Chapter 6: Yellow Petals and Truths
He gave her space. For three days, she catalogued the solar, a narrow room filled with charts and astrolabes, a task that kept her well away from his study and the main dining hall. Their paths only crossed in the silent, choreographed dance of meals. She’d hear his footsteps on the stairs, always after she’d taken her own seat. He’d enter, nod curtly, and lose himself in correspondence. The only sound was the scrape of cutlery. When he asked for the salt, his voice was perfectly civil, utterly distant. She responded in kind. Grace’s newfound assistants was the only tangible proof the confrontation had ever happened, a bustling normality that made the quiet between them even louder.
On the fourth evening, as she was putting the final entries into the solar ledger, the door opened. He stood there, illuminated by the hallway sconce, his silhouette sharp against the warm light. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a white shirt rolled to the elbows, his waistcoat unbuttoned.
“Teresa.”
She looked up, her pen hovering. “Yes?”
“Have you finished for the day?”
She nodded, capping the inkwell. “Just now.”
“Would you join me for a walk?” He asked it quietly, as if the request were fragile. “The moon is nearly full. It’s a decent night for it.”
She hesitated. A walk held no contractually defined duties. It was an invitation, not an order. That was its own kind of trap. She saw the careful neutrality on his face, the practiced calm. She was building a wall, stone by careful stone, and she could see it bothered him. The realization gave her a thin, cold sliver of satisfaction. “Alright,” she said.
They didn’t speak as they moved through the hushed house. Jacob, the new footman, bowed his head as they passed. Out the side door, the night air was cool and smelled of damp earth and night-blooming jasmine. A heavy silver moon hung low over the moors, bathing the gardens in a monochrome glow. The gravel of the path crunched under their feet, two distinct rhythms out of sync.
“I’m going away for a few days,” he said, his eyes on the path ahead. “Leaving at first light.”
She absorbed this. His absence was a tangible prospect, a weight about to lift. “What are my duties to be while you’re gone?” Her tone was professional, a librarian awaiting instructions.
He glanced at her, a faint crease between his brows. “Your duties are unchanged. Continue the catalogue. But… keep an eye on things. Make sure the house keeps running smoothly. Grace and Wayne will defer to you if they have questions.”
“You’re leaving me in charge?” The surprise was there, before she could mask it.
“In a manner of speaking. Cho will be here. He’ll handle any true crises. I just want the… the domestic machinery to remain oiled.” He waved a hand, as if dismissing the entire household as a clockwork contraption. “Consider it an extension of your resource management critique.”
They walked on. The silence now was different, filled with the chirrup of crickets and the soft sigh of the wind. It stretched, long enough to become its own entity. He seemed to be wrestling with something, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.
“Charlotte,” he said suddenly, the name stark and solid in the quiet night.
Teresa looked at him. His profile was sharp in the moonlight, jaw tight.
“Her name was Charlotte. My… um my daughter.” His voice was low, rough-edged. He cleared his throat. “She had wild curls. The colour of spun gold. They’d catch the light and look like a halo.” He stopped walking, gazing out at the dark outline of the hills. “Her skin was like silk. Cool, perfect silk. I used to… I used to press my lips to her forehead just to feel it.”
He stopped, his breath hitching slightly. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He stared fiercely at the horizon, refusing to let the moisture gathering in his eyes spill over.
Teresa stood beside him, a respectful half-step away. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t speak. She simply waited in the shared space of his memory, the intimate, devastating detail hanging between them. After a long moment, she said, very softly, “I am so sorry for your loss, Patrick.”
Her voice held no pity, only a clear, clean empathy. It was a simple acknowledgment of a vast, endless pain. He heard the sincerity, the absence of any transaction within it. He’d forgotten how that felt, the raw comfort of it. He filed the sensation away, a strange, painful artifact to examine later, when he was alone.
“Thank you,” he managed, the words thick.
They resumed walking, the gravel path giving way to soft grass. The manor house loomed behind them, a dark sentinel.
“Why did you tell me that?” Teresa asked eventually, her gaze on the shadowed rose bushes that lined the path.
He’d known the question was coming. “Because I want to ask you a personal question. And I didn’t want it to seem like… an interrogation. Or an extraction.”
She shook her head, a small, rueful motion. “You’re trying to buy my secrets with yours. Another transaction. My intimacy for yours.”
