She looked at him. He looked at the garden.
“Mrs. Peel tells me you have not eaten,” he said.
“Mrs. Peel worries excessively,” she said.
“She worries appropriately,” he said. “There is a difference.”
Temperance said nothing. She looked back at the garden, and the bench was long enough that there was a reasonable distance between them, and the morning was quiet and the apple trees were doing what they always did, which was stand there and be old and unconcerned.
“I handled it badly,” he said.
She did not say anything.
“Not only Alford,” he said. “The whole of it, from the beginning. I arrived here and I told you what was going to happen as though the decision had already been made, which it had, in my mind, before I had any understanding of the situation. I made assessments without information and acted on them as though they were facts.” He paused. “That was wrong.”
She was looking at the garden. He could not see her expression from this angle.
“I am not saying this to ask you to be less angry,” he said. “I am saying it because it is true and because you deserve to hear it said plainly.”
A long pause.
“I am not angry,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
She turned to look at him at that, quickly, and he met her eyes and held them, and the pleasant unrevealing expression had slipped slightly, just at the edges, and he could see what was underneath it, which was not anger, which was something considerably more complicated than anger, and he sat with it and did not look away.
“That is the problem,” she said, quietly. “I should be.”
He said nothing.
She looked back at the garden. The book was still in her lap, closed, and her hands were resting on it, and she sat there in the morning light under the apple trees and he sat beside her and neither of them said anything for a while.
“Thursday,” she said eventually. “Lord Fenwick.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I will be ready at eight.”
“I know you will,” he said.
She looked at him sideways at that, briefly, and something moved in her face that was not the managed version, just the real one, there and gone before she could do anything about it.
He stood up.
“You should eat something,” he said.
“I will,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment, sitting on the bench with her closed book and the apple trees and the morning around her, and he thought about the library and the teacup and the half-finished letter, and he thought about Joseph’s voice.
The only fun I had. In a long time.
He went back inside.
He did not feel better about leaving this time either. But it was a different kind of not better from the kind in the library, and he thought, without being able to articulate precisely why, that the difference mattered.
He went back to his study and sat at his desk and opened the ledger, and this time the numbers made sense, and he worked through the afternoon with the focused efficiency he always brought to things that needed doing, and he did not think about the bench under the apple trees or the expression that had slipped at the edges or the particular quality of the morning light on the garden.
