Chapter Twenty One #2
“I did it badly,” he agreed, and she could hear the laugh still in his voice, “and I did it honestly, which you once told me was the only way you have ever managed to do anything at all, so I considered myself in excellent company.”
“You were,” she said. “You always have been.”
The carriage carried them home through the dark, and Thomas laughed again, very quietly, and Jane closed her eyes and listened to the sound of it, and thought she had never heard anything more beautiful than a once-silent man discovering that his voice could do a great deal more than wound.
***
“I would like to buy the building,” Thomas said, and the sentence came out with the deliberate care of a man who had practised it, because he had, for an hour, in the study, with the door closed.
Jane looked at him across the breakfast table.
The morning after the assembly was bright and quiet, and the house felt different, lighter, as if the speech Thomas had delivered the night before had removed something heavy from its foundations.
The tea was poured. The muffins were on the table.
Thomas was sitting in his chair with the expression of a man who was about to propose something and was prepared, this time, to do it correctly.
“You practised that,” Jane said.
“For an hour.”
“It shows.”
“In a damaging way?”
“In a wedded way.”
Thomas’s mouth performed the movement she had come to treasure, the settling into something that was unmistakably a smile.
The smile was steadier than it had been months ago.
It arrived more easily and stayed longer and did not require the visible effort that his early smiles had cost. The change was not dramatic.
Thomas Bennister would never be a man who smiled freely.
But he was becoming a man who smiled when the person in front of him made it impossible not to, and the becoming was enough.
“I am not proposing to give the building to your parents,” Thomas said. “I am proposing to purchase it from the Garricks and lease it to your family at a fair rate. Your parents pay rent. The bakery remains their business entirely. The building simply has a different landlord.”
“A landlord who sits at their daughter’s breakfast table.”
“A landlord who has been thoroughly and expensively educated in the difference between patronage and partnership.”
“And who learned the lesson clumsily, at considerable cost to his pride.”
“And learned it in earnest, which you have always told me is the part that signifies.”
Jane looked at him. The response sat between the teacups with the weight of every conversation they had shared since the parlour where she removed her glove and placed her bare hand in his. “We present it to my parents today. They decide.”
“Agreed. And the adjoining shop, if they wish to expand, is included in the purchase. Margaret may have it or not, as she chooses.”
“Margaret will have it. Margaret has been planning that expansion since she was sixteen.”
“I suspected as much.”
They drove to Millcombe that afternoon. Thomas presented the terms to William and Jane’s mother and Margaret at the bakery table, with flour still on the surface and the smell of the morning’s bread in the air.
He presented them clearly, without decoration, and he answered every question William asked with the honesty of a man who understood that honesty was the only currency this family trusted.
William listened. He asked about the rate.
He asked about the term. He asked about the legal structure and the conditions and the obligations, and each question was asked with the careful attention of a man who had spent thirty years being precise about measurements and who applied the same precision to everything.
“The rate is fair,” William said.
“It is fair. Philip reviewed it.”
“Philip is a viscount. Viscounts do not set rents for bakers.”
“This one does. He is very thorough.”
William looked at Thomas. The look lasted a long time and contained the particular evaluation of a father assessing a son-in-law, which was not the same as a baker assessing a landlord and which carried different stakes.
“You will not interfere with the business,” William said. It was not a question.
“I will not.”
“And if Margaret wishes to expand, the terms extend to the adjoining property on the same conditions.”
“They do.”
“Then we accept.” William extended his hand across the bakery table. Thomas took it. The handshake was firm and brief and sealed something that paperwork would formalise later but that the table and the flour and the handshake had already made real.
The aftermath of the assembly settled across the county in the weeks that followed, and Thomas brought Jane the pieces of it as they arrived, the last of them on a Tuesday evening in the study, with the fire lit and the autumn deepening outside the windows.
“Piers was convicted at quarter sessions this morning,” he told her. “Arson and criminal damage. His solicitor argued provocation, and Philip’s documentation was not the sort that can be provoked, so the argument went nowhere. He is to be transported.”
“And the family?”
“His mother attended the sentencing and left before the verdict was read, and did not defend him. The cousin who came to our dinner with Mrs. Whitchurch was seen leaving the county within the week. Garrick has become a name people in Millcombe say carefully now, the way one says a word that has gone sour in the mouth.”
“You said there would be no trial for Hubert.”
“There is not, and there cannot be. His part was financial rather than physical, and the letters alone do not meet the bar for criminal conspiracy. But Philip saw to it that every creditor and every club and every drawing room that matters learned exactly what he had done.” Thomas’s voice was even, factual, without satisfaction in it.
“His credit collapsed inside the month, as Philip said it would. The men who lent against the expectation of this dukedom have called in their debts, and he cannot meet them. He has sold what he could and retreated to a small property in Shropshire, and I do not expect we shall hear from him again. It is not a symmetrical justice. He will not be transported as Piers will. But it is complete in its way.”
“Is it over, then?” Jane asked.
“Hubert is finished. Piers is convicted. The Garrick family will not trouble your parents again.”
“Philip is monitoring. But the motivation perished with Hubert’s credit. There is nothing left to protect.”
Jane sat with this information. The campaign that had begun before she arrived at Aldermere, the campaign that had sent Piers to her bakery and to the lane and to her garden, was over.
The machinery Hubert had built was dismantled.
The instruments were broken. The man who had financed the pressure had left in disgrace with nothing left to finance.
“Thomas, there is something I have been waiting to be certain of before I told you.”
“You may tell me whatever it is. I have grown a great deal braver about being told things.”
“I may be with child.”
Thomas went still, and it was not his old stillness, the controlled and disciplined kind he had trained himself into. It was the stillness of a man who had just heard something so large that his whole body had stopped to make room for it.
“Jane,” he said, and got no further.
“My name is not a full sentence, Thomas, however much you may wish it to be.”
“It is a complete sentence when I am the one saying it, and you will simply have to accustom yourself to that.”
Jane looked at him. The fire crackled. The study was warm.
Thomas was looking at her with an expression that contained everything he had ever felt about her compressed into a single moment, and the compression did not diminish it.
It amplified it, because Thomas Bennister’s emotions were strongest when they were concentrated, and this one was concentrated to a point that made her chest ache.
“I am devotedly attached to you.” Thomas said.
“I know. But I did want to hear it.”
“Then I shall say it again.”
He crossed the room and placed his hand, gently, over her stomach. The gesture was tender and careful and trembled at the edges the way his gestures always trembled when they carried more feeling than his composure could comfortably contain. Jane placed her hand over his.
Thomas whispered something Jane did not hear at first. She leaned closer and caught the word, and the word was “Henry,” spoken in remembrance now and no longer in punishment, and the speaking of it was the last opening of the door that had stood locked for so long.