No Terms

Monday, August 26, 1816

“Fifty-two at eight o’clock,” Crispin said, “and eleven hundredths in the funnel. That is the warmest Monday since I began, Aunt Linnea.”

“Then write it large. We may not see another.”

Linnea was buttering Tabitha’s bread at the schoolroom table when she heard boots on the east stair. They were coming up faster than they usually did. Tabitha heard them too. She did not go behind Mercy’s skirts, and had not done so for some weeks. She only turned on her cushion to watch the door.

Gideon came in with a letter open in his hand. The Ludlow post reached the castle a little after eight, and he had plainly broken the seal in the hall and climbed three flights without stopping. His face was as stiff as she had ever seen it. She had learned by now that this stiffness meant feeling, and her stomach turned over.

“It is from Quince,” he said. “The Master has made his report.”

Nobody at the table moved. Pip had a spoon halfway to her mouth, and it stayed there.

“Crispin, you asked me in May whether the court could make you go. I told you that it could. You had better hear this first.” He looked at the page, though she thought he had it by heart already. “Mr. Pym finds that I am the fit and proper person to be guardian of the three of you. He has reported so to the Lord Chancellor.”

Mercy Onions sat down on the nearest chair as if her knees had been cut.

“May I read it, sir?” said Crispin.

Gideon gave it to him. There were two papers, a letter in Quince’s square hand and a longer sheet in a clerk’s copperplate. The boy took the second to the window and read it through with his lips moving. Then he turned back to the top and read it again, aloud, in his thin careful voice.

“‘I find that His Grace Gideon, Duke of Brackenhope, the paternal uncle of the said infants, is a fit and proper person to be appointed guardian of their persons, and I humbly approve of him accordingly. And I am of opinion that the marriage of His Grace, whatever its occasion, has given the said infants a regular and well-ordered home, and that I have not been shown a better.’” He looked up. “It is dated the twentieth of August. That was Tuesday. It rained on Tuesday.”

“It has rained on most days,” Gideon said. “I am glad he did not let it prejudice him.”

Linnea counted that as the eighth, somewhere at the back of her mind. The front of it was taken up with a single sentence in a clerk’s hand. Whatever its occasion. She thought that the dry old man in the rusty gown had put a great deal into three words.

“Does it mean we stay?” Pip’s voice was sharp with distrust. “Say it properly. Does it mean Uncle Pargeter can’t have us?”

“I will say it exactly,” said Gideon. “The Master reports and the Lord Chancellor decides. He will not sit to confirm this before November. Mr. Quince writes that the Chancellor very seldom goes against a Master, and that your uncle Pargeter may object if he chooses, though Quince knows of no ground he could stand on. So it is not finished. But the man who was sent to find out the truth has found for us, and he has put it in writing.”

“That’s nearly,” Pip said.

“It is very nearly.”

She put the spoon down. She got off her chair and walked to the door with great composure. Then they heard her on the stairs, going down them at a gallop, and Crispin went after her with the report still in his hand. Mercy caught up Tabitha and followed.

Linnea and Gideon reached the turn of the great stair together. The hall lay below them, grey flagstones under the old Duke’s portrait, and Mrs. Hobday was crossing it with her keys.

Pip did not see the housekeeper. She ran out into the middle of the floor, flung her hands down and went over. For a moment there was nothing to be seen of Philippa Kynaston but a froth of petticoat and two half-boots in the air. She landed on her feet, staggered, and stood there panting, with both plaits over her face.

“Miss Philippa!” said Mrs. Hobday.

“We’re staying,” Pip told her. “A Master said so. It’s written down.”

The housekeeper looked up the stair. Gideon nodded once. Mrs. Hobday put her hand flat against her bombazine, over the heart, and then she did a thing Linnea had never seen her do. She turned her back on the family and stood for a moment looking at the wall.

“I did not see that cartwheel,” she said, when she turned round. Her eyes were wet and her voice was perfectly steady. “And I shall not see the next one either, Miss Philippa, if it is done before nine o’clock.”

Pip did the next one at once.

Tabitha wriggled down from Mercy’s arm and came to the foot of the stair. She looked up at Gideon with her head tipped right back.

“Is the pirate staying too?”

