Chapter Twenty-Four
Sir Alistair had not been invited but came all the same, because a man who had ruled a family for years did not learn in one night that his rule had ended.
They showed him into the library, where Theodora sat with Teague and the assembled papers, and he came in with what was left of his old manner.
“My dear. I have come to talk sense, and you will forgive an old man for coming without his card.” He spread his hands, warmly, to the room, to Teague and to nobody.
“A spectacle has been made. There is time yet to contain it, if you will be guided by a man who has managed these people for thirty years.”
“Sit down, Papa.” Theodora did not rise. “You may have the chair by the door. It is the one you kept for me, in rooms of this kind, for many years.”
“Now that is unkind, and unlike you, and I shall not remember it against you.”
“On the contrary. I have only just remembered myself, and I do not intend to forget again.” She nodded to Teague.
“Mr Teague has the four drafts, the margin note in your hand, the estate figures corrected in your ink, and copies of all of it lodged in three places you cannot reach.” Her voice did not rise.
“He will explain what happens to those papers under two conditions. You will choose which you prefer.” Her voice did not rise.
“It is the last choice you will make about my life or my sister’s. ”
Teague rose without hurry, and took his time squaring the bundle before he began.
“On the first of them, Sir Alistair, Her Grace lays an information before the magistrates, I attend with the drafts, and the margin note, and the matter proceeds as a prosecution for forgery and for uttering a forged instrument. I would not put the outcome higher than probable. On the face of it, though, I should say the papers are as strong as any I have handled in thirty years of practice.” He rested one hand on the bundle.
“Strictly speaking, the county already has the fact of it, since Her Grace read it out in a ballroom. What the county has not got is the particulars. The rent-book entries, name by name. The subscription fund, shilling by shilling. Those remain in Her Grace’s gift, and she has withheld them, and I am instructed to say that she can as easily stop withholding them. ”
“You would not dare, either of you. A scandal has no manners. It touches whom it touches, and it would touch the girl as hard as it touches me, and even harder.”
“It touched Her Grace, Sir Alistair, and she is still standing, and you are the one who came here this morning to talk sense.” Teague let his voice go quieter rather than louder.
“Under the second condition, the papers remain where they are, sealed. No information is laid. The particulars go nowhere at all, so long as you do three things, and continue to do them, and never once fail in any of them.”
“Well. Let us hear the terms, then, and let us hear them from you and not from the gentleman with the papers, since I have always preferred to be robbed by somebody I am fond of.”
“It is not silence you are buying. It is restraint, and it is a great deal cheaper than you deserve.” Theodora took it back from Teague, because the terms were hers and she would say them in her own voice.
“I will tell you what it costs me to sell it, because I keep an honest book even against myself. If Mr Teague lays that information, the tenants who paid you twice stand at the back of a creditors’ queue for four years, and my sister loses every door in this county on the day the indictment is read.
” She let that stand. “I am not willing to spend either of them on you. So I am trading a verdict for three signatures.” She let that stand.
“First. Cecily’s portion is settled on her this week, entire, in her own name, under the trustees already named between your solicitor and my husband’s.
You sign your half, and you add not one clause of your own anywhere, because I will read every line, and I read your clauses as nobody else living can read them. ”
“That money was to serve the family. It always was. You speak of it as a theft, but it was a provision.”
“Hers. It was always to be hers. You merely meant to spend her with it, as you spent me, and you will not.” She did not pause for him.
“Second. The tenants are repaid, over three years, out of the sums you took, and Mr Teague administers the repayment, and neither you nor your steward puts a finger near it. The men who paid twice will be paid back once. It is a wrong made partly even, and the world does not commonly offer more than that.”
“Give me the last of them,” said Sir Alistair, and the warmth had gone out of him entirely, and what was under it was flat, cold and very old.
“Third, you retire. To the Loxton house, or anywhere else on earth that is not where I am. Town is finished for you, and so is dining out on stories.” She did not look away from him.
“You do not, ever again, tell a single soul a single thing about my sister or me, true or false, because the moment you open your mouth on the subject of your daughters, Mr Teague opens the seal.” She squared the last of the papers under her palm.
“You have spent years being the only witness to what you did to me. You are about to spend the rest of your life being watched by a man who kept every draft. It is a very small cage, Papa. It is exactly the size of the one you kept me in. I have measured it for you myself.”
For a long moment the old man said nothing, and Theodora watched him look for the exit he had always found before, the clever clause, the story that would turn it, but found none.
“You were always the difficult one,” he said at last, and it was not quite a surrender, but it was the nearest thing to one he had left in him. “I told them all you were difficult.”
“You did. It was the truest thing you ever said of me, and the only one, and you meant it as a sentence, but I have decided to take it as a description.” She rose, at last, and it put her above him, and she allowed herself that for exactly the length of one sentence.
“I am difficult, Papa. I was difficult to break, difficult to silence, and difficult to spend, but the county learned that difficult is only the word frightened men use for a woman they could not make afraid.” She gathered the papers under her hand.
“Mr Teague will bring the dowry instrument on Thursday. Sign it, and go home, and be grateful the terms were set by me and not by a magistrate, because a magistrate would not have measured the cage half so kindly.”
He signed on Thursday, every line, adding nothing, because Theodora read every line and there was nothing he could have added that she would not have caught.
Then he went home to Loxton, into the small quiet cage of a house with nobody left in it that he was permitted to tell the story to.
The county had watched him rule for thirty years.
It watched him go out of it in a matter of weeks, and discovered, to its considerable surprise, that it had not been looking at him for some time.