Chapter Four #2
“You do the honest note extremely well, Your Grace,” she said at last. “I will grant you that much. It is the most valuable item in the room, and it has never once been charged to you.” And the seam closed over.
Her father laughed, broad and easy, and begged the duke not to regard her, because she had been wound tight since the licence came, that brides were nervous creatures and this one above the common run.
Rowan did regard her. The woman refusing to read his settlement had refused it in the exact grammar of a person quoting a document back to the man who wrote it, and he had never written her a line in his life.
He signed.
The alternative was to overturn a table laid with other people’s rescue on the strength of a feeling he could not yet clothe in fact.
He wrote his name, Teague sanded it, the father’s clerk witnessed it, and the debt that had bent three households for two years went out of the world with the scratch of a nib.
It ought to have been a victory. He came away from the desk carrying instead the sense of a name set against the wall of a room whose far side he could not see.
Wine was offered and refused. Rowan rose, and at the study door he saw the old butler waiting, and took a moment with him in the passage while Teague gathered the papers.
“You have had a long service here, Beddoes.”
“The better part of forty years, Your Grace.”
Rowan considered him. “Then you will have carried this house through worse mornings than the signing of a wedding settlement. You do not wear the face of a man at a celebration.”
Beddoes counted his words one degree too carefully.
“I am too old for celebrations, Your Grace.” He hesitated, and the next words came out against some weight.
“It is a good settlement you have signed. The kitchen will sleep tonight. It has not slept a whole night this twelvemonth. Forgive an old man for speaking so far above his place.”
“There is nothing to pardon, and I would allow you a great deal beyond plain speech. Tell me one thing, since we have both stepped above our places. What is this house afraid of? It is not the debt. You have this minute told me the debt is lifted.”
The old man’s eyes went, for the space of a breath, to the study door and the woman beyond it, and came back to the duke. “I could not say, Your Grace,” he answered, and it was the plainest thing said to Rowan all morning, but it sat cold in him the length of the hall.
The younger Miss Loxton was waiting at the turn of the stair, pale, her hands folded very tight before her. She looked at the study door, and then at the duke, and spoke before she could reason herself out of it.
“Your Grace. Forgive me, I know one is not to stop a gentleman in a passage, but if I do not ask you now, I shall not ask at all, and might I ask you one thing before you go?”
“Several, if you have them. Your sister asks me nothing but questions dressed as sentences. A plain one would be a relief.”
“The servants.” Cecily came down two steps and stopped, and came no further.
“Beddoes, and the rest of them. I heard Papa say to Mr Pymm that the marriage may not hold. He said it twice, and I know I ought not to have been on the landing at all, but if it should not go forward, Your Grace, for any cause, after today, do their places still hold? Or do they hold only so long as the wedding does?”
“That paper is a marriage settlement. Your father’s covenants come into force with the marriage, but if there is no marriage there is nothing in it for my solicitor to enforce, and I will not stand on a stair and tell you otherwise.
” Rowan waited until she looked at him. “So, take this instead. Whatever becomes of your sister and me, Beddoes and Cray and the two nurses stay in their places, and the roofs on the east cottages go on, out of my own pocket and in my own name. That is not a clause. That is me, and I do not go back on things.” Cecily did not thank him for it.
Her hands stayed exactly where they were, and her eyes went past his shoulder to the study door and the desk beyond it.
“Who taught you to weigh a man’s word against a piece of paper and find the word wanting?
It is a strange lesson for a girl of your years to have got by heart. ”
“Nobody sat me down and did it. Theo, I suppose, only she never said it out loud. She says that a promise is a thing people mean at the time.” Her eyes had filled, and she was losing the fight with them.
“And Papa means everything he says, Your Grace. He means it beautifully, and then Lady Day comes, and there is nothing in the drawer. I am not calling you a liar. I would only rather it were written down somewhere, and I ought not to have said that either. Thank you. Truly.”
“Before you go,” Rowan said. “One question of mine, since you have paid for it with yours. Your sister. Has she always carried herself as she does now, or is the cold a new thing?”
Cecily stopped on the stair, and her loyalty and honesty fought a brief, perfectly visible war across her face.
“She has always been sharp. That is not new. She was sharp at twelve, and it was rather wonderful. The cold is new. It came in the last week or so.” She glanced once at the study door.
“I have said more than I ought, and she would not thank me for a word of it, only nobody ever asks me anything, so I have never had anywhere to put it. She has held this house up on her own back for seven years, and no one in it has ever once thanked her for it. They all go on needing her to be the difficult one because it is so much more comfortable for everybody else, and I do it too, Your Grace. I do it too.”
She was up the stairs and gone before he could ask her what she meant, leaving him with the most useful sentence anyone at Loxton had yet spoken to him, and no one remaining in the passage to explain it.
Rowan stood in the cooling passage and reckoned up what he had just seen, and did not care for the total.
Theodora had come now as far as the study door. He turned to her with the plain question at last out in the open where somebody might answer it.
“Your sister is nineteen, and she has just asked me on a staircase whether the roof over the servants will survive our marriage,” he said.
“You treat the match as a sentence handed down. She treats its collapse as a disaster to be prevented at any price. Your father keeps a room hot enough to roast a man, to prove he is not cold.” He paused.
“Every soul in this house is frightened of a different thing, and none of you will give me the name of what you are all standing so carefully around.”
“You have signed the papers, Your Grace.” But she had gone still, and this time the stillness carried a hairline through it. “The house and everything breathing inside it is bought and paid for. You are not owed the reasons on top of the goods.”
“I am not asking as a purchaser. I am asking as the man who must live in the middle of it.”
“Then you ought to have asked before you signed.”
“Give me one reason,” he said. “Not the whole story. One reason, in your own words, why a woman offered wealth, her own income, and the running of a great house, looks at the offer and sees a cell. Give it to me however you can. Angry. Sideways. I am not particular this morning.”
She looked at him, and for a moment he believed she would spend one.
“Here is one, then, and the only one you will have from me today.” She did not move from where she stood.
“A man who must ask why the gift frightens me has never once stood on the receiving end of a gift he was not permitted to refuse. That is not a fault, Your Grace. It is a schooling you were born too high ever to be given.” She stepped back.
“But do not stand in my father’s hall and ask me to teach it to you in the ten minutes before your carriage. ”
She gathered herself, and the crack sealed over without leaving a mark. “Go and make your second call. You did a great kindness this morning. You may keep the entire credit of it. No one else beneath this roof is permitted any.”
He left because anything else would have made a scene, and he had no intention of handing Sir Alistair a scene on the morning of the signing. At the door, the boy gave him his hat, the same boy who watched the upper windows. Rowan turned to make his bow, and it was then that he saw it.
She had not come to see him out. She had stopped at the foot of the stairs, beside the door of the small parlour, and she was looking at it.
Not through it. At it. Her hand hovered near the frame without quite touching.
She examined the hinges and the brass plate of the lock intently, wanting to remain unnoticed.
She was trying to determine whether a specific door in the house locked from the inside, where someone could hold it shut, or from the outside, where they could not.
His eyes were on her, and she drew her hand back from the frame and folded it away.
“Good day, Your Grace,” she said. “You will forgive me if I do not wave.”
Rowan bowed, set his hat on his head, and went out into the ordinary afternoon, carrying with him the picture of a woman measuring a familiar door for the side of its lock.
With it came the unwelcome, steadily hardening conviction that he had spent two years’ debt and a portion of his own name to buy his way into the middle of a story whose first pages a careful hand had already burned.
Behind him a shutter went back in an upper room, and somebody stood in the gap to watch him go, and he was at the bend of the drive before it occurred to him to look up and see who.