Chapter Thirteen
“You have taken the last of the marmalade again,” she said, “and you did it without once looking to see whether anybody else at this table wanted any, but I have decided that is the most aristocratic quality you possess. I include the dukedom.”
Rowan looked at the offending spoon, and then at her across the breakfast table, unhurried. “The second pot is behind the toast rack.”
“And in this house, it always is. That is what I am telling you. You have lived your entire life with a second pot behind the toast rack, and it shows in how you reach for things.” She buttered nothing, to prove she was not counting.
“I grew up counting the marmalade, and I shall probably count it until I die. You may have the last of it. I only wish you to know that I noticed, because noticing is the one economy I was never able to give up.”
“I will remember the marmalade,” he said. “I shall leave it, and you will be obscurely annoyed that I remembered, and before long we shall be having the same argument about something else entirely. I find I am looking forward to it.”
She did not answer that, because there was nothing to say to it that was not more dangerous than marmalade, and she reached instead for the post, which Beddoes had brought up from the hall.
She found Cecily’s weekly letter near the top, and read four dutiful paragraphs about a broody hen and the state of the lanes, and in the fourth, folded between the hen and the frost, the one true sentence.
He is very quiet since he came back from Calder.
He eats little and does not mention you at all, which from Papa is the loudest thing he could do.
“His visit did something to my father,” she said, and passed the relevant line across the cloth, because she had discovered, lately, that she showed him things now, small things, without first calculating what showing them would cost. “Cecily says he has gone quiet. Quiet, in my father, is not peace. Quiet is a man rethinking his position.”
“He should rethink it. His old position is no longer available to him.” Rowan read the line twice and handed it back. “What was under the rest of the letter? You read it all and showed me one line of it.”
“The rest was poultry.”
“You do not slit a letter that fast for poultry.”
“The rest,” she admitted, “was my sister asking, in her roundabout fashion, whether I am happy. She has taken to asking it every week, and I have taken to not answering, because I do not have the word for what I am, and I dislike sending Cecily a blank where a word should go. A blank is a thing she worries about. She always has.”
“And what would you write, if you had the word?”
“I would write that the marmalade runs out and nobody is blamed for it,” Theodora said, and stood, gathered the estate post, and did not look at him.
“It is not an answer, but it is the truest one I have. The Loxton figures came with the rest. I am going to spend the morning taking my father apart on paper. You may join me when you have finished your stolen marmalade.”
***
They did not come to the real thing until the afternoon.
“My father’s Michaelmas figures are a work of art,” she said, when he came into the library at last and found her already an hour deep in them, “and I mean that as an accusation.”
She had the Loxton papers spread across her end of the library table, the end that had stopped being her end and become simply hers, and Rowan came round to look over her shoulder, close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him at her back and did not move away.
A month ago, she would have shifted her chair a hand’s breadth and called it fetching a pen.
“Show me the art.”
“Look here, and then at this column. He has learned from Sowerby, or Sowerby learned from him, I have never been sure which direction the education ran between them.” She traced the columns with one finger.
“The arrears are dressed as hardship, the hardship is dressed as his own generosity, and the generosity is paid for out of a fund that does not exist. He means the rents he has never entered.”
“How much has he taken?”
“Four hundred pounds over the three years the paper covers. Over my entire life, everything, but the paper only proves the four hundred.” She squared the sheets.
“And four hundred pounds is a hanging matter dressed up as a family embarrassment. That is how he has always survived. He steals in sums small enough to be forgiven and frequent enough to add up to a fortune.”
“And you used to put it back.”
“I used to recover it, quietly, put it back, and say nothing, because saying something cost more than the money. I have spent my entire womanhood being my father’s unpaid conscience.
” She squared the last sheet against the table edge.
“It is a post I am at last in a position to resign. I could have this in front of a magistrate by Lady Day.”
Rowan set his fingers along the edge of the table. “And will you?”
“No, and I have sat here for an hour hating the arithmetic that says no.” She did not look up from the sheets.
“Put my father before the bench and Cecily is the daughter of a convicted racketeer in every paper in three counties before Easter. She is nineteen. She has her name and four thousand pounds, and the first of those does not survive an assize, and without it the second buys her nothing but a bad husband in a hurry.”
“That is Cecily’s reason. Give me yours.”
“Mine is worse, and it is the one that decides it. The day he is prosecuted, his affairs go into the hands of the law, and every creditor he has run from since I was a girl comes forward at once with a solicitor at his elbow. The Loxton tenants are owed the smallest sums of anybody, and they have not one attorney between the lot of them, so they stand at the back of that queue for four years, five, waiting on a court to hand a man back the eleven pounds my father took off him in a morning.” She set her palm flat on the arrears’ column.
“I can have him in front of a magistrate, or I can have those rents paid back by Candlemas.” Her palm stayed where it was.
“I am not willing to buy my own satisfaction at that price.”
“I would have had him committed this week and thought myself just for doing it.” Rowan turned the sheet a little toward himself and did not read it. “It had not once occurred to me that the men he robbed would be the ones paying for my justice. You may put that in the book of my faults as well.”
“I keep it where he can see the shape of it through the drawer. That is worth a great deal more than firing it. A prosecution is spent the instant it is used, but a prosecution that has not happened yet will make him sign anything I put in front of him.” She let the pen roll out of her fingers.
“It is the ledger again. I am worth more to those tenants as my father’s creditor than as his prosecutor, and I have wanted him in front of a magistrate since I was nineteen years old, but I am not going to have it.
It is very strange.” She looked up at last. “Do not tell me it is interesting. I am aware it is interesting. I would rather it were not happening to me.”
“That was not my intention.” He drew out the chair beside her and sat down, so that his eyes came level with hers.
Few men had ever troubled to sit down and lose the height difference between them.
“I was going to ask why it has gone strange. You are the least sentimental person I have met, about your own father. You have never once pretended to me that you love him.”
“I do not love him. That is not the strangeness.” She turned the paper a quarter-turn.
“The strangeness is that I have spent my life being the person who survives my father, and this morning I found the door out of that and shut it again myself, for good reasons, and I do not know what I am now. It is not a good trade being the one who endures him. It is only the one I know.” Her hand stayed on the paper.
“I had thought that when I could end it, I would know what came after. The ending is here under my hand, and I have declined it. And I have no notion what a woman does with the years when the thing she was built to endure goes on exactly as before.”
He let the quiet stand, and she waited for the reassurance, but it did not come.
“You are allowed to change your mind in either direction,” he said. “The paper will keep. Teague has taught me that much. A fraud in a locked drawer is patient, and it does not spoil in the meantime.”
“That is not comfort. That is logistics.”
“You prefer logistics. I have noticed. Comfort you inspect for the hook, but logistics you can hold in your hand and check the weight of.” He said it without any pride in the noticing.
“So, I give you logistics, and let you find the comfort inside them yourself, at your own speed, where I cannot be blamed for having put it there.”
“You are beginning to learn how I view things.”
“I am. It is the most rewarding study I have set myself, and I was thought diligent in my day. Do not tell me it unsettles you because I know it does. Solved things get shelved. You have warned me.”
“I disliked you, you know,” she said, into the quiet, because the papers had opened a door in her she could not now easily shut. “At the beginning, and thoroughly.”
“I am aware. You told me, in a carriage, that I did the puzzled note beautifully.”
“I disliked you specifically. Most men I dislike in a general, defensive fashion that costs me nothing.” She made herself look at him. “I disliked you for a particular thing. You were so certain of your own decency.”
“That is a strange charge to level at a man. Most wives complain of the reverse.”