Chapter Sixteen
“I have seen the letter, Jane.”
Thomas was standing in the library when she came down for breakfast, and his expression told her everything his words had not yet said.
The letter from Garrick House, the one she had hidden in her recipe book between ‘good’ and the undelivered refusal, was on the desk in front of him, unfolded, and the sight of it there, exposed in the morning light, made Jane’s stomach drop.
“You went through my things,” she said.
“I did not. The book was open on the table in our rooms. I saw the letter when I passed.”
“I left it in the spine of the book. It could not have been visible unless you opened the book.”
Thomas hesitated, with the distinct air of one apprehended in a fault, suspended for a moment between the impulse to justify his actions and the necessity of acknowledging them. “I opened the book because I noticed you had added something new since the last time I saw it. The spine was thicker.”
“You noticed the spine of my recipe book was thicker.”
“I notice everything about you, Jane. We have discussed this.”
Jane sat down in the chair opposite the desk.
The library was quiet. The morning light came through the tall windows and fell across the desk and the letter and Thomas’s hands, which were flat on the wood on either side of the paper.
His hands were still. The stillness was not composure. It was restraint.
“Reputational concerns,” Thomas said, reading from the letter without looking at it, because he had clearly memorised the contents. “The Garricks are reconsidering your family’s lease due to reputational concerns. And you hid this from me.”
“I did not hide it. I delayed imparting this information to you.”
“You hid it in a book.”
“I placed it in a book while I decided what to do about it.”
“And what have you decided?”
“I have decided that you are not going to buy the building.”
The sentence landed between them with the force of a wall erected in the middle of a conversation.
Thomas looked at her, and his expression shifted from controlled concern to something more complicated, something that contained surprise and resistance and the beginnings of an argument he had not expected to have.
“I can buy the building,” he said.
“I know you can. That is not the point.”
“It is very often the point.”
“Not to people who have had to earn what they keep.”
Thomas went quiet as he started contemplating.
That landed. Jane saw it land. Thomas went quiet.
Not the silence of punishment. The silence of a man who had heard something that required him to stop and think.
To dwell upon the matter was absolute torment, centered as it was upon the immense gulf dividing his understanding of life from hers.
That distance was nothing less than the width of the entire world.
“You cannot simply purchase every difficulty that approaches my family,” Jane said, and her voice was steady but the steadiness was costing her. “The Garricks send a letter. You buy the building. Piers makes a threat. You buy the threat. The lease comes due. You buy the lease.”
“Those are separate problems with a common solution.”
“The common solution is money, and money applied from above resembles charity. It does not matter that you mean it as partnership. It arrives as patronage.”
“Jane, that is my intention.”
“My family has survived for three generations on its own labour and its own pride. If you save the bakery like a duke bestowing favour, you may preserve the building, but you will diminish the people inside it which will follow them longer than the Garricks ever could.”
Thomas was quiet. The library clock breaking the silence between them.
“My father built that bakery from his mother’s bread recipe and a rented oven,” Jane continued, more quietly.
“He has never borrowed money he could not repay. He has never accepted a gift he could not reciprocate. If you buy the building and hand him the deed, he will thank you, because my father is a gracious man. And then he will stand behind his counter every morning knowing that the building he stands in was given to him by his daughter’s husband, and the knowing will eat at him, Thomas, because my father’s pride is not vanity.
It is the structure that holds him upright. ”
Thomas looked at her for a long time. She watched him process what she had said, taking it apart piece by piece, examining his own impulse with the slow, painful honesty she had come to recognise as his most difficult form of courage.
“I have insulted you,” he said.
“Not intentionally.”
“That does not improve it.”
“No. It does not.”
“I wanted to protect your family.”
“I am aware, but wanting to is not the problem. The method is the problem. You are very good at protecting, Thomas. You are less good at asking whether the protection is wanted, and in what form, and by whom.”
He was quiet again, and then he said, “Tell me how to help without taking it from them.”
