Chapter 13 — Beatrice
Jasmine
BEATRICE
Four evenings after Vivienne’s carriage has gone, we are back in the still room, and I am beginning to understand that the still room has become something other than what I built it for.
Eliza sits at her usual place, the Valeriana officinalis specimen propped before her, three days now into an illustration she keeps insisting is not yet right, though I looked at it over her shoulder an hour ago and found nothing wrong with it at all.
I am at the bench behind her, reducing the crisis tincture, and the room holds the particular quiet we have built together over these weeks — not silence exactly, but something with room in it, the low bubble of the apparatus, the scratch of her pencil, the small domestic sounds of two people occupying the same space without needing to fill it with talk.
“I was seven-and-ten when I married him,” Eliza says, without preamble, without looking up from the page.
I do not stop what I am doing, because I understand, by now, that she tells me things more easily when I am not looking directly at her, the way a person confesses more freely in the dark. “I know,” I say.
“You know the fact of it. I have never told you the rest.” She sets down her pencil.
“I was told it was a good match. I was told this so many times, by so many people who loved me and believed it, that I did not think to ask myself whether I agreed until I was already married and it no longer mattered whether I did. He was not cruel, precisely. He simply expected a wife, and I learned to become one — not the woman I might have been, but a shape he found agreeable, worn smooth over seven years the way a stone is worn smooth by water that never once asks the stone what it wants.” She looks at the specimen in front of her rather than at me.
“I stopped being able to say what I liked. Not because anyone forbade it. Because no one ever asked, and eventually I forgot there was an answer to look for. I am four-and-twenty years old, Beatrice, and I have only just begun to find out.”
I set down the mortar. I do not offer her sympathy, because I understand, watching her, that sympathy is not what she has given this to me for. She has given it to me the way one hands over something heavy, trusting the other person to simply hold it, not to remark on its weight.
“I built this house because of a man very like yours,” I say, and I feel the words leave me before I have entirely decided to let them.
“Not cruel in any way the law would recognize. Simply unable to tolerate a wife who managed better than he did, who understood the estate’s accounts more thoroughly, whose competence he experienced, every day, as a small deliberate insult.
I spent four years learning to be smaller than I was, and then he died, and I discovered I did not know how to stop.
” I look at my hands, steady around the mortar, and think of how long it took to make them steady again.
“Wyndermere is built the way it is built because I decided, brick by brick, glass pane by glass pane, that I would never again live inside a place I had not chosen every part of myself. I do not let people close because closeness is how a person finds the seams in you. I found out what happens when someone finds the seams.”
The room is very quiet. I have not said this to anyone — not Vivienne, not Portia, not the version of myself that rehearses conversations at three in the morning and never has the courage to have them by daylight.
I do not know what has made me say it now, except that Eliza gave me something true first, and it seemed, suddenly, a poor return to offer her anything less.
I could stop there. I understand, even as I keep speaking, that I could stop there and it would already be more than I have given anyone in a decade.
I do not stop. “I do not know how to want something without immediately calculating what it will cost me to lose it,” I say.
“I have been doing the sum since the evening you first came to the greenhouse. I have not yet arrived at an answer that lets me stop doing it.”
“Perhaps,” Eliza says carefully, “the sum is not the right question.”
“It is the only question I know how to ask.”
“Then let me ask you a different one.” She has not moved from her stool, but something in her has gone very still and very direct, the particular stillness she brings to a letter she is about to solve.
“What do you want, Beatrice? Not what it costs. Not what you stand to lose. Simply — what do you want?”
I open my mouth to give her the careful answer, the one I have practiced for weeks without ever intending to say it aloud, and find that it will not come.
What arrives instead is simpler, and considerably more dangerous, and I say it before I can talk myself out of it.
“You,” I say. “I want you. I have wanted you since before I could think of a reason to, and I am tired of doing the sum instead of simply saying so.”
She is looking at me now, and there is nothing in her face I recognize as pity, which is the only reason I am able to bear being looked at at all.
“Thank you,” she says, “for telling me that.”
“I have never said anything like that to anyone before now.”
“I know,” she says, and there is something in her voice — not triumph, nothing so unkind as triumph, but a kind of quiet wonder, as though she has been handed something she understands to be rare and does not intend to treat carelessly.
I am the one who moves first. I do not decide to; I am simply, in the space of one held breath, standing, and crossing the short distance between the bench and her stool, and she is rising to meet me before I have fully arrived, and neither of us says anything at all for a long moment, because there is nothing left to say that the last quarter hour has not already said more honestly than words could manage.
“Come with me,” I say finally, and my voice is not quite steady, and I do not try to make it otherwise.
I take her hand — not her arm, not her elbow, the careful shapes of contact I have permitted myself for weeks, but her hand, my fingers laced through hers — and I lead her out of the still room, past the greenhouse where every important thing between us has happened until tonight, up the back stairs that the household does not use after dark, to the one door at Wyndermere I have not opened for another living soul in ten years.
My bedroom is plain, by design — a large bed, a good fire already banked low, a single lamp turned down to almost nothing, curtains open to a sky gone fully dark now, no moon.
I have never once brought anyone here. I understand, standing in the doorway with Eliza’s hand still in mine, that this is the actual threshold, more than any other door in this house, and that crossing it means something I am not going to be able to take back.
