Chapter Ten
She came to the study at the hour she had set and stood before the desk until he looked up.
“I have your answer, Your Grace, if you still want it.”
“I want it.” He rose.
“Then here it is,” she said quietly. “I will marry you.”
His hand closed once on the cap of the inkwell and let it go.
“Thank you.”
“I have not finished. You will find I rarely have, when a thing matters.” She sat without waiting to be asked, folded her hands, and measured him the way a woman measures a wagon she means to load to the axle.
“I will marry you, and I will do it on terms. The terms will be mine. You have had the drawing of every arrangement under this roof since the night I came. You will not have the drawing of this one.”
“Name them.”
He reached for the ink.
“I would rather see them written before I trust them to the air,” she said. “Send for your solicitor afterwards and let him put them into Latin. But I want them set down first in plain English, where I can read every word, and in a hand I can watch while it does the writing.”
“Whose hand?”
“Yours.” She did not blink. “I would sooner watch your pen than trust a clerk to round off the corners while my back is turned. You will not soften a thing you have written yourself. You have not the talent for it.”
He drew a fresh sheet towards him and uncapped the ink, and the small obedience of the act steadied him more than it had any right to.
“Begin.”
“Write that the marriage is a bargain, and will be conducted as one, and that neither party entered it under any illusion to the contrary.”
He wrote it. The words stood there in his own hand, black and plain, and his fingers did not argue with them, which surprised him.
She watched the pen move.
“Write that Lady Iris shall remain in my care unless we are agreed otherwise. That no decision touching her upbringing, her education, her health, or her removal from Ravensmere shall be made by either of us without first speaking to the other.”
“That binds us both.”
“It is meant to. You have a habit of deciding what is best for everyone before anyone else has been consulted. I will not have that habit governing the child as well.”
He looked at her for a moment, then bent his head.
He wrote it.
“Write that, if you die before me, Lady Iris remains in my care. Not the family’s. Mine.” She did not look away from the page.
“That is the one term I cannot promise the law will honour,” he said. “My word will hold while I live. A court might unpick it after I am gone, if Helena’s people choose to spend money making the point, and they will choose to.”
“Then write your word,” she returned, “and if the law must have its say one day, let it find yours already on the page.”
He wrote it, because she had asked for his word, and because that, at least, was his to give.
“Write the settlement as you offered it,” she said.
“The dower house and the income, mine the day we marry, and mine still if I should ever choose to live apart from you. And write the choosing in. Write that I may live apart, at my own discretion, without forfeit, and without asking leave of any living soul.”
“You want it on the page that you are free to leave me.”
“I want it on the page that I am not yours. The two read alike in law, and they are not the same sentence at all.” Her chin lifted a fraction.
“I have been a man’s property once already, in everything but the word.
I gave good service for it, and was buried in his debts for my trouble.
I will not be owned a second time, however warm the new owner keeps the fires. ”
He wrote that she might live apart, at her own discretion, without forfeit, and the writing of it cost him more than the income had. He held his hand level through every letter.
“There is the matter of the captain’s debts,” he said.
“There is no matter. They are mine. I have paid them down four years on a companion’s wage, and I will go on paying them out of a duchess’s pin-money, which I am told runs higher.”
“They would be cleared the day we marry. All of them. It is the ordinary course of a settlement, and it would draw no remark from anyone.”
“You would pay my dead husband’s debts.”
“I would pay yours,” he said. “The debts are in your name now. The man himself is past being either obliged or insulted by it.”
“You will forgive me if I find it strange charity, a man clearing the slate of the very fellow he…” She did not finish it. She closed her mouth on the end of the sentence the way a person closes a hand on something hot.
“I shall write it as a loan, then, if charity sits ill in the mouth. The estate advances the sum against your settlement, and you repay it at a farthing a year for as long as it amuses you to. I do not care what the paper calls it. I care that you do not carry another man’s accounting into a second marriage. ”
A pause.
“Write it as a loan.”
He wrote it as a loan.
