CHAPTER FOURTEEN #6
“I do see, I think,” he said. He looked thoughtful, his brow furrowed.
“Independence is no small thing. You would have had it here, if you’d accepted my offer, but I understand why you refused it.
But with this Mistress Rykener, you might have had a .
. .” He trailed off, his frown deepening.
She could see him grasping for which words to use, and felt it prudent to cut him off before he came to any inopportune conclusions.
“A partnership, with responsibility shared in kind,” she said. “But it is not to be, and so there is no use in my thinking on it any longer. I merely find it - difficult - not to brood.” She attempted a smile. “There are few distractions in Hilda’s house, after all.”
His frown had not dissipated. “I hardly think it fair or fitting, that Hilda be able to wield such power over you. Why should you not pursue your own fortune? Forgive me, but it’s not as if you provide her some service that she could not hire on a servant for.”
“Matthew,” she said, letting a hint of reproach creep into her voice.
“She has Walter - or Piers and Ralf do, which is all to the same end. They would never let me take him. You know I would never - if the choice were between keeping him and leaving him behind - just think if it were Marian, what choice would you have?”
He looked down at her words, to where Marian was still seated on the floor with her toys.
She seemed to sense her father’s eyes on her: she looked up, face breaking into a toothy smile as she launched herself to her feet, grasping the edge of Matthew’s chair for balance.
He bent and lifted her into his lap, kissing the top of her head.
When he spoke again, his voice was quiet - quieter than she thought she had ever heard from him.
“When we were first wed,” he said, “and I was perhaps more - rash than I ought to have been, Elizabeth and I quarreled. Our disagreement ran along much the same lines: she feared her old liege lord would take Marian from her as his rightful vassal, if she challenged him. I thought the risk worth it. But Marian was not yet born, then.” He tightened his grip on her.
“If the same question were posed to me now, I think my answer would be different. We were fortunate.” Isabel did not miss the bitter twist of his mouth as he said it.
“Lord Ferrers did not feel the need to impose his will on us. I think I would have been roused enough to go to war against him if he had tried. But he is a lord and we are peasants; the law offers us no redress against his abuses. Hilda is of your class. Surely there is some way to circumvent her.”
Isabel was shaking her head before he even finished speaking.
“That would require money, and I have none. And,” she added as he opened his mouth, “do not think to offer your own - I know you prosper in your work, but a blacksmith may not win against a merchant’s wife where gold is concerned.
” And even if he could, what recourse was there?
Buying the wardship? The wardship was never the point: Hilda, Ralf, and Piers didn’t cling to it for their own gain, they did it on principle.
Isabel and Walter were cuckoos in their nest, and their control over the wardship was revenge for the indignity of Isabel’s presence.
Money could not buy that; it was worth more to them than a thousand pounds of gold and jewels.
“Not money, then,” he said. “But there must be something they value above that. Or some gesture you may offer that would appease them.”
Isabel began to shake her head again, then stopped.
“There is,” she began, then cut herself off and began anew.
“They wish to - reclaim what I took from them. Money, yes, but also their pride. To arrange matters so that my claim on Geoffrey’s estate is erased entirely and our marriage and its fruits forgotten.
I might . . .” She trailed off. An idea was taking shape.
Money would not satisfy them - not her money.
But if it were money they thought rightfully theirs, and she offered them the chance to claim it in its entirety . . .
Matthew was watching her. She could tell from the look on his face that he knew she was calculating something, though he may not yet have grasped the shape of it. “There is a chance, then?”
Isabel looked down at where her hands were resting on the tabletop.
There was a fine dusting of ashes on her fingertips, left over from Matthew’s haphazard attempt at sweeping.
“A chance,” she said. “Only that. I am at their mercy, entirely. If they prove capricious, there is nothing I can do. And I do not wish to hope, and then have my hopes proven false. But - there is a chance, yes.”
Matthew nodded. “Have you need of my assistance?”
“Thank you, but no.” It was not even Matthew’s temperament that made her demur: this was something she had to do on her own.
The presence of another person in the room would not sway Hilda, Ralf, or Piers.
“But I will tell you, the moment I know more.
And -“ She hesitated. “If I succeed, Walter and I will need a place to stay. At least until such time as I have earned enough money to take rooms.” She wasn’t sure how long that would be; she had not rented rooms in almost fifteen years, and had no notion of how much coin would be asked of her.
Nor was she certain how much she could bring in with only her embroidery.
She had the coin purse Constance had given her, and while she was loath to part with its contents - those coins were hardly hers by right, and Constance could make use of them - she was not above doing so and then paying Constance back later.
If Constance even wished to see her again.
As if he had read her mind, Matthew asked, “what of your tailor? Have you no home with her? You are welcome here, of course, but if you would prefer -“
Isabel swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said. “When we parted, I -“ But that memory was too sharp to dwell on, and she had cried enough already today. “I don’t know.”
“I suppose you can’t,” Matthew said, “until you ask her.” The word until made Isabel start slightly - the easy, simple assumption that she would be asking Constance, when she herself had not yet gathered the courage to do so. Her brother, it seemed, had more faith in her than she did in herself.
Marian, now bored in her father’s lap, was fussing to be set down. Matthew did so, then stood. “I had best begin to prepare supper, if I mean to have it ready when Elizabeth returns. Will you eat with us?”
Isabel opened her mouth to decline, then closed it.
Hilda had given her leave for the afternoon.
Why should she hasten back when she was - if all went well - shortly to be free of her demands forever?
Why, especially, should she hurry away from her brother, when she had passed so much time apart from him in the name of protecting her position?
And on that matter, she still had more to say.
“I owe you an apology,” she said. Matthew looked up, startled. “For my conduct, when you and Elizabeth first wished to wed. I was to you as Hilda has been to me, and -“
His brow creased in confusion. “How may you say so? You had no power over my comings and goings, much less my marriage.”
“But I still made the attempt,” she said. “If I had had my way, you would never have been wed at all. Or, you would have been wed to a woman not of your choosing, and Elizabeth would have been - I shudder to even think of it. I do not know how it is that you bear me no grudge for it.”
His face softened. “Well, it is easy,” he said, “as there was no harm done, in the end. And I cannot fault you for attempting to do right by me, however much I may have disagreed with your methods.” He stooped to pick up Marian again, tossing her in the air to the sound of her shrieks of laughter.
“And it all worked out in the end, did it not? Now all that is left is to see you settled as happily as I am.”
Isabel had thought her tears spent for the day, but she felt her eyes burning again at his words.
She bore such guilt, over so many things - over the life she had brought Walter into, over her abandonment of Constance, over her opposition to Matthew and Elizabeth’s marriage.
She had not realized how heavily it weighed on her until her brother lifted it from her shoulders with the ease of plucking a leaf.
She did not wish to weep again, though, so she dashed her tears away with the back of her hand and attempted a smile.
“Elizabeth has been a good influence on you,” she said.
“You were not half so magnanimous before.” She unbuttoned her sleeves, then, and rolled them up to her elbows.
“Now, where do you have need of me in the kitchen?”