Chapter Text
“Were you disappointed when you learned that I would be your wife?” Agnes tried to hold her hands steady as she asked him. She’d spent the past ten minutes equally gazing at him and looking away.
It had only occurred to her after their match that maybe he wouldn’t want to marry her. He was a new Commander. Young and handsome. Any girl would be lucky to marry him. And maybe, Agnes thought, he already had someone in mind. Someone prettier, or more accomplished, or better suited to the kind of life people expected him to build.
The thought made something uneasy twist in her chest, though she did not fully know why. She had been told, all her life, that a girl should be grateful for the match given to her, grateful for the mercy of provision and protection. And she was grateful. She knew she should be. But gratitude did not quite silence the small, frightened hope that he might be pleased to have her.
They sat side-by-side – close but not quite touching – in her family’s parlor.
Each piece of furniture was set at a careful angle, as though even it understood the rules. The only softness of the room came from the warm afternoon light, filtering through the pale curtains.
The relative hush of the room made every small movement feel noticeable.
Rosa and the other Martha’s milled about on the periphery of the room, trying to be as inconspicuous about their chaperoning as possible. A practiced quiet of women who knew how to make themselves useful without being noticed.
Paula had been disappointed. She thought Garth was beneath Agnes, despite his father having previously been a Commander. But the unfortunateness of Agnes’s lineage — Paula’s words — had made a more respectable match impossible.
Her disappointment had been enough to send her away while Garth visited with Agnes. She saw no reason to stay.
Commander Mackenzie hadn’t outright said anything about his daughter’s prospective marriage. But Agnes knew well enough that his silence said more than words ever could. In Gilead, silence was seldom neutral.
Still, she didn’t care. She was happy. Blissfully happy. Elated even. The feeling sat luminous and unreal inside her, fragile enough that she barely dared to touch it in front of anyone else.
They were feelings that didn’t happen often in Gilead, and she had learned how to hide anything too joyful, too eager, too alive. What she felt was overwhelming – almost frightening in its brilliance.
She’d had to temper every smile, every praise be since learning that she would marry Garth. In the presence of others, she was a grateful girl. Not a happy girl. Only Becka truly knew how Agnes felt.
Agnes had hugged her best friend two days ago when she’d learned that she would, indeed, marry her Guardian. She’d wrapped Becka up into her embrace and held her for a long time, her heart beating quicker than ever before as she whispered, “Aunt Lydia gave me my match.”
She’d continued to hug Becka, relishing her warmth and scent, and Becka had held her in turn. Agnes remembered the flush of Becka’s cheeks, the tears in her eyes.
If only everyone could have a friend as good as Becka.
Agnes waited, her breath held in her throat as Garth regarded her. He gave her a lopsided smile. There was something thoughtful in the way he looked at her, as though he were trying to understand more than the simple utterance of her question.
He let his fingers brush delicately against her hand that sat between them. It felt light. Almost accidental. His smile widened a little when he heard her sharp intake of breath.
He liked Agnes. He thought her kind. Sweet, even if naïve. And curious in a way that was uncommon in Gilead. She had a gentleness about her that did not feel rehearsed, even if so much of her life had been. A contrast between her formal upbringing and her inner workings. She was, he could see as much, a sincere sort of girl. Someone genuine.
Before Daisy had told him that Agnes loved him, that had been enough. He had liked her for the little things: the way she hesitated before speaking, as though she wanted to mean what she said. There was something almost startling about that in Gilead, where so many people learned to speak as though they were performing the part expected of them. Agnes seemed less interested in performance than in intention, and that made her feel, to him, more real than most.
It was also small things like the way her face changed when something pleased her and she tried – a little unsuccessfully – to hide it. He had not needed much more than that. In Gilead, tenderness was rare enough that even a small kindness could linger in the mind.
But after he learned that she was in love with him, it was as if something in him had shifted toward her. It made him look at her as though she had become, all at once, more human and more vulnerable in his eyes. He wondered what it meant that she had chosen him in whatever limited way choice was allowed her.
And then there was the question he could not quite stop himself from asking. What would it be like to love her back? Not only as someone to protect, but as someone to know. As Agnes. The beautiful girl who sat beside him with careful hands and earnest eyes, who seemed to trust that gentleness could still mean something in a world like theirs.
He’d danced with her. Felt the heat and softness of her. Had let his hands and fingers linger against her in the ways he could. The brush of his thumb against her silk covered elbow. Her delicate fingertips pressed against his own.
It had all ended too soon.
What would it be like to love her as someone whose quietness might contain more than he had first noticed? What thoughts did she keep to herself? What hopes had she buried so deeply she could hardly name them? It made him want to understand the shape of her heart as it had been made and constrained by the life she had been given.
He wondered what she would have been like outside of Gilead, and he felt a pit open in his stomach when he realized that outside of Gilead, she could be anything. The thought came to him with a kind of force that startled him. Not because it was impossible to imagine, but because it was too easy. Too many possibilities crowded in at once, all of them things Gilead had taught her not to want. A doctor. A teacher. A woman with opinions of her own, with work of her own, with a life that belonged to her.
