Temperance had been told by way of a note slipped under her door that morning. She had picked it up from the floor in her dressing gown and stood there reading it, and it said only that dinner would be at seven, that it would be the two of them, and that he hoped she would come.
She read it twice and then put it on the dressing table, telling herself she was not going to spend the day thinking about it.
Of course, that had only been an exercise in vain.
By six o’clock she had changed her dress twice, which was not something she did. She had stood in front of the wardrobe for a long time and then taken out the green dress, and put it on, and looked at herself in the mirror for a moment, and gone downstairs at five minutes to seven.
The dining room door was open and the candles were lit. The table had been set for two, which changed the character of the room entirely, two places close together at one end rather than the usual arrangement that put them at opposite ends of a table long enough to require some effort of projection.
Harper was standing by the window when Temperance walked in, turning when she walked in.
She saw him register the dress, the particular green of it in the candlelight.
“It looks even better on you this evening,” he said. “It was entirely a waste on Elias, who wouldn’t have appreciated it as I do.”
“You picked it out, that makes all the more sense,” she smiled.
The initial awkwardness had been broken by the conversation.
“Please,” he pulled out the chair for her and sat across. The staff brought the soup and poured the wine and withdrew. She lookedat him across the table noticing that the small specific details of a man she had been pretending not to love all this time. She felt the warmth of it and did not look away from it this time.
The staff cleared the soup and brought the next course, and when they had gone Harper set down his fork and said, “I want to say something. There is a lot that has been unsaid between us, and it is time to make it right.”
“It makes me nervous when you say it like that,” she admitted, feeling her heart race.
“It shouldn’t,” he assured immediately, “after all that we have gone through, the last thing that you should be is nervous.”
“Easier said than done.”
“I have not been clear, and I am aware that the lack of clarity has cost us both a considerable amount of time. So, please know that I do not want there to be any ambiguity about anything I say tonight.”
She put down her own fork, and braced herself.
“I never pitied you,” he said. “I want that to be the first thing, because I know you interpreted things in that manner. But pity has never been any part of what I feel for you.” He paused. “What I feel has been considerably more inconvenient than pity.”
She had learned, with Harper, that the most useful thing she could do when he was saying something difficult was to let him say it without interruption. Besides, she wouldn’t even know what to say.
“I did not know how to tell you,” he said. “I am aware of how that sounds. You are a woman who says what she means in circumstances that would silence most people, and the contrast between that and my own inability to say a straightforward thing was not lost on me. I noticed it every time but I simply could not seem to do anything about it.” He looked at her steadily.
“And what do you wish to say to me now? Now that you have decided to give me some clarity?”
“I am not someone who has had practice with this. Any of this. I had one marriage and it taught me a specific set of lessons, and I spent several months here applying those lessons to a situation they were entirely wrong for, which I suspect you noticed.”
“Tell me about the marriage,” she said. “I feel that might be the underlying reasoning behind a lot of your apprehensions, and I don’t think that we have never gotten a chance to properly speak about it.”
He was quiet for a moment. Outside the window the garden was dark and the apple trees were just visible against the sky and the house was very still around them.
“I married her when I was twenty-two,” he said. “Both families wanted it and I went along with it because I thought that wasenough of a reason. It was the wrong decision, but I did not know that yet.”
She said nothing and kept her eyes on him, letting him speak.
“The early years were not cruel,” he said. “I want to be accurate about that. We were simply two people in the same house with very little in common. I told myself that was normal. That most marriages looked like that from the inside.”
“When did things change?” she asked.
“Slowly,” he said. “And then very quickly. I started to notice things with how her mood would change, and I learned to make sure Joseph was somewhere else before it arrived.” He looked at the table. “He was very young and I wanted to keep him away from it for as long as I could.”
“Did he know something was wrong?” she asked.
