Chapter Five #2
No one had ever told her, in plain daylight, that they looked forward to her.
She had been useful, and tolerated, on two occasions, feared, and once or twice admired in the careful way men admire a clever animal.
No one had looked forward to being with her.
The strangeness of it landed harder than any insult in the sheet.
An insult had a shape, and a shape could be braced against. This had no shape at all, and it left her standing in his library with no answer ready, which had not happened to her in years.
Across the room, Beatrice, forgotten in her chair, made a small approving noise into her glove.
“Hear the rest before you strike him,” Beatrice said.
“Because he is being honest and foolish in equal measure and leaving out the cruel part, which a friend must supply. Miss Linfield, you may refuse him. You have every right, because a less worldly woman would, and I would think no less of you. But understand what refusing buys you. He will protect you either way. I know him. Only without his name, his protection is a man sheltering a woman, which is the very thing the sheet accuses, and which will be true the longer it lasts. The town will not punish you for being his wife. The town will punish you, slowly and with great enjoyment, for being his… anything else.”
“So, my choice,” Giselle said slowly, “is to be his wife, or to be his scandal. To take the name, or to be defined by the rumour of the name. And what manner of wife.” She kept her eyes on Royce.
“You have a scandal to bury and a dangerous witness to keep close. Say plainly whether you are offering me a marriage or a locked cabinet with a ring fitted to the hasp.”
“I am offering you the first, and I am aware it will look, for a while, like the second.” He held her gaze and did not retreat into charm, which she marked.
“I will not lie to you about the shape of the early months. There will be a wedding the town reads as convenient, separate rooms, and a great deal of careful arithmetic about who watches whom. What it becomes after that is not mine to decree. It is the one thing in this whole arrangement I am content to leave undecided, because I have found I would rather not know the ending of you in advance.”
“You are very composed for a man asking a stranger to take his name before nightfall.”
“You are not a stranger. You are the woman who has had her hands inside my ribs and her opinions inside my filing, and I find I know you better after two days than I have known most people after twenty years. It alarms me considerably, but it changes nothing.”
“That is the flattering part again. You smuggle it in whenever you think I have stopped counting.”
“You never stop counting. It is among the three or four things about you I have already decided I cannot do without, and we are not even betrothed, which tells you how poorly I am managing this.” His mouth did the thing that was almost a smile.
“Your choice is between a cage I am offering you the key to and a cage Veyr is building you without one. I know which sounds like the better bargain, and I know it is still a cage. I will not insult you by calling it anything else.”
“He is, you understand,” Beatrice observed to the room at large, “the only man in London who would propose marriage by reciting its disadvantages. Other men lie to a woman.”
“You are not helping, Beatrice.”
“I am helping enormously. I am simply doing it from the side you dislike.” She got herself up out of the gilt chair with a small theatrical groan.
“I shall be in the morning room with the other three sheets and a strong dread of the song. Decide your own life, child. It is the one thing in this house no one can do for you, and I find I would not do it for you even if I could. I shall chaperone whichever version of it you settle on, and I shall be fond of you in all of them.”
The door closed behind her, and they were the two of them again, and the quiet that came down had none of the danger of the night before. It was thinner than that, and somehow more frightening, the quiet of a thing waiting to be decided.
She walked to the window he had left and looked down at the same indifferent street, the carriages, and the ordinary morning that did not know or care that a woman’s whole life was being recut in the room above it.
Three letters lay in a tin box under a floor two miles from here, signed in a hand she had taught herself to copy for the comfort of being written to.
A motto she could not read had pressed its worn letters into her breastbone every day of her remembered life.
Somewhere across the city, a man counted spoons from the street and waited, patiently, for a frightened woman to make the one mistake that would end her.
She set that man against the one behind her, who told the truth badly and looked forward to her across a table he had not yet earned, and she weighed which of the two she would rather have at her back.
The weighing did not take as long as it ought to have.
“I have a condition before I have an answer,” she said, without turning. “Several. But the first stands above the rest, and if you cannot meet it, the others do not matter. So, you will hear it first.”
“Name it.”
She turned from the window to face him fully.
The fear had not gone anywhere. It sat cold beneath her ribs where it had sat all morning, an old tenant she had long since stopped trying to evict.
But something older than the fear had woken beneath it now.
The thing that had carried her out of the foundling house and into four men’s libraries and across the whole hostile breadth of her unprotected life.
It steadied her voice into the flattest and most dangerous calm she owned.
“If I marry you, Your Grace, I will not disappear behind your name.”