Chapter One
“Eight pence the pound, Miss Marchmont, and I’ll thank you not to look at me as though I had named a sum to ransom a bishop.”
Cordelia Marchmont, who had been looking at Mr Hatchwell precisely as though he had named a sum to ransom a bishop, rearranged her face into something more diplomatic and set her basket on the counter.
She had been buying her sugar from this man since she was tall enough to see over the edge of it, and in all that time she had never once paid the first price he named, because the first price he named was a kind of greeting between them, a thing said for form’s sake, the way other people said something about the weather.
“Eight pence is a Tuesday price,” she said. “It is the price you give to strangers and to people you dislike, and I flatter myself I am neither.”
“It is the price the sugar costs me, miss, which is a different matter entirely from what I think of the person buying it.”
“The brown sugar from Bristol last spring was seven pence, and the duty has come down since. I read it in the paper.”
“You read a great many things in the paper, and you carry every one of them into my shop and lay it on my counter like a winning hand of cards.”
“And yet you never fold.”
“And yet I never fold,” he agreed, and she could see that he had begun to enjoy himself, which was the first sign of a successful negotiation and very nearly the only part of her morning she had looked forward to.
The truth, which neither of them would have said aloud for any sum he cared to name, bishop or otherwise, was that Mr Hatchwell had been carrying her on credit since the autumn.
He had twice sent his boy up to the Hall with small mercies dressed as accidents, two oranges that were going to spoil, a half-pound of butter that would only have gone to waste, and Cordelia had accepted them with a level face because to refuse would have shamed them both.
There was a debt between them that had nothing to do with sugar, and they conducted the business of sugar with such ceremony precisely so that they need never look at the other thing directly.
“Seven pence,” she said.
“Seven and three farthings, and you will take a half pound of currants besides, for they are past their best and I would sooner you had them than the mice.”
“Those currants are not past their best. I can see them from here, and they are as plump as a curate at Christmas.”
“Then we shall agree they are past their best between the two of us, and let the currants keep their own counsel.”
She took the currants, because there was no graceful way to refuse, and because Henry would be home from Eton at Christmas, and Henry loved currants past all reason, and Mr Hatchwell knew it, and the knowing of it was the whole of the gift.
She counted the coppers onto the counter one at a time, and he let her do it without hurrying her, which was a courtesy of its own.
“You will tell Master Henry I asked after him,” he said, folding the paper round the sugar.
“I shall tell him you robbed me blind and threw in the currants out of guilt.”
“That will do nicely,” said Mr Hatchwell, and looked, for the length of a breath, as though he might say something kinder, and thought better of it, and wished her good morning instead.
***
She walked home up the lane that led to Marchmont and to nowhere else, and she kept her mind off money until she was through the side door, because thinking about money where anyone might see her was a luxury she could not afford, and composure was very nearly the only one she had left.
Mrs Birling took the sugar in the kitchen without remarking on the smallness of the parcel, which was a kindness Cordelia noticed and loved her for, and the currants were put by in the dry larder against Henry’s homecoming, and then there was nothing more to be done in the kitchen and no further reason to put off going upstairs.
Her mother had given her the key to the study six weeks before, the day before the end, folding it into Cordelia’s palm with fingers that had already begun to forget their own strength.
There are letters, she had said, and nothing else, because by then explaining had become too large a thing for the breath she had left.
Cordelia had not opened the desk in the six weeks since.
She had told herself it was for want of time, and that was a lie, and she had known it was a lie even as she told it.
Her father’s study still smelled faintly of her father, of pipe smoke and old paper and the particular dust of a room where a man has done his thinking, and she had not been able to walk into it and find him so nearly present and so entirely gone.
This morning, she had thirteen shillings and four pence in the house and a bill at Mr Hatchwell’s she could not pay, and grief, she was discovering, was a thing one could only really afford on a full stomach. She went up the stairs, and she put the key in the lock, and she opened her father’s desk.
The papers inside were ordered the way her father had ordered everything, which is to say not at all, and she went through them sitting on the floor, because somewhere around the second drawer her legs had stopped taking an interest in holding her up.
There were receipts. There was a bundle of her own childhood drawings, kept for reasons she would now never be able to ask him about, which undid her rather more than the receipts had.
And at the bottom of the deepest drawer, tied in a faded blue ribbon, there was a packet of letters in an unfamiliar hand, each signed at the foot with a single word. Ravensmere.
They were friendly letters, unremarkable, between two men who had been close at school and had grown sentimental in middle age about the notion of binding their families together.
They spoke of a rose garden, and of August, and they mentioned, more than once and by name, a little girl called Cordelia and a boy two years older, and the hope that the two of them might one day suit.
Beneath the letters lay a contract, drawn up by a country solicitor, dated the fourteenth of August, 1803, and signed by her father and by the late Duke of Ravensmere.
In the corner, in a clerk’s careful hand, ran a note recording the lady at ten years of age and the gentleman at twelve, the agreement to hold upon the mutual consent of both parties at the gentleman’s coming of age.
Cordelia had been ten years old in the August of 1803.
She put her hand to the chain at her throat, where it had hung beneath her gown for thirteen years, and felt the small hard shape of the ring through the muslin, the pearl ring she had worn on her own finger for a fortnight that summer before her mother had drawn it gently off and threaded it onto a chain and told her it was to keep.
All this time, she had believed she was the only person alive who remembered, and here, in faded ink, was the proof that she had once been promised to someone in writing, by men who had since had the discourtesy to die and leave her holding the page.
There was a second packet, newer, tied in a ribbon she recognised at once as her mother’s.
It held four letters in her father’s own hand, each addressed to the present Duke of Ravensmere, and not one of them had ever been sent.
The first, from 1814, asked with great civility whether His Grace meant to honour the understanding between their fathers.
The last, written when his hand had already begun to fail, ran to four lines and asked only after the young man’s health.
There had been no reply to any of them, and there had been no reply because they had never been posted, and why her father had written them and never sent them was a question he had not lived long enough to answer.
Folded beneath them was a single scrap of paper, the writing on it gone large and uncertain in the way his writing had gone in his last year.
For Henry, it said. Nothing else. He had left no instruction to go with her brother’s name, and no will anywhere that she had found, only the name itself in that large failing hand, set down before he could no longer hold the pen.
Cordelia turned the scrap over twice, as if the back of it might prove more forthcoming than the front, and it did not.
She sat on the floor of the study for a long while after that, doing the only arithmetic the papers allowed her to do.
Her father was dead, and her mother too.
Her brother was fifteen and away at school and wholly her responsibility, and their uncle held what money there was and had made it perfectly plain that he regarded both his wards as expenses to be discharged at the first decent opportunity.
She had thirteen shillings, a contract no one had honoured, and a note that said for Henry and appeared to mean nothing at all.
And she had, in Yorkshire, a duke. A duke who had once been a boy of twelve in a rose garden, and who had, as like as not, forgotten he had ever stood in it.
It made a thin enough foundation for a future, and a great deal more of one than she had owned an hour before, and she had long since stopped being sentimental about the size of the materials she was handed.
She went down to the morning room and took out paper and wrote to the Duke of Ravensmere.
***
The letter cost her three attempts and most of the afternoon.
She kept all pleading out of it, since a woman who pleads has told the reader he is permitted to refuse her; and she held a good deal back besides, because a woman who lays out the whole of her case in a first letter keeps nothing for a second.
She named herself as the daughter of his late father’s old friend, referred him to the contract of 1803 without enclosing it, and asked, with as much composure as she could press into the words, whether he might do her the honour of a reply.