Chapter Fourteen
“I have asked you to the library to put a proposal to you, and I am going to do it badly, so I would be obliged if you would let me reach the end of it before you decide precisely how badly.”
“That is the most honest opening you have ever given me, my lord.” Renae folded her hands at the edge of the long table, as she folded them for the accounts. “Proceed. I shall hold my verdict until the summing-up, as one does at a trial.”
“You are very calm. I had half hoped to find you nervous, so that I might have company in the condition.”
“I am the calmest I have been in a fortnight, my lord, because for once I can see the whole of the board, and a clear board is a restful thing even when the game laid out upon it is one you would never have chosen to play. You may proceed.”
He had written nothing down, for him the equivalent of walking into a duel unarmed, and since he had to begin somewhere, he began where it was safest, at the foot of the column.
“You should wed me. I will give you the reasons, because the reasons are sound, and you are a woman who respects a sound reason far more than a pretty one.” He set the first down between them like a coin laid on baize.
“It protects your reputation. A housekeeper suspected of being kept becomes, overnight, a wife above suspicion, and the lane discovers it has nothing left to tattle about. The talk starves and perishes by the second Sunday, and no lawyer need lift a finger to destroy it.”
“That is one, and it is the reason a stranger would lead with, and it tells me you have arranged these in the order you would lay accounts before a board of governors. You may go on, my lord. The court is attending, and the court has the whole of the evening before it.”
“I have arranged them in the order of their strength, which is the only order I have ever trusted. Sentiment would have me lead with the weakest and name it the most important, and I have never found sentiment to be a reliable bookkeeper.” He set down the second coin beside the first. “It gives me standing to force the trust where you cannot. Your own suit would take three years you have no means to fund, and your cousin is counting on precisely those three years to grind you back into his keeping.” “A duke’s heir, with a duke’s solicitors and a duke’s patience, brings Lucien to terms inside a single season.
He cannot outspend what he cannot outlast, and I can outlast him.
He has built his whole campaign on your having no one behind you.
I propose to be that someone behind you, and to be an expense far exceeding his estimations. ”
“That is two, though I suspect you are about to tell me it is also three.”
“My name leaves you beyond reproach. My money outlasts his delay. You are right, it is the same blow struck twice, which I prefer to call thorough rather than repetitive. You count efficiency a virtue even in the listing of reasons to wed you. I am beginning to make out the shape of the husband I am acquiring, my lord, and the shape is a column that adds correctly and a man who lives in quiet dread of the morning it will not.”
“That is the most accurate thing anyone has said of me in twenty years, and you arrived at it inside a quarter of an hour.” A breath, and the next coin came down harder.
“It satisfies my father’s condition. The settlement releases the entailed funds to the heir upon his matrimony, and those funds are the only wall standing between Carrington and a winter the house does not survive.
You would be saving it, in the strictest legal sense, by the simple act of entering into a matrimony with the man who cannot save it alone. ”
“So I am to be the key that turns your father’s lock. That is a heavy weight to hang upon a woman the county is at present calling something rather coarser than wife. You have a rare gift, my lord, or delivering a rescue as though you were settling an account.”
His mouth did not change. “I am perfectly aware of how it sounds. I have no other register to offer you. If I owned a prettier one I would have reached for it years ago and spared us both the present scene.”
She held still, her hands folded where she had set them. “And the fifth.”
“The fifth is the only one I am almost ashamed to offer, because it is the one that profits you least and me most to name.” This one he kept in his hand rather than laying it down.
“It lets you keep the household you rebuilt with your own two hands. You do not leave the work. You do it as its mistress, with no one set above you, ever again, to make you account for the burning of a single candle. There is a sixth, but the sixth is only the first five turned to a kinder light, so I will spare you the indignity of watching me dress it up.”
She was quiet a moment, and the quiet was not the quiet of a woman weighing the coins he had laid out. It was the quiet of a woman counting them a second time to find the one that was missing.
“You have assembled a remarkably thorough catalogue of advantages, my lord.”
“It is a sensible arrangement. I have tried to leave nothing out.”
“You have left a good deal out, though I grant the ledger is immaculate.” Her voice never lifted, and the level of it was worse than any reproach he had braced himself to weather. “How fortunate for me. I have dreamed all my life of being someone’s sound decision.”
The blow landed clean, as her blows always did, in the soft place under the figures where he stored the place where the figures had been built to bury.
“May I ask you something, my lord, and be given the honesty you are about to promise me in the settlement?”
He set his hands flat on the table, as he steadied himself over a column that would not balance. “You may ask. I cannot promise the answer will be one either of us takes pleasure in.”
“Of your six reasons, was there one you placed last because it was the weakest, or one you left off the list altogether because it was the only one that was actually yours?”
“The reasons I have given you are the reasons that hold up in a solicitor’s office, a creditor’s counting-house, and your cousin’s court of last resort. They are the load-bearing ones. A man builds with the timber that carries weight, not with the timber he happens to find handsome.”
She received that without the smallest surprise. “That is a very long way of declining to answer a short question, and I shall take the length of it for the answer, since you have left me nothing shorter to carry away.”
He had a defence ready then, because he always kept a defence ready, and he heard himself reach past every good one for the very worst in the drawer.
“You need not fear that I would ever make demands of you. Of that kind. Affection, I mean. I would not ask it of you, now or at any time after. You would be wholly free of that particular obligation.” He pressed on, because stopping had become impossible.
“I thought it might reassure you to hear me say so plainly.”
“It does not reassure me. It does the very opposite, and you have managed it so neatly that I almost admire the aim.” She turned from the table at last and met his eyes directly, a thing she did rarely, and never once without it costing her something.
“Affection is not demanded, my lord. There is your whole error, set out in a single sentence, and you did not even notice yourself commit it. Affection is not a tax to be levied or graciously waived. It is offered. The offering is rather the entire point of the arrangement, and you have just stood in your own library and promised me, as though it were a kindness, to withhold the one part of a matrimony that might have made it worth more than the paper it is printed on.”
“I cannot offer what I was never taught to carry. You are asking a man born without the sense of smell to walk you through a garden and name the roses.”
“I am asking nothing of you, my lord, and that is the part you persist in failing to hear. No demand of mine has been set upon the table at all. I have only declined to thank you for promising to bolt the one door in the house that was worth the walking through. Bolt it, if you must. Only do not name the bolting a gift, and do not look surprised when I decline to thank you for the draught that comes under it.”
He had no answer to that. He had built an entire life out of always having the answer, and he stood now in the rubble of the practice and found the shelves bare.
“We need not solve it tonight, my lord. Perhaps we need not solve it at all. Many a matrimonies run the whole of their strengths on far less than we already hold between us, which is a working partnership and a mutual respect for competence, and I have watched worse foundations than that hold up far worse houses than this one.”
He turned the words over, suspicious of them, as a man turns over a coin he expects to find clipped. “You are releasing me.”
“I am releasing us both which is not at all the same thing, and is more than you have earned after the remark about the garden.” She straightened the cuff of her sleeve.
“Now I will set my terms,” she said, “because I have been wedded once already to a man who mistook me for a piece of furniture, and I spent nine years and a long silence learning the difference between a wife and a chair. I do not intend to unlearn it on your account, however immaculate the ledger you keep.”
“Set them. I would far rather have your terms than that expression you are presently wearing.”
“The expression is the terms, my lord, set down on the only paper I had to hand. Read it and you will scarcely need me to recite them, but recite them I shall, because I have learned that a man holds a thing better in his memory once it has cost him the discomfort of hearing it spoken aloud.”