Chapter Six
“You said you wished to settle certain particulars,” Elias said, setting aside his book as she entered. “Am I to be presented with articles of war?”
“If you prefer to think of them as terms of peace, you may.” Victoria held a folded paper in one hand and remained standing.
“That depends. Am I the enemy?”
Her answer came a moment too slowly.
“I have not yet decided.”
She saw the answer reach him, saw the faint stillness behind his composure as he absorbed the small wound without complaint, and understood too late that she had given it.
He had received her in the library rather than the study, a warm, worn room filled with books that had plainly been read.
She understood the choice at once and resented it.
He had meant the meeting to feel less like an interview, and she had no wish to be managed gently.
Gentleness could be only cruelty with better manners.
“Sit, if you like,” he said. “Or remain standing and read them at me from a height. I am told I deserve to be read at.”
“I shall stand.” Victoria unfolded the paper. “The first concerns Sophy. She remains with me. She is not to be sent to relations, removed to some distant nursery, or placed wholly in a governess’s charge without my consent.”
“Agreed.” Elias set the book aside.
“Her education is mine to direct. Her companions, her hours, what she wears, reads, and learns.”
“Agreed.”
“My correspondence remains private,” Victoria went on. “I shall receive the callers I choose and refuse those I do not. I will not be required to show civility to people who have treated me badly merely because they arrive in a good carriage.”
“Agreed to that as well.”
“I will not be used.” She looked up from the page.
“Not as an ornament at your table, nor an answer to your reputation, nor a hostess displayed to prove that you have acquired a wife. I will not be offered as evidence of your gallantry whenever it suits you. I have been all those things before. I will not be them again.”
“Agreed,” Elias said quietly. “I would sign that one twice if doing so would help you believe it once.”
His calm was maddening. Each agreement came the moment she stopped speaking, level and immediate, as though she had asked him only to pass the salt.
“You might dispute one of them,” she said. “For the appearance of the thing.”
“I might, if I disagreed. You have asked to keep your daughter, your correspondence, your choice of company, and your dignity. It is a modest list. I have signed away more before breakfast for considerably poorer reasons.”
“There is more.”
“I assumed there would be.”
She looked down at the paper again. When she spoke, her voice had grown more careful.
“I will have my own rooms.”
“You already do.”
“And the door between them will remain locked.”
“There is no direct door between them,” he said evenly.
That checked her.
“There is a sitting room between your chamber and mine,” Elias explained. “It may be entered from either set of apartments, but both doors may be locked from your side.”
“Right. You have already seen to that.”
“I have,” he said mildly.
The answer left her with no quarrel, though some part of her had come prepared for one.
“My first marriage was full of promises made kindly and altered by degrees,” she said more quietly. “You must understand that I do not yet know how to take an agreement at its word.”
“I understand that you cannot take mine so,” Elias replied. “Not yet.”
She studied him across the paper. “And if I never do?”
“Then the locks will still work,” he said. “Belief is not required of them.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“You make it sound very simple.”
“No,” Elias said. “I only mean that I should rather earn your trust than require it.”
The words settled between them.
She looked down at the list to escape his face. “I will not share your bed.”
“Not unless you choose to.”
“You require an heir.”
“I do.”
“Then one day you will ask.”
“One day,” Elias said carefully, “I may ask whether the terms upon which you married me may be fulfilled. I will not assume the answer, and I will not take what you refuse.”
She gave a short, humourless laugh. “You say that because you are a decent man.”
“No.” The word came more sharply than he intended. “I say it because necessity does not become a right merely because an earldom depends upon it.”
She flinched before she could stop herself.
He saw it at once. The sharpness left him almost as quickly as it had come, and he stepped back from the desk, deliberately putting another pace between them.
“Forgive me,” he said quietly. “I raised my voice.”
Her fingers tightened on the paper.
“My first husband never apologised after raising his.”
“I am not your first husband.”
“You are only my second.”
The words settled heavily between them.
At length he said, “Is that all I am permitted to be?”
Her composure, which she had carried into the room like a full cup held level across a crowded floor, tipped at last.
“Yesterday I was a widow,” she said. “Poorer than I let anyone see and lonelier than I would ever have admitted, but free. My days were my own. My mistakes were my own. My daughter was my own. Today I am a countess because a drunken fool laid a hand on my wrist in a conservatory, and half a ballroom decided before the evening was over that my life belonged to the nearest respectable man willing to claim it. You happened to be that man. Do not ask me to find romance in the arrangement.”
“I do not.”
“You cannot know what it cost me to say yes. You stood in a hall for a few minutes and understood the shape of it. I have lived inside that shape for years.”
“No,” he said simply. “I cannot.”
The plainness of the answer took some of the force from her anger.
He remained where he was, leaving the space between them untouched.
“But I can tell you what I did see.”
She said nothing.
“I saw a woman surrounded by people who knew exactly where her fear lived. I saw a child become an argument instead of a child. I saw a man rewarded for laying hands upon a lady where any decent man ought to have been ashamed to touch her. Marriage was the only means I possessed of ending that conversation before it reached a court.”
He glanced at the folded paper in her hand.
“It was a blunt instrument. It was also the only one that would serve.”
Silence lay between them for a moment.
“At no point,” he continued quietly, “did it occur to me that the rescue itself might resemble another prison. That failure is mine.”
Victoria looked down at the paper.
After a long moment, she crossed the room and laid it on the desk between them.
“These are the understandings by which I believe I can live this marriage,” she said.
Elias did not reach for the paper immediately.
“May I?”
The question caught her more completely than any answer could have done.
After a pause, she inclined her head.
“You may.”
Only then did he unfold the page.
“Very well,” he said. “Let us see whether I have overlooked anything important.”
He read it through without interruption, his expression altering only once or twice, more in thought than disagreement.
When he reached the end, he laid the paper flat upon the desk.
“I find I have no quarrel with any of it.”
“That is because you have not yet reached the troublesome parts.”
“I suspect I have.” A faint corner of his mouth moved. “The troublesome parts are not on the paper.”
She looked at him, uncertain whether to answer.
He drew a clean sheet towards him.
“I should like there to be a copy in your hand and one in mine,” he said. “Not because either would bind us more securely than our word already ought to, but because memory has an unfortunate habit of improving itself in its own favour.”
Without another word, he began copying her list.
There was something oddly disarming in watching a man of his consequence spend several quiet minutes doing nothing more remarkable than taking her wishes seriously.
When he had finished, he sanded the page, folded both copies with the same care, and offered one across the desk.
“For you.”
She accepted it.
“You have not added anything.”
“I considered it.”
“And?”
“I found that everything I wanted might be reduced to a single request.”
She waited.
“When something troubles you, tell me before I discover it from someone who wishes us both ill.”
She looked down at the folded paper in her hand.
“I cannot promise to trust you so quickly.”
“I did not ask you to.”
“No.”
A silence settled between them, no longer hostile, merely unfamiliar.
“At least,” she said after a moment, “we now possess a treaty.”
“I hope,” Elias replied, “never to have occasion to consult it.”
“Why write it, then?”
“Because people are at their wisest before they have had opportunity to disappoint one another.”
That answer stayed with her.
Victoria left the room a few moments later with one folded paper in her hand and another life waiting somewhere beyond the door.
It was a curious thing, she thought as she climbed the stairs, that the first thing her second husband had given her was not a jewel, nor a key, nor a title, but the unforced assurance that he considered her a person in her own right.
He had listened because it had not occurred to him that she should not be heard.
She folded the paper once more before laying it away in the drawer beside her bed.
She told herself she was keeping it because agreements ought to be preserved. She was not entirely certain she believed herself.