The thought turned bitter. Angry.
Something about the realization – in relation to Agnes – made him hate Gilead even more. Hated it for stealing the dreams she didn’t even know she could have. Stealing from her even the knowledge of what she had been denied. Gilead had narrowed her world so much that she could not even name what had been taken from her. It made her small in the ways that mattered the most.
He hated Gilead for stealing everything from her.
He would give her everything back. That was what it would mean to watch Gilead burn.
But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t let his fury overpower the tenderness he wanted to offer her. What good would rage do her, spoken aloud at the wrong moment? What would she hear in it, if not danger? If not the harshness of a world she had already been taught to fear?
What did it mean for a girl in Gilead to be in love? Was it simply his age and proximity to her, the relief of having someone near? Or did it mean something truer, something hopeful?
“I was surprised when I learned that you would be my wife,” he finally told her.
“Surprised?” she asked softly.
“You’re a top Commander’s daughter. I expected a top Commander would want to marry you.”
“I didn’t want to marry a top Commander,” as soon as she said it, he could tell that she’d shared this thought without thinking. She looked away from him, suddenly interested in whatever was over her shoulder.
His eyes widened of their own accord, “Agnes.”
She turned back to him slowly – all earnestness and sincerity written in the blush of her cheeks and innocence of her eyes. There was unmistakable honestly in her expression.
“Did you…did you want to marry me?” as he said it, the question felt ridiculous. After all, he already knew her feelings for him.
But Agnes didn’t know that he knew that.
She opened her mouth to respond but was interrupted by the smiling presence of Rosa. She walked into the room, a tray in hand, “I brought you some tea and biscuits with honey.”
Something in Agnes’s chest softened at seeing Rosa. Her cheerful smile and her freckles that could be mapped like constellations. Agnes watched as Rosa placed the tray on the table in front of them. Steam rose from the cups of tea. Everything smelled warm and sweet. There was still butter melting on the biscuits.
“Thank you, Rosa,” Agnes reached for a cup and saucer to hand to Garth before looking up at Rosa, “Do you want to sit with us?”
She felt Garth’s subtle adjustment next to her. The tilt of his head, the jolt of his body.
Agnes could feel the heat of his gaze on her before she met his eyes. When she gathered the courage to lift her eyes to his, she didn’t see the disappointment she had half-expected. There was no tightening of his expression, no small rebuke or reminder of place. She didn’t see the silent chastisement she’d seen from others at inviting a Martha to sit and eat with them.
Instead, he gave her a look she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before.
Rosa reached out, still smiling as she affectionately brushed a tendril of hair from Agnes’s face, “You two enjoy it, Sweetie Pie. I’ve got some other work to do.”
Agnes nodded.
When Rosa disappeared around the corner, Garth spoke thoughtfully, “That could get you in trouble with other Commanders.”
“I…” Agnes’s lower lip wobbled. She bit it to stop the motion and looked down at her lap, not sure what to say. She had not meant anything by it. She’d known Rosa for a long time. Rosa had been there through so many moments – both ordinary and life altering. Because of that, it had never occurred to Agnes that inviting her to sit might be seen as anything other than considerate. But meaning was often something others assigned for you. A thing could become improper simply because someone with authority decided it was. Agnes knew that. She had been taught that. She had lived inside those rules long enough to understand how quickly a careless kindness could be turned into fault.
The realization left her feeling suddenly small. Not only because she might have done something wrong, but because she had done it without even meaning to, without even seeing the danger until it was already there. Her face felt warm. Her throat tightened. She hated the way that could happen — the way something as simple as asking Rosa to sit could make her feel foolish, childish, exposed. As if she had reached toward something safe and discovered she was not as safe as she had thought.
She did not want Garth to think she was careless. She did not want him to think she was foolish. Most of all, she did not want him to look at her with the same quiet disappointment she had seen from others before.
But then she felt Garth take her hand in his, lacing their fingers, “Not with me, though,” he told her resolutely, “Never with me, Agnes.”
His hand was rough and warm. Larger than her own. Before their engagement, he’d held her hand in ordinary ways: helping her out of the car, steadying her as she climbed one of Paula’s horses and then failed to keep her balance. But this was different.
He had never held her hand like this. His fingers slotted between her own with quiet certainty, his thumb moving once, then again, in slow, absent-minded circles over her knuckle.
Something in her loosened at the touch. The tight, embarrassed knot in her chest did not disappear, but it eased enough for her to breathe around it. She had been bracing herself for correction, for the mild but unmistakable shame that usually followed when she had done something wrong. Instead, he met her mistake with warmth.
Agnes lifted her eyes to him then, startled by how much it mattered. They stared at one another, Garth’s expression telling her that he meant it.
The gentleness of his hand made the reassurance feel truer than the words alone might have done. It was one thing to be told she was not in trouble. It was another to be held as if that were so.
For a moment, she could not think of anything to say. She only let herself sit there, her hand in his, feeling the slow rhythm of his thumb against her skin and the strange, delicate relief of being accepted. Of being told she had not done something wrong after all.