He’d anticipated this, too. “No,” he said, stopping to face her. The moonlight lit one side of his face, leaving the other in deep shadow. His blue eyes were intense. “I’m placing a piece of my trust in your hands. With the hope… not the expectation, the hope… that you might consider placing a piece of yours in mine. It’s not currency. It’s a… a provisional treaty.”
Teresa studied him. The man was too clever by half, parsing emotional exchanges like legal documents. But she heard the distinction he was drawing. She gave him a half-smile, a fragile, fleeting thing, and shook her head again, as if marvelling at his audacity. “Ask away, then. Before I reconsider.”
They started walking again, side by side now.
“I have trouble reconciling the parts of you I’ve seen,” he began, his words measured. “You seem fearless. You stood up to me in my own dining room. You stood up to drunk, abusive husbands at the abbey. You walk through this house like you own it, even when you don’t.” He paused, choosing his next words with deliberate care. “But then, in the study… your reaction was one of pure, tactical survival. Not fear, exactly. Preparation.”
He let the sentence trail off, leaving the observation hanging.
Teresa didn’t reply for several paces. She looked down, her boots whispering through the dewy grass. They approached a large, old rose bush, its pale blooms glowing like pearls in the moonlight. She stopped, reaching out to gently cup a blossom without picking it. Her back was to him.
“You want to know why I stood up to those men,” she said, her voice so soft it was almost carried away by the breeze. “If I expect angry men to beat me, why would I put myself in their path.”
She was quiet for so long he thought she might not answer. He waited.
“It’s precisely because I expect it,” she finally said, turning the rose in her fingers. “It’s because I know, with absolute certainty, that I can handle a beating.” She let the flower go and turned to look at him, her face pale and serious in the lunar light. “I know how to protect my head. I know which ribs are most likely to break and how to turn to minimize it. I know how to curl up into the tightest ball on the ground so that kicks do the least damage, where to tuck my elbows, how to lock my fingers behind my neck. I have a practiced, thorough knowledge of how to endure violence from a man and come out the other side.”
The clinical recitation was more devastating than any sob. She stated it as a fact, a sombre skill set, like knitting or baking.
“So, when a man comes to the abbey gates, full of ale and fury, looking for his wife… I stand between him and the gate because I know I can survive what comes next. The women and children inside… they don’t have that knowledge. Their fear is a wild, panic-stricken thing. Mine is a calculated variable. It’s a burden I can carry, so I do.”
Patrick stood frozen. The night felt suddenly colder. He’d asked for truth and she had given him a shard of glass, honed sharp by a lifetime. He saw not a victim, but a veteran of a silent, brutal war. Her courage wasn’t the absence of fear; it was a cold-eyed assessment of risk and a willing sacrifice of her own body.
“And in my study?” he asked, his own voice barely a whisper. “Was I just another angry man to be calculated?”
She met his gaze. “At that moment, yes.You were. The outcome was uncertain. My calculation was to de-escalate. To offer no resistance. To become a stone.” She gave a small, weary shrug. “It usually works faster than fighting back.”
The words usually works echoed in the still air. Patrick looked away, a hot shame washing through him. He had become, in that instant of theatrical anger, indistinguishable from the monsters of her past. He had triggered a protocol written in her very bones.
“I am not that man,” he said, but the statement felt feeble now, meaningless against the history written on her.
“I believe you,” she said simply, and started walking back towards the house. “But believing and knowing are two different countries. My body remembers the map of the first one. It takes a while to trust a new landscape.”
He fell into step beside her, the easy silence now gone, replaced by the heavy weight of her revelation. The manor’s windows glowed with a faint, welcoming light, but it seemed very far away.
As they reached the side door, she paused with her hand on the latch. “When do you return?” she asked, her tone shifting back to the practical, the present.
“In four days. Perhaps five.”
She nodded. “Safe travels, Patrick.”
“Teresa,” he said, stopping her before she could slip inside. She turned, her green eyes questioning in the dim light from the hall. He searched for something to say, something that could possibly bridge the chasm he’d just been shown. An apology felt insultingly inadequate. A promise felt like another transaction.
All he could offer was the same fragile, provisional treaty. “The yellow roses by the east wall,” he said quietly. “Charlotte loved them. I’d be… I’d be glad if you continued to tend them. While I’m gone.”
It was a request, not an instruction. A tiny surrender of a sacred ground.
She held his gaze for a long moment, then gave a single, slow nod. “I will.”
Then she was gone, the door closing softly behind her, leaving him alone in the forgiving darkness.