Chapter Ten #2
He inclined his head, because his voice had grown unreliable on the subject of the child watching her world rearranged in the open for once.
“Then I will set one term of my own. It is the only one I want.”
“You are owed one.” She gathered her gloves into her lap. “Name it.”
“Whatever this is between us, Iris is not to be told it is only a bargain. Not by you, not by my aunt, not by me. She has had two years of being arranged around. She is not to think that every person who stays must first be trapped into it, nor that your staying has made a prisoner of you.”
Elizabeth’s face changed a little.
“That is a strange term, for a man who has just set the whole truth of it down in his own hand.”
“The page is for us. The child is owed a kinder truth. She is to know that you stayed because you chose to stay. That much, at least, is true.”
“…Agreed.”
She looked at him oddly. “You are full of surprises this morning, Your Grace.”
She stood, gathered her gloves, and paused at the door with her hand on the frame.
“You agreed to every term I set. Every one. The leave-clause among them. A man who only meant to mend a paragraph would have fought the settlement.” She studied him. “I have not yet decided what to make of that.”
“You need make nothing of it. It is a bargain. You said so in the first clause, and I wrote it down.”
“So you did. You write everything down, Your Grace. It is how a man keeps from ever having to say it.”
She had her hand on the door. “One question, and then I will leave you to sign in peace. The night I came, you stood at the door and looked at me as if you had seen a ghost. I have wondered since what you saw.”
“A woman who had travelled too far in the cold.”
“You are a liar to the last inch, Your Grace, and a tidy man with it.” Her mouth tilted at the corner. “I will leave you to your signature.”
She left him with the page and his own name waiting at the foot of it.
***
Matilda found him there a quarter of an hour later, still seated, the unsigned sheet under his hand.
“You have the look of a man who has won an argument he meant to lose.”
“There was no argument,” he said evenly.
“No. I heard.” She sat down across from him without invitation. “She thinks you do it from guilt, I expect. The marriage, the terms, all of it.”
“She is right enough about the guilt.”
“She is right about the half of it you can afford to let her see.”
He said nothing.
“Tell her the other half, Gavin. Whatever that is.”
“And watch her use the leave-clause inside the hour? She would not stay under a roof with a man who wanted the very thing she has written out of the contract.”
“You do not know what she would do, because you have never once given her the true account to do anything with. You have decided her answer for her. You did it with Helena. You do it with Iris. You are doing it now.” Her voice did not soften, and the hardness of it was, in its way, a kindness.
“You were never cruel them. That was not the trouble. You were a wall, and a person can live beside a wall a great many years before they admit they have been alone there.”
“And if the sentence is true,” he said, “and she does not want it?”
“Then she does not want it, and you will have given her the dignity of refusing the truth, instead of the burden of accepting a lie. There is a difference, and a woman feels it the rest of her life, whichever way she turns.” Her hands folded in her lap.
“You are not afraid she will leave you, Gavin. You have written her a door and pressed the key into her hand. You are afraid she will stay, and that you will spend forty years knowing she settled for the wall because the wall was warm.”
He looked down at the unsigned page beneath his hand.
“She asked for terms,” he said.
“She had every right to. She is not a girl in her first season, dazzled by a title and a carriage. She is a widow who has learnt what arrangements cost when only one person is allowed to name them.” Matilda’s voice softened by a fraction.
“She did not ask for terms because she is cold. She asked because she has had to survive men who called their wishes duty.”
He said nothing.
“And you answered in ink,” she said. “That is not the worst thing you have ever done.”
He said nothing.
Matilda rose slowly, one hand on the chair-back. “You have until the wedding to find a sentence, Gavin. After it, every day you keep that sentence to yourself becomes a fresh deceit.”
She left him with that, and the page, and the light going long across the desk.
He did not sign it at once. He went up instead, by the back stair, to the nursery, and stopped where he always stopped, in the doorway, with one hand on the frame.
Iris sat on the floor by the cold hearth with a book open in her lap, turning the pages without sound. She had not heard him. No one ever heard him in a doorway. It was the one thing he did as well as the accounts.
“She is going to stay,” he said from the threshold, low, because the words had to go somewhere and there was no one else in the room small enough to be safe to say them to. “Mrs Mercer. She is going to stay for good now. I have seen to it.”
The child’s hands went still on the book. She lifted her head and found him in the doorway. She did not speak, but she held him in a steady gaze with a question in it that he had no contract to answer.
He meant to cross the room. He stood in the doorway with the whole short distance of it before him, and still his feet would not take it.
At last, he stepped back, the way he always stepped back, and left her looking at the place in the doorway where her father had been.