Chapter 15 #3
“You are certain.”
“She told me herself.” He paused. “Twenty-fifth of December in the year 1792. She told me it’s the one thing she’s never forgotten from her past. Christmas Day was a day her mother loved—opening presents. It’s the only memory of her mother she has.”
“Interesting. And a guardianship petition, as I understand it from the forty years I spent watching my husband manage his estate and his affairs, applies to those who are either minors or those declared incompetent.” Dorothea settled her spectacles on her nose and regarded him with an expression of perfect composure. “A woman of twenty-one is neither.”
Oliver went still.
“The petition,” Dorothea continued, in the tone of someone who has been thinking about something for slightly longer than the conversation has been happening, “is fraudulent in its timeline, but is also potentially moot in its premise. If Megan has no need of a guardian—legitimately, legally, formally—then there is nothing to petition for. Penharrow’s mechanism collapses. ”
Oliver stared at her.
“There is,” she said, “one circumstance under which a woman of twenty-one has no guardian and is not subject to any petition by anyone. Under which she belongs, legally and entirely, to herself. Or,” she added, with measured precision, “to be exact, to the man she has married.”
The word dropped into the room like a stone into deep water, and Oliver felt the ripples of it move through him, slow and enormous.
“Marriage,” he said.
“Marriage,” she agreed. “It supersedes any guardianship claim. It renders the petition moot on arrival. A married woman’s legal identity attaches to her husband, and there is not a court in England that would award guardianship of a wife to a man who is not that wife’s husband.
Especially if her new husband were a Marquess and heir to a dukedom. ”
Oliver sat very still and turned this over with the methodical precision of a man who had spent three hours in a solicitor’s office being told what could not be done and was only now being shown what could.
“I should have thought of that,” he said. It came out differently than he’d intended. Quieter.
“You were busy trying to solve the problem through conventional means,” Dorothea said, without a great deal of sympathy. “It is a common failure of the well-educated. They learn the established channels so thoroughly they forget to look for the door in the hedge.”
“The Duke.” Oliver sat forward. “He’ll have a fit.”
“Leave your uncle to me. He is my son after all.”
He looked at her. “But she can’t prove she’s twenty-one. She doesn’t know her name.”
She looked at him with the expression that had preceded every significant thing she had ever arranged in his life.
The chess game at seven when she’d let him win three times in a row and then beaten him comprehensively on the fourth because she’d wanted him to understand what losing felt like when it mattered.
The conversation at twenty when she’d told him, with considerable calm, that the war was going to change him in ways that he could not yet imagine and that she was going to be there when he came back regardless of what shape he was in.
The particular quality of certainty she wore like a second skin, the certainty of a woman who has lived long enough to know exactly how much she is capable of and has stopped apologizing for it.
“You have a plan,” he said.
“I have the beginning of one.”
“Grandmother.”
“All will be revealed in good time, Oliver. That is not evasion. I need to make certain of one or two things before I say anything further. Just ask the archbishop for a special license. He knows me. I’ll write him a note.
He will do it. Just be ready.” She removed her spectacles and looked at him with an expression that was, beneath the composure, something warmer and more urgent. “What I need from you is one thing.”
“What?”
“I need you to speak to Megan,” she said. “Before you speak to anyone else. Before the solicitor, before your uncle, before anyone. You owe her the truth, and you owe her the choice. Will you do that?”
Oliver looked at her for a long moment.
Then he picked up his hat.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll go now.”
“Oliver.” He paused in the doorway. “The question is not whether you can keep her safe through legal mechanisms. The question—” she paused, choosing her words with the care of a woman who knows the value of precision— “is what you want. Only beware, she will fight this option for all she’s worth because she will think it’s a sacrifice on your part.
You’ll have to persuade her otherwise. Show her you love her. ”
“How did you know?”
“Silly boy. I know you better than you know yourself. I see it in the way you look at her. It’s the way your grandfather used to look at me.”
He nodded. Did he love her? He certainly wanted her.
He thought about it all the way down to the south terrace and by the time he spied her in the garden he understood that he loved her so much he’d die before he let anyone hurt her again.