Chapter Four
Rowan came up the Loxton steps with his solicitor a pace behind him and the settlement between them in a leather case, while he counted, as he climbed, the shuttered rooms in a house that still called itself lived in.
“You might yet turn the horses,” Teague murmured. “There is no name on anything until the ink, and a man is permitted his change of mind up to that point. Strictly.”
“So he is, and this one has cleared the debt in his own head a hundred times since Tuesday and cannot make it come out any other way. The house is failing, the daughter can run it, and I am the only man in three counties with the money to take on both.” Rowan gained the top step.
“I am not marrying a temper, Teague, whatever her father is selling. In a year I have met one person who would notice if I were being robbed, and she is behind that door. The temper comes with her, and I can bear it.”
“You have read it through three times since Tuesday,” Teague said at his shoulder. “It has not altered in the nights between. On the face of it, it is the cleanest instrument I have drawn in some years, and I should say it flatters you rather less than most of what I draw.”
“Read me the material clauses once more before we go into the study. I want them in my own ear when I set my name beneath them.”
Teague opened the case on the hall table, moved the salver aside, and laid the pages down on bare wood.
“The debt cleared entirely on signature. Four thousand pounds to Miss Cecily under joint trustees, the principal beyond any husband’s reach.
” He touched the page. “Then the covenants Sir Alistair gives for his part, as the price of the clearing, drawn into the same instrument so that I may enforce them against him. The east cottages held rent-free until their roofs are certified sound, and the holding binds whoever comes after him at Loxton. The named servants confirmed in their places. Beddoes. Cray. The two nurses, entered as Hodge and Salt. And the lady’s own income, twelve hundred the year, paid to her hand and chargeable by no one living, yourself first among them. ”
“And nothing set against it. There are no expectations for her behaviour. The twelve hundred is hers to spend out of my sight, and where she goes and to whom she writes are her own business and nobody else’s.”
“Not a line of it, Your Grace. I should have refused to draw it had you asked, but you did not ask.” Teague squared the pages.
“I will make one observation, strictly outside my instructions, and then hold my tongue. In my experience, a man does not write a wife twelve hundred pounds she may spend unwatched unless he has already settled with himself what he wants of her. I would not put it higher than an observation. It is no part of the law, and you may disregard it.”
“I will keep it and ignore it both.” Rowan studied the shut face of the house. “One more matter. When this is signed, what becomes of your drafts? The earlier versions, the working papers?”
“They go into my chest, Your Grace, and there they remain. I have not destroyed a version of anything in thirty years of practice. It has made me a tedious dinner companion, and on four occasions I could name it has made me the only man in the room able to prove what had truly been agreed.” Teague allowed himself the ghost of a smile.
“A client’s memory and mine are seldom the same document.
Strictly, it is the drafts that decide those cases. ”
“You are uneasy,” Teague added, when the duke did not move at once. “You have worn it since the gate. In my experience a man clearing a debt of this size for a bride of this quality is better company on a doorstep than you are.”
“I am marrying a woman who treats me as a wrong already done to her, and I cannot find the wrong. A week I have turned it over. On Tuesday I answered her plainly when she was plain with me, and that will not explain the temperature of her.”
“Brides commonly run cold before a match they did not choose. I should not read a great deal into it.”
“On Tuesday she was not cold. She was sharp, and I liked her the better for it. Something has been done to her in the days between, and nobody in that house will name it, and the not-naming is a good deal louder than any answer would be.” Rowan turned the case once in his hands.
“You keep every draft. Tell me plainly. Can a man be handed a paper that is not the paper another man signed?”
“Anything at all may be handed to a man, Your Grace. Paper takes whatever name is written upon it. I keep my originals under lock for that reason and no other.” Teague studied him. “Do you suspect a substitution?”
“Nothing I could say aloud without slandering my host across his own hall on the morning I take his daughter. Forget that I asked. Keep your drafts.” Rowan straightened his cuff. “Then let us go and sign your tedious, honest paper.”
