Chapter Eleven #2
The old man let his eyes fall shut. “Go down. There is much to be done, and you are the only one left to do it. I am told it is the hardest sentence I have ever passed upon you, and it is certainly the truest.”
Beatrice was waiting in the small parlour with a list, as Beatrice was always waiting somewhere with a list, and she put it into his hand before he had so much as sat.
“Eight names. Every one of them living, eligible, and able to be wedded inside two months by special licence, the whole of the span the creditors and your father between them will allow you. I have done the work you have been too proud and too lately bruised to do for yourself. You need only point at one.”
He read it. He read it as he read a column he meant to dispute, and he set it down upon the arm of the chair without pointing at anything on it.
“No.”
“No to which of them?”
Beatrice tilted her head a fraction. “It is not a difficult instrument. One points. The finger does the work the heart is too proud to.”
“No to the list entire. The names are sound. The hand is yours, and so the judgment behind them is sound also. I have no quarrel with one woman on it.” He returned it to her side of the table.
“I simply will not point, and I am aware that is not an answer, and I intend to give it to you regardless.”
She left the list where he had put it. She regarded him a long moment with the particular patience of a woman who has decided the hour for subtlety is past.
“Shall I be vulgar, then, since subtlety has done neither of us the slightest good?”
He almost laughed, and caught it before it could escape him. “You have never been anything other than vulgar when it suited you, and it has reliably suited you. Be vulgar. I find I prefer it to the list.”
“You require a wife with sense, with nerve, and no romantic illusions about the comfort of a half-ruined dukedom. If this is my roundabout way of naming Mrs. Trelawney, you will say it wants polish, and I will tell you I abandoned polish the afternoon you began staring at staircases down which she had recently walked. You need a wife the law and the creditors accept tomorrow. She needs a husband with rank enough to wrench her fortune from that snake Lucien, and no solicitor and no lawsuit will manage it inside three years. You each hold precisely what the other cannot otherwise obtain.”
“You think my trouble is that the logic fails.” He stayed on his feet.
“It does not fail. That is the whole of the difficulty. It is the soundest argument anyone has put to me in a year, and I have spent the year being handed sound arguments by men paid to make them. I distrust this one for a single reason. I want it to be true. The spare learns early not to trust a thing he wants this much, the wanting having always been the first step on the road to being disappointed of it.”
“That,” Beatrice said, “is the most honest thing you have ever said within my hearing. It is also the most foolish, and I am too old to sit out the years it will take you to outgrow the foolish half of it.” She rose, and gathered her list, and did not soften her voice as she went.
“Think on it tonight. The clock that solicitor keeps mentioning is not a thing of his invention, and it does not stop running because you have closed your eyes against the face of it.”
***
He found her that night in the steward’s room with the accounts, a single candle and the household ledger and her sleeves turned back to the elbow, and he came in meaning to say a thing about Renton, and stayed instead because she did not send him away.
“You should be asleep,” she said, without raising her eyes from the column. “It is past the hour at which even the conscientious become merely vain about their diligence.”
“You are doing Renton’s worrying for him, and he is paid interest for the privilege. You do it by candlelight for nothing, which makes you a saint or a poor woman of business, and I have not yet decided which.”
Her quill did not pause on the column. “Neither. I do it because the figures will not be untruthful to me, more than I can say of most of the company I have kept in my life. There is a peace in a column that adds to what it ought to. I should have made a passable clerk, had the world troubled to make clerks of women. It does not, so I make do with being trusted to hold the keys and never the quill, the arrangement the world prefers, and the one I gave up arguing with a long while ago.”
“I find the house too quiet to sleep in tonight. It has lost a man it never once had beneath its roof, which is a strange thing to be kept awake by, and yet here I stand, thoroughly kept, by a man I never managed to like and a grief I had not the wit to expect.”
She was quiet a moment, her quill still moving.
Then it stopped. “I entered the things from the north wing today. The clock, for mending. The horse.” Her voice did not alter, which was the surest sign the next of it cost her something.
“And the sampler. The one worked by the child whose name the damp had taken. I sat a foolish long while over it before I could bring myself to set a value beside a child her own house had contrived to forget.”
“You are thinking of a different child than the one who stitched the sampler.”
“I am nearly always thinking of a different child, my lord. It is the one extravagance I permit myself, and I permit it only at this hour, when the candle is low and there is no one awake to catch me being unreasonable about it.” She set the pen down.
“I wanted them. Badly, and long past the point where the wanting was either sensible or kind to me. It is a foolish grief, perhaps. To mourn a thing one never had.”
“No. It is not foolish.” He stood at the edge of the candlelight, where the edge of the candlelight kept the rest of him.
“One may grieve a house one was never given the keys to. I have done it most of my life. I grieved a warmth that was forever in the next room, behind a door I had been told was not mine, and I called the grieving foolish, and it was not. The thing you never had leaves the same hole exactly as the thing you lost. The world simply declines to let you raise a stone over it, and so you carry it about unmarked, and it weighs the more for having no name.”
She turned to him then, across the small light, and a thing passed between two people who had each spent a lifetime being informed that their particular grief did not signify, and neither of them put a name to it, because the naming would have asked one of them to be braver than the hour was prepared to allow.
She took the quill up again, for the quill was the one thing that would carry her past a moment she had no other way through. “You have much to decide, I think, in the little while ahead of you. It is gathering about you already, like weather coming up the valley.”
“I have decided the most of it already. I am only waiting to discover whether I am permitted to want the thing I have decided. It is a different question, and a newer one, and I have had no practice at it whatsoever.”
“Wanting is not a thing one practises, my lord. It is a thing one survives, when one is fortunate, and buries quietly when one is not. I am told the trick is to be sure which of the two you are doing before you begin, because they look identical from the outside, and only the one of them lets you sleep at night.”
He went up. Sleep stayed well clear of him. And in the morning, before the household was rightly awake, Wells brought him a second letter, and this one had not crossed any sea. It had come nine miles, from a market town, in the hand of a solicitor who was not Fenwick and wrote a colder line.
Lucien Trelawney gave formal notice of his intention to contest the late Sir Malcolm’s provision for his widow, on grounds the letter set out in patient and unhurried detail, unless the widow returned within the quarter to the protection and the roof of her late husband’s family, where a woman in her reduced situation properly belonged.
The threat had been a letter for a year. It was a writ now. Declan stood with the cold paper in his hand and understood that the thing he had spent a month refusing on the single ground that he wanted it too much had, overnight, stopped being a thing he had the luxury of refusing at all.