He looked at her with an expression she could not entirely read, though it contained something that was not unlike relief. "I know," he said, "that is in large part why I am here."
She allowed herself carefully to believe that. Not entirely. Not with the open unguarded fullness she had once brought to believing things about men who looked at her a particular way, but enough. Enough to be going on with.
"Then you may continue in my company," she said, "if you will extend the same courtesy to me."
"Which courtesy?"
"Honesty," Maria said, "not comfort. Not careful management. Honesty about what this is and what it is not at each point that either of us requires it."
He nodded once with the gravity of a man who understood he had just agreed to something that would require more of him than he fully understood yet, and who was not deterred by that fact. "You have my word."
They talked for an hour after that about the essay collection, about the agricultural pamphlet, about a letter she had received from a relation in Edinburgh. The conversation had, as it always did, the quality of two people meeting precisely where they each actually were without adjustment or performance. But it felt different now, more solid, like ground that had been tested and had not given way.
He left before supper. On the doorstep he paused and looked at her with the precise considering expression she was beginning to understand was not reticence, but thoroughness, the expression of a man being careful to mean what he said.
"You asked for honesty," he said. "I want to be honest now, so that it is recorded from the beginning. I am not proceeding from friendship or from social obligation. I want you to know that plainly."
Maria held his gaze. The March wind moved through the elm trees along the Voss Park Drive. "I know," she said. "I have known since January."
Something shifted in his face, briefly and completely, and in that unguarded moment, she understood with a certainty she had not allowed herself in a long time that this was different from before. Not only because he was different from Thomas, though he was, profoundly, but because she was different from the woman who had spent 3 years hoping to be chosen. She was not hoping now. She was deciding, and the distinction between being chosen and choosing was, she understood, standing in the cold March afternoon, the most important thing she had learned from everything that had hurt her.
She watched his carriage down the long drive. Then she went inside.
Thomas Pemberton married Augusta on a Saturday in the third week of March. White flowers, cold bright sunshine, three dozen neighbors who declared it a lovely occasion. Maria stood in the second pew and held her mother's hand during the vows and looked at the light coming through the east window above the altar, which was the color of winter honey, and fell across the old stone floor in a way that was genuinely beautiful and had nothing to do with what was being said.
She did not begrudge them the happiness she sincerely hoped they would find. Sustained bitterness requires an investment of energy she had long since decided she could not afford. Augusta was her sister and had been, before everything, her closest companion. What had passed between them was not finished. The accounting of it would move beneath the surface of their relationship for years in ways neither of them had yet recognized. But it was not something Maria intended to carry into every room for the rest of her life. She was going to need her hands free. She had things to build.
Nathaniel called on her father 4 weeks after the wedding on a clear April morning when the first real warmth of the season had settled over Voss Park and made the garden smell of turned soil and beginning things. Sir Edmund Voss, who had watched the preceding year with the quiet guilt of a man who knew he had observed something unjust and had not intervened when intervention was owed, received the duke in his library with the expression of someone who understood precisely what was being requested and had been waiting with a mixture of hope and the particular unease of a man aware of a debt he could not fully repay to see whether it would come.
Nathaniel made his intentions plain with the direct unfashionable simplicity that was simply how he moved through all things. He was not there to negotiate. He was there to ask permission to ask Maria. Nothing had been predetermined. Maria would choose entirely freely as he believed she was entirely entitled to do. Sir Edmund Voss said yes with a promptness that contained, for anyone listening carefully, the faint sound of a man beginning to pay a debt he had not finished calculating.