“I seem to recall,” he said, “that I gave youcarte blanchefor the house renovations, Jane. Do stop saying ridiculous things and sit down. I am too much the gentleman, you see, to seat myself before you do.”
She felt uncomfortable, he could see. She perched on the edge of a chair some distance away.
“Jane,” he said impatiently, “sit at your embroidery frame. Let me see you work. I suppose it is another skill you learned at the orphanage?”
“Yes,” she said, moving her place and picking up her needle.
He watched her in silence for a while. She was the picture of beauty and grace. A lady born and bred. Fallen indeed on hard times—forced to come to London to search for employment, forced to take work as a milliner’s assistant, forced to become his nurse, forced to become a mistress. No, not forced. He would not take that guilt on himself. He had offered her a magnificent alternative. Raymore would have made her a star.
“This has always been my vision of domestic bliss,” he said after a while, surprising himself with the words, which had been spoken without forethought.
She looked up briefly from her work.
“A woman beside the fire stitching,” he said. “A man at the other side. Peace and calm about them and all well with the world.”
She lowered her head to her work again. “It was something you never knew in your boyhood home?” she asked.
He laughed shortly. “I daresay my mother did not know one end of a needle from the other,” he said, “and no one ever told either her or my father that it is possible occasionally to sit around the hearth with one’s family.”
No one had told him those things either. Where were these ideas coming from?
“Poor little boy,” she said quietly.
He got abruptly to his feet and crossed to the bookcase.
“Have you readMansfield Park?” he asked her a minute or so later.
“No.” She looked up briefly again. “But I have readSense and Sensibilityby the same author and enjoyed it immensely.”
He drew the volume from the shelf and resumed his seat.
“I shall read to you while you work,” he said.
He could never remember reading aloud, except at his lessons as a boy. He could not remember being read to either until Jane had done it when he was incapacitated. He had found the experience unexpectedly soothing though he had never listened attentively. He opened the book and began reading.
“‘About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park.…’”
He read two chapters before stopping and lowering the book to his lap. They sat in silence for a while after that. In a silence that seemed to him thoroughly comfortable. He was sprawled in his chair, he realized. He could nod off to sleep with the greatest ease. He felt…Howdidhe feel? Contented? Certainly. Happy? Happiness was something he had little or no acquaintance with and set no store by.
He felt shut off from the world. Shut off from his usual self. With Jane. Who was certainly shut off from her world and usual self, whatever they might be. Could this be perpetuated? he wondered. Indefinitely? Forever?
Or could it at least become an occasional retreat, this room that was so much Jane and in which he felt comfortable, restful, contented—all alien to his normal way of life?
He should put an end to these foolish, unrealistic, and uncharacteristic dreams without further ado, he thought. He should take his leave—or take her to bed.
“What is it you are working on?” he asked her instead.
She smiled without looking up. “A tablecloth,” she said. “For the dining room table. I had to findsomethingto make. Embroidery has always been a passion with me.”
He watched her for a while longer from beneath lazy eyelids. The frame was tilted away from him so that he could not see the pattern. But the silks were autumnal colors, all tastefully complementary.
“Will your hackles rise,” he asked, “if I come and look?”
“No indeed.” She looked surprised. “But you are under no obligation to be polite, you know. You can have no interest in embroidery.”
He did not deign to answer. He hauled himself out of the deep, comfortable chair, setting his closed book on top of her open one as he did so.
She was working a scene of autumn woods across one corner of the cloth.