The question was the right question. Jane could feel the rightness of it in her chest, the precise, careful weight of a man who had learned, over months of clumsy courtship and Louisa’s corrections and Jane’s own insistence, to ask instead of arrange.
He was not offering a solution. He was asking to be shown how to participate in one.
“We will talk to my parents,” Jane said. “Together. We will tell them about the letter and about the Garricks and about whatever Philip has found regarding Hubert’s involvement. We will ask them what they want. Not what we want for them, but what they want.”
“And if what they want is for me to buy the building?”
“Then we will discuss the terms. Together. With my parents at the table, not receiving a letter.”
Thomas nodded. The nod was small and contained the effort of a man setting down a tool he had carried for years. The tool was control, and setting it down was the hardest thing he had done since saying ‘she has captured my heart entirely’ in a bright room with his sister watching.
***
Piers Garrick came on a Wednesday.
He came to Aldermere, which was new. He had never approached the house directly before.
His previous encounters with Jane had been in Millcombe, on the lane, in the spaces between the bakery and the duke’s gate where the ground was neither his nor Thomas’s.
Coming to Aldermere was an escalation, which was deliberate.
Jane was in the kitchen garden when he appeared. She was cutting herbs for Mrs. Vale and thinking about the conversation she and Thomas had planned with her parents, and the sound of boots on the gravel path reached her before the voice did.
“Your Grace.”
Piers stood at the garden gate. His smile was the same pleasant emptiness she had learned to recognise, and his coat was the same too-fine coat, and the picture he presented was the picture of a man who had arranged his appearance to suggest a social call and his timing to ensure he found her alone.
“Mr. Garrick, you are not welcome here.”
“I come with goodwill, Your Grace. And an offer.”
“I have no interest in your offers.”
“You may find this one more accommodating than my previous observations.” Piers leaned against the gate, and the leaning was deliberate and casual in the way all his movements were deliberate and casual.
“The lease renewal is, as you know, under consideration. My father is inclined to be reasonable, but reasonableness requires cooperation.”
“What kind of cooperation?”
“A simple statement. Made publicly, in the appropriate company. That the Duke of Aldermere entered into matrimony with you from obligation. That the events on the lane precipitated a proposal that honour required and affection did not.”
Jane’s hands went still on the rosemary shears. The garden was quiet. The bees were working the lavender. The morning was warm and bright and entirely wrong for the conversation that was happening.
“You wish me to say my husband is not utterly devoted to me?”
“I want you to say what the county already suspects. The confirmation would put certain minds at ease. Your family’s lease would be renewed. The bakery’s future would be secure. A small accommodation for a significant return.”
“My husband’s reputation for a lease renewal.”
“Your husband’s reputation is not at stake, Your Grace. His reputation is that of a silent, eccentric duke who wedded his kitchen maid. Whether the matrimony was affection or obligation changes nothing for him. It changes everything for your family.”
Jane looked at Piers Garrick. The garden shears were in her hand and the rosemary was sharp in the air between them.
The man standing at the gate was offering a bargain that would protect her family and betray her husband.
The shape of the bargain made the protection feel necessary and the betrayal feel small. That was the design.
“You are asking me to fabricate the truth,” Jane said.
“I am asking you to simplify. The truth is always more complicated than the public requires, and a simplified version that serves everyone’s interests is not a falsehood. It is diplomacy.”
“It is a falsehood dressed in your vocabulary, Mr. Garrick, and I recognise the dress.”
“Your father’s lease, Your Grace. Your mother’s bakery. Your sister’s livelihood. A single public statement and all of it is secure.”
“Secured by my husband’s humiliation.”
“Your husband would not be humiliated. He would be excused. The county would understand that a duke with a guilty conscience entered into matrimony with a girl he compromised. It is a story they already half believe. Confirmation would merely settle the matter.”
“And settle your debts with your creditors, I imagine.”
A slight tremor shook Piers’s countenance, a brief lapse quickly corrected, yet it did not escape Jane's observation. The mere mention of creditors had penetrated a vulnerability that the remainder of the conversation had left untouched.
“I do not know what you mean, Your Grace.”