Chapter Five
“Hold still, or I shall pin your hair to your collar and marry you off fastened to yourself.”
Cecily worked at the last pin, and worked at it a good while past the need, and did not once look at the door of the next room. “There. You are every inch a duchess, Theo.”
“I am a woman in a good grey gown, and that is more affordable and more practical.” Theodora turned from the glass. “Do not cry at the church. If you cry, Papa will tell the pews it is joy, and I shall have to stand there being the cause of joy before noon, and I have not the constitution for it.”
“I am not going to cry. You need not say you are glad, only that you are not unhappy.” Cecily’s chin did the exact thing their mother’s had done. “Not-unhappy would do. I could carry the whole day so much better on not-unhappy.”
“It is not yours to carry, any of it. You are nineteen. At nineteen a girl ought to be eating too much cake and flirting with a curate.”
“There is no curate, the cake is plain, and my sister is marrying a man she watches the door for, and not in the nice way, and I do not believe she has smiled at him once. So, I shall carry what there is.” Cecily set down the pin. “I have watched you do it long enough to have the trick of it.”
“You have the look of it. The rest of it is a different article altogether, and I pray you never need it.” Theodora took up the gloves.
“The trick, since you want it, is this. You decide, before you go down, the one thing you will not let them take from you today. You let them have everything else, and you do not tell them which one it is, so that they spend the whole day reaching for the wrong thing.”
“And what is your one thing?”
“That I chose this. They may have every other version of the story. That one is mine, and I do not lend it.”
Theodora looked at her sister a moment, at the hope held carefully out and already half-withdrawn against a refusal, and could not spend the truth on her. Not today.
“I am not unhappy,” she said. “There is a house I know how to run and a sister who will never again lie awake over four thousand pounds. Nobody has ever called me a fool at a bargain. Now give me the gloves and stop looking at me. No one is leading me anywhere against my will.”
“Is that true?”
“Gloves, Cecily.”
***
Small, cold, and half empty, the church suited her exactly. The Duke of Calder stood at the front in dark blue and watched her come up the aisle, steadily, from her shoes to her face and back again, but she kept her eyes level and gave him nothing to read.
The service proceeded as usual, until the clergyman reached the word.
“Will you obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him, so long as you both shall live?”
There was a pause. It was not long, and a stranger would not have marked it, but her father did and so did the duke.
She stood and thought about the single word she was being asked to give, and the almost restful part of the business was that she had given it once already, in ink, in a drawer where none of them could see it.
The register waiting in the vestry would only be the second time.
“I will,” she said.
The clergyman read on. She watched the duke file the pause away, and she could have written out for him, word for word, the wrong conclusion he was filing it under. Pride, he would call it. The truth was that she had met the word before, in writing, under his own supposed hand.
On the church step he offered her his arm.
“I can reach a carriage unassisted, Your Grace. I have managed it some years.”
“The arm is not for the walking.” He did not lower it. “It is for the dozen people behind us. I would rather hand them the dull story.”
“They may have what story they please. I only decline to hold the pen.”
Her father was at her elbow; his voice pitched under a smile aimed at the church door.
“Take his arm, my dear. It is a poor place to mention it, I know, but you signed an agreement, and agreements do have their consequences.” The smile stayed on the door.
“He is watching you refuse it in front of witnesses.”
She took the arm, because the alternative was a scene, and Cecily would pay for a scene, but she had signed a paper for the express purpose that they should never pay for her pride again.
“Your father has a gift,” the duke said, as they went down the path.
“He has several. Which had you in mind?”
The duke did not glance back at her father, twenty paces behind them. “He can make a woman do a thing and arrange it so the thing appears to be done to him. I have watched him work it three times now. I keep a count.”
“For a man with no interest in the domestic, Your Grace, you keep a great many counts.”
“Only of what does not add up. Your household is full of sums that do not, and you are the largest of them.” He handed her up into the carriage before she could answer, and swung in after, and the door shut them into the small moving quiet together.
