Chapter Three #2
“Your secret is safe. I have troubles enough of my own to gossip about. You are not in the least what the ballroom promised,” she said.
“The ballroom is a poor advertisement for anybody. It shows you people at their most performed and asks you to wed them on the evidence.”
“And yet you would have me enter into matrimony with you on the evidence of a single night and one morning.”
“On the evidence of a shared enemy and a mutual objection to being pitied, which outlasts most things that begin with violins. Affection is a poor foundation, Miss Fairbourne. A common contempt for the same man is granite. Then we are well matched already, which is more than most couples can say at the altar.” He set his hand flat on the settlement outline.
“Shall we come to terms, before your aunt strains something pretending not to listen?”
Lucy drew the settlement outline towards her across the small table. “We shall. Begin, and I will interrupt you the moment you overreach.”
“I would expect nothing less. We wed quickly, by special licence, within the week, because a long betrothal gives the room time to invent things and I dislike being narrated. In public we present one front and no seams. If you smile at me, I will smile back. If I say a foolish thing, you will look as though I have said a wise one, and I will do you the same courtesy, which in your case will require less acting.”
“And in private?”
“In private you will have your own rooms, and your own hours, and your own door, which I will not cross uninvited. I will not require affection of you. I have no right to it and no talent for coaxing it, and a matrimony that demands what it cannot earn becomes a debtor’s prison for two.
I will not press you for an heir. The succession is a cousin in Northumberland’s concern in any case, and I decline to make your body a clause in a settlement. ”
Lucy turned the question over twice before she let herself put it to him.
“And if I cannot form an attachment for you? You speak as though you have arranged the outcome to spare us both. Suppose it arrives regardless, and I am fond of you, and want a good deal more than a door you have promised not to cross.”
“Then it will be your decision to make and yours to offer, and I will meet it honestly when it comes, though I do not expect it to. I am not an endearing man. I am a survivable one, and most wives learn the difference too late. I am giving you the discovery in advance, at no charge.”
Lucy put the pencil down. “You are determined to make yourself sound a poor bargain.”
“I am determined you should not be cheated. It is the nearest thing to tenderness I have about me this morning, and I would rather you named it correctly than mistook it for coldness and resented me for a warmth I was in fact attempting.”
She had braced for many things across a sleepless night. She had not braced for that, and it took her a breath to steady the surprise off her face.
“You are very generous with your renunciations, Your Grace. It almost sounds as though you would prefer a wife who wanted nothing of you at all.”
“I would prefer a wife who is not afraid of me. Wanting nothing of me is merely the nearest available substitute, and I have learned to make do with substitutes.” He turned a page he did not read.
“There is a last term, and it is the one I would have you weigh most carefully. After one year, if you find the arrangement intolerable, an estate in Kent goes to trustees, to your sole and separate use, free of my debts and free of my control, the income paid to you on your own receipt and no other. Penn has the names of the trustees and you may strike out any of them you dislike and put in your own. Beside it he holds a deed of separation, drawn and ready and wanting only two signatures.” He said it in the voice he kept for figures.
“I am aware of what a deed of separation does to a woman in the eyes of the world. You would be talked of for a year and pitied for ten, and you would be the freest woman of your acquaintance, and I am not going to pretend to you that those are the same thing.”
She read the same line of the settlement three times and got no further. “You have had it drawn already.”
“On Saturday. Before I came to this house, and before I knew whether you would have me, because a term a man draws after he has secured the lady is not a term. It is a favour, and it can be withdrawn.” He did not look up from the page.
“This one cannot. That is the entire point of putting it in the hands of trustees. The door is not mine to lock again once it is open.”
Lucy looked at the outline in front of her, at the small neat columns and the sums beside them, and found she could not read a word of it.
A man she had known for eleven hours had gone to a solicitor on a Saturday and had drawn up, in advance and at his own expense, the machinery of his own abandonment.
It was either the coldest thing she had ever been offered or the kindest, and she was to decide which by Tuesday.
“And the jointure?” she said, when she could. “Since we are being businesslike.”
“Six thousand a year, if you outlive me, and the Kent house, and Wycliffe House until my cousin turns you out of it, which he will not, being frightened of me even in the abstract.” He turned the page.
“Pin money, eight hundred a year, paid quarterly, and I do not want an accounting of it and I will not ask for one. If I ever ask you what you have done with your own money, Miss Fairbourne, you may show me this conversation and remind me that I promised not to, and I shall apologise like a gentleman and mean it like a coward.”
“Eight hundred a year.” Her aunt, across the room, had stopped pretending to embroider entirely.
“It is not generosity. It is arithmetic. A woman with no money of her own has no door, whatever I write on the deed.”
“You have thought of everything.”
“I have thought of everything that can be written down. It is the rest I am hopeless at, and I would not insult you by pretending otherwise.”
Lucy looked at the paper, and at the man, and at her aunt arranged so carefully within sight of the open door with her needlework held upside down.
She thought of the modiste’s withdrawn account, and of Julian’s easy laugh on the far side of a shrubbery, and of a life spent small and quiet and pitied in a series of other people’s spare rooms. And she thought, too, of a man who offered a fortress and troubled himself to describe the door.
“I will accept,” she said. “On one condition, which you will not enjoy.”
“I so rarely do. Name it.”
“You will not make decisions about me without me again. Not to save me. Not to spare me. Not because the hour is late or the matter is delicate or you have decided, in your ducal wisdom, that I would only worry. You announced a betrothal over my head once. You will not do it twice, on any subject, for any reason you find sufficient and I do not.”
He considered her a moment. “That may prove inconvenient.”
“Then Your Grace must learn inconvenience.” She folded her hands together on the settlement outline. “I understand it is a novel discipline for men in your position. I am prepared to be patient while you acquire it.”
For the first time since he had walked in, something in his face gave way entirely, not a smile, but the ground a smile stands on.
“Agreed,” he said. “You will find I keep the terms I set my hand to, even the ones designed to make my life harder. Especially those. They are the only ones worth the ink.”
He rose, and made his farewells to her father with a courtesy that left the older man visibly reassured, and bent over her aunt’s hand in a manner that earned him a look of grudging revision. At the door he paused.
“Eleven on the hour suited us today,” he said. “I will send the licence and the day within the hour. Try to sleep, Miss Fairbourne. You will want to meet my aunt with your wits about you. Lady Marwood collects them.”
He was gone before she could decide whether that was a warning or a gift.
She stood a while in the settling quiet, turning the strange morning over, and had almost begun to believe the worst of it was behind her when the parlour maid came up with a folded paper on the salver, no frank, no seal, only her name in a careful hand that leaned too hard on every letter.
“This came just now, miss. A boy left it at the area door and did not wait.”
Lucy unfolded it by the window where the light was good.
Do not think a title makes a liar into a lady.
There was nothing else on the paper, no date and no direction and no hand that she could name.
She turned it over twice and found the back as blank as the front was cruel, and the cruelty of it was not the insult, which she could have borne, but the accuracy.
It said, in a single line, the exact thing she had lain awake all night fearing that all London had already decided about her.
She folded it small, and then smaller, and stood at the window with the crushed thing in her fist while the certainty settled cold and complete.
Someone had watched her rescue arrive. Someone had gone straight home and sharpened a quill.
And whoever it was did not mean to wait for the matrimony to fail on its own.
They meant to see it fail, and they had started before the banns.