Chapter Nine #2
“It came up open. The seal has been lifted. Do not stand there and tell me a seal lifts itself, Your Grace. I have opened too many of them in my life to be lied to about the mechanics.” Her voice had gone fast and hard, and she could hear it but could not stop it.
“You gave a very fine performance. The messages repeated twice, the money in my own name, the whole household summoned to hear how free I am.” The words were coming out ahead of her now.
“And all the while you could not resist the one small proof that it was theatre, that the door was never truly mine, that a man who swears he does not read my letters opens one the instant he thinks I have begun to believe him.”
“Theodora,” he said her name, but she cut straight across it.
“Do not use my name to gentle me. It is the newest of your instruments and the most transparent.” She did not stop for breath.
“Say it plainly. You read it. You wanted to know what my sister tells me, what I tell my sister, or whether I have begun to be grateful, so that you could measure the return on your investment.” Her chin came up.
“Well, here is your return. I am exactly as grateful as I was the day you handed me a locked door and told me the key was mine.”
He had risen as she spoke, and he did not move toward the table.
His voice remained unchanged, yet something within him had shifted; an unexpected straightening, a subtle line appearing where there had been none before.
Something went across his face that wanted saying at once and sharply, but he shut his mouth on it and took the time to put the pen down straight.
“I did not read your letter,” he said. “I will say it once more, because it is true, and then I am going to say a second thing, and you are going to dislike it.” He kept both hands on his own side of the table.
“The letter came up creased because the boy who carries the post from Marsden rode through rain and put it inside his coat. If you send for him, he will tell you so, and you will believe him, because he is frightened of you, and the frightened do not lie to you. They have learned better.” He let that land. “That is the first thing.”
“And the second?”
“I have spent a week taking apart a cage I did not build, because it was the only apology I had that was worth anything.” He held her eyes.
“I will go on taking it apart for as long as it takes, and I will not complain of the labour. But understanding why you flinch does not oblige me to stand still and be struck every time you do.” His voice stayed level.
“Those are two different duties. I owe you the first. I do not owe you the second, and I will not pretend otherwise, because a man who stands and takes it in the name of another man’s cruelty has only made himself the next one in the row. ”
She stood very still.
No one had ever said such a thing to her.
All her life the men who held power over her had used it, and the moment she made them uncomfortable they had reached for the lever: the servant to be dismissed, the plan to be cancelled, the money to be withheld, the roof to be pulled down.
A boundary and a threat had always been the same object seen from different ends.
And here was a man setting a boundary with no threat folded inside it.
He had not put out his hand toward a single lever.
He had told her where he ended and left the rest of the ground to her.
She had never once in her life been given the map of where a man’s forbearance stopped without also being handed the bill for crossing it.
“I should send for the post-boy,” she said. It came out stiff and wrong, the words of a woman reaching for an apology with tools built for war. “If what you say is true, I should establish it. I do not take things on assertion. You would not want me to.”
“No. I would not.”
“Then I will send for him, and if he says he put it in his coat,” she said, and stopped for a while, “then I will have been unjust to you. I am not often unjust to the people who deserve it least. It is a poor economy, and I dislike it in others.”
“I will send for the post-boy myself,” he said, “and let him tell you in his own words, so that you are not left to take even the apology on my assertion. You told me you do not take things on assertion. Neither, as it happens, do I.”
“That is either the most respectful thing anyone has said to me, or the most maddening. I have not yet decided which.”
“Both, I should think.” He inclined his head. “That is an apology you have just made me. It is a strange-shaped one, but I recognise the species.”
“Then it is the only shape I have. They were not much practised in my father’s house.
He did not apologise, and so I never learned the grammar of it.
” She made herself hold his gaze. “I am aware that I am doing it badly, but if you make one remark about it, I will take the whole thing back, and we will pretend I came in here to discuss the coal.”
He did not remark.
That was the thing she carried out of the room with her, later, turning it over as she turned over anything she could not explain.
Standing at his own table, he had watched her apologise in her broken second-hand grammar, and had watched what it cost her, the whole visible expense of a woman spending a coin she had never been taught the value of.
He had neither smiled nor softened. Above all, he had made no remark that would have charged her twice by naming how hard it had been.
He let it stand, as he had let the true settlement stand on the desk, and gave her the one thing she had not known she was starving for: the chance to have done a difficult thing without being watched do it.
She sent for the post-boy that afternoon.
He stood in the passage turning his hat and said it plainly enough.
“It was raining, Your Grace, and I put the letters inside my coat, same as I always do, but the seals took the damp and went soft. I’m sorry for it.
I’d have wrapped them if I’d had the oilcloth by me.
” He had put the letter in his coat, against the rain, exactly as the Duke had said.
She gave the boy a shilling for his trouble, and went up to the blue rooms, and took out her sister’s creased letter.
She went down to dinner still turning everything over and found him already at the table, waiting. A month she had spent watching him for the hook. Not once had she wondered what he had been watching for.