though I had not noticed I was doing it until just now, which I imagine is rather the point of it.” She set the quill down and regarded him with a directness that was not quite proper between an apprentice and a duke and that neither of them moved to correct.
“Does the house seem very quiet to you, Your Grace? I ask because it seems quiet to me, and I have wondered whether it was always so, or whether it learned to be.”
He was silent a moment, because the question had walked straight up to a thing he did not discuss.
“It learned to be,” he said at last. “Some years past, indeed. Yet it is only of late that I have come to understand the silence not as a mere attribute of the house, but as a deliberate act of its own making.”
“Then perhaps it is unlearning,” Jane said, gently, and turned back to her jars before the remark could become anything she would have to account for.
He leaned against the door frame and said nothing further, because what she had described, the sound a person makes alone and content and done with performing, was precisely what he had been listening to from the corridor, was what had drawn him in and pulled a question out of him before he could weigh it, and the line between those facts was too plain to hide.
“You have ink on your wrist,” he said, which was not what he had meant to say and was also, in its own way, exactly what he had meant to say, because it told her he had been looking at her wrist, and telling her so was as near to honesty as he could come without crossing the line Louisa had drawn two hours before and that he could still feel laid across the back of his mind.
She looked down at her wrist, then back at him, and her expression shifted in a way he might have missed had he not been watching her so closely.
Something passed between them that had no words in it, a quiet mutual recognition that the moment was not what the arrangement was meant to contain.
He had come to the stillroom because she was in it, and she had not asked him why, and neither of them was going to name what was gathering in the space between his question and her answer.
“I should finish the labels,” Jane said, and her voice was not quite steady.
“Yes,” Thomas said, and did not move from the door.
A beat passed, and then another.
“Goodnight, Your Grace,” she said, and the formality was a door drawn gently shut between them.
She did not wish it shut, he thought, watching her say it.
She had only found, as he had, that leaving it open was more than either of them could manage in a room that smelled of vinegar and preserves and the last of the June light.
“Goodnight, Miss Rennet.”
He left, and got halfway down the corridor before he stopped and pressed one hand flat to the wall and breathed.
The exchange had run to no more than two minutes and held nothing improper.
It had overwhelmed him more entirely than anything he had known since the loss of Henry, leaving him more desolate than even his original sorrow had done.
When he glanced back, the stillroom door still stood open, and Jane stood where he had left her, the quill in her hand and her eyes on the empty doorway.
The next morning he resolved to keep out of the kitchen altogether.
He would stay in the study, attend to his correspondence, apply himself to the estate accounts he had allowed to fall into arrears for these three weeks past, resolving that nothing should entice him downstairs.
He would not think about the stillroom, or the humming, or the ink on her wrist, or the way her voice had cost her something when she said goodnight.
He lasted nineteen minutes.
At nineteen minutes he set down his quill and went down and along the corridor and heard her voice inside, putting it to Whitlock that nutmeg was a spice no one had ever ruined a dish by being generous with.
“There is such a thing as too much, Miss Rennet,” Whitlock was saying. “I have tasted a pudding that fought back.”
“That pudding was under-sugared and you are blaming the nutmeg, which is the usual fate of nutmeg, to be blamed for the failures of less interesting ingredients.”
“You would put nutmeg in everything if Mrs. Vale permitted it.”
“I would put nutmeg in a great many more things than she permits, and the world would be the warmer for it, and you would thank me inside a fortnight.”
“I would not. I would write to the newspapers about the baker’s daughter who ruined the Aldermere puddings, and they would print it, because nothing sells a newspaper like the downfall of a duke’s kitchen.”
“You have a very low opinion of my puddings, Whitlock, for a man who ate three of them yesterday when you believed the door was closed.”
“That was reconnaissance,” Whitlock said, with great dignity. “A man cannot critique what he has not thoroughly investigated, and I am nothing if not thorough.”
From deeper in the kitchen Mrs. Vale’s silence held its peace, which meant the debate had not yet crossed into interference with actual work and could run a little longer on those terms. Thomas stopped in the corridor and did not go in, which was the whole of the restraint he could manage on a morning when every part of him not governed by duty pulled at the door.
He stood with his shoulder to the cool stone and his eyes closed and Louisa’s warning was there with the sound of her voice, thin and clear, and he heard it and understood it and it made not the smallest difference.
Jane said something about cinnamon, and Whitlock something about proportion, and then she laughed, and the laugh reached him through the closed door and arrived in his chest like something that had been searching for him and had found the right address at last. He went back to his study and took up his quill and did nothing useful with it for the rest of the morning, because a man who had spent four years teaching himself to want nothing was discovering how completely the discipline fails when the thing he wants hums her mother’s songs to a row of jars and believes herself alone.
He would try again tomorrow, though he knew beforehand how fruitless the endeavor would prove.