Chapter Three
"He has brought no valet," her father said, and let the curtain fall back against the glass. "A duke, coming twelve miles for a morning call, with one man on the box and nobody behind."
"Perhaps he did not think he would need dressing between here and Wiltshire."
"It will be remarked on."
"By whom?" Cecily said.
Rufus did not answer that, because the honest answer was by him, and he had already done it.
The drawing room had been ready for him two days before.
The good chairs had come out of the parlour, the fire had been lit three hours before it was wanted, and there was a decanter of the madeira her father kept for people he wished to impress, bought in June on an account that was still open at Grantham.
Mr Loxley had come over with his papers that morning and sat at the writing table under the window with his case open.
Cecily had priced the morning before she came downstairs, and kept the figure to herself, because there was no version of saying it that would have altered anything.
She stayed where she was at the end of the sofa with her hands in her lap.
She had spent four days assembling the man who was about to come through the door, and she had built him out of the only materials she had.
He would be handsome, because they generally were.
He would be charming about the money, because charm was what a man reached for when he had nothing else to offer.
He would call it a settlement and never once call it a debt, and he would find some way of implying that she was fortunate.
From the window she had seen the carriage come round the last of the lime trees. It was a good carriage and had been one for a long time, and the man on the box got down and held the horses himself because there was nobody else to do it.
The door opened, the butler announced him, and the man she had built came apart before the real one had crossed the carpet.
He was tall enough to have to think about the doorway, black-haired, with a long face.
Nothing about him was shabby. His coat was black and very well cut and had been brushed that morning by somebody who cared about it.
The cuff of his left sleeve had been turned and reworked, and it had been done so well that she only saw it because she had been mending her father's cuffs herself since she was nineteen.
Nothing on him was new, but nothing was worn either. It had cost somebody trouble to arrive at that.
"Miss Frayne." He bowed to her first, and to her father afterwards, and the order of it was not lost on anybody in the room.
"Your Grace," she said, from the sofa.
His eyes were dark, near enough to black in a room with one window, and they went over her once, and no part of that was what she had prepared for. Most men looked at her twice, briefly, and then addressed her father.
Her father had already begun.
Rufus spoke for some minutes and was good at it, in the way he was good at everything that required no follow-through.
He gave them Ferrers, the chapel, the fourth duchess, and the general sense that two ancient interests had been united through the straightforward application of good sense.
He used the word settlement four times and the word arrangement twice.
He did not use any other word that had a figure behind it.
The Duke stood by the mantelpiece and let him do it. He answered when he was applied to, and somewhere in the middle of it he put out one hand and moved the card tray a half inch until its edge ran true with the edge of the mantel.
"And I have always held," Rufus was saying, "that where there is a real community of interest, the rest follows more easily than people suppose."
"You require my money," Cecily said.
"Cecily." Her father's hand came down on the arm of his chair.
The Duke turned his head towards her.
"Yes," he said.
She had a second question prepared, but had to search for it, as the first had been designed to withstand resistance and had not been overcome.
"How much?"
"Forty thousand pounds." He did not look towards her father while he said the figure.
"All of it?" she asked.
"Yes," he said plainly.
"And the debt is your own?"
"No." He did not hurry to the next part, and the pause before he filled it was long enough for her to hear the clock. "My father's."
Rufus moved his hand. "These details need not trouble Miss Frayne."
Neither of them looked at him.
"My fortune does not belong to my father," Cecily said.
"I know," the Duke replied.
"It does not become yours when I marry."
He nodded once. "I know that as well."
She sat forward a little. "What were you told?"
"That your grandfather tied the capital, that your father cannot reach it, and that its use would depend upon the terms of a settlement."
"Who told you so?"
"My agent, who had it from Mr Loxley, who I understand would not answer him at all until he had put the questions in writing."
That was true, but she had not known it, and her father had gone rather still on the other side of the hearth.
"And what do you expect those terms to be?" she said.
