Chapter Ten
Nathaniel still held the note when he entered the drawing room, and he did not return it.
“You will not receive him alone. On that point, I will not be persuaded. You may conduct the meeting and say whatever must be said, but I shall remain in the room. I will be silent unless you look to me; or unless I believe you to be in danger.”
Selina stood at the window with her back towards him, one hand closed around the edge of the curtain. She had sent him the note almost as soon as it arrived. He understood what it must have cost her and did not remark upon it.
“I had intended to ask the same of you. I wished only to establish that you would not use your presence to take the meeting from me. Giles will expect a duke to speak over his wife. He has known women spoken over all his life. It will unsettle him to discover that you intend to let me speak, and I want him unsettled.” She turned from the window.
“You are therefore to sit in your chair and remain magnificently, expensively silent unless I give you cause to do otherwise.”
“I can be silent.” Nathaniel placed Giles’s note upon the table between them. “It is very nearly the only social accomplishment I possess.”
He drew another folded paper from inside his coat.
“There is something else you must know before he arrives. Sowerby sent his preliminary report two days ago. Rowland is deeply in debt, and the largest of his obligations is held by Giles.”
Selina released the curtain. “You have known this for two days?”
“Yes.”
“And you did not tell me.”
“I wanted to know whether the connection was more than coincidence before placing your cousin’s name before you.” Nathaniel held out the report. “That was not my decision to make. I should have told you when it arrived.”
“No,” she said, taking the paper. “It was not.”
She read the relevant passage twice.
“Do you believe Giles is directing him?”
“I believe Giles possesses the means to do so. We have no proof that he has used it.”
Selina refolded the report and returned it. Her gaze moved to the note upon the table.
“Then we allow him to believe we know less than we do.”
“Agreed.”
Lord Merrow arrived at three.
Nathaniel saw at once that he was a man shaped by grievance and appetite, soft where his cousin was spare, wearing the Calvert features like a coat inherited from a better man and let out carelessly at the seams. He bowed too deeply to Selina and not deeply enough to Nathaniel, accepted the chair offered to him and the tea which had scarcely been offered at all, then extended his legs until his boots reached the edge of the hearthrug.
He set his cup upon the table at his elbow without troubling to look where it landed.
“Cousin,” Giles said. “Or must I call you Your Grace now? I suppose I must. How very strange. I remember you in short skirts at Merrow, ordering the grooms about as though you owned them. Now here you are, ordering a duke’s household.
Not everyone in the family has landed so softly.
Some of us have been obliged to shift as best we could. ”
“You have landed softly enough to afford that coat, which is newer than anything I owned during my final two years as Miss Gray.” Selina remained standing.
“Say what you came to say. My husband has generously agreed to remain silent while you say it, and I would not squander the rarity of a silent duke upon reminiscence.”
Giles lifted his cup, discovered that the tea was too hot and replaced it.
“So direct. You always were. Like your father. Though it did not serve him particularly well in the end.”
“Very little served my father in the end. That is what the end means.” She glanced deliberately at the clock upon the chimneypiece. “You may have three-quarters of an hour, which is more than politeness requires me to grant a caller. You have already spent four minutes of it upon my short skirts.”
Giles laughed. The sound emerged at the wrong pitch, and he cleared his throat over it.
“You are not curious to know how I found you? No? Well. A companion, they said. Miss Gray. Very quiet, very grey. Then, overnight, a duchess, with half the town wondering who the new Duchess of Wexford might be and only one or two of us knowing.” He leant back.
“I did not speak. I want that understood before we proceed, because you will otherwise misconstrue me. You always did. One word from me in the proper ear, and Miss Gray would have appeared in every sheet in London before the town had finished learning of your marriage. Yet I held my tongue. Out of family feeling. I believe that entitles me to a hearing. That is all I ask.”
