He had no clean answer to that, and she didn’t appear to require one. She shifted slightly, her weight moving from one foot tothe other, and looked at the floor for a moment in the way of someone deciding how much further to go.
“I will marry,” she said. “I want you to know that I am not refusing, because I understand the situation and I am not being difficult for the sake of it.” She looked up. “I want the stability. Not for me, particularly. For my mother.” She said it plainly, without self-pity, as a fact.
“She has finally free, in the way she should have been allowed to be for thirty years, and I cannot watch that be taken away. If marrying gives me the means to protect her, then I will marry willingly.”
Harper looked at her.
“And for yourself?”
She seemed momentarily surprised by the question. As though the category offor yourselfwas one she had not recently consulted.
“I would like,” she said, after a moment, “not to be a burden.”
“The nunnery,” she said, in the tone of someone deciding to hand something over, “was not — kind. I don’t mean that the women were cruel, not most of them. I mean that it was never meant for me. I was sent there as an infant, which I’m sure you know. I grew up in it the way a plant grows in the wrong soil — you manage, you find a way, but there is always the sense ofnot quite fitting the container you’ve been put in.” She glanced at him and then away, quickly, in the manner of someone checking that they are still being listened to and finding the checking mildly embarrassing. “I got in trouble constantly. Not for anything serious — for reading when I was supposed to be at prayer, for arguing with Sister Marguerite about things that didn’t warrant argument, for laughing too loudly. Small things. The kind of things that don’t seem like much individually but accumulate.” She paused. “Twenty-two years of accumulation is quite a lot.”
“Yes,” Harper said. “It is.”
She looked at him, briefly, at that. As though the two words had been more than she expected.
“I came home three years ago,” she said, “and my father died that same evening. Before I had said more than a dozen words to him.” She said it without drama. “I was not — I found I was not very sorry. About the death itself. I was sorry for my mother, because she had to feel whatever she felt about it, which was complicated for reasons I understood only later. But for myself, I was not sorry.”
Harper looked at her.
She was looking at the floor again, and there was a small, slightly lopsided expression on her face that was not quite a smile and not quite not a smile.
“What?” he said.
“I’m telling you things,” she said. “I don’t usually tell people things, as I’m not sure what that means.”
Harper looked at her. At the small smile and the green eyes and the slight flush that had come into her face somewhere in the last few minutes without either of them apparently noting its arrival.
He felt, with a clarity that was not especially welcome, the precise and specific desire to reach out and take her hand.
He looked at her hand. He looked at his own. He understood, in the space of approximately two seconds, that he was standing at a dinner party experiencing something he had not experienced in such a long time that he had genuinely begun to believe the capacity for it had simply gone.
He stepped back. One step, small, barely perceptible. He did it with a composure that he was working for rather than arriving at naturally, and he turned his gaze to the wall beside her head and kept it there until he was reasonably confident his face was doing what he needed it to do.
“We should go back in,” he said and he was grateful for the steadiness. “They’ll be moving to the drawing room.”
“Yes,” she said. She was looking at him with a slight expression of assessment, as though she had noticed the step back and was filing it somewhere. “Probably.”
He offered his arm. She took it, in the easy, formal way she had, and they walked back toward the door together.
“The next event,” she said, as they reached it, “tell me who will be there first. Before you decide anything.”
“I will,” he said.
“And if I say someone is unpleasant, believe me.”
“I will,” he said again, and meant it both times.
She glanced at him sideways. The small smile was still there, barely, at the corner of her mouth. “That was almost easy,” she said. “You agreeing with me.”
“Don’t get used to it,” he said.
She laughed and pushed open the door, and the warmth and noise of the party came out to meet them, and Harper followed her back inside and spent the remainder of the evening being extremely attentive to the conversation around him and not at all attentive to the feeling that was sitting quietly in the center of his chest, which he had not asked for and did not intend to examine until he was somewhere private and could do it properly.
He did not succeed at this.
