Chapter Seven
“Name me one more, then, and I’ll give you the innocent version, and you can stop holding inquests over your own wife.”
Rede had his boots to the library fire and had already heard a good deal of this. Rowan stood at the far end of the hearth with a glass he had not touched.
“She paid the physician for the still-room maid’s mother. In coin, out of her own twelve hundred, and told no one. I know only because the man sent his bill here by error, and she had already settled it.”
“That’s an easy one. Kind to servants, sharp with husbands, half the women in England manage the same trick. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Rowan turned the untouched glass in his hand.
“She will not sit at cards with my aunt, and will not say why, so my aunt has decided she is proud. Yet she sat two hours with the deaf old vicar at Marsden because no one else would trouble to raise their voice, and came away knowing the name of his dog and the state of his roof.”
“She picks and chooses. Most of us do. Calder, you are building a saint out of the same creature who told you on your wedding night that she could not tell your walls from her cage.”
“That is the trouble.” Rowan set the glass down.
“I came expecting a spoiled, ungovernable woman, because that is the woman I was sold. Three weeks, and I have not found her.” He left the glass where it stood.
“She is unkind to me and gentle with everyone who cannot pay her back. Vanity does not run in that direction, Rede. Something taught her to expect the boot from the hand that is holding out the bread. I want the name of it.”
“You want a great many names lately, for a fellow who married for a house and said so at the time.”
“I married for a house that turned out to have a person holding it up.” Rowan came away from the hearth.
“Here is another for your innocent versions. My steward wrote to me before the summer was out that three servants must go, to bring the wages right. Three went nowhere.” He turned the glass without drinking from it.
“She countermanded him, housed the saving in economies no one can find, and told no one. When I asked Denholm how the books had come right, she said she could not tell me, only that they had.”
“She has no authority to countermand your steward.”
“None whatsoever. She did it anyway, and saved three old people their places, and let my steward keep the credit of the reduced wage-bill. That is not the conduct of a proud woman, Rede. A proud woman takes the credit. This one buried it, and would have let me go on believing the steward had done it.” He stopped.
“A person says, on her wedding night, that she cannot tell my walls from her cage. Either she is out of her senses, and she plainly is not, or she is describing a wall I cannot see. I have decided to believe she sees a wall I do not.”
“And if the wall is real?”
“Then somebody built it, and I mean to have the mason.”
The door opened on his solicitor before Rowan could say more. He had shown up from the estate room with a leather case under his arm and a frown he had not brought in with him.
“I must beg your pardon for the intrusion, Your Grace. The registration requires Her Grace’s countersignature on the trust schedule, and it seems that obtaining it in person would be quicker than sending it. Mrs Denholm has gone up to ask her.”
Theodora came a few minutes later in the plain dark stuff she wore about the house, and stopped inside the door when she found three men in the room. Rowan watched her face shut itself, one feature at a time, before she had finished crossing the threshold.
“Mr Teague. Your Grace. Mr Rede.” She did not sit. “A signature was wanted. Show me where, and spare us the conversation around it.”
“Here, and again here, Your Grace. Your sister’s trust. Strictly, the funds cannot move without it.”
She read it, because she read everything, and signed it, because it was Cecily’s.
“There is one further matter, if I may, since you are here.” Teague drew another paper up. “His Grace would have the household disbursement pass through your hand from this quarter. I have drawn the authority. It wants nothing but your acceptance.”
“I will not accept it.” It came out flat and immediate.
“I have told His Grace, and I will now tell his man of business, since one of you keeps forgetting it.” She had not moved off the edge of the carpet.
“I am not to alter the household or its order without his consent in each instance. The disbursement may not come into my hand. It is the second provision. I signed it, and I do not require it read back to know I am bound.”
Nobody in the room moved. Rede’s boot came down off the fender. Teague looked at his case and did not open it.
“Your Grace,” said Teague, taking it slowly, “I am bound to tell you there is no such provision.”
