Chapter Five #2
“Then I shall learn the shape of the wall, and where the mortar in it has gone soft. I have spent nine years studying the weak mortar of worse walls than my cousin.” Her voice stayed level through the whole of it.
“I am not afraid of a long road, my lord. I am afraid of reaching the end of a short one and finding I have paid the whole fare with the one thing I set out to keep.”
“And what is that? The thing you set out to keep.”
She took up her pen off the table, though there was nothing left on it to write.
“Myself. It is a small estate, my lord, and much mortgaged, and the roof leaks in three places I could name you. But it is the only one the law left standing in my name, and I do not mean to sign it over to a kinder landlord merely because the last one let it fall to ruin.”
He had no reply that was not an argument, and found he had no wish to win it even so. He respected her the more for the refusing of him. It was an inconvenient thing to find in himself an hour after a man like Lucien had walked out counting his colour like coin.
***
His aunt arrived that same afternoon without warning and with luggage enough for a siege. The luggage was her chosen manner of apologising in advance for her opinions.
Lady Beatrice came through the door drawing off her travelling gloves and taking a full inventory of the hall in one unhurried sweep, the water stains, and the bare hooks where the pictures had hung, the small starved fires.
She kissed her nephew’s cheek, held him off at both arms to read his face, and then put her attention past his shoulder onto the woman with the keys at her waist who had come down to see the boxes in, and held it there longer by far than a household ring could account for.
“Well,” said Beatrice.
“Aunt.”
“You have a housekeeper.” The remark was for Declan, but her eyes had not left Renae.
“I have a great many, by reputation. This one stays.”
“I can see that this one stays.” She drew off the second glove and held the pair out into the air at her side, not looking, the small idle test that great ladies set without minding they have set it.
Renae took the gloves, passed them to a hovering maid, and went on about the boxes, and Beatrice’s brow lifted a clean quarter-inch at the correctness of it.
She waited until Renae had gone up to see the rooms aired, and then she sat herself down in the cold drawing room uninvited and patted the cushion at her side until Declan came and took it like a boy half his present size.
“Her cousin was here this morning,” he said, because she would have it out of him by supper regardless. “He means to wed her for a fortune he has frozen, and he went away promising to make a scandal of her staying under my roof.”
“Then the man has handed you your honest reason on a salver, and you are either too proud or too frightened to put out your hand and take it.” Beatrice set her own hand over his on the arm of the settee.
“A man who shields a woman from ruin by entering into a matrimony with her is doing a decent thing, Declan, and not a weak one. The weakness is wanting to, and dressing the want up as bookkeeping so that no one may catch you at the indignity of having a heart.”
“Do not look at her as though she were a locked door, Declan.”
“I was not aware I had looked at her in any particular way.”
“No. That is exactly the trouble with you.” Her thumb moved over his knuckles and stopped.
“You have always been far too fond of keys, ever since you were a small boy and your brother had the run of every room in this house and you had only the few you could let yourself into. A locked thing was the one thing you ever trusted, because a locked thing cannot rise up and leave you. That woman is not a door, and she is not a sum, and she is most certainly not a thing you may keep merely by declining to open her. If you mean to keep her near you, find an honest reason and say it where she can hear it. Take her as your wife, pay her properly and leave her be, or send her off with a good character. But choose the thing in daylight and call it by its right name, because the dishonest reasons, the ones a man keeps half-built in the dark and visits when he is certain no one is watching, will cost the two of you far more than this house has left to spend.”
“And if the reason were only a sum to be settled. The entail, her cousin, the house, all of it solved in one signature.”
Beatrice regarded him with something that fell a little short of pity.
“Then say as much to her on the day you ask, and she will refuse you where you stand, and she will be entirely right to. A woman sold once for a roof does not sell herself a second time for a tidy set of accounts, however neatly a man keeps them.”
“You assume I mean to ask her anything whatever.”
She gave a short laugh with no great humor in it. “I assume nothing, Declan. I observe. You would call the two the same, and she would not, and that is rather the heart of why I like her already.”
“You have decided a remarkable quantity about a woman you met four minutes since in a hall.”
“I decided it about you in far less, and you I have studied forty years.” She took her hand back and used it to lever herself up, and the matter was closed because she had closed it.
“Now go and tell your failing cook to raise a dinner out of something, because the house may be expiring but I am not, and I have come a very long way to watch you play the part of a simpleton, and I should by far prefer to do it on a full stomach.”
He sat on alone in the cold drawing room after she had gone up, and he turned the thing over once, exactly as she had dared him not to.
It came down to a sum in the end, and a sum was the single language in which no one had ever yet been dishonest with him.
A wife unfroze the entail and saved the house.
Entering into a matrimony with a woman of his own choosing set her past the reach of the one Lucien had chosen for her.
The woman already beneath his roof, already running it better than it had run in a decade, already owed a freedom by the very man Declan would have paid handsomely to ruin, and settled the funds and the line and her danger in the single stroke of a single signature.
He could see the whole of it laid out before him, clean as a column ruled in her own hand.
He refused it.
Not because the figures failed to balance.
Because they balanced far too well, and a thing he wanted that also balanced was precisely the kind of thing he had taught himself never to trust, having learned, small and early, that the rooms a boy is freely let into are the ones with nothing inside them worth the locking.
He folded the sum up with care and put it away in the drawer with the other things he kept and did not use, and he told himself, in the flat voice he kept for the truths he meant to hold to, that he would not be taking it out again.
He took it out again before the candle had gone cold.