Chapter Five #3
Her father had talked for as long as she could remember about her mother's fortune as though the wedding had settled the question of whose it was.
Not once, in all that time, in any room, had anybody asked whether Maria minded.
This man wanted forty thousand pounds by Christmas, or he lost four hundred and eleven households, and he had stopped the entire proceeding to establish that two thousand was not being quietly diverted to a man he had met once.
She wrote the conditions herself, at the window side of the table, in her own hand, while the men waited, her father having found his way in behind Loxley and taken the end of the table.
First: The mortgage upon the Ferrers estate to be discharged in full, and the discharge to be a matter of public record and not a private accommodation.
Second: The formal discharge, when obtained, to be shown to me.
Third: Every debt subsisting against the estate or against the Duke of Havering personally to be declared in writing before the marriage.
Fourth: No borrowing hereafter upon the security of my protected capital without my consent in writing.
Fifth: No part of my separate estate, being the three thousand pounds and the pin money, to be pledged, charged, lent or applied to Ferrers or to any Chaloner purpose, save by my own hand in writing upon each occasion.
Sixth: The accounts of the Ferrers estate to be under my written authority for three years from the date of the marriage.
The room stayed quiet while she wrote, and when she looked up once, at the end of the fourth, all three of them were watching her write. She read the conditions out, and nobody interrupted her.
"The first," Rufus said comfortably, from the end of the table where nobody had invited him to sit. "Public record. That is theatre, my dear, and these things are done quietly. They always have been."
"That is precisely why I will not have it done quietly."
"You will be talked of for a twelvemonth. I shall be talked of with you, which you may not have considered."
"I shall be talked of in any case. I would rather be talked of accurately. If I am buying a house I will do it in daylight, and the county may say what it likes about the price."
Piers had let the first, the second, and the third go by.
Loxley put his finger on the sixth.
"This one has a difficulty, and it had better be said in front of everybody. A married woman cannot enforce a promise made to her by her husband. If His Grace covenants with you and breaks it, you cannot sue him. You are the same person at law."
"Then it is drawn between him and my trustees," Cecily said, while Loxley was still looking up from the page.
"I have thought about it since September.
The covenant is given to the trustees. They can sue in their own names because I cannot sue in mine.
And the deed is made a condition of the release, so that not one shilling of the forty thousand moves until it is executed. "
"That would do it," Loxley said slowly. "That would do it entirely."
"Then draw it that way."
Piers had been listening with his hands flat on the table.
"Do you understand what you have just described?" he asked.
"I have described a deed."
"You have described three Manchester men with power to take the Duke of Havering into Chancery over the cost of a roof."
Cecily did not blink. "Yes."
"Say the rest of it."
She set down her pen. "I will not put forty thousand pounds into a house and then be told that its finances are none of my concern."
"You will not be."
"You are giving your wife control of the accounts of a ducal estate."
"For three years," he said.
"As though that makes it ordinary."
"It does not," Piers said.
"Then why?"
"Because you are paying its debts." He met her eyes across the table to do it.
It was not a romantic answer. She turned it over twice but could not find anything wrong with it, and she had been finding things wrong with men's answers since she was seventeen.
"You do understand what people will say," she said. "That I bought Ferrers."
"I do."
"That I bought you."
His face did something she had not seen it do before, and it was not offence.
"Yes," he said.
Cecily waited, and let the waiting go on past the point where a comfortable man would have filled it.
"The least I can give you," Piers said, "is the truth of what you are buying."
The word went into her like a splinter, and she did not trouble to hide it.
He saw her dislike it, but neither of them repaired the sentence.
Sowerby began stacking the vouchers into their linen tape, and he had the ink and the sand ready before Loxley finished reading the engrossment aloud.
He had plainly expected this outcome since the middle of the day and had kept it to himself.
Piers signed the terms at half past three without disputing one of them.
Cecily looked at his signature. It was smaller than she had expected and entirely plain, with no flourish under it.
"You have not argued a single condition."
"They are sensible."
"You might at least pretend that this does not wound your pride."
"I see no advantage in lying to you this late in the conversation," Piers said.
She came close to smiling, and this time she let a little of it go.
Then she took the pen from him and signed under his name. Her hand was steadier than his had been, and she put that away with the rest.
Mrs Tregarth came in as the light went, to see whether the room was wanted any longer. She looked at the two signatures on the engrossment, then at Cecily, and went out again without saying one word on the subject.
Cecily sat on afterwards in the cold room while Sowerby carried the boxes out two at a time.
Her fortune released on marriage. That was the whole difficulty and always had been. It released to anybody, on any wedding day, to a solvent man as readily as to a ruined one.
Her father had not stolen a shilling. He had simply had a reason every time.
Marrying a ruined man meant the money went out in one payment, on one named day, to one named creditor, for one purpose recited in a deed. Then it was gone and could never be reached again by anybody, including her husband, including her father, including her.
She was not buying a title. She was buying the impossibility of a slow leak, and she had been working towards that purchase, without a name for it, since the spring the Kelby garden was sold.
There was a cost, and she had counted it before she picked up the pen.
She would be a woman who had bought a duke, and the county would say so, and she would have to endure it for as long as she lived in Wiltshire.
Her mother had been talked of in the same county for the same reason and had never once answered any of it.
At least, that was how Cecily had put it to herself all week, and sitting here with the ink not yet dry on her name, she was less sure that the saying would be so easy to live with.
But he was not her father, and Cecily had decided that the difference was worth forty thousand pounds.