Chapter Sixteen #2
“I think you do, Mr. Garrick. And I think when my husband’s solicitor has finished his work, you will discover that I know a great deal more about what you mean than you are comfortable with.”
The bluff was not entirely a bluff. Jane did not know the specifics of Philip’s investigation, but she knew an investigation existed, and the knowledge gave her words a weight that Piers could feel.
“No,” Jane said. “I will not say my husband wedded me from obligation, because it is not true. I will not tell falsehoods about a man who has shown me more honesty than I believed a person capable of. You may leave now. By the front gate. Mrs. Vale does not like strangers in her garden.”
Piers’s smile did not waver. “I am sorry to hear that, Your Grace. My father will be disappointed.”
“Your father’s disappointment is not my concern.”
Piers left. Jane stood in the garden with the shears at her side and her hands trembling with the cold fury that had become familiar, the kind that settled into the bones because it had no outlet.
She had refused him. She had refused him clearly, completely, without hesitation.
The refusal was correct and the refusing had been easier than she expected, because the alternative, saying Thomas’s affection was obligation, was a fabrication so large that her mouth would not have been able to form it.
The assembly order arrived the following day. A letter from the county assembly committee, addressed to Rennet’s Bakery, requesting provisions for the Michaelmas gathering. Forty covers. Bread, pastry, preserves, and two formal cakes. The largest order the bakery had ever received.
Margaret brought the news to Aldermere personally.
“This is our chance,” Margaret said, standing in the kitchen with flour at her cuffs and her eyes bright with the particular intensity that meant she had identified a strategic opportunity and intended to seize it with both hands.
“The assembly is the county’s shop window.
Forty covers. Every family of consequence in attendance.
If we deliver this order and deliver it well, every person at that table sees our work. ”
“Can the order be executed?”
“Not from the bakery alone. The ovens are not large enough for forty covers of formal pastry on top of the bread we already produce. We would need additional space, additional equipment, and at least one additional pair of hands who understands what Mrs. Vale would call ‘the standard.’”
“You are asking for Aldermere’s kitchens.”
“I am asking for the use of Aldermere’s kitchens for two days. And I am asking for Mrs. Vale’s cooperation, which I understand is approximately as easy to obtain as a papal dispensation.”
“Mrs. Vale respects competence. If you demonstrate competence, she will cooperate.”
“I have been demonstrating competence for twenty-three years, Jane. I simply need a larger audience.”
“I will ask Thomas.”
“You will ask Thomas,” Margaret repeated, and her expression held something between amusement and wonder. “My sister, who six months ago set herself on fire in a duke’s kitchen, will ask the duke for the use of his ovens. The world is a remarkable place.”
“The world is exhausting, Margaret. But yes. Remarkable also.”
Margaret looked at her with the steady, gaze that was her most powerful tool. “The Garricks cannot touch a bakery that feeds the county assembly. This order is not just business, Jane. It is armour.”
“I am aware.”
“Then make sure Thomas is aware as well.”
Jane told Thomas about Piers that evening.
She told him in the study, with the door closed and the fire lit and the autumn evening pressing against the windows.
She told him about the garden and the offer and the bargain and her refusal, and she told him in the order it happened, without editing or softening, because Thomas deserved the truth in the shape it arrived.
Thomas’s face did not change while she spoke.
It held the careful, controlled stillness that was his professional expression, the expression of a duke hearing a report.
But his hands, which were resting on the arms of his chair, tightened.
The knuckles went pale. And when she finished, the silence that followed was not his measured, deliberate silence.
It was the silence of a man holding himself in place through an act of will.
“He asked you to deny our matrimony,” Thomas said.
“He asked me to redefine it. To call it obligation rather than affection.”
“And you refused.”
“Of course I refused.”
“Jane.” His voice was quiet and strained and carried something she had not heard in it before, a roughness at the edges that came from controlling an emotion larger than his voice could comfortably contain.
“He should not have been able to reach you. He should not have been in the garden at all. I should have prevented it.”
“You should not have done anything differently. I managed him perfectly well. I refused him. He left.”
