Chapter Fourteen
She woke to sunlight and the warmth of him beside her, and to the unfamiliar discovery that the least restful place in England, a duke’s bed on the first night of a matrimony, had turned out to be the place she had slept most deeply in months.
At breakfast, Thomas had taken it upon himself to pour her tea. He did not wait to ask if she wanted it, nor did he look to Mrs. Croft to perform her accustomed duty at the table.
He had poured it himself, two sugars, no milk, the way she drank it at her station after a long morning, and the precision of the knowledge made her chest ache, because he had been paying attention for months and the attention was in the cup.
Banana muffins, cooked with her mother’s very own recipe, had been laid upon the table as though they were in their rightful place alongside Jane, who too, had finally found her place in her new home.
Thomas sat across from her with his coffee and his careful manner restored and began asking questions.
“Are the rooms comfortable?”
“Very comfortable, Your Grace.”
“The curtains. Do you prefer them lighter?”
“The curtains are perfectly fine.”
“The dressing table. Is the position adequate, or should it be moved nearer the window?”
Jane set down her cup. “Thomas.”
He stopped.
“You are doing it again,” she said. “You are asking questions about curtains and furniture in the voice of a man conducting a household inspection. I am your wife, at your breakfast table. I assure you, the curtains do not require review.”
“I desire to know your preferences.”
The sentence was so simple and so honest that it disarmed her completely.
He was not inspecting. He was not managing.
He was a man who had spent four years alone in a house and had no idea how to share it, and his only tool was questions, and the questions came out sounding like evaluations because he had not yet learned the difference between caring for someone and cataloguing them.
“I like the rooms,” Jane said, more gently. “I like the tea. I like the muffins. I miss the kitchen.”
“You miss the kitchen?”
“I miss knowing what to do with my hands. I miss having a task and a standard I must meet. I miss being useful. A Duchess is not a skill I have trained for.”
“And pastry is.”
“Pastry is the thing I know, Thomas. When I am rolling pastry, I know exactly who I am and what I am doing and whether I am doing it well. When I am sitting in a beautiful room with curtains I did not choose and a dressing table I did not earn, I do not know any of those things.”
Thomas set down his coffee. “I have done this badly again.”
“You have not done it badly. You have done it generously. The rooms are generous. The tea is generous. The muffins are generous.” Jane paused. “But generosity without purpose feels like decoration, and I have never been comfortable being decorative.”
“You are not decorative.”
“In this house, this morning, in a room I did not arrange and clothes I did not buy and a position I did not train for, I am very close to decorative. And it is kind of you to have arranged all of it, and it hurts, and I know those two things should not exist in the same sentence.”
Thomas was quiet. “I thought rest would comfort you.”
“It did. And it hurt.”
He looked at her with the careful, wounded attention of a man who had tried to give her something kind and had given her something painful. The combination of kindness and pain was the most honest thing about him.
“Then tell me the difference,” he said. “When I miss it. Tell me when the comfort becomes the hurt, because I cannot see the line.”
“You will learn to see it.”
“I would rather you drew it for me than let me cross it without knowing.”
Jane reached across the table and placed her hand over his. Thomas looked down at her hand and went very still.
“I will tell you,” she said. “Every time. I will not let you guess.”
***
After breakfast, Jane went to the kitchen.
Not as an apprentice. Not in an apron. She went because the kitchen was the place in this house where she knew how to exist, and existing was what she needed to practise before she could learn anything else.
The stairs between her rooms and the kitchen were wide and well-maintained, and Jane counted them on the way down because counting was a thing she did when her nerves required occupation.
Mrs. Vale was at her station. The kitchen was in full operation, the ovens hot, and the preparation tables busy with the morning’s work. The smell of bread and rosemary met her at the door, and Jane stood in the doorway for a moment and breathed it in and let the familiarity of it settle over her.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Vale said, and the title landed on Jane with a weight she was not yet accustomed to.
“Mrs. Vale. I wanted to ask about the afternoon preserve schedule.”
“The preserve schedule is my concern, Your Grace.”
