Chapter One #2
"You cannot mean to live with me the whole of your life," he said, more gently. "Nor to go from my house to your cousin's at Wantage and be useful to a woman who will never ask your opinion of anything but the fish."
"No," Cecily said, to the glazier's letter.
"Then what is your plan? I have never once heard it."
It was a fair question, and she disliked how fair it was. She had forty thousand waiting ten years for a signature, a room at the back of a house that would belong to her cousin the day her father died, and nowhere in England she could shut a door in.
"Havering's debt would be discharged entirely," Rufus said. "The estate saved. Four hundred families left where they are. You would have rank, security and a house of that size to be mistress of. I cannot think what more a father is expected to arrange."
He believed every word. He had made the identical argument to a Manchester spinner thirty years ago concerning a girl called Maria, and had believed that one too. He had gone on believing it through eighteen thousand pounds, a sold garden and a wife who stopped speaking at meals.
"Does he wish to marry me," Cecily asked, "or does he wish to marry forty thousand pounds?"
Her father laughed, and there was nothing cruel anywhere in it.
"I doubt the distinction has yet troubled him."
Mr Loxley shifted in his chair.
"There is no want of applications for a duchess," Rufus said, recovering himself. "I merely happen to think this one honest."
"You have not met him."
"I have had his agent's letter, and I have seen the figures." He turned his glass by the stem. "And I will tell you what I have never been able to say about any other man in this county. He did not once try to make them look better than they are."
Cecily wrote Michaelmas at the foot of the glazier's letter and underlined it and her hand was steadier than she had expected.
"I will meet him," she said.
"My dear," Rufus said warmly.
"That is not an agreement. I will meet him, and I will look at what he owes, and then I will tell you."
"One does not ask a duke for his accounts," Rufus said plaintively.
"Then he may refuse."
Her father began to explain how these things were done. Cecily gathered her letters, and Mr Loxley rose with the promptness of a man who had been waiting an hour to leave a warm room.
At the door the solicitor stopped.
"Miss Frayne. The trustees will require a written request under your own hand before anything is drawn. Nothing moves without it."
"I know," she said.
"I am aware that you know," he said. "I wished it to be said in front of your father."
He carefully slipped on his gloves, one finger at a time, as if weighing a decision.
"There is one further matter," he said. "The duke's agent wrote to me directly two days ago. Before anything else, before the sum, the date or the security, and he asked two questions."
"Which were?"
"Whether the forty thousand is yours absolutely, and whether any part of it passes to Lord Frayne."
Cecily set the letters down.
"And you answered him?" she asked.
"That it is, and that none of it does. He wrote back the same day to say that his principal would not proceed on any other footing." Mr Loxley took up his hat. "I have drawn forty marriage settlements. Nobody has asked me that first."
"What did you make of it?"
"I have not made anything of it yet," he said carefully. "I thought you had better have it before you meet him."
He bowed and went out. Rufus watched him go with mild affection and observed to the room that Loxley was an excellent man who had never understood the difference between a rule and a person. Then he went to see about the horses, there being a mare at Lambourn he had been meaning to look at.
Cecily stayed in the study.
The fire had dwindled to a point where it seemed poised either to consume the coal or to die out on its own. She chose to let it be, standing quietly at the window with letters still clutched in her hand.
There were nine servants at Frayne House, and there had been nineteen when her mother came to it.
The kitchen worked to a book Cecily had begun keeping at seventeen after the cook gave notice over a quarter's wages that had gone to a horse.
Her father had never asked to see that book.
He praised the dinners, and praised her to visitors as a great manager, but had no more idea of what managing cost than of the price of coal.
Somewhere towards the stables her father was being charming to a groom.
Forty thousand, and fourteen weeks less the drawing of a settlement, and a man in Wiltshire she had never seen, with an old name, a dead father and a house that ate money. Four hundred families would be told to move on if she said no but something better arrived too late.
She opened the second drawer of the writing table.
The seed tin sat where it had sat since they came to this house. It was japanned in black, with a spray of yellow flowers on the lid rubbed nearly to nothing along one side, and it was the only thing of her mother's that Rufus had never thought worth selling, because it was worth ninepence.
Maria Marchbank had entered the garden at Kelby in the last September before it was sold, diligently gathering seeds as she always did, and storing them away in preparation for the spring to come, when the house would belong to them.
However, no house had yet been built. Instead, there had been three different sets of lodgings, accompanied by much discussion about the canal.
Cecily was sixteen when her mother died, and the tin came to her. She had carried it through four removals and ten years without once opening it, and could not have said whether she was keeping it or refusing it.
She turned it over in her hands. The lid was still tight, the hinge had a little rust on it, and something inside shifted when she tilted it.
Her mother had money, a husband, a title to be addressed by, and a settlement drawn by two firms of solicitors who both went on to prosper. What her mother never had was one square foot of England that Rufus could not sell without asking her.
Cecily went upstairs, took the travelling case down from the top of the press, and put the tin in the bottom of it beneath her stockings.
If she was going into Wiltshire to look at a man who wanted forty thousand pounds, Maria could come and look at him too.
She was calm about it, or near enough to pass.
She had already worked out what she would find at the other end, after twenty-six years in a house with one of them, and the only question was whether this one would be charming about it or ashamed.
At least, that was what she told herself on the stairs.
Then she sat down on the edge of the bed thinking that a man who wanted the money badly enough to be refused by three houses had spent his first letter asking whether any of it would reach her father.
It was not a question her own father would have thought to ask, and she doubted he would have understood it if somebody had asked it of him.