Chapter Fourteen #2
She lifted one finger, the bookkeeper’s mark for the first item in a column.
“I am not an ornament. You will not dress me and stand me at the head of a table to prove to your county that the house is settled at last. I am a voice in this household, and you will hear it, particularly on the occasions when it disagrees with you, which it will, often, and at the least convenient hours you can imagine.”
He let a moment pass before he answered, so that she would know it was an answer and not a reflex. “Agreed. I hired you in the first place for the disagreeing. It would be a poor economy to wed the habit and then forbid its exercise.”
“My money is mine. When the trust opens, the funds come to me, in my name, and they are never once folded into yours, not for the estate, not for the roof, not for the noblest emergency you are able to invent at three on the hour in the morning.” Her chin held level, but the look behind it rose to meet him.
“I was poor at the mercy of a husband once. I have no intention of being rich at the mercy of another.”
“Agreed, and gladly.” He inclined his head.
“I have wanted no woman’s fortune in all my life, and I want yours least of any, because taking it would cost me the single thing I appear to be acquiring tonight, which is your trust, and which I am reliably informed does not come back cheaply once a man has spent it. ”
“No decision concerning my life is made without me in the room. Not by you. Not by Beatrice with her lists of brides. And no solicitor carries my future about in his satchel to be settled over my head. If the matter touches me, I am present for the deciding of it, or it is not decided.”
“Agreed.”
“And honesty. Especially when honesty is the harder of the two roads on offer, which in your particular case it almost always will be, because you have spent your life choosing the easier one and calling the choice discretion.” She held his look and did not let him out of it.
“Those are my terms. They are not negotiable, and they are not generous, and I have made them deliberately hard, so that I will learn, by whichever of them you balk at, the exact dimensions of the bargain I am being asked to sign.”
“You have kept the hardest of them for the last, as a careful clerk buries the costliest clause at the foot of the page. Honesty I can give you, though it will come out of me in the wrong order and at the wrong volume and a full day later than it was wanted. I have not practised it. It will make a poor hand of me for a long while yet.”
“I do not require you to be good at it, my lord. What I require is that you reach for it on the occasions when the easy falsehood is sitting right there, polished, within arm’s length.
A man who attempts honesty and fails at it honestly is a wholly different creature from one who never once reaches for the thing at all.
I have already been married to the second kind, and I will take my chances on the first.”
“I balk at none of them.” It came too quickly, and he heard the speed of it, and could not bring himself to regret a word.
He was, to his own faint astonishment, relieved.
She had handed him a list of rules, and rules were a thing he could keep, and a list was the one language in which he had ever been wholly fluent.
She had chosen, with great deliberation, to negotiate in it.
Whether that was a mercy or a verdict he was not yet steady enough to determine.
“I have one term of my own, since you have been thorough with yours.”
She turned her hands palm-up on the table, conceding him the floor. “You are entitled to one. Name it.”
He said it to the table rather than to her, which was the only way he could get it out.
“Do not perform contentment for me. If the arrangement galls you, I would far rather have the gall laid out plainly than a smooth face stretched over the top of it. I have lived my whole life in a house full of smooth faces. I have no wish to build another and move you into it.”
“That is the first thing you have asked for tonight that was genuinely your own, and I notice you waited until it could be mistaken for a clause before you risked it.” She inclined her head a careful degree.
“Agreed. You shall have my discontent entirely unedited, my lord, and an abundance of it, and the day may well come when you wish you had asked me for the ornament instead.”
“Then I accept,” Renae said quietly.
She said it as a careful person signs a sound contract.
There was no joy in the saying of it, none, not the smallest wasted excess of it anywhere between the two, and he stood and received the absence like a sum entered against his name in a hand he had no grounds to dispute.
She had accepted him. He had got the very thing he had spent a month refusing to admit he wanted.
And the getting of it tasted of nothing at all, the exact flavour, he was beginning to understand, of a thing acquired correctly and obtained entirely wrong.
“I will have Fenwick draw the settlement to your terms,” he said.
“Every article of it, in writing, so that you need never once take my word for any clause, and so that if I should ever forget tonight, the paper will be near to hand to remind me of the man I promised to be before I had the chance to disappoint you out of nothing worse than habit.”
“That will do, my lord.”
“Declan. My name is Declan. You have agreed to take it. You might rehearse the use of it before the church requires it of you.”
“That will do, my lord.” She gathered the household keys from the table, where she had set them down to fold her hands, and the small iron weight of them returning to her waist was the only sound the room could offer.
“There is much to be arranged, and arranging is a thing I am good at, and I find tonight I would far rather be good at something than be anything else at all. Good evening, my lord.”
He almost said it then. The true word came up as far as his teeth, the one that had been on no list and balanced no column.
He held the door of his mouth shut against it as he had held every door shut for thirty years, and the moment for the saying of it walked out of the room a half-second ahead of her.
She went out, and the library kept her absence as the nursery three floors above had once kept his, and he stood a long while in the cooling room beside a fire he had not thought to feed. He tended it at last, because a man must give his hands some honest work, and he made a poor job even of that.
He had laid six reasons on the table like a man laying down a winning hand.
Each one he had built true, squared at its edges, and presented in the strict order of its strength.
And every one of the six had been a reason that she should enter into matrimony with him.
Not one of the six had been a question. The single question that signified he had never put at all, the one a man asks before all the others or asks never, the question of whether she could bear it, whether the life he was holding out was a life she could survive without becoming the chair again.
He had not asked it, and he was not at all certain, alone now in the dark with the keys gone from the table, that he could have survived the hearing of her answer.
Asking it would have required him to stand in the open and want the answer aloud, and wanting aloud was the one entry he had spent his entire life keeping off the books.