Chapter Seventeen
“This was Henry’s room.”
Thomas stood in the doorway of the north corridor with one hand on the frame and the other at his side.
Standing just a brief distance apart, Jane could clearly see his hand trembling at his side.
Never had she seen Thomas Bennister so shaken not on the lane when he faced Piers, not in the parlour when he waited for her answer, not in the church when he spoke his vows.
The trembling was new, and it was a tell-tale sign that whatever lay behind that door was larger than anything she had yet met in the long shape of his grief.
The room was small and still and held the stale, settled quality of air that had not been disturbed in a very long time.
Morning light came through a single window and fell across a narrow bed, a chair with a coat draped over its back, a bedside table holding a half-read book with its spine cracked open to a page that would never be finished.
Riding gloves lay on the windowsill, creased at the knuckles, arranged the way a person arranges gloves they intend to put on again.
Dust coated every surface, but the dust was thin, tended, and held back by regular attention that stopped short of cleaning.
Someone had been keeping this room from decay without allowing it to change.
“Four years,” Thomas said. His voice was rough. “Everything as it was. I have not moved anything.”
Jane stepped inside. The floorboard creaked beneath her foot and Thomas started at the sound, and his reaction revealed to her that sound in this room was a violation he had kept the door locked to prevent.
She looked at the coat on the chair. It was good wool, dark, the kind of coat a young man wore for riding.
The collar was turned up, which meant Henry had taken it off quickly and thrown it over the chair without straightening it, and the careless gesture had been preserved ever since as though it were sacred.
“He was younger than you,” Jane said.
“Three years. He was two and twenty when he passed away.”
“What was he like?”
Thomas was quiet for a moment. “Brave. Louder than me. He laughed at things that did not require laughter, which made everyone around him laugh too. He forgave easily. He rode too fast.” A pause. “He was everything I was not.”
“That is not an answer. That is a comparison.”
Thomas looked at her. The correction landed, and she could see him receive it the way he received all of her corrections, with the visible effort of a man adjusting a habit he had held for too long.
“He was kind,” Thomas said. “Genuinely kind, in a way that did not require effort. My kindness is strategic. Henry’s was instinctive. He met people and liked them immediately and they liked him back. I met people and observed them and they found me unsettling.”
“You are not unsettling.”
“I am aware that you do not find me so. Most people do.”
Jane waited. The room was still around them.
As the morning light stole softly across the chamber, it found Thomas standing quite unguarded.
His hands hung idle at his sides, and that rigid composure he so dutifully maintained before the world was entirely gone, leaving his countenance utterly laid bare.
“We quarrelled,” Thomas said. “About a horse. The quarrel was ridiculous the kind of argument brothers have when they are bored and irritable and the weather is poor. I said things I did not mean, and he said things he did not mean, and then I said something I did mean.”
“What did you say?”
“I called him a coward.”
The word sat in the room beside Henry’s gloves and Henry’s coat and Henry’s unfinished book. Jane heard it and felt its weight. Not the weight of the word itself, which was a common word, a word people used carelessly every day. The weight of what the word had done.
“Henry was not a coward,” Thomas said. “He was the bravest person I knew. I called him a coward because I was angry and because anger makes me reach for the cruelest available word. It is my worst quality. I say less than most people, but when I choose to wound, I choose precisely.”
“What happened after?”
“He looked at me.” Thomas’s voice was barely audible. “He looked at me as if I had struck him. Not hurt, exactly. Surprised. As if he had not believed me capable of choosing that word and was revising his understanding to accommodate it.”
“And then?”
“He left. Within the hour. He took the horse we had been arguing about and rode out through the stable yard and down the lane. He was thrown from his horse near Merton’s farm, cast into a ditch.
The bone was fractured in two places, and the fall inflicted some internal injury quite beyond the reach of the surgeon’s skill. ”
“You found him.”
