Chapter Nine #2
“You cannot, or you would prefer not to?”
“Both. Either. Mrs. Vale would have my head for the informality.”
“We are not in the kitchen.”
“We are in your herb garden, which is near enough.”
He looked at her with warmth and patience and something careful that she recognised, after weeks of misreading, as a man asking for something and prepared to be refused.
“I will not ask you his name, and I will not ask what he said,” Thomas said. “I find I have one question only, and it is not about Garrick at all.”
“Then it is already an improvement on most of the morning’s conversation.”
“Do you dislike being noticed?” He said it without weight, the way a man lays a thing down gently so it will not break. “Not by him. By anyone. I have wondered it for some weeks and never found a way to ask that did not sound like another of my inspections.”
The question was quiet, and it was not an accusation or a diagnosis, and the bareness of it made her want to answer in kind.
“By some people,” Jane said, and the answer came too quickly, before she could trim it into something safer. The quickness told them both what the careful version would have hidden.
Thomas took the admission and did nothing with it, which was new.
He did not ask which people. He did not press, and he did not arrange.
He simply allowed the answer to stand between them in the warm air, and his willingness not to intrude upon her thoughts was the most delicate consideration she had received of late.
“The rosemary is good this year,” he said, and the retreat to safer ground was so deliberate and so careful of her that Jane’s throat tightened.
“Very well, Mrs. Vale is threatening to put it in everything, including the pudding.”
“Mrs. Vale’s puddings have never suffered from excessive ambition.”
“Unlike her apprentice.”
“Your ambition has produced excellent results, Miss Rennet.”
“That is dangerously close to a compliment.”
“I shall be more careful in future.”
Jane laughed. The laugh surprised her because it was real. Thomas’s expression shifted at the sound, settling into something very nearly and unmistakably a smile.
“You should do that more often,” Jane said, before she could stop herself.
“Discuss pudding?”
“Smile, Your Grace. You should smile a great deal more often than you do.”
The request hung between them in the warm garden air.
“I will consider it,” Thomas said. “Taken into consideration.”
“That is the most formal response to a compliment I have ever received.”
“You will find I am consistently formal in the face of things that disarm me.”
Jane’s breath caught. The sentence was the most personal thing he had ever said to her. The quietness of the delivery meant he had meant every word.
She gathered the rosemary and her composure and walked back to the kitchen. Her face was warm and her hands were steady. The weight Piers had placed on her that morning was still there but lighter, as though someone had stood beside her long enough to share it.
She finished the afternoon’s work with a steadiness that surprised her. The custard set properly. Mrs. Vale pronounced the dessert acceptable. At five on the hour she cleaned her station, hung her apron, and collected her things.
Whitlock met her at the kitchen door. “The gig is ready, Miss Rennet.”
“I will walk, thank you.”
“It is half past eight. The light is going.”
“The light has been going since seven, and I have walked this lane a hundred times.”
“His Grace asked me to offer whenever you work past seven.”
“I know. And I am declining, because accepting the duke’s gig every evening will produce exactly the talk I am trying to avoid.”
Whitlock nodded. “Goodnight, Miss Rennet. Be careful.”
“Goodnight, Whitlock.”
She left through the courtyard and passed through the lower gate. The evening was cooler than the afternoon, the sky the deep blue that came before darkness proper. The gravel crunched under her shoes in the rhythm she associated it with the sound of going home.
She walked quickly because her legs were tired and because empty lanes at dusk made her think of Piers Garrick. The quickening was its own kind of answer to whether she was afraid.
The lane curved near Merton’s farm, where the hedgerow grew thick enough to block the remaining light.
Jane heard the footsteps before she saw the man.
Quick, deliberate steps from behind the curve.
By the time Piers appeared on the lane, she had already stopped and shifted her basket to her left hand.
“Miss Rennet.” His voice was pleasant. Everything about Piers was pleasant in the way a trap is pleasant when designed to look like something else. “You really ought to accept the duke’s gig.”
“It is not dark, Mr. Garrick.”
“It will be shortly. And you are alone.”
