Chapter Twenty-Three
“Burn it yourself. I have handled that paper enough for one lifetime, and I would rather watch you do it than do it for you.”
Rowan held out the forged settlement across the breakfast table, the fair copy she had signed at her father’s desk. He held it out lightly, without ceremony, at the full length of his arm, and waited.
“You kept it.” Theodora did not take it yet. “All this time. Why keep the thing at all, if you always meant it to burn?”
“Because it was evidence, and I do not burn evidence until it has done its work.” He set it down in front of her instead, since she would not take it from his hand.
“And because it was never mine to burn. You signed it. You were the one lied to over it. A paper of that kind gets destroyed by the person it was used against, or it is not destroyed at all. It is only put out of sight.”
She looked at the paper on the cloth between the teapot and her own untouched plate.
“You understand what it is I would be burning.”
“I understand it is the only thing left in this house that says you belong to anybody.” He did not soften it.
“Burn it, and there is no document anywhere in the world that governs you, his or mine or any other man’s.
” He did not stop there. “You would come out of this room a woman with no paper over her at all, and you have never had one hour of that in your life. I am handing you the choice, because a man who freed you with his own hand would only be the next one holding a paper, and you would never afterwards be quite easy about the hand that did it.”
Theodora took the paper up, and carried it to the small fire, and made no speech over it, because a speech would have been a performance and the moment was too much her own to perform.
She held one corner to the flame and watched the clause about the colour of her gowns curl and go, then the clause about her letters, and then her own signature, the frightened, careful hand of a woman who had believed she was signing the only life available to her.
She held it until the fire reached her fingers, and let it drop.
“It is done,” she said, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected.
He had not moved from the table. “How does it feel to be a woman that no paper governs?”
“I do not know yet. I have been governed by paper so long that I keep waiting for the next clause.” She came back and sat, and looked at him across the cleared cloth.
“There is a difficulty, Rowan, and I am going to put it badly, because I have never once had occasion to say it at all, and I have no practice.”
“Go on and put it however it comes. You are only ever unsure of the sum when you have no practice, and I have grown fond of watching you be unsure.”
“That is precisely my difficulty.” She turned her cup a quarter round and did not drink from it.
“At first I knew exactly why I stayed in this house. I stayed because my sister’s dowry sits with trustees your solicitor and my father’s named between them, so that not a shilling of it moves without both their names, and because the Loxton servants’ places were in your gift, and because I took it that you held those things over me exactly as he held the drawer over me.
” She turned the cup again. “A woman who is held can tell herself she has no choice, and it is restful, being held. It asks nothing of her but endurance, and I am very good at endurance.”
“And now?”
“And now the paper is ash, and Cecily’s portion is hers whether I stay or go, because you signed your half of it over to her trustees a week ago and told Mr Teague to have my father’s half out of him or ruin him for it.
You have spent all this time proving, item by item, that you hold nothing over me at all.
” She met his eyes. “So, if I stay in this house past this morning, I stay for no reason on earth except that I want to, and I find, Rowan, that I do not know how to want a thing out loud.” She looked down at her hands.
“I was trained out of it early. A girl who wanted things in my father’s house had handed him the map of where to hurt her. ”
Rowan was quiet a moment, and did the thing she had come to trust in him above all the rest. He let the quiet stand, and put no reassurance into it.
“Then do not want it out loud,” he said.
“Not today. You have spent one evening being braver in public than most people manage in a lifetime, and I will not ask you to be brave twice before luncheon.” He leaned back.
“Stay because the coffee is tolerable, the library is good, and you have not finished with the estate books. Stay for the reasons a sensible woman stays anywhere. The other thing can wait until you have a word for it you trust.”
“You are letting me off.”
“I am doing the one thing your father never did. I want you to stay, and I do not require you to grovel for the privilege of being wanted.” He said it plainly, without heat.
“Your father made a paper of everything. My regard is not going to be one, Theodora. You have burnt enough of those this morning. If you stay, I will know why, and so will you, and neither of us will need it witnessed or signed.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“I am not going anywhere,” she said at last. “I will not tell you all of the reasons, because I do not have all of it in words yet, and I will not counterfeit the parts I am missing.” She met his eyes.
“But I am not going anywhere, and I want it heard as a choice and as nothing else. It is the first choice I have made in years that no one arranged for me.” She let that stand between them.
“I chose the gown. I chose the room. And I am choosing, now, over cold coffee, to stay in a house with the one person alive who has never once tried to hold a paper over me.”
“That will do,” Rowan said, and there was a roughness in his voice she had not heard from him before, and he did not trouble to smooth it out. “That will do for this morning.”
He got up then, and she expected him to go near her. What he did instead was cross to the door and shut it, and stand a moment with his back to her before he turned round.
The room was very warm at that end. The last of the paper was still in the grate, a curl of black lifting and settling over the coals, and the smell of burnt rag would not go off.
There was a red mark across the pad of her thumb where she had held the corner too long, and she was turning her hand to look at it when he crossed the hearthrug, turned it back and looked at it himself.
He held the hand a good deal longer than the thumb required, and she let him.
“You asked me a question in the library, a long while back,” he said.
“You asked what currency I was paying in, and I got as far as the first word and stopped, and you let me stop.” His thumb moved once across the burn.
“I have carried the rest of that sentence since then, and I am putting it down now, and nothing whatever alters if you have nothing to set against it.”
She did not tell him to stop. That was all the answer he waited for.
“I love you, Theodora.” He said it in the voice he kept for facts about rents and the price of oats.
“It did not begin there. I began by disliking a woman who would not tell me the truth, and it turned over on a cold morning in Hollis’s yard, with you in front of a book proving a man had robbed his own tenants, and never once looking up to see whether the room was impressed.
You did not need me for any of it. That is the only reason I can say this to you at all. ”
There was a yard of carpet between them, and she had measured it without meaning to, because she measured everything. Twice a man had left a distance standing and made the closing of it hers, and both times it was this one. She crossed it, and did not ask, and did not stop at the arm’s length.
She put her hands on either side of his face, which she had never done to any living creature, and kissed him. The first one had been careful, and had been about permission. He made a low sound that was not a word. His hand closed in the hair at the back of her head and stayed.
“I am not going to hand you a matching sentence,” she said.
“I have not one drawn to my satisfaction.” Her thumb moved along his cheekbone.
“So, take the plain version. I have never said a thing of this kind to any person breathing in six-and-twenty years. I love you, and there is no small hand under it. You have had every line of it from me.”
Rowan added nothing, having nothing that would improve it, and rested his forehead against hers, and neither of them was facing the door. Neither of them saw, therefore, how long the second footman had been standing in it, nor how often he had cleared his throat before he was heard.