Chapter Eight #2
“I did not know it was a lie when you signed it. I know it now.” He met her eyes without flinching.
“That is the whole of my defence, and it is a poor one, but I give it to you plainly, because you have been handed a great many fine defences that were false. I would rather leave you a poor one that is true.”
She was quiet a moment. “You expect me to be grateful.”
“I do not.”
“That is what this is. You have discovered you did not, after all, personally author every humiliation I have endured for a month, and you have called me down to watch you be innocent of it.” She kept her eyes on the papers.
“You expect that I will be so relieved to find one man in my life who is not my jailer that I will hand you the gratitude nobody has ever once let me keep for myself.” Her eyes stayed on the leather.
“Am I to thank you, Your Grace, for the rules you did not write? I have thanked men for less. I have thanked my father for roofs that I sold my mother’s stones to keep.
” Her mouth twisted. “I am well practised. Name the words you want, and I will say them.”
“I want nothing from you tonight, and I mean nothing at all.” He had not moved from where he stood.
“Not a single soft word like the ones you have extracted from better liars than I have shown myself to be.” He let a breath pass.
“I did not bring you here to collect. I brought you here to tell you one fact, and then to leave you the room, because you have not had a room of your own to think in since you were nineteen, and I can at least give you that hour.”
“Then tell your fact, and give me my hour, and let us both stop performing.”
“No one in this house holds the authority that document describes.” He set each word down on its own and left it standing. “Your father wrote it, and he does not hold it. My solicitor has proved it false, and he does not hold it. It wears my name, and I do not hold it either.”
“Everyone holds it. That is the one thing I have known my whole life.”
“Not here. No one on this earth may tell you what to wear, when to read, whom to keep, or what to weigh.” His voice did not rise, and the quiet of it was worse than any shout of her father’s.
“The paper claims as much. It is falsehood, and has been so since it was created. The only power it ever held over you was the influence you gave it through your belief. I cannot take that away from you, because it was never within my power to do so.”
“You offer that to me as freedom.” Her voice was almost steady.
“It is not. It tells me the walls were painted on, and that is worse. I have spent a month walking around painted walls, Your Grace, and a painted wall a person has believed in is harder to leave than a real one, because there is nothing to set your hands against and push.”
“I know it.”
Her composure cracked, one hairline wide. “You cannot possibly know it.”
“I can try. I can leave you the room to find the edge of it in your own time, which is more than anyone has done for you in years, and it is the only thing I have to offer that is not another wall.”
“And if I do not want the room? If I have grown so used to the wall that I would rather you left it standing, because at least a wall tells a person where she is?”
“Then you may build it back yourself, brick by brick, and I will not stop you.” He let that sit between them.
“But the hand on the trowel will be yours, neither your father’s nor mine.
That is the difference I am offering you tonight.
It is a smaller thing than freedom because it is only the authorship of the cage, but in my experience that is not nothing. ”
She stood over the two papers and found, for once, that she had nothing to say.
It was not that she believed him. Belief was a country she had been kept out of too long to enter on a single afternoon.
It was that the cutting reply, the one that was always there, always loaded, the one that had carried her through her mother’s death, her father’s economies and a wedding to a stranger, was not in her hand.
She reached for it out of pure habit and closed on air.
He had said no one held the authority, but she had lived her whole life certain that everyone did, and between those two sentences there was no bridge her wit could throw across fast enough to cross.
“I am going to take my leave now,” he declared. “And I intend to perform a final act that you might dismiss as mere trickery. Nonetheless, I will proceed, for I have run out of methods to gain your belief that they do not come at a cost to you first.”
He crossed to the door and left the forged contract lying on the desk in plain sight, unlocked, unclaimed. He left it there, hers to read again, burn, keep or throw in his face at breakfast, and did not turn back to her while he said the last of it.
“It is your paper. It always was. No one is coming to take it from you, and no one is going to tell you what to do with it. That is the change, and there is nothing hidden in the rest of it. I know it does not sound enough, and I know you do not believe it yet, but I am not asking you to. Good night, Theodora.”
The door closed.
She stood alone in the warm library, with her papers and a sense of doubt. It was her space, silent and empty, waiting for a cutting reply that never came; her first big failure as an adult.
She lingered there for a while. Then, carefully, she picked up the false contract: the six clauses, the subtle cruelties and her father’s confident notes crowded into the margins. With resolve, she carried it to the fire, held it over the flames, but refused to release it.
She was a keeper of reckonings, and had been one since she was nineteen, and a woman who kept reckonings did not burn the single proof that a wrong had been done to her, however much the burning would have warmed her hands.
There might come a day, in a room she could not yet picture, when she would want to lay this page on a table in front of witnesses and let them read for themselves exactly what had been done, by whom, and in whose borrowed name.
She folded it instead and put it away. The true settlement she left where it lay on the desk, in the lamplight, for him to find or not find as he chose.
She went up to the blue rooms but did not test the key. She lay awake for a long time, imagining how the wall was built and who laid the first stone.