The Capable Bride's Terms for a Ruined Duke

Chapter One

"Havering," Lord Frayne said, and leaned back until the chair complained beneath him. "Seventh duke. The creation is Restoration, but the family is a great deal older than that."

Cecily did not look up from the coal merchant's letter. It had reached the stage of politeness that arrived shortly before a solicitor did.

I remain, my lord, reluctant to trouble you further upon so small a matter, and hopeful of your convenience before the quarter day.

The small matter was the coal, and it had been small since February. The year was fourteen and September half gone, and the sum stood no larger than when it was first sent.

"Wiltshire," her father went on. "Ferrers Abbey. Eight hundred acres of park, and a Chaloner in the chapel from every century since the fourth Edward."

"Nine hundred and twelve acres," Mr Loxley said.

"There. Nine hundred."

Cecily laid the letter face down on the pile of letters she would answer herself, and took up the glazier, who had been waiting since Lady Day.

The fire had been lit because the solicitor was coming. Her father had taken the chair nearest it, and the decanter as well, though the hour was barely noon. He poured for Mr Loxley first, as he always did when he wished his own glass to look like an afterthought.

"You will want to know about the family," he said. "Chaloner. Not one of your new creations. The mother was a Sedley of the Norfolk branch, and there is a portrait of the fourth duchess at Ferrers that people used to travel to see."

Mr Loxley turned a page of the papers on his knee and let that go by.

"He is thirty-four," Rufus said. "Exactly the right age. A man of twenty-two has opinions. A man of thirty-four has arrangements."

Cecily wrote a line to the glazier promising him half by Michaelmas, but blotted it, and her quill pen slowed in the second sentence, because neither of the men behind her had yet said what the duke wanted.

They had been talking for a quarter of an hour. Between them they had produced the park, the chapel, the duchess in the portrait, the age of the creation and the age of the man, and not one of those things was a figure.

She put down her pen.

"How much does he require?" she asked.

Her father smiled at her the way he smiled at a servant who had come in during a story.

"My dear. Havering is not a tradesman presenting a receipt."

"How much?" Cecily said curtly.

"There is a proper order to these things."

She turned a little in her chair. "Then tell me the improper part first."

Rufus laughed and began on the Chaloner again, and had got as far as a lieutenancy in the last reign before Cecily gave up and looked at Mr Loxley instead.

Mr Loxley had been her father's solicitor for nine years, and in that time the household had taught him several things. One of them was that Miss Frayne never stopped asking.

"Forty thousand pounds," he said.

Nothing in the room altered. The fire kept burning coal that had not been paid for, her father kept holding his glass, and out in the yard a boy dragged something metal across the cobbles and back again.

The sum was not merely large. It was the figure her grandfather had tied to her name ten years ago, in an instrument drawn so tightly that Rufus had been complaining ever since.

"Grandfather's money," Cecily said.

"Your settlement," Rufus said easily.

She waited, hands in her lap, until he set down the glass he was not drinking from and looked into the fire. From him that was as good as an admission.

Silas Marchbank had spun cotton in Manchester for forty years and had come south twice: once for his daughter's wedding and once for her funeral.

He approved of neither occasion. On the first he gave Maria eighteen thousand pounds and a piece of advice about solicitors, and Rufus spent the eighteen thousand in nine years without ever once doing anything that could fairly be called theft.

There had been a roof, then a season, and then an investment in a canal that was going to be the making of the county. A horse was also going to be the making of the investment.

Maria's fortune went out of the house by respectable increments. The last of it was the small property at Kelby with a garden in it, which her mother asked him not to sell in the only raised voice Cecily ever heard her use.

He sold it though, and Maria died in the October of the year after.

Silas came south the second time, stood at the graveside in a coat better than anybody expected and worse cut than anybody could forgive, and said eleven words to his son-in-law. Then he went home to Manchester and made his will again.

"The duke is aware of the source, I take it?" Cecily said.

"Of course he is aware."

"And he wishes to marry me notwithstanding?"

"My dear," her father said, spreading his hands with great good humour, "forty thousand pounds has never suffered from a want of admirers."

Mr Loxley looked at the fire.

Cecily let the line sit where it had fallen. She had heard her father say worse things about her mother's money and had never once heard him say a thing he thought unkind. He would have been easier to hate if he had ever meant it.

