Chapter Twenty One
The evening loosened after that, and the county came to the Rennets one after another.
The colonel reached William first, pumping his hand and declaring the bread the finest he had eaten in thirty years of dining out, and Jane’s mother stood beside her husband with her eyes bright and her composure trembling under the effort of receiving recognition with the same steadiness she had brought to thirty years of baking.
“You have made my wife cry in a public hall, Colonel, which no man has managed in three decades,” William said, though his own voice was not entirely level. “I shall have to forgive you, since you did it with a compliment.”
The colonel laughed and moved on, and William turned to Jane, low, his hands hanging oddly at his sides.
“Three decades of mornings before the light,” he said, “and I never once thought the reward would be a colonel telling me my bread was the finest in the county. I find I do not know where to put my hands.”
“At your sides, Papa, exactly where they are. You look like a man who built something that mattered, which you are.”
Margaret stood near the service entrance and let the county come to her, and they told her the cakes were extraordinary and the bread the best they had tasted, and she received each compliment with the straight-backed grace of a woman who had been waiting twenty-three years for it and intended to accept it without a single unnecessary word of thanks.
“You might smile, Margaret,” Lottie teased, appearing at her elbow. “It is permitted. The magistrate is not watching.”
“I will smile when the last of them has admitted aloud what I have always known about our flour,” Margaret said. “Surprise at being noticed implies one doubted one deserved it, and I never have.”
Lottie laughed and turned and caught Jane in a hug that was fierce and lasted longer than was strictly appropriate for a public gathering, and Jane did not care in the least.
“I have wanted to do that all evening,” Lottie said into her shoulder. “I have been seeing what they finally saw tonight for months, and it is a great relief not to be the only one who could see it.”
“You were insufferable about it, you realise. You told me he had taken a liking to me before I had stopped calling him Your Grace.”
“I was right about it, which is the only part that signifies, and I shall be insufferable about that for the remainder of my natural life.” Lottie pulled back far enough to look at her sister’s face.
“You are happy, Jane. I have watched you be a great many things this past year and happy was not reliably among them, and tonight you are, and I find I could weep about it if the magistrate were not still within view.”
Sam tugged at Jane’s sleeve and looked up at her with great seriousness. “Did the duke make all those people applaud, Jane?”
“He did, in a manner of speaking.”
“I knew dukes were important,” Sam said, nodding slowly, “and now I understand why, because they can make a whole room do a thing just by talking, and he hardly ever talks, so it must have been saved up.”
“That is very nearly exactly correct,” Jane said, and pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
Louisa found her near the punch table and embraced her with the brisk efficiency of a woman who considered emotion a necessary but time-limited indulgence. “He was magnificent, Jane, and I am not a woman who uses the word lightly or, indeed, more than once a decade.”
“He was Thomas, which I have always thought was the same thing, though I am so very pleased the county has finally caught up to my opinion.”
“That is exactly what I said, only you have used a great many more words to say it, as is your lifelong custom.”
Philip appeared beside his wife with his leather folder and the expression of a man who had just observed a case presented to a jury of two hundred and was professionally satisfied with the verdict.
“Hubert left by the side entrance,” he said. “I have his departure noted, and the solicitor’s brief will be filed in London by Friday.”
“What is to become of him?” Jane asked.
“He will be utterly cast out of polite society, and the social ruin is the least of it. His credit will collapse within the month, because the creditors who lent against the expectation of a dukedom will call in their debts the instant this evening reaches London, and Hubert has not the resources to meet them.” Philip’s voice stayed even and factual.
“He will retreat. He will sell what he can. He will live quietly in some place where the name Bennister no longer carries the weight he borrowed against, and he will have a great deal of time in which to consider how he spent it.”
“And Piers?”
“Piers faces prosecution for arson and criminal damage, and the evidence is sufficient to secure it. The stable boy’s testimony and the labourer’s account, set beside the button and the lease documents, establish both motive and opportunity, and I expect a conviction at quarter sessions.
