Chapter 3
THE THIRD CHAPTER
And then again, I have been told
Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold.
—Ben Jonson
“Though I Am Young and Cannot Tell”
After the funeral, everyone repaired to March House where Aunt Hermia had conspired with Father’s butler, Hoots, to provide an impressive cold buffet and quite a lot of liquor.
My relations seemed very pleased with both.
And so was I. The more they ate and drank, the less they spoke to me, although I still found myself repeatedly cornered by well-meaning aunts and faintly lecherous cousins.
The former doled out advice over shrimp-paste sandwiches while the latter made me dubious proposals of marriage.
I thanked the aunts and rebuffed the cousins, but gently.
They were an intemperate lot, especially with the amount of spirits Aunt Hermia had offered, and if I offered one of them an insult I had little doubt there would be a duel in the garden by sunrise.
It was a relief when Father finally fetched me to his study.
“Time for the will,” he said tersely. “You haven’t accepted your cousin Ferdinand, have you?”
He glanced over my shoulder to where Ferdinand was still tipsily proposing marriage to a marble statue of Artemis and her stag, completely unaware of the fact that I had excused myself.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I am glad to hear it. He is a famous imbecile. They all are. Marry one of them and I will cut off your allowance.”
“I shouldn’t marry one of them if you doubled it.”
He nodded. “Good girl. I never understood why we Marches always married our cousins in the first place. Bad breeding principle, if you ask me. Concentrates the blood, and God knows we don’t need that.”
That much was true. Father had been the first to marry out of the March bloodlines and had ten healthy children to show for it, all only mildly eccentric.
Most of our relations who had married each other had children who were barking mad.
He had strongly encouraged us to marry outside the family, with the result that his grandchildren were the most conventional Marches for three hundred years.
In the study, the solicitor, Mr. Teasdale, was busy perusing a sheaf of papers while my eldest brother, Lord Bellmont, viscount, MP and heir to the family earldom, browsed the bookshelves. He was fingering a particularly fine edition of Plutarch when Father spied him.
“It isn’t a lending library,” Father snapped. “Buy your own.”
Bellmont bowed from the neck to acknowledge he heard Father, nodded once at me, then took a chair near the fire. His manners were usually impeccable, but he hated being barked at by Father. Mr. Teasdale put aside his papers and rose. I offered him my hand.
“My lady, please accept my condolences on your bereavement. I have asked Lord March, as head of the family, and Lord Bellmont, as his heir, to be present while I explain the terms of Sir Edward’s will.”
I took a seat next to Bellmont and Father took the sofa. He snapped his fingers for his mastiff, Crab, who came lumbering over to lie at his feet, her head on his knee. Mr. Teasdale opened a morocco portfolio and extracted a fresh set of papers, these bound with tape.
“I have here the last will and testament of your late husband, Sir Edward Grey,” he began pompously.
My eyes flickered to Father, who gave an impatient sigh.
“English, man, plain English. We want none of your lawyering here.”
Mr. Teasdale bowed and cleared his throat.
“Of course, your lordship. The disposition of Sir Edward’s estate is as follows: the baronetcy and the estate of Greymoor in Sussex are entailed and so devolve to his heir, Simon Grey, now Sir Simon.
There are a few small bequests to servants and charities, fairly modest sums that I shall disburse in due course.
The residue of the estate, including Grey House and all its contents—furnishings, artworks and equipages, the farms in Devon, the mines in Cornwall and Wales, the railway shares, and all other properties, monies and investments belong to your ladyship. ”
I stared at him. I had expected a sizable jointure, that much had been in the marriage contract. But the house? The money? The shares? All of these should have rightfully gone with the estate, to Simon.
I licked my lips. “Mr. Teasdale, when you say all other monies—”
He named a sum that made me gasp. The gasp turned into a coughing fit, and by the time Mr. Teasdale had poured me a small, entirely medicinal brandy, I was almost recovered.
“That is not possible. Edward was comfortable, wealthy even, but that much—”
“I understand Sir Edward made some very shrewd investments. His style of living was comparatively moderate for a gentleman who moved in society,” Mr. Teasdale began.
“Comparatively moderate? I should say so! Do you know how little he gave me for pin money?” I was beyond furious.
Edward had never been niggardly with money.
Each quarter he had given me a sum that I had viewed as rather generous.
Generous until I realized he could have easily given me ten times as much and never missed it.
Father’s hand stilled on Crab’s head. “Do you mean to say that he kept you short? Why did you not come to me?”
His voice was neutral, but I knew he was angry.
He was famous for his modern views about women.
He favored suffrage, and had even given a rather stirring speech on the subject in the Lords.
He made a point of giving each of his daughters an allowance completely independent of his sons-in-law to offer at least a measure of financial emancipation.
The very idea that one of his daughters might have been kept on a short lead would gall him.
I shook my head. “No, not really. My pin money was rather a lot, in fact. But there were times, when I wanted to travel or buy something expensive, that I had to ask Edward for the money. I always felt rather like Marie Antoinette in front of the mob when I did, all frivolity and extravagance in the face of sober responsibility. It’s just lowering to know that he could have thrown that much to a beggar in the street and never missed it. ”
Father’s hand began to move on Crab’s ears once more. She snuffled at his knee, drooling a little. Bellmont stirred beside me.
“Mines in Cornwall. Surely those have played out by now,” he said to Teasdale.
Mr. Teasdale smiled. “They are still profitable, I assure you, my lord. Sir Edward would not have kept them were they not. He was entirely unsentimental about investments. He kept nothing that did not keep itself.” He turned to me, his manner brisk.
I swear he could smell the money in the air.
“Now, if your ladyship would care to leave the management of the estate in capable hands, I am sure that their lordships would be only too happy to make the necessary decisions.”
“I do not think so,” I said slowly.
Beside me, Bellmont stiffened like an offended pointer. “Don’t be daft, of course you do. You do not know the first thing about managing an estate of this size. You will want advice.”
Father said nothing, but I knew he agreed with me.
He would not say so, not now, because he wanted to see if I would stand my ground with Bellmont.
Few people ever did. As the eldest son and heir, Bellmont had been entitled since birth, in every sense of the word.
Mother had not died until he was almost grown, so he had felt the full force of her far more conventional ideals.
It was not until her death, when the raising of the younger children had been left to Father and Aunt Hermia, that the experiments had begun.
Bellmont had been sent to Eton and Cambridge.
The rest of us had been educated at home by a succession of Radical tutors with highly unorthodox philosophies.
Bellmont had never gotten accustomed to thinking of his sisters or his younger brothers as his equals, and of course he had the whole of the English legal, judicial and social systems to back him.
He paid lip service to Father’s Radical leanings, but when the time came for him to run for Parliament, he had done so as a Tory.
Father had refused to speak to him for nearly four years after that, and their relationship still bumped along rockily.
I swallowed hard. “Of course I shall want advice, Bellmont, and I know that you are quite well-informed in such matters,” I began carefully. “But I am an independent lady now. I should like very much to make my own decisions.”