Chapter Ten #2
“The jewels were not entailed,” she said.
“You know they were not, because my mother left them to me by name in a codicil written in her own hand. They were her separate property and never formed part of the settled goods of the estate. The bequest was explicit, however inconvenient you find it now.” She moved around the chair.
“You have not brought me a legal fact. You have brought me a legal fiction dressed in enough Latin to frighten a woman whom you assumed could not distinguish between them. I was present while my father’s estate was administered.
I know what was settled and what was not.
” She stopped before him. “And there is one thing more. I shall ask you plainly, and I shall watch your face while you answer, so take whatever time you require.”
Giles had grown a shade paler. “Ask, then.”
“When my mother died, I wrote to you at Merrow, where you had installed yourself among my father’s remaining possessions.
I wrote to tell you that she was gone and to ask, not for money, because I had already learnt better than to ask you for that, but whether any of her effects remained.
Anything which had belonged to her and which I might keep, since I had managed to save so little.
” She waited. “Did you receive that letter, Giles? It is a simple question. Did my letter reach you in the winter my mother died?”
Giles opened his mouth, closed it and looked towards the window. His hesitation extended far beyond the point at which an honest man’s answer would have come.
Nathaniel watched him from the chair beside the fire and offered no assistance. Neither did the clock, which continued marking the silence.
“I do not recall every letter I receive.”
“No. I imagine you do not.” Selina did not raise her voice. “But you remember mine well enough. You merely refuse to admit it, because then you would also have to admit that you chose not to answer.”
She glanced at the clock.
“I have heard enough. The butler will show you out. You will send me nothing further concerning the jewels, because the next accusation to which you put your name will go directly to a solicitor considerably better than whoever taught you that little piece of law.”
Giles rose and reached the door before turning back, one hand upon the handle.
“You always believed yourself cleverer than the rest of us. Your father believed himself clever too. Look where it carried him.” He waited for an answer and received none.
“The estate’s debts are not all settled, whatever you may imagine.
Certain matters remain which a court would find very interesting.
Very interesting indeed. Cleverness will not answer them forever. ”
He departed before she could reply, which was the only victory the afternoon afforded him. They heard his steps upon the stairs, then his voice in the hall putting a question to Bassett which the butler did not answer, and finally the closing of the front door.
Nathaniel watched his wife hold herself perfectly upright in the centre of the drawing room until Giles was gone. Then the rigidity left her; not in collapse, for she did not collapse, but in a weariness which made her appear suddenly older before she folded it away again.
“He received the letter,” she said to no one. “I always knew that he had. There is a difference between knowing something and watching a man fail to deny it. I did not expect the second to cost more than the first.” Her hand tightened upon the chair. “It should not. The fact has not changed.”
“Sit.”
She looked at the chair Giles had occupied, chose another and lowered herself into it.
Nathaniel rang for fresh tea and remained at a careful distance while she collected herself. Bassett entered, replaced the tray and closed the door behind him with more care than the door required.
“I was wrong about the printer,” Selina said.
“I made the accusation before I possessed the facts, and Giles knew it. For one full minute, he had the better of me.” She pressed her fingers briefly to her eyes, the first unguarded gesture Nathaniel had seen from her all afternoon.
“I do not do that. I have never done that.”
“You were angry.”
“I was careless. They are not the same.” She lowered her hand. “Then he told me that my father had written to him while awaiting trial. I should like to believe he invented it, but he did not. Giles has not the imagination. My father wrote to him about the timber.”
Nathaniel remained silent.
“He will not stop at the jewels,” he said at last. “That final remark about the estate’s debts was not merely temper. It was a seed. He wants us to lie awake wondering what else he may know, because uncertainty will soften us for his next demand.”
“The debts were settled. I watched it done. There is nothing outstanding which a court could touch, and Giles knows it. He is relying upon my not being certain.”
Selina accepted the cup Bassett had brought but did not drink.
“And yet he is not entirely wrong to rely upon uncertainty, because there is something I have not told you. I shall tell you, because we promised one another no lies and because anything Giles half-knows becomes more dangerous when kept in darkness.”
Nathaniel became very still. “Tell me.”
“Not tonight.” She turned the cup a quarter turn within its saucer. “It is not dangerous, only private, and I spent all the courage I brought downstairs upon Giles. Ask me again after I have slept.”
“I shall not ask. You will tell me when you are ready.” His voice softened. “I have grown unexpectedly skilled at waiting in this house.”
He did not sit beside her. He remained where he was, with the tea cooling between them, and allowed the afternoon to end in silence.
***
When Selina eventually went upstairs, Nathaniel was still standing.
He was courting his own wife.
The knowledge had been assembling within him for several days and chose that afternoon to become complete.
He had sat through Giles’s threats with his hands upon the arms of a chair, aching to intervene and holding to his promise because Selina had asked it of him.
Alone in the cooling room, he examined that fact and discovered that it did not alarm him.
That surprised him more than the fact itself.
That evening, he performed the first deliberate act of the courtship.
He sent for white violets and paid considerably more than violets had any right to cost. Then he sat at his desk with a card before him and composed the message four times. The first three attempts went into the fire.
Not from pity. Not from duty. From your husband.
He read the words once and allowed them to stand. Then he entrusted the flowers and the card to Bassett, with instructions that they be placed in Selina’s room while she was at supper. She would find them without Nathaniel standing there to watch her response.
He did not ask that evening or the following morning whether she had kept the card.
Bassett supplied the answer regardless. With the studied indifference of a butler determined not to appear pleased, he mentioned that Her Grace had asked for the violets to be kept in water beside her bed rather than sent downstairs with the other flowers.
The card, he added, was nowhere to be found.
In a house where Bassett found everything, Nathaniel understood what that meant.
“Will there be anything else, Your Grace?”
“No. Thank you.” Nathaniel turned over a paper upon his desk which required no attention. “Bassett… the violets. When they fade, replace them. Quietly. Do not mention it to Her Grace, and do not allow the vase to remain empty.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
Bassett withdrew. If there was a satisfaction in his step which had not been present before Selina entered the house, Nathaniel chose not to observe it.
He closed the study door and remained for a moment with his hand upon the handle. Then, alone, where neither ledger nor wife could witness it, he allowed himself one unguarded smile.
Rowland remained deeply indebted to Giles, and Giles had now brought a false claim against Selina into Nathaniel’s drawing room. He could not yet see precisely how the two facts joined, but he no longer believed that they stood apart.
Nathaniel sat in the darkness without consulting the arithmetic. It was a long while before he lit a candle.