“I have been alone on this lane every evening for two months.”
“Until now.” Piers stepped closer, casual in the way men who wished to intimidate made their movements casual. “I wanted to speak with you about the lease. My father has been reviewing the terms.”
“Then your father should speak to mine.”
“I thought a more informal conversation might serve. Between friends.”
“We are not friends, Mr. Garrick.”
“No?” He tilted his head. “A woman in your position can always use friends. Particularly friends whose families own the building where her family makes its living.”
“If that is friendship, I would prefer the alternative.”
“The alternative is a conversation with my father that goes rather differently.”
He caught her arm.
It was neither a rough nor a violent movement.
His fingers closed about her arm with a steady, deliberate movement, perfectly matching the composure of his countenance.
He inflicted no pain; he knew full well that pain was excessive.
The gesture was intended only to signify his total territory, to remind her that he might breach her propriety at will, and she was without recourse to prevent it.
Jane went cold. The deep, still cold of a woman touched without consent by a man who was smiling about it. The smile was the worst part. The smile meant he thought this was acceptable.
“Take your hands off me,” she said.
“I am merely making conversation, Miss Rennet.”
“Remove your hands from my person, Mr. Garrick.”
He did not let go. His grip tightened and his smile widened, and the two movements were connected in a way that made Jane’s stomach turn.
“Miss Rennet is under my household’s protection.”
The voice came from behind Piers. It was quiet, though not soft; it possessed the stillness of deep water, suggesting a dangerous force perfectly governed by restraint.
Jane knew the voice before she saw the man, because she had spent weeks learning the textures of Thomas Bennister’s silence, and this was a new texture entirely.
Thomas stepped onto the lane.
He had followed her. He must have seen Piers from the wall where he had stood the evening before.
Jane did not know how long he had been walking behind her or how much he had heard.
She only knew that he was here, and that the lane, which had felt like a trap thirty seconds ago, now felt like something else entirely.
Thomas did not raise his voice. He did not quicken his pace.
He walked to where Piers stood with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who had decided what he was going to do and did not need to rush because the outcome was already settled.
He looked at Piers’s hand on Jane’s arm.
His expression contained nothing that could be mistaken for tolerance.
He removed Piers’s hand with a precise, controlled motion, placing his own hand over Piers’s fingers and detaching them from Jane’s forearm like a man choosing, with visible effort, not to break them, and the choice and the restraint and the cost of both were plain on his face for Piers to read.
Then he stepped between them, his back to Jane, his shoulders blocking her view of the other man entirely, so that the protection of it became a kind of wall, one that said without a word that Piers Garrick would have to go through the Duke of Aldermere to reach her.
“A generous arrangement for an apprentice,” Piers said. The pleasantness was thinner now, with an edge.
“You will not touch her.”
Thomas’s voice was the same quiet. The quiet was worse than shouting would have been, because shouting could be dismissed as temper and this could not.
“Your Grace, I was merely speaking with the young woman.”
“You were not merely anything.” Thomas paused with the silence of a man selecting each word with the knowledge that words had consequences. “You stopped her on a public lane after dark. You placed your hand on her arm without her consent. And you did it because you believed no one was watching.”
A second pause followed, of shorter duration but possessed of a harsher gravity.
“Someone was watching.”
Piers’s smile held, but the thing behind it faltered. Jane could see it from behind Thomas’s shoulder. The recalculation of a man who had expected an empty lane and a woman alone.
“I intended no harm, Your Grace.”
“Your intentions are not my concern. Your actions are. You will not approach Miss Rennet on this lane again. You will not approach her at the bakery. You will not approach her anywhere that is not a public room with witnesses.”
He paused. Piers opened his mouth. Thomas spoke over him with quiet precision.
“If you do, Mr. Garrick, you will find the conversation we have next will not take place on a lane. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear, Your Grace.”
“Then you may go.”
Piers went. He walked back along the lane with the careful steps of a man retreating and wishing to make the retreat look like a choice.
Jane watched him go. Her arm ached where his fingers had been, less from any real hurt than from the memory of being held by a man who believed he had the right to do it.