"That is for you and your trustees to decide."
Mr Loxley looked up from the writing table for the first time since the Duke had come in.
"Your Grace understands that the trustees will require the capital to be applied directly. It would not pass through your hands, nor through Lord Frayne's."
"I should think less of them if they permitted anything else."
"And that they will want the application recited in the deed, with the sum and the payee named."
"Name them," the duke said. "Name the date as well."
Mr Loxley wrote something down, with his shoulder turned very slightly towards Rufus.
He had said you and your trustees, and had said it to her rather than across her.
Cecily put that beside the card tray and left it there.
"What is it secured on?" she said.
"Not the house. My father knew what the house was worth." He said that without any expression. "The land that carries the rents. Bramshaw, the river side, Chalke Coombe, four farms at Netherton and the strips beyond the mill."
"And tenanted?"
"Every acre," he said.
"How many households?"
"Four hundred and eleven." He gave the number the way another man might have given his own age.
She had been ready for an approximation, and for the ordinary vagueness of men who own a great deal and count none of it.
"Are you certain of the number?"
"My agent counted them by name," he said. "I did not ask him to."
Cecily folded her hands in her lap.
"When would the money be wanted?" she said.
"By the twenty-fifth of December."
"And if it is not there?"
"Then the estate is broken up over the following year, and I am the Duke who lost it."
He said it as Mr Loxley said figures, with no appeal anywhere in it and no invitation to comfort him.
She had heard a version of this conversation before, at second hand, from a woman ten years dead.
Her mother had been asked for eighteen thousand pounds by a man who explained that it was not really being asked for, that it was a joining of two interests, that a settlement is not a price.
No figure had been said aloud in that room, and it had taken nine years to find out what it had been.
This man had given her the figure at the second question, and nothing had been taken off it for her comfort.
It was not the same thing as being safe. It might only be a better grade of the same thing, though sitting there she could not have said where the difference lay, and she had to be still for a little and reorganise herself around it.
Rufus, who could not bear a silence with money in it, began to say something about the tenantry.
"I should like to see your accounts," Cecily said.
The clock went on, and her father's face performed several things in succession and settled on embarrassment. Mr Loxley, who had not spoken since the deed, became extremely interested in the third page of his own papers.
"My dear, that is not a thing that can be asked," Rufus said hastily.
"I have asked it," she said flatly, with her eyes on the Duke.
The Duke's expression remained almost unchanged; however, a subtle tightening of his jaw and lips betrayed his internal tension. He cast a glance at the wall behind her head before meeting her gaze once more.
He disliked it very much. Cecily watched him dislike it and thought, with something that was not quite relief, that here at last was the ordinary place where it would stop, where pride would come up under the money the way rock comes up under a spade.
"Of course," he said, and took his hand off the mantelpiece.
Rufus turned in his chair.
"You ought to know what you are being asked to pay for," the Duke said to her.
She had prepared for charm and for offended dignity, with a reply ready for each, but neither was any use to her now.
"The whole of them," she said. "Not a statement. The books."
"Sowerby will have them out on the table when you come. He would rather you had them than not."
"Would he?" she said.
"He has been the only man in England allowed to look at them for two years," the Duke said. "I do not think he has enjoyed it."
"Then I may come to Ferrers."
He hesitated, briefly and unmistakably, but she could not tell which part of the request was doing the costing.
"Yes," he said. "You may."
"I will not decide upon a drawing room conversation."
"I would not ask you to."
Rufus was recovering himself and had begun to arrange the visit aloud, dates, roads and whether the Lambourn horses could be spared, and the duke answered him civilly but looked no happier for it.
"You will stay to dinner," Rufus said. It was not a question, and her father had been planning the dinner all week.
"Thank you. I am expected back tonight."
"Twelve miles at this hour?"
"Twenty-two, from here," the Duke said. "My sister sits up."
"How old is your sister?" Cecily asked him.