“You need not make conversation,” she said. “We are married. The conversation was for before.”
“I am asking a question, and you may refuse it, and I shall count the refusal too. In the church, at the word obey, you stopped. Your father thinks it pride. I think it recognition. You have met that word somewhere in writing, on worse terms than these. Where?”
For one dangerous breath it all stood on her tongue, the drawer, the six clauses, the fair copy of his own supposed cruelty.
Behind the breath stood her father’s voice.
She would not go to the duke alone, she would not open the estate, she would sign the paper as it stood.
She had signed it. What breaking it would cost the people it protected, she could not yet see.
“It is a foolish word to ask of anyone, and I dislike saying foolish things in cold buildings,” she said. “Put it in your count under vanity, where my father keeps it. It is warmer there, and you will have company.”
“You answer before the question has finished arriving. That is a habit a person learns in a house where the questions were traps.”
She turned her face away, to the shadowed corner of the carriage. “Or I was born with it. My father calls it a fault, my husband calls it a symptom, and you are both very fond of diagnosing me. Neither of you has asked whether I wish to be cured.”
“I am asking now.”
“No, you are collecting. A man who asks wants the answer. A man who collects wants the set, and will keep me on a shelf between the estate map and the good clock.” She almost smiled, but killed it before it could arrive.
“You have bought a house, a wife and a great deal of trouble. Run the house. Leave the wife to run herself. She has managed the office longer than you have held the dukedom and never once has come in over budget.”
“That is the first thing you have said today that I believe entirely.”
“Then take one more, and we shall call it a wedding gift.” She turned back to him. “Your steward at Calder. Is he honest?”
“I have always assumed so.”
“That is not knowing so. It is not near it.” Her voice went flat, the voice she kept for a column of figures. “A man you assume honest is a man you have not checked, and a man you have not checked has an opportunity and your confidence. The trade has never once required a third tool.”
“You have been my wife three hours, and already you are auditing my staff.”
“I have kept another man’s house standing seven years, unpaid and never been thanked.
I cannot walk into a hall without counting its exits and its silver.
” She drew off one glove, finger by finger, the first unguarded thing she had done since dawn.
“Send me the Calder rent-book and the last three years of the home-farm figures. Not because I suspect your steward. Because I suspect every steward, and I have never once been wrong.”
“And if I decline?”
“Then you will have married a woman who keeps her sums in her head instead of on paper, and a head is harder to check and no less exact.” She looked at the glove in her lap. “Send the book. It is the cheaper of your two options, and you are learning that I price everything.”
“You shall have it by Friday,” he said.
“Then you have learned the first useful thing about your wife on her first day. My father never contrived it in the whole of my life at his table.”
He looked at her a moment longer than the answer required, and let it go, and the letting go was in no way belief. He had decided, for reasons of his own, against pressing her the last mile to his door.
***
The wedding breakfast was held in a hired room, and it was there, over the plain cake, that her father’s cousin Mrs Verrall came at her warmly, with both hands out, having travelled a long way for the pleasure of it.
“My dear Theodora. Or Your Grace now, however shall we remember.” Mrs Verrall pressed her hand.
“I said to Mr Verrall in the carriage that Providence does look after the difficult ones after all. Because you were difficult, my dear, and we may say it now that you are so grandly settled.” Her voice dropped to the confiding.
“Your poor father’s patience. I have seen prettier girls than you sit out four seasons and go home to their mothers, and here you stand a duchess.
I cannot account for it, and I have tried. ”
“Do go on trying. Somebody ought to get to the bottom of it.” Theodora set down her cup. “What is the moral, Mrs Verrall? That a woman should be difficult, since it ends in a duke? I shall have it embroidered for the girls still going home to their mothers. They will be so encouraged.”
Mrs Verrall’s smile turned into uncertainty, and she retreated behind her cup. Across the room, the duke had turned his head, only enough. He had heard the compliment and the knife folded inside it, and her own knife folded inside her answer. He was looking at Mrs Verrall now and not at his wife.