“There is one more, and it is the one that matters to me, so I will say it slowly, and you will set it down exactly.” She drew a breath, and for the first time the steadiness frayed at the edge of a word before it caught itself.
“Write that neither party shall look to the other for affection, nor reproach the other for the want of it. That no debt of feeling is owed in either direction, now or hereafter. That I am not married for love, and shall not be required to counterfeit it.”
She paused.
“And that I understand what is expected of a duke’s wife.
I understand the question of heirs. I will not pretend ignorance in order to purchase delicacy.
But I will not have that expectation turned into a debt against me, either.
Write that no want of children shall be laid at my door as failure, and no claim of title or succession used to demand from me what has not been freely given. ”
He did not move at once.
Then he bent his head and wrote it, every word.
“And write,” she said, more quietly now, “that you are not to look at me as though I have failed to deliver some article that was never written into the order.”
The word look did the thing certain words could do, and swung open a door four years back that he kept bolted on most days.
Spain, the spring before she was widowed.
A supply tent with rain coming through a seam, and Elizabeth Mercer arriving from the baggage lines with her hair dark and flat with wet, asking after blankets gone astray.
He had looked. He had not meant to, and he looked anyway, one beat past what a married colonel was permitted.
When he brought his eyes back to the canvas, Captain Mercer was watching him, his face holding no anger yet, only a slow reckoning, a man totting up a column he had not known was there.
Mercer said nothing. He smiled, and laid a hand at the small of his wife’s back, and turned her out into the rain. The smile was the worst of it, the smile of a man who had found a thing he could use and meant to keep it dry.
“Your Grace. You have stopped writing.”
“I am writing it.”
He set the clause down word for word, none of it softened, every line in the same steady hand. When it was on the page, he did not lift the pen at once.
“And if it should change?”
“If what should change?”
“The bargain. The terms. People are not fixed things. If, in a year, or in five, the want of affection I have written here should turn into a different want…”
“It will not,” she said quietly.
“You cannot know that of yourself, and you cannot know it of me.”
“I know that you do not change, Your Grace. You provision. It is a different verb entirely, and it does not conjugate into the one you keep reaching after.” She said it without unkindness, and the want of it was the worst of all.
“Whatever drives you to the fires and the wage and the dower house, it is not the article the clause forbids. The clause costs you nothing. You may sign it with an easy mind.”
He looked down at the clause in his own hand, which cost him every single thing he had, and at the woman who had just assured him it cost him nothing.
The only correction left to him was the truth, and the clause he had written had made the truth look almost like a breach of contract before the ink had dried.
“There,” he said instead, and turned the sheet to face her. “Read it. Tell me where I have rounded a corner.”
She read it through slowly, her finger moving under the lines the way it had moved under the newspaper. At the last clause, she read it twice, and a thing surfaced behind her eyes that he did not let himself reach for.
“You have changed nothing,” she said. “You have even written the part that lets me leave.”
“You dictated it.”
“Men dictate a great many things to other men with pens, and the pens find ways to mishear them. Yours did not.” She set the sheet down.
“Well, you asked for it plainly, and I have no talent for softening, as you observed.”
He capped the ink.
“There is the wedding still to settle. By licence, here, inside the week, with as few witnesses as you can bear to stand up before.”
“Who stands up with us?”
“My aunt. Briggs, if you wish him. No one out of the column.”
“Briggs.” Something near a smile crossed her, the first of the hour. “He will wear his old regimentals and tell me afterwards every single thing I did wrong, and it will be the one honest speech at the breakfast.”
“Then he is welcome to it.”
“There is no one to give me away.” She said it as a fact a quartermaster notes, and not a complaint. “My father is twelve years dead, and there is no one left who has the right to stand in his place. You are marrying a woman whose whole family fits inside the one sentence.”
“Then we will do without the giving. You are not a parcel to be handed between men, in any case.”
“And Iris stands where she can see me, the whole time,” she said. “Whatever else this is, it is to be plainly a thing happening to her as well, and in daylight, not managed behind her back the way the last great change in her life was managed.”