Chapter 3
The next morning was clear and cold, an April morning not yet willing to call itself spring.
Jane came down early and found the breakfast room occupied only by Colonel Pethwick, who was eating methodically and reading a newspaper held at an angle that suggested his eyesight was also a matter requiring management.
They exchanged good mornings. The Colonel heard neither of them.
Jane poured her coffee and took a seat near the window and looked out at the garden, which was formal and still frost-pale at this hour, the gravel paths damp and dark between the box hedges.
She had slept adequately. She had woken at her usual time without assistance, which was one of the things she valued about herself that no one else had ever thought to value about her.
Other guests arrived in ones and twos. Mrs Mercer and her daughter.
Mr Dalton, who had more to say about drainage and said some of it.
Catherine appeared at half past eight with her hair dressed and her colour high and looked like she had slept well and was pleased to be alive, which was her general morning aspect and which Jane had spent twenty-two years finding both admirable and slightly effortful to be near before coffee.
Frédéric came in with Mr Ashworth at a quarter to nine.
He was less polished in the morning, not dishevelled, simply less arranged.
His coat was plain. His hair was not quite what it had been at dinner.
He helped himself from the sideboard and talked to Mr Ashworth about something in a low, easy voice, and then looked around the room for a seat and found one beside Mrs Mercer’s daughter, who brightened when he sat down.
Jane read the newspaper Colonel Pethwick had finished with and did not watch him.
After breakfast the party dispersed as house parties do, the men toward the stables or the billiard room, the women toward each other or their correspondence or both. Mrs Ashworth organised a walk for those who wanted it. Jane went upstairs, wrote two letters, came back down.
In the hall she found Mrs Ashworth with her hand on Frédéric’s arm, steering him toward Jane. Mrs Ashworth believed introductions were a form of service and she performed them accordingly.
“Miss Claverton — Mrs Kensley —” Mrs Ashworth began, then corrected herself with a small flustered laugh.
“Miss Claverton, forgive me, I don’t know why I said that.
Here is Monsieur Frédéric Aubert, a great friend of my cousin’s who has been threatening to visit us for two years and has finally made good on it.
Frédéric, Miss Claverton is one of our nearest neighbours, though she is at Claverton Park and not so near as all that. ”
“Miss Claverton,” he said. In English, correct and warm and accented, so that the English sounded like a courtesy extended to the room rather than his native ground.
“Monsieur Aubert,” Jane said. In French, without thinking, because he had spoken English and she had the words in French already and her mind had simply taken the path of least resistance.
His expression changed. Not dramatically, a kind of opening, a sharpening of attention. Surprise, and then something past surprise, more like recognition. She had opened a window in a room he had expected to be closed.
“Vous parlez fran?ais,” he said. Not a question.
“Oui,” Jane said. “Assez couramment, je crois.”
He smiled then, fully, and replied in French, a full sentence, rapid and warm: that he was delighted, that he had resigned himself to a fortnight of managing in English, that English was a language he respected and found exhausting in equal measure, and that she had just improved his visit considerably.
Jane felt the shift herself, the ease of a language she loved and used rarely in conversation, only with the older children at the school, only with her own books.
French was where she had gone when her mother was ill, when Claverton Park was at its quietest and most demanding, sitting alone with a grammar and then a novel and then everything she could find.
It was hers in a way English wasn’t, precisely because no one had given it to her.
“L’anglais n’est pas si difficile,” she said. English isn’t so difficult.
“Pour vous, peut-être.” For you, perhaps. He said it without self-pity, simply as fact. “Mais j’y pense toujours en anglais. Je ne le sens pas encore.”
She understood this exactly, the difference between thinking in a language and feeling in it.
“?a vient,” she said. It comes.
“Combien de temps vous a-t-il fallu?” How long did it take you?
“I was eight,” she said, switching back to English because Mrs Ashworth was still standing between them, politely stranded, having organised an introduction that had immediately exceeded her.
“Ah,” he said, and then in English, for Mrs Ashworth: “She is formidable, your neighbour.”
“She is,” Mrs Ashworth agreed, visibly relieved to be back in the conversation. “She runs a school, you know, for the village children. French lessons and everything.”