“There are six, Mr Teague, and I have them by heart. The man who wrote them never troubled to.” She was already turning for the door.
“You drew the pleasant paper. Another hand drew the rest. If you have misplaced your copy of the terms your client required of me, apply to him. I do not intend to educate a duke’s solicitor on the specifics of a duke’s requests. Good morning.”
She was gone before Rowan reached the door, and the three of them stood in the quiet she left, and it was Teague, the man who never destroyed a version of anything, who found his voice first.
“I drew that settlement with my own hand, Your Grace, and there is no domestic provision in it of any description, and I should have to call six a large number of them. Her Grace believes herself bound by an instrument these eyes have never seen.”
“There is a second paper, then.” Rede had lost all his ease.
“Calder. On your wedding night she told you she could not tell your walls from her cage. At your own breakfast table she named which of the walls were built for her keeping. She has been telling you there is a paper since the hour you met her, in every language on earth but the plain one.”
“I know it,” Rowan said. “I have spent three weeks calling it temper.”
Rowan put both hands on the back of the chair. “Get it, Teague. Whatever she signed. Whatever she has carried about my house since the day we met. Get it, and bring it to me, and we will read it together, because I no longer trust my own eyes on the subject of my wife.”
***
It came within two days, and the speed of it was the worst part; the copy asked for in one civil line and surrendered without a fight, because the man who built the thing had never imagined that anybody would put a plain question about it in writing.
Teague laid it on the library desk between them and set his own engrossed original beside it, and they read.
“The settlement first, Your Grace, so that you have the true instrument in your eye before the other.” Teague set a finger to his own page.
“Her income, hers absolutely. Her sister’s four thousand.
The servants named. The cottages. And there it ends.
There is no conduct required of her anywhere in it, on any reading. Now the other.”
Rowan drew the second paper to him. “Read me the six she recited. I want to hear them said aloud in this room.”
“Her correspondence stands first, none of it to be opened, sent, or received without your knowledge.” Teague’s finger went down the page.
“Then the household, which she may not alter in any particular without your consent. Third comes travel, where an escort is required of her upon every journey.” He paused over the fourth.
“She is denied a guest of her own choosing. Money is put into no hand but yours.” His finger stopped at the foot of the page.
“And the sixth requires that she shall not contradict you in any person’s hearing.
” His voice had been flat and precise all the way down, and at the sixth it went unsteady at the edge.
“All of it in a fair clerk’s hand, Your Grace, and got up to resemble an instrument you had required. ”
“Those are the large ones.” Rowan turned the page, because there was more below in a smaller, closer hand. “And what have we down here?”
“They are of another character altogether, Your Grace. Particular rather than general. A man does not set that sort of thing down at the same sitting as the rest, in my experience of men.”
Rowan read them aloud, because he found he needed to hear his own mouth say them to believe a hand had set them down.
The Duchess shall wear such colours as the Duke shall approve, and no other.
Her reading is to be confined to such hours as do not interfere with her duties, and she shall not sit up with a candle past eleven.
No gift, letter, or token from any former acquaintance is to be retained, the same to be surrendered or destroyed.
She shall not gain more weight than is appropriate unless she produces a physician’s certificate explaining the cause.
He stopped at the last, and set the paper down flat, and did not speak for a moment.
“The colour of her gowns,” he said. “What hours she may read in. The weight of her own body. He has written the weight of her body into a marriage and hung my name over it. And I sent her a dozen day-dresses in the second week and could not understand why each one came back.”
“And the invitations,” Rowan went on. “She refused every card in the county, and I called it pride. She was refusing to be displayed, because a woman who may not choose her own gown does not walk into a ballroom on the arm of the man who chose it for her.” His hand closed on the edge of the page hard enough to crease it, and he made himself open it again and smooth the crease flat.
“And the rooms. I gave her a door that locks and told myself I was being delicate, and she thanked me for it, and I heard the thanks as manners. She was pricing a longer chain.”
“You were not in a position to know it, Your Grace. I would not put it higher than that.”