Chapter Twelve #2
Her father rose. He was too practised to storm.
He gathered his dignity about him and made the gathering look deliberate.
He spoke pleasantly of the length of the road and the poor state of the inns between Loxton and Calder, and left a space where the invitation belonged.
Rowan thanked him for coming. Nothing else was offered.
The space held a moment past bearing, and then Sir Alistair filled it himself, observing that he would push on and be at Hexham before dark.
The visit had run under the hour, but it had done a thing to the balance of Theodora’s entire life that she had not known could be done.
At the door, her father tried once more, because he was her father, and the reflex of twenty years could not die in an afternoon.
“The Loxton rents, Your Grace, before I go. The Michaelmas quarter has questions in it that a man of business ought to look at. I could have my steward send the figures up to you, if you would cast an eye over them yourself. Between ourselves, and no ceremony about it.”
“They should go to the Duchess,” Rowan said. “She understands the Loxton rents better than either of us, and she will find in an afternoon whatever your steward has spent a quarter hoping nobody looks for. Direct them to her by name. It will save the postage of the second letter.”
Sir Alistair looked at his daughter then, and it was the first proper look he had given her.
Theodora looked back at him from her chair at the edge of the room and did not lower her eyes.
She watched it arrive in him, at last and all at once, that the room had changed owners while he was talking.
The new owner was the one person in the world he had spent his whole life making certain would never be believed.
He left. The carriage took him back down the drive into the grey afternoon with the trunk and the hat-box strapped up again behind, and Theodora sat where she was for a long while after the sound of the wheels had gone.
Her hands had come unfolded in her lap without her permission, and for no reason she could put a name to and every reason she could not, speech was entirely beyond her.
She did not find her voice again until after dark, and when she found it, she went looking for him with it, and going toward a man on purpose to say a difficult thing was itself a thing she had never done in her life.
He was in the library, but he did not rise and make an occasion of her arrival, and she was grateful for that, because an occasion would have required a composure she did not have.
“You did a thing this afternoon,” she said, from the doorway, “that I do not have the grammar for. I warned you I did not learn the grammar of gratitude in my father’s house.
I find I did not learn this one either, and I do not know its name, but I have been sitting with it for six hours trying to find where it is kept. ”
“You need not name it. It was not done to be named.”
“That is exactly the trouble. Everything done for me my whole life was done to be named, invoiced, and produced again at the worst hour. I know the shape of that so well I could carry it in the dark. This has no shape.” She came a little into the room.
“You held my father to answer, in his own words, in front of me, and asked nothing back, and I have no drawer it fits in. Tell me what you want for it, Rowan. Please. It is easier if I know the price. No bill has ever undone me. It is only the gifts that frighten me.”
He took his time about answering, and she watched him decline three or four kind and useless things a lesser man would have said.
“I did not do it for you,” he said at last. “I want you to hear that plainly, because it is the only version you will be able to keep.” He set the book aside.
“A man came into my house and lied to my face about a person I have come to respect, and I do not permit that in my own hall. It would have been as true of my steward or my horse. You were not the reason. You were the occasion.” He looked at her.
“There is no bill, because you did not commission the work. I did it for my own sake. I have grown tired of hearing a good instrument slandered by the man who blunted it.”
She stood in the middle of the library, and the six-hour thing in her chest shifted and settled into a place that had not existed that morning. He had done the one thing that could reach her. He had refused to make her the debtor, had taken the weight of it onto himself and left her owing nothing.
“That is a very good answer,” she said, once she had her voice back. “It is so good I almost believe you did not build it in advance to be exactly the answer I could bear.”
“There was no building. A thing that precise is beyond my cleverness. I told you the truth and the truth happened to fit.” He looked at her across the lamplit room.
“Go to bed, Theodora. You have had a hard afternoon being defended, and I am given to understand that it is harder work than being attacked, for a person out of practice. It will be easier the second time.”
“Will there be a second time?”
“As many times as your father is fool enough to buy,” he said. “I have a great deal of patience, and he has a great deal of folly, so I should not plan on running short of occasions.”
She almost laughed. It came up in her, the second one he had drawn out of her in as many days, and this time she did not fight it all the way down.