Chapter Five #2
He came to her side when the cousin had gone. “That woman has just congratulated you on being unmarriageable and called it a kindness,” he said. “You returned it with interest, and she has not yet noticed she is bleeding. Where does a person learn to do that?”
“In a house where the alternative was to cry, and crying was carried to my father as proof of instability. One learns to draw first. It is the cheaper wound.”
“You keep telling me things are cheap or dear. You reckon the whole world in what it costs.”
“I was raised by a man who taught me the price of everything and the worth of nothing, and then sent me the bill for the schooling.” She met his eyes. “Yes, Your Grace. I reckon in what things cost. It was the only sum I was ever permitted to work aloud.”
He took a moment over that. “I begin to suspect I was sold the wrong daughter’s faults,” he said, and moved off to let her sister reach her.
Cecily caught her before the carriages. “I am to go back with Papa tonight. He says the house cannot spare us both.” She had been crying and had stopped.
“Only that is not the reason. The reason is that he cannot spare an audience, but never mind. Write to me, Theo. Tell me you are allowed to write to me.”
“Nothing in the paper says otherwise.” Theodora did not add that she expected every letter read before it left the house, because Cecily had enough to carry down a dark road with their father.
“Go home. Mind the east cottages. Pymm will try the doubled rent again the moment my back is turned, and you are the only one left who will catch him at it.”
“I do not have your head for it.”
“You have a better head than you have been allowed to use. Use it. And Cecily…” She held her sister’s hands. “Whatever Papa tells you about how this came about, and he will tell you a version before the week is out, remember that I chose it. Say it back to me.”
“It was your own choosing. Nobody made you.”
“Good. Hold on to that one. It is the only true thing in the story he is about to tell you.”
Cecily’s arms came round her, quick and fierce.
“I will write every week, and he will read them, of course he will read them, so I shall make them dull. Poultry. Pages and pages of poultry until he begs me to stop, and then, oh, and then I shall put one true thing in the middle of it, where he has given up attending, and you will know which it is because there will be hens on either side. Is that foolish? It is a little foolish, but I shall do it anyway.”
“You have more of my head than you let anyone see.”
“I have been watching the expert for years. Go and be a duchess, Theo. Terrify them for me.”
***
Calder House received them at dusk, lamplit, enormous and colder than its fires could explain, and a line of servants stood in the hall to look at the woman now set over them.
The duke found her at the foot of the great stair when the line had gone, and waited until the last footman was out of the hall before he spoke.
“There is a thing I should say before we go up. I would rather say it plainly than let you find it in the dark and build a reason for it. We will keep separate rooms.”
“How considerate. Go on.”
“Yours are the blue set at the end of the east passage, and they are yours entirely.” He stood a careful arm’s length off, as he had stood all day.
“The only people who enter are the servants you choose. I will not come to them. That holds tonight and every night after it, until you should ever wish it otherwise, and you are under no obligation ever to wish it.”
“And the reason?” She set the fact aside and reached for the thing beneath it.
“You love a plain answer, so give me a plain one. A man in your position marries for an heir as often as a house. You have cleared a debt and settled a sister, and now you decline the one thing the whole arrangement is usually for. I want the omission explained before I decide what it costs me.”
“Nothing at all. That is the point of it.”
“Everything costs something.” She let it stand as it was. “I have never once been handed a thing for nothing that did not prove the most expensive item in the room.”
The pause before he answered ran longer than any pause he had taken all day.
“I will not share a bed with a woman who flinches at a door,” he said.
“You have flinched at three of them since I met you.” He let that stand between them.
“Whatever put it in you, I did not, and I do not build on another man’s work.
When you cease to flinch, if you ever do, you will tell me, and I will listen.
Until then the arrangement holds. Your ear insists on calling it a clause.
It is the one courtesy in this marriage with no paper behind it at all. ”
And there it was, another line drawn round her by a man who drew lines and named them courtesies, and she was too tired to be grateful and too well practised to be silent.
“How generous, Your Grace. A room of my own, a door of my own, and the word of the man who wrote the rules that this particular rule is a mercy.” She heard her own voice go thin and could not stop it.
“I shall rest so easily now, knowing which of my walls were raised for my comfort and which for my keeping. Forgive me if I cannot tell them apart on the first night. The architecture is very new to me.”
She watched it land, and watched the thing move behind his eyes that a lesser-governed man would have let straight out of his mouth, some sharp true sentence he held ready and decided, at visible cost, not to spend on her.
“Good night, Duchess,” he said instead, inclined his head, and took himself off before the ready sentence could get loose.
And she stood alone in the great hall with no idea at all what to do with a man who carried his own cruelty out of the room to die quietly where she could not watch it, when every man she had known had preferred to let his die in front of her and do its proper work.
The blue rooms were exactly as promised: warm, and hers. She stood a long while after the maid had gone, and then she did the thing she had done in every new room of her life, the thing she no longer had to decide to do. She went to the door and looked at the lock.
The key was in it, on the inside, on her own side.
She turned it, heard the bolt go home, stood with her hand on the cold iron and could not decide what the key meant.
A jailer did not hand the prisoner the key, unless the key was nothing, unless the true locks were the six that she had signed and the door was only a door, left unbarred because the real bars would hold without it.
She turned the key back. Then she turned it again, and stood in the lamplight; a duchess in her own warm room, wide awake, holding a door shut from the inside, a thing she had never once done in her life, and trusting it not at all.
Somewhere below her another door closed, and she stood listening to work out which one it had been, and whether anyone down there had looked up the stair before it shut.