“I know. I am asking because I would like to help, if you will permit it. Not as a duchess. As someone who knows her way around a kitchen and would rather be useful than ornamental.”
Mrs. Vale studied her for a long moment. The study was not hostile. It was evaluative, the same evaluation Mrs. Vale applied to every ingredient and every technique. She was determining whether the offer was genuine and whether the genuineness would survive contact with her standards.
“The pears need sorting,” Mrs. Vale said. “You will find them in the cold store. Do not rearrange my shelves.”
“I would not dream of it.”
“And if anyone addresses you as ’Your Grace’ while you are in my cold store, you will answer to it, because you are the Duchess of Aldermere, and my kitchen will extend the proper courtesy regardless of whether you are sorting pears or hosting the King.”
“Yes, Mrs. Vale. Pears, second shelf, soft ones first, and I am to answer to my own title in your cold store.”
“You learn faster than most of my apprentices ever did, which I shall take as a hopeful sign. The pears are waiting.” Mrs. Vale turned back to her work. “Go on, before they soften past the point of usefulness while we discuss the proprieties.”
Jane went to the cold store and began sorting pears, and the work settled into her hands with the familiar comfort of a thing she had done a thousand times, the cold air sharp and the pears fragrant and the shelves kept in Mrs. Vale’s exact order, and the moving among them was the first moment since the wedding that felt entirely like herself.
Bess passed the cold store door twice before stopping.
“Your Grace,” Bess said, and the title came out stiffly, pulled from a place that did not want to release it.
The dynamic had shifted. Bess, who had resented Jane the apprentice, now faced Jane the duchess, and the resentment had lost the footing it once had.
There was no longer a competition, because the competition required two people at the same level, and the levels had changed.
“It is still only me, Bess, whatever the title says, and I am glad of the company at these shelves.”
“The pears on the left are softer. They should go first.”
“Thank you.”
Bess hesitated. The hesitation was small, visible only to someone who was watching for it. “The cinnamon preserve Mrs. Vale is planning for Thursday. She uses Ceylonese, not Cassia. If you are helping, you should know the difference.”
“I do know the difference. My mother taught me, the year I turned twelve and ruined an entire batch by reaching for the wrong jar.”
“Then you know more than Ruth did when she started, and a great deal more than the last girl, who never did learn it and is fortunate Mrs. Vale only dismissed her rather than something worse.”
“I am sorry for whatever I did to you by arriving the way I did, Bess. I never said so, and I have meant to.”
Bess was quiet a moment, her hands busy among the pears. “You did nothing to me. The luck did. And the luck is not yours to apologise for, so we will say no more about it, and you will keep the soft pears on the left where I have put them.”
The remark had no friendship in it and no warmth, only information freely given, and information in Mrs. Vale’s kitchen was a kind of currency.
Bess had offered her a coin of it, and the offering was the beginning of something workable, a professional understanding between two women who had once stood at the same station and were now finding their way across a change in hierarchy with as much dignity as the hierarchy allowed.
Mrs. Vale, who had observed the exchange from her station without turning her head, said nothing, though she approved.
***
That afternoon, Jane explored the house, which was a great deal larger than she had understood it to be from the kitchen, its corridors branching to drawing rooms hung with disapproving men in wigs, sitting rooms full of furniture chosen for beauty rather than use, a music room with a pianoforte kept perfectly tuned and perfectly dusty.
The library was the best of them, smelling of old leather and holding more books than Millcombe had people, and each room she passed through kept a silence of its own, the drawing rooms silent like places abandoned, the library silent like a place that was waiting, Thomas’s study silent like a room occupied by a man who made no sound.
On the second floor she found the north corridor, where the carpet changed from blue to a faded green that had been laid once and never laid again.
It was shorter than the others and held three doors, two of them open onto rooms draped in dust cloths and shuttered against the light, the third closed.
Jane tried the handle, and it did not turn, and she tried it again with more purpose and felt the firm resistance of a lock that had been set on purpose and would not yield to optimism.
There was nothing in the door itself to mark it out, the same wood and the same brass as every other, and yet a door locked in a house where nothing else was locked asked a question that no open door ever could.