Chapter Three
“Sit down, Theodora, and do not stand over me. The settlement went up to be engrossed on Tuesday. I signed it this morning, witnessed, sealed and done with. There is a second paper here, a private one, and that one is yours.”
Her father kept his eyes on the desk. Two documents lay squared to the edge of the blotter, and their tidy appearance suggested the conversation had been arranged in every particular before she was sent for.
“You have signed already,” she said. “The wax has set. You did it before you sent for me.”
“I signed at nine, with Teague’s clerk on one side of me and the rector’s man on the other.
It is done, and it is good, and it clears this estate to the last farthing your grandfather borrowed against it.
” He smoothed a hand across the second paper.
“This other is no part of that instrument. It is a private undertaking between you and His Grace, yours to sign and yours alone. I would have you read it with a cool head, and not the head you carried in to dinner last week.”
“Then you had better not watch me read it.”
He smiled, and the smile said she had scored a point against herself.
He turned the second document and slid it across the leather to her hand.
“His Grace’s conditions,” he said. “Every man of his rank sets them down, and the ones who decline to set them down enforce them anyway, unwritten, and unwritten is a great deal worse. I told you as much in this very room only days ago. I would rather you had them from me, sitting quietly, with a fire and a glass of something at your elbow, than come upon them some months into the marriage and make a scene under his roof instead of mine.”
She drew the paper to her and read. It was a clerk’s fair copy, plainly written and without ceremony, and at the foot of it stood the Duke’s signature.
First, that no letter be opened, sent, or received by the Duchess save with the knowledge of the Duke, and that her correspondence, sent and received alike, be kept in a cabinet under lock, the key remaining upon his own chain.
Second, the household stands as the Duke appoints it; its servants, its hours, and its order, and where alteration is wanted his consent must be had in each instance.
Third, that the Duchess go beyond the bounds of the estate only in company he has approved, and accept no invitation until he has seen it.
Fourth, guests beneath the Duke’s roof shall be of the Duke’s choosing, and of his choosing only.
Fifth, money, income, and property in her sole name are forbidden the Duchess, all such being administered upon her behalf.
Sixth and last, no contradiction of the Duke is to be offered by the Duchess in the hearing of any other person.
Six of them, numbered down the page, and the Duke’s name written under the last. She read to the foot of the sheet and then read it through again, slowly, because a paper of this sort deserved to be understood exactly, and because she meant to be able one day to say precisely what she had been asked to sign.
“Well, he is a thorough man,” she said at last, and set the paper down as flat and square as her father had kept it. “I will grant him that much. He has spared me the labour.”
“Now, my dear. We will not take that tone about the man who is saving this family, and I will not have it taken in my own book-room.”
She did not look up from the page. “I am reading his terms back to him in his absence, Papa. Consider it a rehearsal. The first says he is to have the knowledge of every letter I write and every letter I am sent, and a cabinet with a lock to keep them in, and the key on his own chain. Not the reading of them, you will note. Only the knowledge.” She moved to the next line.
“A subtler man than I took him for. He does not wish to steam my correspondence open. He wishes me to steam it open for him, and report.”
“It is a reasonable provision in a great house, and you would find it in nine settlements out of ten if you were ever let to read them.”
“And the fifth. I am to keep no money in my own name.” She tapped the line once with one finger.
“There is a fine jest in that, and you are the only other person alive who will see it. I have never in my life held a shilling in my own name.” Her finger stayed on the line.
“He has forbidden me a thing you took from me at nineteen. Between the two of you I shall be very thoroughly prevented from something nobody has ever once permitted me to try.”
Her father said her name once and set the warning down between them and left it lying there. She went straight past it.
“The last is my favourite. I am not to contradict the Duke in the hearing of any other person.” She looked up.
“He met me across a single dinner. He heard me correct one lie about eleven shillings, and he has legislated against the habit for the rest of my natural life. Does he know how many of the lies I have contradicted across this table were yours, Papa? Or did you leave that out of the letters, along with the rest of the useful information?”