“It entitles you to nothing. You did not remain silent out of kindness. You remained silent because a duchess is worth more to you intact than disgraced, and you have come to collect the difference. Do not dress appetite as restraint in my hearing, Giles. I was raised at the same table as you.” She indicated the clock.
“Name the thing; or spend the remainder of your visit admiring my furniture.”
His soft face tightened, and grievance showed beneath the courtesy like bone beneath thin cloth.
“Very well. Since you insist upon having it in the ugliest possible form, which was always your way.” He adjusted one cuff.
“You have done well for yourself, cousin. Better than a woman in your position had any right to expect, and I am glad of it, whatever you may believe. I have never wished you ill. There was a time when I might have done, but never mind that.” He glanced towards Nathaniel, then back to Selina.
“Your good fortune rests upon an unsound foundation. That is the plain fact of it. I have come, at some inconvenience to myself, to help you strengthen it before someone less kindly disposed notices the same weakness.”
“Then name the weakness,” Selina said.
He took his time. First, he surveyed the pictures, the hangings and the height of the ceiling, pricing each in turn. Then he looked back at her with the satisfaction of a man preparing to spend a coin he had carried a long way.
“The jewels.” He spread his hands. “Your mother’s garnets. You sold them, cousin, to a dealer in Ludgate Street, for a sum which I shall not embarrass you by naming. I do not blame you. I am certain you were driven to it, and equally certain it was very difficult.”
He paused to allow the sympathy its effect. Selina gave him none.
“The difficulty is that the jewels were not yours to sell. The law is particular upon the point, and it does not agree with you.” Again, he glanced at Nathaniel.
“They formed part of the settled goods of the Merrow estate. Upon the administration of your father’s affairs, they ought properly to have passed to the heir, which is to say, in the fullness of the law and with no pleasure to myself, to me. ”
He settled more comfortably into the chair.
“There it is. You sold property belonging to the estate. A court has an unpleasant name for such conduct, and it is not a name any duchess would care to carry.”
The room became still.
Nathaniel remained in the chair assigned to him, his hands resting upon its arms. After a moment, his right hand closed. He looked down, opened it finger by finger and laid it flat again.
“You are attempting to blackmail my wife in my drawing room,” he said. His voice was low and level, and therefore more dangerous than anger would have been.
“I am attempting to discuss a family obligation, Your Grace.”
“You have stated what you came to state. My wife will answer you.”
Selina allowed Giles no time to recover.
“Who else knows of this?” she asked.
Giles’s expression altered. “I beg your pardon?”
“You would not come here without preparing for my refusal. Have you taken this accusation to a printer?”
“I have done no such thing.”
“Do not lie to me.”
“I am not lying. I have never spoken to a printer in my life.”
Colour rose abruptly into Giles’s face, accompanied by something which looked disconcertingly like genuine indignation.
“You always did this, cousin. You ran ahead of the facts, arrived at the most disgraceful conclusion and expected everyone else to have reached it before you. Then, when you discovered that we had not, you never once apologised.”
Selina said nothing.
The silence lasted a moment too long. Giles heard it lengthen and sat straighter, a new brightness entering his expression.
“Your father wrote to me,” he said. “From the Tower. Three times.”
Selina’s hand closed around the back of the chair before her.
“Did you know that? I imagine not. Three letters in his own hand, every one concerning the estate and what must be done to preserve the family name; not one line in any of them about you.” He leant forwards, warming to the cruelty now that he had found its mark.
“He had a daughter of seventeen living in hired rooms, yet he wrote to his heir about the timber. Do not stand there explaining how this family reasons, cousin, as though its selfishness somehow passed you over. He did not think of you either. None of us did. You have made a creed of being the only honest Calvert, and I have never understood how you believe you earned the distinction.”
“That will do,” Nathaniel said.
“Let him finish.” Selina did not look at either man. “He has very little left.”
Giles settled back and adjusted his cuff. He appeared pleased with himself, though the pleasure did not survive Selina’s turning towards him.