CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Word has arrived from Carrow, Your Grace. He has given a full account, and quite exceeded your instructions, I fancy.”
Theodore took the packet and broke the seal, and Pearce stood with his hands behind him and waited patiently while his master read, which took some time, because Carrow was a thorough man and had not failed in his mission.
It was all there, laid clearly out in a friend’s dry hand.
The Earl of Greaves had nursed his grievance for nine years, since the spring Theodore rose in the Lords and spoke for three quarters of an hour and killed the sugar bill that would have made the earl a second fortune off the backs of men he would never have to look at. The grievance had not faded.
Carrow noted, in a line at the foot of the page, that the earl spoke of the bill still, at his own table, nine years on, the way a man speaks of a wound that has never properly closed, and that those who dined with him had learned not to bring up the name of Pillard at all, the name being apt to sour the port.
Theodore read that twice. He knew the shape of a hatred carried that long. He had carried one or two himself, and they did not improve a man, and he held no illusion that his own were the prettier for being, in his own estimation, the better deserved.
There was more. Through a chain of London agents with names that meant nothing and led nowhere, Greaves had been buying the river bottom-land off Pillard tenants these three years past, quietly, a field here and a water-meadow there, the Burtons’ lost acres among them, assembling along Theodore’s own river the beginnings of a hold he meant one day to close.
And there, at the foot of Carrow’s last page, in the same dry hand, the name of a regiment, and the name of an officer in debt, and a sum of money that had changed hands at a coffee-house in town a fortnight before a certain night at a certain folly.
“He hired the lieutenant,” Theodore said. “Carrow has even the sum.”
“Then Your Grace has him. Whenever you choose.”
“I have him.” Theodore set the pages down, aligned them with precision, and found himself entirely devoid of the emotion he had anticipated. “I have had men ruined for less than is on these pages, Pearce, and slept the better for it. Stay your hand for the time being.”
Pearce’s brows did not move, which was as near to surprise as he permitted himself. “Your Grace was decided, a fortnight since.”
“A fortnight since I had not thought the whole of it through. To bring the earl down I must bring the folly into the light, his hire of Vance, the trap, the trees. And the moment the folly is in the light my wife is in it beside him, the duchess who walked out alone at night to meet an officer, and no court in England will hear the one without relishing the other.” He turned the squared pages face down.
“I will not buy his ruin with her name. Hold it. Keep gathering. The earl has waited nine years to move against me. I find I can wait a little longer to move against him.”
“Very well, Your Grace.”
“There is a thing I have only lately come to see, and I will say it the once and not return to it.” He was quiet a moment.
“For nine years I have fought this man the way I fight everything in my life, from behind a wall, through agents, with what I am pleased to call policy, never once in the open where it might cost me something to be seen doing it. And it has answered handsomely. I have beaten him at every turn, and he despises me the more for it, because he has never once been able to find the hand that did the beating. I am beginning to wonder whether a life conducted entirely from behind walls is a victory at all, or only a very comfortable and very long sort of hiding.”
“That is rather above my office to judge, Your Grace.”
“It is above mine as well, plainly, since I have contrived to reach five-and-thirty without noticing it.” He almost smiled, and there was no humor in it. “Hold the campaign. Buy the land. We will fight the earl in daylight, when the daylight will not also fall across my wife.”
“And the river land?”
“Buy it back. Quietly, through agents of our own, at whatever it costs, and ask me no questions about the price. I want every acre he has taken off my people back in my people’s hands before he knows it is going.
” That, at least, gave Theodore something near satisfaction.
“Begin with the Burtons’ fields. They are to have their own ground under them again, and they are never to learn it was ever in doubt. ”
When Pearce had taken his leave, Augusta came in without knocking, which she did when she had something to say that she did not mean to be told to keep.
“She rode this morning,” Augusta said. “Over the south ridge, with Hibbert behind her, and came back with color in her face for the first time in a week. She has been in the garden since, in an old apron, quarrelling with Coyne about the frost. I thought you would wish to know that your wife has decided to live after all.”
“I am glad of it.”
“Are you? One is not always able to discern.”
“You might tell her so yourself. It would carry rather more conviction from you than from a breakfast tray.”
“She does not wish to see me.”
“You have not the smallest notion what she wishes, Theodore, because you have never once asked her, because asking would mean standing in a room and waiting upon an answer you could not arrange in advance, and you would sooner be flayed in the market square.” She sat, uninvited, and arranged her shawl.
“She ordered me out of her room five days ago, did you know that. Told me to leave, in as many words, and a great deal more besides. It was the best afternoon’s work I have done in a twelvemonth. ”
“You provoked her on purpose.”
“Of course I provoked her on purpose. A grief that has gone still wants a stick put into it to make it move again, and I had run out of gentler sticks.” Augusta looked at him steadily.
“In the very act of ordering me from her presence, she said something that has occupied my thoughts ever since. I feel you had better be made acquainted with it, however little you may thank me for my pains.”
“Then perhaps do not say it.”
“She said she was finished being managed by people who care for her.” Augusta let it sit.
“And she said that you send a maid to her door three times a day to ask whether she wants a book or a higher fire, and never once come yourself, because even your kindness must be handed down through a servant so that you need never stand in a room with her and risk her having a feeling where you can see it.”
Theodore said nothing at all.
“I have known you since you were an hour old,” Augusta said, more gently.
“I held you before your mother did. So believe me that I mean it kindly when I tell you the girl has the whole of you in one sentence, and that she brought it to a conclusion within a fortnight, lonely and frightened and half starved, which is more than your tutors managed in twenty years at a great deal of expense.” She rose.
“You watched her sit at that window for a week and did not go to her. A man does that for one of two reasons, Theodore. He does it because he does not care, or he does it because he cares so much that he dare not. You have never in your life been a man who did not care. Work out the rest yourself. You are clever, when you trouble to be.”
He did not answer her, because there was no answer that was not either a falsehood or a confession, and he had never in his life made the second, and found himself, of a sudden, very tired of making the first.
“Silence is your answer, then? So be it.” Augusta gathered her shawl with evident satisfaction.
“A man who has run clean out of clever answers is a man on the very edge of doing something honest. See that you do it, Theodore, before the girl decides, quite reasonably, that she has waited long enough for you and stops waiting.”
She left him with it.
He sat a long while after she had made her exit in the cold neat order of his study, with Carrow’s packet face down on the desk and the fire burned low, and he made himself do the thing he had spent a great many years not doing, which was to look squarely at what was in him and call it by its name.
He had chosen her before there was any debt to be settled between her house and his.
A season ago he had stood in a shabby morning room and watched a girl pour tea for the brother who was selling her, watched her keep her chin level and her hands steady while her whole life was bartered across a desk in front of her, and somewhere in that half hour he had decided he would have her, and had dressed the wanting up afterward in the decent language of rescue and convenience because the bare fact of it frightened him more than anything had frightened him in years.
Upstairs, pressed between the leaves of a book on his shelf, lay a violet from her wedding bouquet, put there the night of the wedding and called, ever since, a sentiment of no consequence.
There was the mare bought for her with no reason given, and the wall raised around her against her brother that she had never been permitted to glimpse, and the spring violets sent up to her room with no card, and the daily messages carried by a maid, and the ride into the dark to save her from ruin followed by a week of silence she could only ever have read as judgment.
Every last thing he had felt for the girl had reached her by the agency of another, through a servant or a barred door or a senseless beast or an unsigned card, so that he need never once stand in front of her with his face uncovered and say a true thing aloud and watch what it did to her.