To the One I Cannot Have

You should close it.

You know you should close it. You have the Stanmere deed in your left hand and the drawer's edge under the fingers of your right and all you have to do is push. One inch. The lock will catch or it won't, and either way you'll have done the honorable thing, and tomorrow he'll check it last thing at night with his thumb on the brass and never know.

You push.

It sticks. The ribbon is caught in the runner.

So you ease it out, just a little, to free the silk. Just enough to see.

The drawer is deep, deeper than the others, and full of paper. Not ledgers. Not deeds. Letters, folded the way letters are folded to be sent, square and neat, and stacked in bundles, and every bundle tied with black silk ribbon in the same careful bow. Dozens of bundles. The ones at the back have gone soft and yellow at the edges. The ones at the front are bright.

On top of everything, not tied, not even folded, lies a single sheet.

It's covered in his hand. That small, black, upright hand you've read a hundred times in margins. Yes. No. Pay her. God, no. But it isn't small here. It runs across the page as if it couldn't stop, lines sloping a little at the ends the way a hand slopes late at night, and at the top, in the place where a man writes My dear Sir or Madam, it says:

To the one I cannot have.

It's dated yesterday. Late. After the musicale. After the notes.

You don't decide to read it. Your eyes are already halfway down the page before you know you're looking, because that's what eyes trained on handwriting do, and by the time your conscience catches up, it's too late.

You will never read this. That's the only reason I can write it.

For fourteen years I've written to you without a face. I gave you a voice sometimes, or a way of laughing, but never a face, because a face would have been a man, and a man would have been a danger to himself for knowing me. You were safer as nobody. I could love nobody without harming him.

And now you have a face, and I don't know what to do.

He has ink on the second finger of his right hand that he thinks I don't see. He hums the Old Hundredth when he's thinking, and stops when I mention it, and I have regretted mentioning it every hour since. He reads Latin better than the Bishop of Salisbury. He reads me better than that. He brought me toast as though it were the most natural thing in the world to notice that a man hasn't eaten, and I sat there and could not swallow for a full minute, because no one has noticed in years.

He argued with me in the first nine minutes. Nobody has argued with me since my father died.

Tonight I sent him a note asking him not to go, and he didn't go, and I sat at this desk afterward until the candle guttered, happier than I have any right to be.

I will never tell him. He's in my employ, under my roof, and he has nothing to protect him but my silence. If I said a word, if I so much as let him see, I would be asking him to stand where I stand, and I would rather cut off my hand. So I will be cold to him by daylight, and I will eat his toast, and I will write to you instead, the way I always have.

Only now, God help me, when I write "you," I see him.

The page ends there. No signature. There's never a signature, you'll learn later. There's no one to sign it for.

You're on your knees on the carpet.

You don't remember kneeling down again. The Stanmere deed is on the floor beside you. Your hands are shaking, and you press them flat on your thighs to stop them, and it doesn't work.

He has ink on the second finger of his right hand.

You look down at your own hand. There it is, as there always is. The stain no pumice shifts. You've hated it for years, the mark of a clerk, a poor man's son, a scribbler. He saw it the first day. He catalogued it with everything else, the shabby cuffs, the mended glove, and you thought he was judging you.

He was writing it down. Writing you down, Ethan, ink and all, as if you were worth keeping.

You are Ethan Carew, twenty-seven years old, and you have known what you are since you were sixteen and a boy at school lent you a book of Catullus and touched your wrist when he took it back. You have never said it aloud. You've never written it down, not once, not even in cipher, not even to burn. You've built your whole life like a house with one locked room, and you've kept the key so long you forgot you were holding it.

And here is a man who wrote it down. Fourteen years of it.

Your eyes go to the bundles. You don't touch them. You don't need to. You can see the outsides, the ones at the edges where the bows have slipped: the same words on every single one, in a hand that changes as you look back through the years, younger, rounder, more careful, a boy's hand becoming a man's.

To the one I cannot have.

To the one I cannot have.

To the one I cannot have.

Love letters. Not to Lady Lucasta. Not to any lady. You've read enough of his letters now to know the shape of his thought, and there's no mistaking whom these are written to. A man. An imagined man, for fourteen years, a figure with no face. And now, as of last night, a face.

Yours.

You think about the way he said no, it wouldn't, about Feltham. You think about the letter that came on Wednesday. I still have the page you'd most like back. You think about the color going out of him from the top down.

Feltham had this key. Feltham sat in your chair.

Oh, God. Feltham took one of these.

The understanding goes through you like cold water. A letter like this, in that hand, in the wrong hands. You know what happens to men in this country when someone finds a letter like this. Everybody does. You've read the newspapers. The pillory at Charing Cross. The crowds with their cabbages and their stones. The ones who hang.

And he wrote, he has nothing to protect him but my silence.

He wasn't afraid for himself. He was afraid for you.

You need to put it back. You need to put the letter exactly as it was, square on top, and ease the drawer shut, and stand up, and go down to Jem with the deed and say nothing, ever, to anyone, the way you've said nothing your whole life. You know how. You're very good at it. You told him so.

You lay the sheet back on top of the bundles. Your fingers leave a faint smudge of ink on its corner. Of course they do.

You're reaching for the drawer's edge when you hear it.

The study door, behind you. The soft give of the latch you'd know anywhere now. A step on the threshold. Then nothing, no breath, no movement, the way a man goes still on ice.

You don't turn around. You can't.

"Mr. Carew," says the Duke of Ashvale, very quietly, from the doorway. "Close the drawer."