Chapter Sixteen #3
“Jane, I would rather we did not.”
“I am not pushing you. I am only asking, and you told me yourself that the things you do not tell me take up more room than the things you do.” She paused.
“The north corridor is taking up a great deal of room, Thomas. I can feel it between us, in the way you steer us down the longer passage and the way your shoulders tighten every time we pass the second-floor landing.”
Thomas’s hands, which had been resting on his knees, closed into fists. There was no anger in it. It was the way a man braces himself to approach a thing he has been running from for a very long time.
“What is behind the door?” Jane asked.
“My brother.”
The two words fell into the study with a weight that silenced the fire and the clock and the evening.
Jane looked at Thomas and saw something she had not seen in his face since the wedding, since the parlour, since the morning she arrived to refuse him.
Grief. Old and carefully contained and pressing against the guard he had rebuilt around it, and the effort of his restraint betrayed itself, as the barrier appeared to be thinner now than on the day of their acquaintance.
Quite unconsciously, Jane had spent months dissolving his armor; and in that gentle undoing lay a profound affection that had guided them at last to this moment, to a study where a man who had not been able to speak of his brother in years was about to tell her why.
“Henry’s room,” Thomas said. “Everything in it as it was. I have not changed a single thing since the day he departed this world.”
“You have kept it sealed all this time.”
“Four years. The room is locked and the corridor is closed and the house moves around it the way the kitchen used to move around my silence. Nobody goes in. Nobody asks. The door stays locked and the grief stays behind it, and as long as the door is locked, the grief is contained.”
“And if the door opens?”
“Then the grief is not contained. And I must look at it, and you must look at it, and I do not know what it will do to us.”
Jane leaned forward. “Thomas. Whatever is behind that door, whatever you have been carrying for four years, it will not change what I think of you.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know you. And I know that whatever you did or said or failed to do, you have punished yourself for it more thoroughly than any judgement I could offer.”
Thomas looked at her. His eyes were bright and his fists were tight and his composure was failing, which was the same thing that had happened in the parlour when she said yes and in the church when he said his vows. The walls he had built were coming down, but together it was bringing affection.
“Not tonight,” he said, and his voice was rough. “I am not able tonight.”
“Then when?”
“Tomorrow. I will show you tomorrow. I do not want to. But I will.”
“You do not have to.”
“I do. I have known for weeks. I have been avoiding the corridor when you are near because the corridor leads to the door and the door leads to the thing behind it, and the thing behind it is the reason I stopped speaking for four years.”
Jane’s breath caught. He had not told her this directly before.
For weeks the silence had felt like grief to her, even without a name to fix to it, and she had taken the locked door for a separate mystery.
Hearing him now, she understood the grief and the door and the room had always been one wound.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Whenever you are ready.”
“I will not be ready. I will do it anyway.”
“That is the bravest thing you have said to me.”
“It does not feel brave.”
“Brave things rarely do. They feel like standing at the edge of a roof.”
Thomas looked at her, and something in his face shifted at the metaphor, as if the image had reached a part of him that the rest of the conversation had not quite touched.
Jane reached across the space between their chairs and placed her hand on his arm. His muscles were tight beneath the fabric. She did not say anything else. The moment needed presence, not words.
Thomas covered her hand with his. They sat in the firelit study with the autumn evening outside and the locked door upstairs and the knowledge that tomorrow the door would open.
Jane squeezed his hand once and released it and went upstairs to bed.
She did not sleep well, and it was not worry that kept her awake so much as the way the house felt different tonight. Aldermere had always been quiet, but tonight the quiet was weighted. The building itself seemed to know what was coming and was holding its breath.
At some point in the early hours, she heard footsteps in the corridor. Thomas’s footsteps, recognisable by their careful, nearly silent tread. He walked past their rooms, past the library, past the main staircase. He walked to the north corridor.
Jane lay in the dark and listened. The footsteps stopped. The silence that followed was long and complete. Thomas was standing outside the locked door, in the dark, alone with whatever lived behind it.
She did not go to him. Every instinct told her to put on a robe and walk to the corridor and stand beside him. But Thomas had said tomorrow, and tomorrow was his choice, which needed to be his. She could not carry this for him. She could only be there when he was ready to set it down.
She lay in the dark and listened to the silence and trusted him.
After a long time, she heard the sound of a key turning in a lock.
Thomas opened the door.