Chapter Two #2
“I have given you the terms.”
“You have given me the ones that flatter you. Every settlement of this kind keeps the other sort folded underneath.” She spoke evenly, and the evenness was worse than any volume.
“Shall I save you the labour and guess at yours? A cabinet for my letters, with a lock, and the key on your own chain. A list of the houses I may enter and the hours I may keep in them.”
Rowan said that he had named no such thing, but she did not stop for it.
“A bell, perhaps, by which I am rung for when I am wanted and set down again when I am not. Tell me which I have left out, Your Grace. I have served a long apprenticeship in imagining the man who buys a wife and calls the purchase a rescue.”
Rowan set aside the sentence he had been about to repeat.
The charge had come at him whole and fitted no part of anything he had said, and something went up in him that he would rather not have allowed in a strange room.
He held it down, and holding it down cost him a second that he could not get back.
“You have decided what manner of man I am,” he said, “before you will grant me the inconvenience of showing you.”
“Men in your position are seldom required to show anything. The rest of us perform it on your behalf, and you are pleased to call the performance your character.”
“You have made yourself the judge of it, then.”
“I appointed myself nothing. I was handed the part before I could read the playbill.” She met his eyes without the softening he was accustomed to from women who wanted his good opinion.
“You offered me an income and a lock in a single breath, and you cannot understand why I heard only the lock. That is not stupidity, Your Grace. It is a woman who has been handed generous papers before, and taught herself to read the small hand that always follows the flourish.”
“You have read a great many bad settlements, then.”
“I have read every settlement this family has signed since I was nineteen, because the man whose name goes at the foot of them does not trouble to. Most of them I wrote out fair in my own hand. There is very little small print left that can surprise me.”
Rowan inclined his head. “And you take it as given that mine will carry the same.”
“I take nothing about yours as given, Your Grace. Nobody has permitted me to see it. What it will contain has been described to me, and I am expected to be content with the description.”
“And where did the description come from?”
She checked, half a second, the first thing all morning her certainty had caught upon.
“The general run of men who marry a woman for her competence and resent her for it ever after,” she said, and the recovery was clean, but he had seen the catch, and he set it beside the servant who looked up and the picture that was gone from the wall.
“I have offered you respect.”
“Anything written by the man who holds every choice in the room resembles charity very nearly.” She left the paper where it lay.
“Keep your income and your honest bargain. I will keep the one thing I have contrived to hold this far. I have never once set my name to a page I had not read to its bottom line.”
Sir Alistair rose, smooth and sorrowful, and set his daughter out for the duke’s inspection with the flaw turned uppermost, an honest dealer showing damaged goods.
“You see what I contend with, Your Grace, and you see it on your second morning, which I had hoped to spare you a while longer.” He spread his hands.
“Every kindness that comes near her arrives as the bar of a cage. Withdraw if you wish it. There is not a soul in this room who would blame you. I should be the first to call you wise, and I should still be your friend at the assembly on Thursday.”
Rowan did not look at him. He was watching Theodora watch her father, and the look on her face was the one from the night before, the look he had failed to place when she named the garnets but could place now.
It was not temper. It was a person listening to herself described by the man who profited most from the description, and choosing, at a price he could only guess at, to let it stand rather than pay for the correction before a stranger.
“I have not said I wish to withdraw,” Rowan said.
“You would be within your rights.”
“I am often within my rights, Sir Alistair. It has never once told me what to do.” He turned back to her.
“You have named the terms twice now, and twice you have invented them and then quarrelled with the invention. Put a question to me that I have not already answered in your own voice. You will find that I answer them.”
She studied him a moment. The folded paper lay unopened between them, and long afterwards he would remember that it had lain there, and that he had taken it for a note about candles and given it no second thought.
“Very well. Three questions, and short ones, since you prize plainness.” She raised a hand with one finger lifted. “First, my sister’s portion. You said no husband could reach it. Say it as a figure, and say who holds it, for a promise without a trustee is only a wish said aloud.”
“Four thousand pounds in the funds, under trustees of your naming and mine together. Her husband, when she takes one, receives the interest at their pleasure and never a farthing of the principal. Name your trustee this morning, and I will set it under his hand.”
“The second concerns the servants.” A finger joined the first. “When this house is reordered after the settlement, and it will be, the ones turned off will be the oldest, because the old cost the most and grumble the loudest.” She named them without a pause.
“Beddoes. Mrs Cray in the kitchen. The two women who sat up with my mother. I want their places written into the contract, not promised across a table.”
“Those places are not mine to give,” Rowan said.
“This is your father’s house, and they are your father’s servants.
He will give them.” He said the next part to Sir Alistair and not to her.
“Bring me the names before the instrument is engrossed, and he covenants for each one of them, by name, in the same deed, as a condition of my clearing a farthing of the debt. My solicitor holds the enforcing of it, and Teague is a disobliging man about a covenant. He would rather enforce one than eat.”
“The third is the cottages at the east end.” She closed the hand.
“They pay nothing until their roofs are sound. The arrangement lives nowhere but in my own hand and my own memory, because the day it is written down a steward calls it arrears and ends it.” She did not soften it.
“I want it in the same deed and given by my father, since the land is his until your money touches it, and enforced by your man and not by mine, because I have seen what my father’s word is worth when nobody is holding the other end of it. ”
She stopped. She had asked for nothing that was hers.
Rowan was aware of Rede gone still at his shoulder, of Sir Alistair’s smile holding at an angle it had not chosen, and of the pale square above the mantel where a picture had been sold to buy another quarter’s grace.
A woman he had been warned was spoiled had spent all three of her questions on a sister, a butler, and the roofs of families who would never learn her name.
“Those are my questions,” she said. “You will observe that none of them concerned jewels.”
“I observed. It is the first thing in this house that has surprised me.”
He rose, took his hat and did not reach for her hand, because she had not offered it, and he had no intention of requiring what was not offered.
At the door he stopped because the thing that had been gathering in him through her three questions had reached the weight where it wanted to be voiced, and he was not a man who left things unsaid only because silence was the lighter thing to carry.
“You believe I came to buy a clock,” he said.
“I came to buy a house whose running I could trust, and I find the running already done, and done well, by the one person that table last night was trained not to see.” He set his hat under his arm.
“I do not yet know what to make of you, Miss Loxton. But I have stopped taking your father’s word for it, and I would counsel you, in your own interest, to begin stopping your ears to his word for me. ”
She had no answer ready. He watched it arrive, that unguarded second before the guard came down again, and he carried it out to the horses with him and did not mention it to Rede.
“Now then,” Rede said, when they had cleared the crooked gate. “Have we escaped?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Rowan said. “I am going to marry her. And between this morning and that day I mean to find out why a house this frightened is so very eager to be rid of the only person left standing in it who knows how it works.”