” He paused. “I built it slowly, so that it would hold. Thomas presented it tonight, but it was made to survive a courtroom, not merely a ballroom.”
“Thank you, Philip. For all of it, and for the quiet way you did it.”
“I am family, Your Grace. This is the work family does, and I was glad of it.”
Mrs. Whitchurch approached the head table with the careful precision of a woman revising a previous assessment. “The cakes were extraordinary, Your Grace. Truly extraordinary, and I do not say so to flatter.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Whitchurch. I shall pass your compliments to my sister-in-law, who baked them with her own hands.”
“Your sister-in-law made these.”
“Margaret Rennet. You met her at our dinner, I believe. She was the one you were good enough to describe as industrious.” Jane let the word rest between them, unhurried, the way Mrs. Whitchurch had once let her own unkindnesses rest.
Mrs. Whitchurch’s expression performed a small and complicated adjustment, the word “industrious” recalled from a dinner where it had been wielded as a weapon, its weight altering in the recollection.
“Indeed,” she said, after a moment, and moved on, and the moving on was as near to an apology as Mrs. Whitchurch was likely to manage.
***
The carriage home was quiet at first. The lanterns outside the hall receded behind them and the lane went dark and the night turned cool, and Jane sat beside Thomas with her hand in his.
He was looking out the window, his profile dark against the darker landscape, his composure simply absent now rather than thinned or managed, and he looked for the first time since she had known him like a man holding nothing in place at all.
“You are very quiet, even for you,” she said gently. “I cannot tell whether it is the good quiet or the kind I have learned to worry about.”
“It is the good kind, I do believe, though I am out of practice at telling them apart myself.” He did not look away from the window.
“I keep expecting to feel that I have said too much. I have spent four years certain that the next unnecessary word would cost me something, and tonight I said a great many, and nothing has fallen down.”
“Nothing has fallen down,” she agreed. “A great deal stood up, in fact, most of it applauding.”
“You spoke for ten minutes,” she said again, a moment later, because she could not yet stop marvelling at it.
“Eleven. Philip timed it, and informed me afterward, as though I might wish to have it for my records.”
“Philip would. I imagine he has it written down somewhere, with the hour and the date.”
“He said the evidence had been presented with adequate legal clarity, which from Philip is the precise equivalent of Mrs. Vale calling a thing competent, and I have decided to be enormously flattered by both.”
“You should be. Between the two of them they have paid you perhaps four compliments in your entire life, and you have collected two of them in a single evening.” She turned to look at him, and the rocking of the carriage carried them on through the dark, and something in the quality of his quiet had lifted that she had no name for yet.
“I have grown so used to your silence being a heavy thing that I do not quite know what to do with a light one.”
“Nor do I,” he admitted. “I have carried the heavy kind so long that the weight had begun to feel like the man. I am discovering tonight that it was only ever the grief, and that the man underneath it can apparently be made to do the most unexpected things.”
Then Thomas laughed, a quiet, low, startled sound, and Jane turned in her seat to stare at him, because in all the months she had spent earning his first smile in a church doorway and his second in a parlour, she had never once heard the man laugh.
“What, pray tell do you find so amusing?” she asked.
“Nothing at all. Everything there is.” He looked at her, his eyes bright in the carriage dark.
“I spoke for eleven minutes in front of two hundred people. I proclaimed my devotion to you in a public hall. I told Piers Garrick he would receive his correction in public and he sat down in front of the whole county like a scolded boy. And now I am sitting in a dark carriage laughing, when I have not laughed since the afternoon my brother passed and I cannot decide whether it is the most absurd thing that has ever happened to me or the most important, and the not deciding seems to be making me laugh harder.”
“It can be both, you know. Most things worth anything are.”
“I am beginning to learn that from you, at a frankly ruinous pace.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder, and the carriage rocked, and his arm came around her without hesitation, easy and natural, the gesture of a man who had stopped calculating his movements and begun simply holding the person beside him.
“You did it badly, in places,” she murmured against his shoulder, smiling. “You stumbled twice and you read the labourer’s account in the voice you use for the estate ledgers.”