Chapter Three #3
“He required that too, and I gave it, in the same deed, and his solicitor holds the enforcing of it.” Something crossed her father’s face and was gone before it could be read.
“He is a great one for writing the small people into his papers, your Duke. I confess it puzzled me at the time, but that it fails to soften you does not puzzle me in the least.”
“Before I take your pen, tell me one thing plainly, since you are so full of plain truths tonight. When it is done, and I am in his house with his six clauses and his lock, what is your design for me? Do you picture me writing to you, managing him at a distance for your convenience?”
He answered without hesitation. “I picture you a duchess, and safe, and glad of it in time. I picture you finding out, in a year or two, that a wide cage with a park around it is not the worst bargain a clever woman ever struck. Most women find it out. You will find it out sooner than most, being quicker than most.”
“You have just described my mother’s marriage.”
It reached him. It was the one shot in her whole quiver that ever reached him, and she spent it seldom, because a weapon drawn too often stops being a weapon and becomes a habit a man learns to arm himself against.
“Your mother signed her paper without reading a word of it, and was content enough,” he said when the moment had gone by. “You have read yours twice over. I leave you to decide which of you came away the better from the bargain.”
“Nothing about him softens me, Papa. He has seen to that in six clauses and a lock.” She looked at the pen. “You may give it to me. It is mended and dipped already. Preparing the instrument before you have won the argument was always your habit, and it is the nearest thing to optimism you possess.”
He put the pen into her hand. Her fingers closed round it and stayed closed, but did not move, for a moment longer than either of them had allowed for.
Holding it, she went through every accusation she intended to one day direct at the Duke of Calder, only to find them all already penned beneath her fingertips, accompanied by his own signature.
She would walk into his house carrying a grievance she had signed herself.
It went down, lodged and would not shift.
She had spent her life being handed generous-sounding papers and taught to read the small hand that followed the flourish, and here at last was the small hand, and she believed with her whole heart that it belonged to the man she was about to marry.
Her signature went down in the full, plain hand she had taught herself the winter her mother died, when there had been documents to sign, and no one else left standing to sign them.
She wrote it out entirely, every letter of it legible, so that one day she should be able to prove exactly what she had put her name to, on what day, and under whose eye.
The ink dried. Her father pulled the paper back across the leather, blotting it with a care he had never once shown on her before folding it neatly and placing it into the locked drawer.
“There now. It is done, and nobody a penny the worse,” he said, warm again, the storm gone off his face entirely and no mark left of where it had stood.
“That was not so very hard, was it? You will thank me for it within a year, when you are a duchess, your sister is settled, and you have forgotten there was ever any question of it.”
“I will not thank you.” She stood. “But I will remember it exactly. You have my word on it, and my word is the one thing in this house you have never troubled to take from me, because you never once thought it worth the taking.”
She did not slam the door, because he liked the door slammed, and went out into the passage where the ordinary evening of the house was going on without the smallest idea of what had been decided in the room behind her.
Beddoes was at the far end with the lamps, lifting each glass and trimming each wick with the same slow economy he had brought to it for the better part of forty years, and would go on bringing to it now, as she had just made certain, until he died in a bed and not a ditch.
Cecily’s pianoforte came thin and untroubled through the drawing-room door, some bright Italian air she had been practising for the assembly, played for a house she believed safe because her sister had always, by one means or another, contrived to make it so.
Not one of them looked up. Not one of them had any reason to. They did not know that the roof over their heads had been bought and paid for that evening, in a currency only one person in the house had been asked to spend.
Theodora stood a moment in the cooling passage and let them go on. Nobody had ever given a truer account of her life, and she had just set her name beneath it in a hand built to outlast the man who had made her write it.
Then she went to find her sister, and to be, for the length of one Italian air, a woman who had chosen nothing, lost nothing and had a whole ordinary evening still in front of her.