Chapter Three #2
“She knows the pleasant half. You have always had a gift for teaching people the pleasant half.”
Her father’s hand flattened on the desk.
“I have a gift for sparing them the other. You have never forgiven me for declining to spare you, and I would decline it again tomorrow. Sparing was never what you were built for, Theodora. You were built for the reckoning, and there is a great waste in keeping the truth from the one person in the house able to carry it.”
“And you offer me that as a kindness.”
“It is the nearest thing to one that I keep,” he said, and she heard her own manner come back to her out of her father’s mouth, and could not for the length of a breath tell which of them the words had first belonged to.
“Then let us reckon it now, plainly, since you are in the mood.” She folded her hands on the desk to keep them still.
“You have signed a settlement that clears the estate. The money is the Duke’s, given for the marriage.
What does my name on this paper add, that its absence would take away?
Say it as a figure. You are always telling me I reduce everything to figures. Here is your chance to beat me at it.”
“The marriage waits on your consent to the terms of it. He will not tie himself to a wife who has not agreed, in her own hand, to conduct herself as his wife.” He counted the next part off on the desk with one finger, slowly, so that she should feel each one land.
“Refuse the paper, and there is no marriage. Without the marriage, the settlement I signed this morning is waste ink by Michaelmas. And then we arrive at the reckoning you are so fond of reading aloud at dinner, only this time you will be reading it to your sister.”
“Go on. You have rehearsed it. I can hear the rehearsal under the words.”
“The estate goes to the creditors within the year.” He did not raise his voice.
Raising it would have been the kinder thing.
“Your sister loses her four thousand pounds and goes to whatever man will take a portionless girl off my hands. The old servants are turned off, and at their ages that is the parish or the road. Whoever buys the land clears the east cottages the same week.” He let a breath go by.
“The roofs you sold your mother’s garnets to keep are pulled down over those three families within a twelvemonth.
That is what hangs on this paper, Theodora. Not your dignity. Their whole lives.”
She was quiet, and in the quiet she did what she always did. She hunted for the seam in what he had said, the place where the threat was only a threat and not a fact she would have to live inside.
“There is another road,” she said. “There is always another road. Sell the London lease. It is worth eight hundred pounds, and it does nothing but house your card friends four weeks a year.” She leaned in.
“Sell it, and I will go to the creditors myself, and show them the true figures rather than the ones Pymm sends, and I will get you eighteen months. I have done it before. I got you last winter.”
“You got me last winter with your mother’s stones, and there are no more stones.
The London lease is already promised against a debt you have not been shown.
And there is no eighteen months to be had from men who have granted two already.
” He shook his head, almost gently. “You are trying to find the sum that lets you keep both your pride and the family. I have done that sum myself, a hundred times, on nights you were asleep. It does not resolve. There is only the one column that balances, and your name is at the bottom of it.”
“Then let me marry him without the paper,” she said.
“Let me go to him myself, without you in the room, and lay the true state of the estate before him, every figure Pymm has buried, and let him choose whether he still wants the bargain once he knows to the shilling what he is clearing.” She held his eye.
“He is not a fool. He may even prefer a wife who came to him honest to one who came to him managed.”
“And when he withdraws, my dear, having heard how deep the debt truly runs?”
“Then I will have learned what his honesty is worth before I set my whole life against it. I would rather know that in September than discover it inside a locked cabinet in the spring.”
Her father’s voice went level and stayed that way.
“No. You will not go to him alone, you will not open the estate to him, and you will sign the paper as it stands.” He did not look away from her.
“Those are the only three things I have asked of you in the length of this business, and I bought the right to ask them by clearing a debt you could not have cleared with every stone your mother owned.”
“You have thought of everyone.” She heard her own voice go flat and level, the voice she used when the alternative was one that she would not permit herself.
“Beddoes. The cottages. Cecily. You have thought of every single soul in this house except the one you are asking to sign herself into a stranger’s cabinet and lock.
How efficient of you. You have built the one argument I have never been able to walk out of. ”
“I have built the argument that happens to be true. You may resent that it is true, but you may not pretend that it is false.”
“No, I have never been allowed to pretend anything. That has been your one steady gift to me.” She looked down at the six numbered lines, and at the word Duchess standing in the middle of most of them.
“Before I sign, I want two things written into the settlement I am not permitted to read. The servants’ places, by name.
Beddoes. Mrs Cray. The two women who nursed my mother.
If they are not in the paper, I am not in mine, and you may explain the creditors to Cecily in whatever hand you please. ”
Her father’s smile thinned by a degree. “They are named, each one of them. His Grace would not put his hand to a farthing until I had covenanted for them under my own, and he was a great deal harder about it than you are being now.”
“And the east cottages. The arrangement made real, written, before his money comes north.”