"When does he want an answer?" she asked.

"There is no want about it. He would be honoured to be received."

"His Grace has not yet said so," Mr Loxley said.

Rufus made a gesture that disposed of the objection. "He will."

Cecily looked past him. "Mr Loxley?"

The solicitor put his glass on the floor beside his chair, having no confidence in her father's tables.

"The matter has some urgency," he said.

"How much urgency?"

"The Havering obligation falls due at the Christmas quarter day. Notice was served in the spring. It will not be renewed."

"Three months," Cecily said.

"Rather less, once the settlement is drawn," Mr Loxley replied.

Her father had never in twenty-six years given her a date. He gave her seasons, intentions and the general direction of his hopes, and when the thing failed to happen, he was as surprised as anybody and rather more forgiving.

Mr Loxley had handed her a day of the year and a reason, but together they did more damage to her composure than all the acreage in Wiltshire.

"They call him the ruined duke," she said.

Her father made a small noise of distaste. "People will say anything at a card table."

"Then what do they mean by it?"

"Nothing that would bear repeating. He shut the east wing, he sold some pictures, he has not been seen in town in two years and he does not keep a pack. In this county that is enough to be going on with."

"And what do they think he ruined?"

"Himself, my dear. Cards, or a woman, or an Italian singer. It varies with the hostess." Rufus turned his glass. "Nobody has ever troubled to ask whether it might have been his father."

"Has he tried other houses?" she asked.

"Three, to my knowledge," Mr Loxley said.

She lifted her eyebrows at him and waited.

"All three declined," he said. "The terms his father accepted were drawn to make the paper difficult to move."

"Drawn by whom?"

Mr Loxley took his time over the question.

"That is not in my instructions," he said at last.

Rufus refilled the solicitor's glass and looked pleased with the room.

"You are making it sound like a ruin," he said. "It is a settlement. Settlements have terms. Every marriage in England is a set of terms, and the ones with affection in them are merely less honest about it."

"We owe Nash eleven pounds four," Cecily said.

Her father looked round. "What?"

"Coal. Since February. Bassett wants six for the glazing, Denton has been waiting since Easter for the wheelwright's account, and the girl who does the dairy has had no wages this quarter because I could not make the money do both.

" She squared the letters against the desk.

"I know what terms are because I respond. I write to them every week."

Her father waved his hand as though clearing smoke from in front of a picture.

"Which is precisely why you would be happier at Ferrers," he said. "The match answers on both sides."

"Both sides," Cecily said. She had turned fully round now. "What is yours?"

He picked up the glass again and found something in it to look at.

"Your grandfather's instrument is a long one, my dear. I have never pretended to follow every clause of it."

"Mr Loxley has," she said.

The solicitor did not look at her father before he answered, and she marked him up for it.

"Upon your marriage, with the trustees' consent, a provision of two thousand pounds becomes payable to Lord Frayne."

The boy in the yard stopped dragging his piece of metal, the fire settled in the grate, and both of Cecily's hands were flat on the desk before she had decided to put them there.

"My grandfather provided for my father?" she asked.

"Indeed, but with the trustees' consent," Mr Loxley said.

"Read me the clause."

"Miss Frayne, I hardly think…" he began, and stopped, because she had shaken her head.

"You need not," she said gently. "I have it."

She had the whole of it before he closed his mouth.

Silas Marchbank had not softened towards Rufus in the last year of his life.

He had sat in an office in Manchester with a man who spent his daughter's money by respectable increments, and had reckoned that such a man would obstruct any marriage which paid him nothing.

So, he had decided he would rather name the price himself than let his son-in-law invent one afterwards.

Her grandfather had bought her father's consent ten years in advance, had thought the price worth paying to be certain of it, and had been right.

"So, everybody is to be paid," she said.

"Do not be theatrical," Rufus said reprovingly.

"Except the bride."

Rufus sighed comfortably.

"The bride," he said, "becomes Duchess of Havering."

"Titles have never appeared on my list of necessities."

"A home has," her father said.

Cecily turned back to the writing table, because her hands wanted something to do and there was a glazier who needed telling about Michaelmas.

Her father had watched her long enough to see where her resilience was thin.