"Nineteen." Something went across his face and was gone before she could read it.
"Does she know what is being arranged?"
He did not answer at once. "She knows a great deal of it. Not all."
"Which part have you kept from her?"
"The part where it does not answer," he said, and took his hat from the table.
At the door Cecily asked the last thing.
"If I refuse?"
He turned the hat once in his hands.
"Then you refuse," he said steadily.
"No persuasion?"
"Your father appears to have that covered."
Rufus made a sound of protest that nobody attended to, and Cecily came near to smiling but stopped short.
Then he was gone, and the carriage went down the drive with one man on the box and nobody behind, and her father came away from the window looking as though something had been done to him personally.
"You might have destroyed the whole thing," he said.
"Then it was not worth much," Cecily said, and began putting the good chairs back where they belonged.
"You asked the Duke of Havering, in my house, to open his books to you like a corn factor."
"He said yes," she said, and lifted the second chair.
"He said yes because he is desperate," Rufus said, but then he realised what he had said, and it was the only moment in years that Cecily had watched him wish a sentence back.
"I know he is desperate," she said. "That is why I asked."
"It was humiliating, my dear," Rufus said plaintively.
"If the truth humiliates him, I had better know it before I marry him rather than after."
Mr Loxley gathered his papers into their case and fastened both straps.
"Miss Frayne. You will want an opinion."
"I want yours," she said.
"I have acted against a good many men in difficulty," he said. "Most of them explain. Some of them weep. Two have offered me money. That one answered nine questions as they were put to him and did not put a single one of them back to you."
"Is that a recommendation?"
"It is an observation. I am not paid for recommendations." He put on his hat. "But I have never in my professional life seen a man agree to open his books to a woman who had not yet agreed to marry him, and I have been at it twenty-nine years."
She went out before her father could recover, and got as far as the second landing before she stopped with her hand on the rail.
He had been humiliated, and that part was not in question. She had watched it go through him, and had watched him decline to spend any of it on her.
What she could not place was the shape of it.
A man ashamed of his figures did not hand them over, did not say that his agent would rather she had them, and did not stand in another man's drawing room and give the quarter day in a flat voice with no word of how little of it was his doing.
He had not defended his father once, but he had not blamed him either.
She stood there long enough that the housemaid coming up with the coal had to go round her.
***
At dinner, which her father ate with the appetite of a man who had been ill-used, it was settled that they would go into Wiltshire in the second week of October and stay four days.
Mrs Ollerton would come with them, because Mrs Ollerton was a widow of fifty-one, was the relict of her grandfather's junior partner, and was the only woman within reach whose presence her father could not object to and whose good opinion Cecily wanted.
"She will bring her Manchester manners into a ducal house," Rufus said gloomily.
"She will bring her spectacles and read the leases."
"That is not kind, my dear," Rufus said reproachfully.
"You may have her manners, or you may have my agreement," she said, and served him the fish.
In her own room afterwards, she wrote to Mr Loxley.
I have three questions, and I should like them answered plainly, and separately from my father: Whether a wife may hold written authority over the accounts of her husband's estate.
Whether such authority can be made to run for a fixed term of years and be enforceable by my trustees rather than by my goodwill.
And whether it has been done before, or whether I am the first woman to think of it.
She read it over, sanded it, sealed it, and rang for it to go by the morning post.
Then she sat with both palms on the blotter. She had come downstairs that morning intending to look at a man, and had spent the last hour looking instead at a document nobody had yet shown her, and the difference between those two things was going to cost her something before Christmas.
The tin was still in the travelling case, packed and waiting, where it had been since she came down, and she did not take it out now.
Her mother had gone into her marriage without a single line of writing that was hers. Everything had been drawn between the two men and their two firms, and Maria had signed where she was shown, and had been content, because it had all been explained to her by people who loved her.
Whatever else happened in Wiltshire, Cecily intended to arrive with her own questions already answered.