“Yes, please do.”
She curtsied and left. With dismay he saw the stack of unanswered letters that had built up in his absence, sitting on his desk. He shuffled through them listlessly and waited for Mary to return. She was downstairs now, ringing a bell strung through to the servants’ quarters next door. If they rang back once Jane was in, twice and she was out. Lenox smiled as he thought of this — the ties between them both literal and figurative.
He hoped so.
Mary returned. “Lady Grey is in, sir,” she said.
“Thank you. I’ll go over there, then. I’ll want lunch when I get back.”
“Sir?”
“Oh —” Lenox waved his hand. “Graham would know. Something warm. Ask Ellie.”
This was the house’s cook. “Yes, sir,” said Mary. “I did, sir, and she says she — well she didn’t know.”
Ellie had a salty vocabulary, and Mary blushed.
“I suppose we must have some sort of potato lying around, gathering dust? No doubt a single homely carrot might be procured from the fruit and vegetable man? If I dream I can imagine a very small cut of meat with sauce?” He snapped. “Tell Ellie if she values her job she’ll put two or three things on a plate by the time I return. The same goes for you.”
“Very good, sir.”
Even as the door closed behind her he sighed. It was rare for him to lose his temper, and he always regretted it instantly. Mary would know his threats were hollow, in all probability — Ellie certainly would — but they still might distress her. It was all because of his fear of this tete-a-tete with Jane.
He strode outside and over there in a burst of determination, however, and once Kirk, Jane’s very fat, very dignified butler had admitted Lenox, he felt silly. It was a house that made him comfortable in all its details, for it reminded him of her, and suddenly things seemed as if they might be all right.
She came out at the knock of the door and saw him. “Hello, Charles,” she said.
“Hello, Jane. I’m so pleased to see you, now that I have a moment to breathe.”
“Will you eat something?”
“No, thanks. Ellie’s cooking.”
“Come into the sitting room, then.”
She wore a plain blue dress with a gray ribbon at her slim waist and a matching one in her hair, which was slightly different now, lying in curls down her neck. Her thin, graceful hands, which had more than once shown surprising strength, were folded over each other, and it was slightly awkward that the two didn’t touch as they went to the sofa and sat down.
“I’ve missed you very much, Jane,” Lenox burst out. “Your letter made me miserable.”
“Oh!” she said. Tears came into the corners of her eyes.
“Did you mean what you wrote?”
“I don’t know, Charles.”
There was a moment’s unhappy and uncomfortable quiet, while each of them pondered the letter she had written — which as Lenox had thought at every stray moment since then was so out of character, so flighty in contrast to Lady Jane’s stable, un-dramatic personality.
He forced himself to speak of something different. “How is Toto?” he asked.
“Physically, entirely well, but as I wrote you — well, you read what I wrote.”
Now he took her hand and, looking straight at her, said with conviction, “Can’t you see how different and how well suited to each other our temperaments are? Haven’t all our years of friendship revealed our true compatibility?”
This eruption led to some silence while Jane cried. Lenox looked at his hand and realized with some detachment that it was shaking.
“I fear I must tell you a secret now, Charles.”
His stomach plummeted. “What can you mean?”
She sighed and looked pale. “You remember my first marriage, I know.”
Indeed he did. At the age of twenty she had made a spectacular marriage, one entirely apposite considering her beauty and nobility, to Lord James Grey, the Earl of Deere and a captain in the Coldstream Guards. It had been the wedding of the season, breathlessly gossiped about, with an invitation seen by those who were on the borderline of receiving one as more precious than rubies and emeralds.
Lenox had sat next to his brother and his father in the third row, a flower in his buttonhole, and the queer feeling he had in his stomach as he watched her walk down the aisle, straight backed and lovely, was the first intimation he had that he might feel something more than friendship for her. Her father, the Earl of Houghton, was Lenox’s godfather, and Lenox and Jane had always been playmates — never more.
Then, not six months later, tragedy — James Grey had died in a skirmish with locals in India, where he was stationed with his regiment.
“I do, of course,” said Lenox softly. “Was it unhappy?”
“We hadn’t time to be either happy or unhappy, I think, only joyful, as newlyweds are. Yet I never told you Charles — it’s a difficult thing to talk about —”
“Yes?”
“I found I was pregnant just a few weeks after the wedding.”
“But that makes no sense —”
He stopped.
“Yes,” she said. “Just the same as Toto.”
All he could say, after a minute of silence was, “I’m so very sorry, Jane.”
“It has made these few weeks difficult for me, you must understand, and I need — I simply need more time, Charles.”
Tears stood in her eyes. His heart went out to her, undercut by a thin stream of jealousy of her first husband — a decent chap, Lenox had always thought, except that now he stood on through time noble, handsome, and flawless, an idol rather than a man of flesh and blood. How could Lenox compete against her memories?
It took all of his courage to say, then, “If you wish me to release you from your word, I shall consent, of course.”
At that Lady Jane did something unexpected: She laughed. It broke the tension between them, and Lenox found himself smiling, too.
“What?” he said.
“It’s not funny, I know,” she said, still laughing, “but of course I want to marry you! As dearly as I did the moment you asked. Oh, Charles! Can’t you understand? I need time, that’s all.”
He put his arm around her waist, and she put her head onto his shoulder. “Then you shall have it. I know I’m selfish.”
“Can we wait until the fall? Next fall? Wouldn’t it be lovely to marry next September? None of our plans yet are definite?”
“September,” he said. “Of course.”
“We have our long lives ahead of us, you know. I want some time — so we can know each other better.”
“Is that possible?”
“Say — say know each other differently, then. It’s frightening, isn’t it?”
He laughed. “A little.”
“I know we’ll be happy, Charles. I shall never doubt that.”
After this their conversation devolved into all the endearments and stolen kisses and long laughs that belong to any new love — and that scarcely need to be repeated here.
Half an hour later Lenox left Jane, promising he would dine with her that evening after he spent the afternoon out. He ate lunch in front of his fireplace, reading over a new journal on Roman history and having a wholesome sort of meal for a cold day, with a glass of red wine to go along. Finally he finished eating, and Mary came to clear the things.
“Thank you,” he said. “Oh, and Mary? Please excuse me for losing my temper with you. You did nothing wrong.”