“I found him. I ran when I heard. He was on the verge with his leg at a wrong angle and his breathing already shallow.” Thomas stopped, and it was not a pause so much as a man reaching the limit of what his voice could carry. “He said my name. Thomas. Just once. And then nothing else.”
“Did he say anything after your name?”
“There was nothing after it. Only the one word, and then his breathing, and then not even that.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing. He said Thomas, and I held him, and I said everything I should have said before. Every apology. Every correction. And none of it mattered because he could not hear me anymore.”
Jane’s eyes were burning. She blinked and let the burning settle and did not look away from Thomas, because looking away would have been a kindness he did not need.
He needed to be seen. He had been hiding this room and this story for years, and the hiding was over, and what he needed now was not comfort at all. He needed a witness.
“You believe he was accusing you,” Jane said.
“He said my name. He was dying and the last thing he said was the name of the person who sent him out.”
“He said your name, Thomas, and you have carried it as an accusation for four years.” Jane held his eyes. “But is it not at least possible that he said it because you were the person he most wanted beside him at the end?”
Thomas looked at her. The question arrived in the dusty, still room with the force of something that had never occurred to him.
She could see the slow realisation upon his countenance, the slow, painful opening of a possibility he had sealed off long ago because the alternative reading of it was too terrible to examine.
“Was it an accusation?” Jane asked quietly. “You do not know that it was.”
“I know what I said before he rode.”
“Yes. You acknowledge the wound, but you must not claim his demise.
A horse threw him into a ditch which fractured his leg.
Granted, you offered an insult that cut deep, and he rode out in a fit of passion, but it was a dreadful providence that took him.
The mishap was not your word, Thomas. The word was the injury. The injury was not the fatality.
“I sent him out.”
“You had a quarrel. Brothers quarrel. The quarrel did not throw the horse. The quarrel did not dig the ditch.”
Thomas’s composure broke. Not gradually, the way it had thinned during the courtship and the proposal and the wedding.
It broke in a single moment, the way a dam breaks when the weight behind it exceeds the structure.
Four years of grief held in silence came through the break, and the grief was enormous and raw.
He made a sound Jane would remember for the rest of her life, something caught between a breath and a word that never quite became either, the sound of a man who had not allow himself to grieve aloud since the afternoon he held his brother in a field and said things Henry could not hear.
Jane took him in her arms and held him tightly in Henry’s room with the dust and the gloves and the unfinished book.
Thomas’s forehead dropped against her shoulder.
His hands came up slowly and gripped the back of her dress, and there was nothing gentle in the grip, only the hold of a man clinging to the one solid thing in a room that had stood still for years and was suddenly a place where everything moved.
She held him and said nothing. Words terrified Thomas. Words were the weapon he had used on Henry and the penance he had extracted from himself. She would not add more words to a room already full of them. She held him and let the silence carry what language could not.
His breathing was uneven against her shoulder.
She could feel the shaking in his chest and in his hands and in the muscles of his back, and it was four years of controlled stillness finally giving way.
The giving way was the beginning of something she could not name yet.
Something that looked less like grief and more like the thing that comes after grief, when a person finally allows it to pass through them instead of around them.
After a long time, the trembling eased and Thomas lifted his head. His eyes were red and his countenance was the most open she had ever seen it, stripped of every guard he had spent so long building.
“If words can wound,” Jane said, “they can also heal. You do not get to use only half the truth.”
Thomas looked at her. “I do not know how to use the other half.”
“Then learn. The way you learned to ask questions. The way you learned to walk in the orchard without arranging things. The way you learned to ‘claim your devotion to me’ in a room with your sister.”
“She told you about that.”
“Louisa tells me everything, Thomas, and keeps almost nothing back, for which I am frequently grateful.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips, fragile and fleeting that made its appearance in the very depths of his affliction.
To Jane, its arrival was an act of the most profound fortitude she had witnessed all morning.
To smile in the very chamber where he had so long entombed his remorse demanded bravery quite apart from mere fortitude or self-command.
“Do you think him gone from me?” Thomas asked.