I cross it anyway.
“No one has been in this room,” I tell her, because she deserves to know precisely what she is being given. “Not since before he died and not after.”
“I know what this is,” she says. “I am not going to be careless with it.”
I light the second lamp, not for practicality — there is enough light already, warm and low, but to see everything I want to see — because I find I want her fully visible to me.
I want no part of this conceded to shadow.
She stands very still while I do it, watching me with an attention that makes my hands less than perfectly steady on the lamp’s wick, and when I turn back to her I find I have run entirely out of patience for anything careful.
I reach for the pins in her hair first — I have wanted to do this for weeks, have wanted to see it fall the way I know it must fall, dark and heavy, when nothing is holding it in place — and when the last pin comes free and it drops loose around her shoulders I hear myself make a low sound I do not recognize as mine.
“Beatrice.” My name, from her mouth, low and wanting, and I feel it everywhere at once.
“Say it again,” I tell her, and I am not entirely asking.
“Beatrice.” Softer this time, closer, her hand coming up to rest flat against my chest, over the place where my heart is doing something considerably less composed than the rest of me.
“I have wanted this since the greenhouse. Since before the greenhouse, if I am honest, since some evening I could not name, even to myself.”
“Tell me,” I say, working the first fastening of her gown loose, unhurried now, deliberately unhurried, because I have spent ten years being efficient about everything and I am not going to stop now. “Tell me what you want.”
She makes a sound that is almost a laugh, almost undone already, and presses closer. “I want your hands,” she says, “where they are going. I want — Beatrice, I have imagined this so many times I hardly trust that it is happening.”
“It is happening.” I find the last fastening, and the gown loosens, and I take my time with what follows, learning her the way I learn a plant I mean to know completely — every response cataloged, every place that makes her breath catch filed away to be returned to.
“Tell me if I have this right,” I say, low, against her throat, and she gasps something that is not quite words and then, when I do it again, more deliberately, it becomes words after all — my name, and yes, and there, and please, the last of her careful English composure finally, entirely undone.
“You are allowed to ask for anything,” I tell her, drawing back just far enough to watch her face. “I want to hear you say it.”
“I want—“ She stops, flushed, astonished at her own wanting, and I wait, unwilling to make this easier for her, because I understand, watching her find the courage for it, that the asking matters as much as anything I could give her.
“I want you to touch me properly. I want to stop being careful. I have been careful my whole life, Beatrice, I do not want to be careful tonight.”
“Then we won’t be,” I say, and I mean it as a promise, and I keep it.
What follows is not quick, and it is not quiet, and I do not once, in the better part of an hour, think of anything beyond this bed and this woman and the particular astonishment of being wanted this plainly, this completely, by someone who has learned, the same hard way I learned it, that wanting plainly is the most dangerous thing a woman can do.
I learn the exact places that undo her and return to them without mercy.
I tell her, in words I have never once used with anyone, precisely what I intend to do to her, and then I do it, and her answering sounds are the truest conversation I have ever had with another human being.
She is not careful with me either, not once she finds her footing — her hands are sure where I did not expect them to be sure, and when she finally has me as undone as I have made her, she says my name like a discovery, like a woman finding out what her own voice is actually for, and I stop being able to think in sentences at all.
Afterward, we lie tangled together in the low lamplight, her head on my chest, my fingers moving idly through her loosened hair, and neither of us says anything for a long while, because there is nothing that needs saying that the last hour has not already made plain.
“I did not know,” she says eventually, her voice rough and quiet against my skin, “that it could be like that. That I could want it. To be asked for, rather than simply to endure.”
“Neither did I,” I say, which is true. Though I am eight-and-thirty, I had believed, until tonight, that I already knew everything there was to know about my own life.
“You should know, I have never done this with a woman before. Been intimate. I know women who have, I am no stranger to it. However, I have spent ten years believing I had built a life that needed nothing more than what I put into it myself.”
“And now?”
I look down at her — at the dark fall of her hair against my skin, at the loose, unguarded line of her shoulder, at a woman who arrived at Wyndermere with a trunk and a secret and has, in three months, dismantled ten years of careful architecture without once meaning to — and I find, for the first time in longer than I can remember, that I do not want to reach for the careful answer.
“Now I think I was wrong,” I say. “I think I was always going to need you. That this house was going to need you. I simply did not know your name yet.”
She does not answer that in words. She only tightens her arm around me, and presses closer, and outside the banked fire settles with a small, contented sound.
I think, lying there, of the sum I told her I could not stop doing — the cost of wanting something, the calculation of what its loss would take from me.
I find, for the first time since I began keeping that particular ledger, that I do not want to finish the arithmetic tonight.
There will be time enough for caution. There will very likely be time enough for fear, later, when the letter and Pemberton and the whole unfinished business of the world outside this room reassert their claims on my attention, as I know they must. But not tonight.
Tonight I have a woman asleep against my chest in a bed no one else has ever shared, in a room I built to need nothing from anyone, and the only sum I can bring myself to perform is the plain, unfrightening arithmetic of her breathing slowing into sleep, one steady count at a time.
I lie awake a long while afterward, my own bedroom entirely changed around me, thinking that I have spent ten years guarding a door I am, at last, glad to have opened. To have opened for her.