"Because," he said, "you are in it." She looked at him. He looked at her. "Because," he continued, "you are the first person in my memory who has sat in this house and looked at what is actually in it. Not what it's worth, not what it costs, not what it represents, but what is actually here. The books, the documents, the wild thyme in the wrong part of the garden." He paused. "Me."
Something moved across her face. That shift that had been happening, that quiet, careful movement toward something, completed itself. "Nathaniel," she said, "I know it's soon," he said.
"It's not soon," she said. "We've been sitting in the same room for 3 weeks. We've had more honest conversation in 3 weeks than most people have in 3 years." She held his gaze. "I know who you are. I decided who you were before I decided how I felt about it. And that is the right order."
"Yes," he said. "It is. So say what you came to say."
He took a breath. "I would like" he stopped started differently. "I am asking you, Eleanor. Not the county, not my grandmother, not the library, and not the estate, and not the Whitmore name." He looked at her directly. "I am asking you whether you would stay, not as the cataloger, as something that doesn't have a name yet, but that I mean completely."
She held his gaze for a long moment. "That is," she said. "The least romantic proposal of any kind I have ever heard."
"I know," he said. "I told you I wasn't going to be easy at it."
"You did say that."
"I meant it."
"Yes," she said. "I know you meant it." She looked at him. "That is in fact why the answer is yes."
He stood very still. "Yes," she said again. Clearly, without performance, I took one step toward her. She did not step back. He reached out and took her hand in both of his the hands that drove fence posts and managed survey documents and hadn't known what to do with themselves for a very long time. And he held it with the care he gave things that were worth holding carefully.
"Eleanor," he said.
"Yes, Nathaniel."
"I am going to be better at this." He said "in time I know you will."
She said, "I'll be patient. I'm good at sitting still with difficult things."
"I am aware," he said, "that I am the difficult thing in this particular sentence."
She laughed again, that real surprised laugh. He felt it the same way he'd felt it in the library like something opening. They stood in the kitchen garden in the August afternoon, not performing anything, not managing anything, just being two people who had found each other in the honest way through work and truth and the accumulation of ordinary days, and had decided carefully and clearly that this was worth more than safety.
Margaret heard the news from Samuel, who had been watching from the upper window, and who came downstairs with an expression of barely contained satisfaction.
"She said, 'Yes,'" Samuel said.
Margaret set down her needle work. "Of course she did."
"He asked her in the kitchen garden."
"H" a pause.
"The wild thyme," Samuel stopped. "How did you know about the wild thyme?"
"I asked the kitchen girl to take Miss Bennett to look at it this afternoon," Margaret said serenely.
Samuel stared at her. "It needed identifying," she said.
"Grandmother. It genuinely did need identifying Samuel. It had been unclear all summer."
He looked at her for a long moment. He thought about asking how much of the past 3 weeks had been arranged and how much had simply unfolded. He decided wisely that there were some questions better left unasked. "You're extraordinary," he said.
"I'm 81," she said. "I've learned how to be patient." She picked up her needle work again. "Tell Nathaniel I'd like to speak with him before supper to congratulate him. To tell him" she said "that if he doesn't handle this properly and with full respect for what that woman has built and who she is, I will rescind the east-wing inheritance."
Samuel looked at her. She looked at her needle work. "I'll tell him," he said.
Nathaniel came to his grandmother's sitting room at 5. She looked at him when he came in and she saw in his face the thing she had been waiting for, had been hoping for, had been carefully tending toward for longer than she would have told him. He looked like himself, not the estate, not the name, not the careful armored version of himself that he had worn like a second skin since he was 26 years old. He looked like Nathaniel, the boy she had known before the war and the inheritance and the 17 refusals and the long years of building fences around himself.