“He should not have needed to be refused.”
“No. But he did, and I refused him, and now we decide what to do about it.”
Thomas looked at her, his hands still tight on the chair arms. “I can act quickly. I can buy the lease tonight, and have Philip file against Piers for trespass and coercion by morning.”
“Thomas, you are doing it again, the buying and the filing, before either of us has decided anything.”
“I know it, and I am trying not to.” The words came out with effort. “I am trying very hard not to.”
“You can act quickly. I would prefer you act rightly.”
“Then we act together.”
The sentence was simple and contained everything he had been learning. Together. Not for her. Not instead of her. With her.
“Together,” Jane said.
He reached across the small space between their chairs and took her hand, and it was not the careful, asking touch of the parlour where she had first put her bare hand in his.
It was certain now, his fingers closing over hers as though the word together had given him leave, and he turned her hand in his and pressed his thumb once into the centre of her palm where the old burn had long since healed, the place that had brought her into his kitchen and his life, and held it there.
Neither of them spoke. The fire moved in the grate.
She felt the warmth of him travel the length of her arm and settle somewhere beneath her ribs, and she thought that a year ago she could not have imagined wanting a man to hold her hand in a firelit room while they plotted the ruin of their enemies, and that she wanted very little else in the world at this moment than exactly that.
Then his thumb stilled, and he let her hand rest in his without releasing it, and told her what he wanted to do.
His voice was steadier now, the rawness of the initial reaction giving way to the methodical precision that was his natural mode.
He laid out the plan the way Philip would have laid out a legal case, point by point, each element connected to the next.
“Philip has the financial correspondence linking Hubert to Piers’s debts.
That establishes motive. The Garricks’ letter establishes the lease pressure.
Piers’s approach to you today, in our garden, establishes direct intimidation.
Combined, the evidence is sufficient to discredit Piers publicly and to ensure the Garrick family understands the consequences of continuing. ”
“And Hubert?”
“Hubert is more difficult. His involvement is financial, not physical. Philip says the correspondence alone may not meet the legal bar. But it will meet the social bar, which for a man who lives on credit and reputation is more devastating than any prosecution.”
“What about the bakery? What about the lease?”
“I would like to buy the building.” He paused.
“I know what you said this morning. I am not proposing to give it to your parents. I am proposing to purchase it and lease it to them at a fair rate, removing the Garricks from the equation. Your parents would pay rent. The bakery would remain their business. The building would simply have a different landlord.”
“A landlord who is also their daughter’s husband.”
“Yes. Which is not ideal. But the alternative is a landlord who is financing their harassment, and of the two imperfect options, I believe this one does less damage to your father’s pride.”
Jane considered this. The plan was not the plan Thomas would have produced three months ago.
Three months ago, he would have bought the building and presented the deed as a concluded business.
This alternative paid her the compliment of consultation.
It gave due weight to the difficulty she had raised, and presented a course that maintained her parents' authority, though flawed in its execution, yet designed with utmost consideration.
“We will present it to my parents,” Jane said. “Together, the two of us, and they will be the ones to decide.”
“Agreed, and I will hold my tongue while they do, however much it costs me.”
“And the assembly order?”
“Margaret and Mrs. Vale will use Aldermere’s kitchens. I will stay out of the way.”
“That would be wise. Margaret does not tolerate interference.”
“I have noticed. It is a family trait.”
Jane almost smiled. The tension of the evening was not gone, but it had shifted. The Piers revelation, the plan, the partnership. They had moved through all of it together, and it had brought them closer to the thing that still lived upstairs behind a locked door.
“There is one more thing,” Jane said.
Thomas waited.
“The north corridor.”
The very air of the apartment seemed to shift.
The hearth-fire snapped, and the dark evening weighed heavy against the glass.
Thomas’s expression, which had been characterised by an unaffected sincerity during all their talk of the plan, withdrew into itself.
It was the familiar, guarded stillness, thin and deliberate; and Jane marked its arrival instantly, for she had at last learned the true character of his face when stripped of its armor.