CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Sit down, Mr. Crewe, and spread the whole of the river out where I can see it. Every parcel that has changed hands these three years, and who holds it now, and which agent stood between.”
Crewe, who had been summoned to the small parlor by a duchess he had not laid eyes on in a fortnight and had half expected to find still prostrate, took one look at her face and unrolled his survey across the table without a word of preamble, which Ellen noted and was grateful for.
She had spent four days behind a bolted door deciding what she was.
She had come out the other side of it not a wife and not a prisoner but something she had no tidy word for yet, a woman with a grievance and a quantity of information and no further intention of waiting in a chair for the men in her life to decide her future among themselves.
“Show me the Burtons’ fields.”
He laid a blunt finger on the map. “Here, Your Grace. The water-meadow and the two riverside closes, sold off eighteen months since to a Mr. Hollis of London, who proves on inquiry to be no one, only a name a solicitor uses. And here, the Renwicks’ frontage, gone the same road to a different name that is the same nobody.
And here, and here.” His finger walked the riverbank.
“I did as you asked and traced the agents back, quietly. Every one of them empties, in the end, into the same solicitor’s office in Lincoln’s Inn, and that office acts for one client whose name it will not give, and a client who hides that hard is a client with something he does not wish seen. ”
“Greaves.”
“I would not have dared say it, Your Grace. But since you have.”
Ellen looked at the river drawn in blue across the survey, the parcels marked in the agent’s neat hand, the broken line of frontage Greaves had been quietly stitching together field by field along the whole of one bank, and she saw it the way she had once seen a neglected garden, all at once, as a thing with a shape and an intention.
“He is not buying land, Mr. Crewe. A man does not hide this hard to own a few water-meadows. He is buying the riverbank in its entirety. What can a man possibly want with an unbroken mile of navigable water?”
Crewe was quiet a moment, and then his face changed.
“He would want it, Your Grace, if he meant to bring a navigation through. A cut, locks, a towing-path the length of it, tolls on every barge of coal and lime that passed. There has been talk of a scheme these two years, to join the river to the canal at Wrenford and open the whole valley to the coal trade. It would want an Act. It would also want every foot of one bank in a single hand, for the towing-path and the works, and no Act would pass that did not show the land already secured, because the Lords will not grant compulsory purchase to a man who cannot prove he holds the better part of it willingly to start.”
“So he needs the whole bank to get his Act, and his Act to make his fortune.” Ellen put her own finger down on the map, on the Burtons’ two riverside closes, square in the middle of Greaves’s long stolen line. “And the duke is buying these back. Quietly. As we sit here.”
“His Grace gave the order a fortnight since. The Burtons’ ground first.”
“Then the duke has already, without quite knowing the whole of what he was doing, put a hole in the middle of the earl’s bank that the earl cannot close, because the moment Greaves goes to buy the Burtons’ closes a second time he will find a Pillard agent has been there before him, and a navigation with a stranger’s field sitting in the center of its towing-path is no navigation at all.
” She straightened. “That is the half of it. The dull half. Thank you, Mr. Crewe. Leave me the survey, and the names of the agents, and your account of how the Burtons came to lose their ground, written out plainly, with the dates.”
“The account of it, Your Grace?”
“In their own words if you can get them, in yours if you cannot. How the agents came, and what they said, and what was not said, and what the Burtons understood themselves to be signing against what they were in fact signing. The truth of it, told plainly enough that a man who has never set foot in a water-meadow could read it and be ashamed.”
Crewe gathered his hat. “May I ask what it is for, Your Grace.”
“It is for the part the duke would never think of,” Ellen said.
“He will fight this man the way he fights everything, by buying the land out from under him in the dark, and it will work, and Greaves will lose his fortune and never know certainly whose hand took it, and loathe the duke another nine years for it, and find another way. I do not want him beaten in the dark. I want him beaten in the light, in front of the very men whose good opinion is the only fortune he has left, so that he cannot come back from it. And for that I do not need a clever agent. I need the Burtons, telling the truth, to the right people.”
Augusta found her there an hour later, still bent over the survey, and stood in the doorway a moment taking the measure of the room before she came in.
“You have come out, then.”
“I have come out.”
“The last time you came out of a bolted room, it was because I drove you out of it with a stick, and you were furious with me for a week, and quite right to be.” Augusta lowered herself into the chair.
“This time I did nothing whatever. I have sat in the parlor four days with my embroidery, fully prepared to come up and be intolerable to you again the instant it was wanted, and it was not wanted, and I find myself put out of work. What was different?”
“The last time, someone had broken something in me and I did not know how to mend it.” Ellen did not look up from the river. “This time someone has broken something, and I have decided to send him the bill for the repairs. It is a great deal more bracing. I recommend it to anyone.”
Augusta laughed, short and delighted. “Oh, he has met his match at last, and does not the whole house is fully aware of it.” She drew the survey toward her and studied the blue river, the agent’s small marks. “What are you about, child?”
“I am about to win something in the open that my husband would have won in the dark.” Ellen met her eyes.
“And I should like your help with a piece of it, because you know every dowager in three counties and precisely which of them still dines with the Earl of Greaves. I am going to need the drawing rooms turned against him at the very hour the duke turns the Lords. A thing said in the House lands twice as hard when the wives have already had the worst of it over cards the week before.”
“You are asking me to engage in a bit of strategic tale-bearing, I see.” Augusta’s eyes gleamed like a young mischievous girl’s.
“Ellen, I have been gossiping strategically since before your mother was christened. It is the one weapon they ever permitted us, and I have kept mine beautifully sharp for want of anything else to do with it. Tell me exactly what you wish known, and to whom, and in what order, and consider it already halfway round the county.”
When they had both gone she sat with the survey a long while, and then she drew a clean sheet toward her, and trimmed a quill and did not write to Greaves, or to a lawyer, or to any of the right people at all. She wrote to her brother.
She had not written to Henry since the wedding.
She had received three letters from him in those months, two of them asking obliquely for money and one of them, the last, asking after her health in a hand that was almost steady, and she had answered none of them, because answering meant feeling, and she had been too busy being furniture to feel.
She looked at the clean sheet now and understood, with the clarity the bolted door had given her, that she had been doing to Henry the exact thing Theodore had been doing to her.
Managing him with her silence. Deciding, alone, that he was not worth the truth.
Protecting herself behind a wall and calling it the only sensible course.
Henry, she wrote, and then sat a while, because honesty was harder than she had supposed, having gone so long without practicing it.