“The third and the fourth belong together, since you have the taste for reading them aloud,” she went on, before he could gather an answer.
“I am not to travel without his leave, and no guest of mine may come beneath his roof. Between them he has arranged that I may neither quit the house nor fill it.” She set the page down.
“A woman so provided for need never trouble the world, and the world need never be troubled by her. It is very neat. I have known jailers with less economy in them.”
“You have known no jailers at all, child, and I would have you leave that word behind you in this room. Carry it into his hearing, and you will only teach him to earn it.”
“You mistake my fear, Papa. I am not afraid of teaching him to deserve the word. I am afraid that he will not require the teaching.”
Her father let his patience settle over him, and it covered everything underneath it. “You are determined to make an enemy of him before you have a ring on.”
“I am determined to know what I am signing. It is the single determination you have never managed to break of me, and Heaven knows you have tried the others.” She turned the page over and discovered that the back was blank. “I want to see the settlement.”
“You are looking at your part of it.”
“Not my part. The one you signed this morning, entire, the instrument that clears the estate. I want to read it beside this.”
“Now that is no wife’s business, and you know quite well it is none.
” Not a flicker crossed his face; the calm demeanour he maintained was reserved for what mattered most to him.
“The settlement is between His Grace and myself, as head of this house. Your business is the conduct required of you inside the marriage. That is the paper under your hand, and it is quite enough paper for one evening.” He let it sit.
“You will not be reading gentlemen’s instruments and second-guessing their clauses.
His Grace shares my view on the point, as it happens.
You will find something very near it standing on your own list.”
She sat perfectly still, gazing at him. The refusal was unmistakeable, yet she could not gauge its magnitude. She dismissed it as just another of his subtle displays of power, and moved on, unaware that the refusal was, in fact, the crux of the entire plot.
“Who drew it?” she asked. “Whose clerk set this down?”
“It came down from London with the settlement, in the same packet, over his own signature. You may write to his man and ask whether the hand at the foot of it is his master’s, if you have taught yourself to take a stranger’s word above your father’s.
” He spread his hands and kept them spread.
“I have not, in six-and-twenty years, found it necessary to forge a duke in order to manage my own daughter. I have never once had to invent your enemies, my dear. You supply them faster than I could ever draft them.”
“How am I to know that this signature is his?”
“There is his name at the foot of it, and if his name will not serve you, you have the man himself. You have sat opposite him twice. Tell me honestly whether that paper could have come from anybody else in England.”
She looked at the signature, and then back up the page at the cold exactness of a mind that had sat down at a table and forbidden a woman her correspondence, her money, and her tongue in a single afternoon.
The man who wrote that had told her to her face that he was not sentimental, that he was offering an honest transaction, that he wanted a house whose running he could trust. He had looked at her too steadily across a ruined dinner and gone away resolved to read her himself. Every line of it answered to him.
“It could have come from nobody else,” she admitted, and hated the admission, and did not see that she had been handed her father’s forgery and had authenticated it out of her own resentment.
“There, you see. That is settled, and we may both be comfortable.” Sir Alistair leaned back and put his legs out toward the fire.
“You have already made him the villain of the piece in whatever book it is you keep. I have read enough of your figures over the years to be certain you keep one. Very well. Be angry with him, my dear, by all means, and be as angry as you please. It is a great deal safer than being angry with me, and it will trouble our arrangement a great deal less.”
“You would like that. His name on the cruelty and yours on the rescue.”
“I would like this family to survive the winter. The distribution of the credit I leave entirely to you. You have always kept the reckoning in this house, and I have never done more than spend what you recovered.”
“Does Cecily know?” she asked. “What is being spent tonight, and by whom?”
“Your sister knows she is to have four thousand pounds, a season, and a sister married to a duke. That is everything a girl her age requires, and everything she would thank you for telling her.”