“Children always know,” Harper said. “He did not have the words for it but he knew.”
She held his gaze and said nothing.
“There was a vase,” he said. “One afternoon, she threw it and it caught my wrist.” He glanced down briefly at the scar. “It was not the first time something had been thrown but she crossed a line that day.”
“What did you do?” she said.
“I kept Joseph with me as much as I could,” he said. “I arranged his days so that I could account for where he was at all times and told myself it was enough.” He was quiet for a moment.
“I suppose it wasn’t though.”
She waited.
“We had gone to the lake one afternoon on the estate. She had been calm for several days and I had made the mistake of thinking that meant something.” He stopped. “I heard one of the estate dogs barking in the trees nearby, and I ran.
The room was very quiet.
“Joseph was in the water,” he said. “She was holding him under.” He said it in the same even voice he had used for everything else but she could tell that it hurt him to recount the incident. “I got to him in time and he was not hurt. Of course, he did not understand what had happened and I told him he had slipped. But he was only four years old then, and I would have never forgiven myself if something had happened.”
“And her?” Temperance said. She couldn’t even imagine what it must be like to go through something like this and found herself wanting to reach out to touch his arm.
“I made a decision,” he said. “It was the right decision and I would make it again, but it was also the hardest thing I have ever done. She went to the asylum that autumn and Joseph was told she had gone away because she was unwell. Which was true. He was told she would not be coming back. Which was also true.”
“Did he ask about her?”
“For a while,” Harper said. “Less as time went on. He adapted as children do.” He paused. “She died the following spring; I was not with her.”
“Do you feel guilty?” she asked.
“I feel responsible,” he said. “Which is a different thing. The decision I made was the right one and I would make it again, and it still ended in her death, and I have had to learn to hold both of those things at the same time without one of them erasing the other.” He paused. “Joseph does not know the full of it. He knows she was unwell and that she went away and that she died. The rest I am keeping until he is old enough to carry it without it changing the way he thinks of her.”
“Because he loved her,” Temperance said.
“He loved her,” Harper said. “Children do that without conditions. I did not want to be the person who put conditions on it after the fact.” He looked at the table for a moment. “She used to read to him. Different voices for different characters. Did he tell you about that.”
“He did,” she said.
“She was funny,” Harper said. “It did not come out often but when it did it was genuine. I try to give him that version of her. I think it matters, that he has a version of her that is true and also good.” He was quiet for a moment. “Most of what I have is not that version, but I have enough of it.”
She looked at him across the candlelit table and thought about a man who had spent years keeping the good memories of someone he had every reason to remember differently, keeping them carefully and deliberately for a child who needed them, and she felt something that was not pity and was not sympathy but was the specific feeling of understanding someone properly for the first time.
“After she died,” Harper said, “I decided I would not do it again. It seemed very straightforward. I had Joseph and the estate and a life that was orderly and sufficient and I did not see any reason to introduce another arrangement into it when the one I had tried had not produced anything it had promised.” He looked at her. “And then I came to Wilmington.”
She said nothing, feeling a flutter in her chest.
“And everything I had decided,” he said, “stopped making sense.”
The dining room was very quiet. The candles had burned down somewhat and the light was lower and warmer than it had been when she sat down.
“I did not recognize it at first,” he said. “I want to be honest about that. I have not been in love before, not the real version, and I did not know what it felt like when it arrived and so I called it other things. Responsibility, concern for the estate but none of those explanations survived the masquerade.”
She looked at him.
“You were wearing the ivory mask,” he said, “and you asked me to put mine on for your sake, which I did, and I stood there in the entrance hall and thought that I would do a considerably larger thing than wear a mask if you asked me to. That was the point at which the other explanations stopped being useful.”
She said nothing. She was very still.
“I should have said something then,” he said. “I know that. I should have said something at any of the subsequent moments when the not saying it was becoming its own kind of statement. I did not, and by the time I understood properly what I was feeling and what I was not saying, you had arranged a ball and invited Elias Talbot and everything had a momentum I did not know how to interrupt without making a considerable mess of it.” He looked at the table. “So I sat in my study all day and simply made myself miserable, which is not a period of my life I look back on with any particular pride.”