The study had been warmed past comfort, the coals heaped high enough to argue that the house could still afford them.
Sir Alistair rose full of welcome. Miss Loxton stood at the far end of the room beside the shelves, her back half to the door, and she did not turn when the duke was announced.
Whatever ground he believed himself to have gained at their last meeting had been quietly repossessed in the days between. He crossed the carpet anyway.
“Miss Loxton.”
“Your Grace.” She turned, and her face closed over. “You have brought your papers. How very thorough. I am given to understand you are a thorough man.”
“So I am told, chiefly by you, and chiefly as a charge to be answered.” He set his hat aside. “You are colder the previous days than you were on Tuesday. I have spent the ride trying to reckon what I did in the interval to earn the change, and the sum will not come out.”
“Nothing was done in the interval, Your Grace. That is rather the whole of your genius. The work was done beforehand, and in a fair hand.”
Her father’s warmth did not waver by so much as a degree.
“My dear, and I say it only because somebody must, is it so very much to ask? The width of a carpet and no more, toward the gentleman who has come all this way to sign your future into safety. There is nobody here who wishes you anything but well.”
“I have carried myself exactly as far as I intend. He is welcome to bring the remaining distance himself, should he find he wants it.” She looked at Rowan with a directness that would have been magnificent had it not been armoured to the teeth.
“Sign your settlement, Your Grace. I have signed mine. Two people are putting their names to paper in a warm room. Let us not gild it into anything finer than that.”
He should have pressed her there. Beneath her words, something heavy with the weight of a genuine question stirred, but his pride enveloped the moment, preventing him from reaching for it.
She had signed hers. He had put his name to nothing at all as yet.
The two halves would not meet, and he set the fact aside unexamined, because Teague was laying the settlement upon the desk and the machinery of the morning had begun to turn.
“Sit, Your Grace, do sit. My man has the fair copy engrossed, and it looks very beautiful. Yours has read it letter by letter, I do not doubt, and quite right too. We should all be the poorer without careful men.”
“Twice this week, and once just before we entered the study.” Rowan took the chair and drew the paper to him, and did not at once reach for the pen.
“Before I sign, Sir Alistair, one small curiosity. Your daughter speaks of conditions, of things required of her. There is no second paper on my side. Is there one on yours?”
“Only the ordinary understanding, Your Grace, that a wife conducts herself as a wife, and I should be astonished to hear it was otherwise in any house in England. Nothing written. Nothing to trouble your excellent solicitor with.” Sir Alistair’s smile stayed exactly where it was.
“She dramatises, my dear fellow. It is her gift and her affliction together, and you will forgive her it as the rest of us have these six-and-twenty years. Where she says cage, hear settlement. Where she says lock, hear roof.” The warmth went out of his voice for the length of one sentence.
“She cannot tell a rescue from an arrest. She never could.”
“I find she tells a great many things very exactly,” Rowan said.
“It is nearly the only ground she and I have so far held in common.” He turned to her.
“Miss Loxton, you will wish to see it before I sign. It concerns your sister’s fortune, your servants’ places, and your own income.
You have the best head for a document in this room, by your father’s telling and your own. ”
Her chin lifted a fraction. “I am not permitted to read gentlemen’s instruments, Your Grace.
I have it on the highest authority that the reading of them is no part of a wife’s business, and that you are wholly of that mind.
” Her hands stayed where they were. “You need not lay a trap to discover whether I will keep it.”
Rowan set the pen down. “I have not, at any point, expressed a view upon the subject.”
Her voice did not lift. “No. I don’t suppose you would.”
“Look at me one moment, if you can spare the civility.” He waited until she did.
“I do not know what authority you believe you are quoting.” He kept his voice exactly where it had been.
“Every promise I have ever made you is on the page in front of me, in Teague’s hand, where you may read them the instant you consent to.
There is no other paper. If anyone has told you there is, they have told you a thing I never said. ”
For half a second the armour showed a seam. She searched his face for the counterfeit in that particular steadiness, and did not find it, and her displeasure at not finding it was plain enough to read across the room.