Chapter Seventeen
“You have added that column twice and arrived at two different men’s fortunes.” Renae did not lift her eyes from her own page. “I begin to suspect the famous Greene head for figures was a story the family put about to frighten its creditors into keeping their distance.”
“The famous Greene head for figures is in excellent working order. It is merely sitting across a small table from a distraction it did not budget for, and the distraction will keep turning the pages of her ledger in a manner I find I cannot train myself to ignore.”
“Then train yourself to add. The two are not in competition, my lord, whatever your face is presently arguing.”
They had fallen, without either of them quite resolving to, into a habit of working the accounts together after breakfast, two heads bent under the one lamp because the second lamp smoked.
The smoking lamp had become, across three weeks of matrimony, the nearest thing to a courtship anyone had ever paid her.
He kept his hands to the figures. He passed the inkwell before she reached for it.
The columns she liked checked he checked without being asked, the only declaration of attachment a man of his rigid dialect could compose, set down in a ledger where every column balanced to a nicety.
“You have begun auditing the laundry accounts, and they were never any business of yours to audit.”
He set his quill down to make the confession with proper gravity.
“I audit them because you audit them, and I have learned that the laundry is where a great house tells the truth about itself. A household faking its grandeur will economise first on its sheets, where the guests do not look. Ours no longer economises on its sheets. I find I am absurdly, indefensibly proud of the sheets.”
“You are proud of the sheets because I mended the linen press in October, and engaged a girl to keep it, and you signed the bill without reading a line of it, which is the sole reason you are aware this house contains a linen press at all.”
“I signed it without reading it because you had drawn it, and a thing you have drawn does not require my reading, for in four months I have not once found a figure of yours that wanted correcting. Call it the soundest economy I have practised in twenty years or the most reckless trust I have ever placed in another living soul. I have decided, on the whole, that I would rather not enquire which.”
“The ditching of the East Meadow will not pay for three years,” she said. “You knew it when you ordered it dug, and you ordered it dug regardless.”
“I ordered it because a thing can be worth doing before it is worth anything. A twelvemonth ago I would have called that sentence sentimental nonsense, and now I appear to believe it with every figure I own.” He glanced once towards the window, where the grey shine of the ornamental pond showed between the limes, and the glance itself comprised the whole of the jest, and he made no pretence otherwise.
“Do not.”
He returned to his column with suspicious diligence. “I have not said a word.”
“You have said the pond, my lord. You contrive to say it with your eyebrows, and we were agreed that the matter of the pond was entirely concluded.”
His quill did not move on the page. “I looked at it. There is no clause in the settlement against a man looking out of his own window, I have checked, and the drafting is yours, so you have only your own thoroughness to blame.”
She set down her own quill to deliver it properly.
“There is a clause against your expression while you do it. It is the expression of a duke’s son who once went into three feet of green water after his aunt’s spaniel and retrieved the creature at the cost of the dignity of all parties present.
You said the single truest thing I had heard from you in my whole tenure while the pondweed slid off the side of your ear, and I have never let you forget it. ”
“It was a tactically sound retrieval, and I maintain I said nothing whatever that was true. I had been dreadfully stunned by a spaniel and I cannot be held accountable for whatever nonsense I may have uttered.” His mouth had not quite surrendered its composure, in him a sure sign of helpless laughter.
“You are the only person alive who would possess the audacity to touch upon such a subject, and I find I keep arranging to sit where the pond is visible, so that you will.”
She laughed, and the laughter produced an effect which had only of late become familiar to her; it unlocked a portion of her heart that had long been resolutely closed.
There had been a time when she, too, had wished for a man’s affection.
In the first weeks of her matrimony, she had brought all the foolish tenderness of a young girl to her union, only to learn, all too swiftly, how little such devotion was valued by her late husband.
It was the cold turning of a back, the final closing of a door, and the particular shame of desiring a husband who regarded the wanting as one regards a tradesman’s importunate bill one intends never to settle.
She had taught her body, after that, to want nothing it could be refused.
The teaching had held a cold decade. It was not holding now, under a smoking lamp, and the failure of it frightened her far more than the court papers would when they came that same afternoon.
She came back to find it set square against the window that took the morning light, a writing desk of pale satinwood with a green leather top and a row of small drawers, and a man beside it with his hands behind his back, pretending he had wandered in by chance.
“You said once you missed having a place to write that was your own. In the housekeeper’s room you wrote standing at the press, like a clerk taking dictation from himself.
” He would not look directly at her while he said it.
“I have remedied it. It takes the good light until noon, and after noon the light is better in the gallery, and I have left a card to that effect in the top drawer, in case you should ever mislay the geography of your own sun.”
“It is a beautiful desk.” She ran her hand along the green leather, and her throat did a thing she did not give it leave to do. “You have thought of the light, and of the drawers, and even of the card. You think of everything, my lord.”
“I am told I am thorough. I have begun to suspect you do not entirely mean it as praise.” He had come nearer than the narrow room could honestly spare, because the desk took the whole width of the window, and the floor left between them was small, and neither of them spent it stepping back.
“I appear to have offended you with a desk. It is a new accomplishment. I had not believed it possible to offend a woman with satinwood and good light, and yet your face is doing the thing it does when the quarter’s books come up short.” He looked at her closely as he uttered those words.
“You have not offended me.” She replied.
“You have done a thing a good deal more dangerous than offend me, my lord, which is to be kind in the only language you trust, and to leave me standing in front of it wanting the one room of you that has no furniture in it at all. Every room but that one you have furnished, my lord. The door of that one you keep shut, and offer me the freehold of all the others instead, and I find I do not want the house. I want the locked room.”
“It is both. It is praise and it is the other thing, and you have learned me well enough by now to hear the two at once.” He answered, but she maintained her composure, though the effort demanded the very same sacrifice her strength had cost her on their wedding night.
“You bestow upon me everything that may be itemised in a ledger and wrapped in silk, my lord.”
“And what is it I keep failing to give? Name it and it is yours. I am far better at fetching than at guessing, as you have declared to my face on more than one occasion.”
“Yourself.” It came out lower than she had meant to let it. “The part of you with no use and no price and no card in any drawer. I have a desk. I have keys. I should like, just once, the man who keeps choosing everything but his own company.”
He went still, and the room went still around the two of them, and he was near enough that there was no mistaking that the words had landed somewhere under the figures.
His hand came up. What he might have done with it she was not to learn, for Wells knocked, and the world that had narrowed to a foot of satinwood widened again onto a silver salver and a packet of papers bound in pink legal tape, the colour solicitors reserve for the slow kind of bleeding.
***
Declan read it on his feet. She observed his countenance do the sum before his mouth would consent to read it out.
“He has instituted proceedings. It is to be tried in open court at the next sittings.” The courtesy left him by degrees as he turned the page.
“He claims you concealed assets from the estate during your widowhood. There is more. He claims you were of unstable mind in your grief, unfit then and unfit now to be trusted with the management of a fortune, and on those grounds he asks the court to place the trust under the protection of your nearest male relation, who proves, by a coincidence that fairly takes the breath away, to be himself.”
“He has dated the instability from the month Sir Malcolm passed away, I imagine.”
His attention moved further down the page.
“From the very week. He has even produced a physician’s letter, of a sort, observing that you kept the household yourself rather than engaging a manager, which he offers to the court as evidence of a mind unhinged by grief rather than a widow left without the means to pay one. ”
“So competence is to be the proof of my madness. I kept a roof over my own head, and that is the symptom. It is almost elegant, how he has turned every virtue I have into an exhibit.”