Chapter Eighteen #3
After lunch, Jane and Thomas sat on the step while the others went back inside. The afternoon was quiet. The bakery smelled of soot and bread, damage and recovery, and the two smells existed together without contradiction.
“You said something to Henry last night,” Jane said.
Thomas was quiet for a moment. The quiet was the new quiet, the resting quiet, and Jane waited in it.
“I said his name,” Thomas said. “Standing in the corridor. Before I opened the door.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ’I am going to open the door now, Henry, and I am going to stop pretending you are in there.’” He paused. “He is not in there. He was never in there. He was in here.” He touched his chest. “The room was where I put the guilt. Henry was always somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. The garden. The stables. The lane where he rode. He was in the places where he had been alive, not in the place where I locked his things.” Thomas looked at the bakery.
“He would have liked this place. He would have liked your family. He would have eaten three pieces of bread and asked for a fourth and Margaret would have told him the fourth was not available and he would have charmed her into producing it anyway.”
“Margaret is not easily charmed.”
“Henry possessed the gift of pleasing in an eminent degree; it was an art entirely his own, and the very reverse of my own disposition.”
Jane took his hand. His palm was rough with soot and blisters from the scrubbing, and the roughness was the evidence of the morning, the proof that Thomas Bennister had spent his morning cleaning someone else’s disaster with his own hands.
“He would have been extremely fond of you,” Jane said.
“I would have been fond of him to. I find I want that, suddenly, which I have not let myself want in a long time, the good opinion of a man who is not here to give it.”
“Tell me something else about him. Something that is not the quarrel and not the lane. I have only ever heard you speak of how he passed away. I should like to hear how he lived.”
Thomas was quiet a moment, and when he spoke the grief in his voice had a warmth threaded through it that she had not heard before.
“He could not pass a horse without stopping to talk to it. Grooms despaired of him. He named one of my father’s hunters Disgrace, purely to make the stable hands say the word in front of company, and the name remained, and there is to this day a respectable bay gelding at Aldermere that answers to Disgrace and no one under sixty will explain why.
” His mouth moved toward something that was nearly a smile.
“I had forgotten that until this moment. I have spent so long keeping the afternoon he passed that I let the rest of him go dark. You have just made me remember a horse called Disgrace, and I find I am grateful for it past all proportion.”
“Then I shall keep asking,” Jane said, “and you shall keep remembering, and between us we will get the whole of him back out of that locked room and into the daylight where he belongs.”
They sat on the step and held hands, simply and without performance, two people at the end of a morning of physical work, resting in the thin sunshine with bread in their stomachs and soot on their skin.
Thomas’s grip was warm and calloused and held steady, which was itself a change worth noting, since his hands had trembled at the locked door and trembled again during the speech practice, and now they did not, here on a bakery step with Jane beside him and Henry’s name spoken aloud without punishment for it.
The trembling had been grief, and its absence was not the absence of grief, since the grief would never quite be absent, but the arrival of something to sit alongside it, something that looked, from where Jane was sitting, very much like the beginning of peace.
“We should go back inside,” Jane said. “Margaret will need the wall brackets tested.”
“Margaret will need everything tested. Margaret’s standards for testing exceed Philip’s standards for legal evidence.”
“Margaret and Philip should never collaborate. The results would be terrifying.”
“The results would be comprehensive. Comprehensively terrifying.”
Jane stood and offered Thomas her hand. He took it and rose easily, a man whose body was tired and whose spirit sat lighter than it had the day before, and they walked back into the bakehouse together as partners, which mattered a great deal more than the cleaning or the rebuilding or the flue, since the soot would wash away and the partnership would not.
Margaret met them at the door. “The brackets want testing, Your Grace.”
“Then I shall test your brackets, Margaret, and I expect you to find fault with at least two of them on principle.”
“Third beam from the left. William says you are tall enough.”
“I am structurally useful. Your father confirmed this.”
“Then be structurally useful. The brackets will not test themselves.”
Thomas went to test the brackets, and Jane watched him cross the bakehouse to do it, and loved him for the ordinary willingness of it, quietly, with nothing in the moment that asked to be said aloud.