“Vraiment?” He looked at Jane with the question still in it.
“Reading, primarily,” Jane said. “A little French for the older ones. It seemed useful.”
“It is useful.” He said it directly. Flattery would have said wonderful or admirable, something elevated. Useful was the word she would have chosen herself. “Languages open rooms. Every one you add is another room you can go into.”
Jane looked at him for a moment.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly it.”
Mrs Ashworth, satisfied that the introduction had produced the desired sociable result, drifted away toward someone else who needed organising. They were left standing in the hall, on either side of the word useful.
“I did not hear you at dinner,” he said. “You were speaking to the Colonel?”
“The Colonel was speaking past me. It’s a slightly different arrangement.”
He laughed, a real laugh, not a social one. “And the gentleman beside you? He seemed very serious.”
“He is very serious. Drainage.”
“Drainage.” He repeated the word in French first and then in English, as if measuring the weight of it in both languages. “An important subject.”
“Evidently.”
“But not, perhaps, ideal for dinner.”
“It could be worse,” Jane said. “He might have had opinions about the weather.”
He looked at her, not quite smiling and not quite assessing her, somewhere between the two, alert and pleasantly uncertain. Something she’d said had required a small internal revision of something else. She recognised this because she was doing approximately the same thing.
“Puis-je vous demander,” he said, slipping back into French naturally, the shift easy and unremarked, “whether you are walking this morning? Mrs Ashworth mentioned a walk.”
“I walked yesterday,” Jane said. “Before breakfast.”
“Ah. Seule?” Alone?
“Yes.”
“Et demain?”
The question was easy, light, without pressure. And tomorrow?
“I haven’t decided,” Jane said, which was true. She decided things the morning of, based on available information.
“Bien s?r,” he said. Of course. As if this were the only reasonable answer. “Then I will hope for information tomorrow morning.”
He inclined his head, a gesture informal yet courteous, and moved away down the hall toward the billiard room, or the library, or wherever the morning was taking him.
Jane stood in the hall for a moment.
The house went on around her, voices from the drawing room, footsteps on the floor above, somewhere a door opening and closing.
She was aware, more than she had been five minutes ago, of the French she still felt in her mouth.
The ease of it. The quiet pleasure of bringing into speech something long kept private, and finding herself met there fully.
She went to find Catherine.
* * *
He was waiting at the bottom of the garden steps the next morning.
Not waiting in any performed sense. He was not standing with his hands clasped and his eyes fixed on the door.
He was looking out at the grounds with his coat collar turned up against the morning air, his breath just visible, apparently absorbed in the middle distance.
He was comfortable being somewhere without requiring the place to entertain him.
Jane saw him from the top of the steps.
She had not decided, the previous evening, whether she would come down at her usual hour or later.
She had told herself there was no decision to make.
She always came down at her usual hour, and if he happened to be at the bottom of the steps, that was merely coincidence and not arrangement.
She had told herself this and believed approximately half of it.
She went down the steps.
“Bonjour,” he said, turning at the sound of her step, easy and unremarkable about it.
The morning light was clear and cold and it caught the gold of his hair, which was less arranged than it had been at dinner, curling slightly at the collar in a way that was probably not intentional. Jane looked at the garden.
“Bonjour. You’re up early.”
“I am always up early. In Normandy the mornings are the best part, when the light comes in off the sea and the whole country looks as though it has just been made.” He fell into step beside her without asking, which she noticed and did not object to, and this, the not objecting, was the first small thing she noted against herself.
“Here it is different. The light is softer. More uncertain.”
“We can’t all have the sea,” Jane said.
“Non. But you have this.” He gestured at the grounds, the long lawn, the walled garden, the parkland where the morning mist still lay between the trees. “It is beautiful. A different beauty.”
They walked down toward the walled garden.
The gate was unlocked and they went through into the ordered rows, bare beds mostly, a few things showing green, the espalier fruit trees along the south wall just coming into blossom.
Jane assessed it automatically: well-kept, somewhat over-planted near the house, the pear tree on the east wall in need of attention.