“He is,” said Gideon.

“Good,” Tabitha said, and went to watch her sister.

Linnea found that she could not see the hall very clearly. She took off her spectacles and polished them on her sleeve. When she put them on again, Gideon was holding out Quince’s letter.

“There is a paragraph for you.”

It was near the foot of the page. I beg leave to add that the Master is not a gentleman who explains himself. His clerk informs me, however, that he was heard to remark after the hearing that he had waited thirty years for a witness to give him the worst of her case first, and that he had not expected it of a duchess. I should be obliged if Your Grace would convey this to Her Grace, with my respectful compliments.

“He writes as if he were sending me a receipt,” she said, and her voice was not quite even.

“It is the warmest letter I have ever had from him. He once condoled with me on my father’s death in four lines.” Gideon took the paper back and folded it along its creases. He looked at her as he did it, and then he looked at the children. “You did this. I shall want to say so properly, and I cannot do it on a staircase.”

He went down to tell Preece. She stood with her hand on the rail and felt her heart going hard under her gown.

She had made him a promise in a sheeted library in London. When the court is done, I shall ask you again. She had thought about it on the Oxford road and every day since. She had not known that the day would arrive at breakfast, with bread and butter on her fingers.
***
It was a long day.

Mrs. Hobday sent up a currant pudding at two, without being asked, and the schoolroom dinner was louder than it had ever been. Crispin read the report a third time between the mutton and the pudding. Pip wanted to know whether a Master was higher than a bishop. Gideon answered everything he was asked. He sat square to the table, with Tabitha leaning against his left arm, and twice his eye came to Linnea across the dishes and went away again.

At three he rode down to the bridge. She understood that well enough. He would not hang about her skirts on the day the report came, like a creditor on quarter day. He had told her he wanted her free to stay away, and he was giving her the whole afternoon to do it in.

She found that it made her cross, and that the crossness was a help. A woman could not be cross and frightened at once.

She went to her bench. Plate sixty-nine was pinned to the board in pencil, with the foot of the sheet still blank. She looked at that blank strip and thought of what she had not told him. It was not a debt to him. It had been her father’s to keep, and it still was. She told herself so, and went on working, and did not like the feeling it left.

The light went early, as it had all that summer. By seven the calico blind was grey and she could no longer tell carmine from lake. She washed her brushes, stood them in their jar, and walked up the path between the heaths to the warm end.

The tub was where five men had set it down at Midsummer. She crouched and parted the tall blades, as she did every evening, and looked into the heart of the plant. There was a new leaf, half unrolled. There was nothing else.

“You are in no hurry,” she told it. “I know somebody like you.”

The door opened behind her and shut again at once.

She stood up. He had come from the stables on foot. He had his hat in his hand, and there was stone dust on his boots. He walked up the brick path and stopped two yards from her, with the last of the daylight on the left side of his face.

“I have a thing to say,” Gideon said. “I ask you to hear the whole of it before you answer.”

“You said that to me once before in this building.”

“I did. I looked at the stovepipe. I shall try to do better.” He turned the hat once by the brim and then put it down on the staging. “On the ninth of May I asked you to be a mother to my brother’s children, and to stand before the Master as my duchess and answer his questions. You have done both. You have done all that you bargained for, and a good deal that was in no clause. The children are safe as far as you could make them. My part is paid as well. Your father’s debts are cleared. The glasshouse is yours by deed, and it stays yours whatever you do, whether you live in this house or in another. The four hundred a year is the same.”

“I have read the deed.”

“Then you know it. I want it said aloud all the same.” His voice had gone rough. “You owe me nothing, Linnea. You do not owe me your company at breakfast or your arm in a London nursery, or anything behind any door. The account is closed. I told you in Upper Brook Street that I wanted you free. As far as I can make you so, you are.”

It was very quiet. The stove ticked. Up in the roof a top light stood open its inch, and she could hear the rooks going home over the park.

He had finished. He stood with his hands at his sides and waited.

“I had a speech of my own ready for this evening,” Linnea said. “I told you I should ask again, and that you had better be at home. You have come and got in ahead of me, and held the door wider than ever.”

“I could not let you ask before you had heard that.”

“No. I see that you could not.” She folded her hands in her apron to keep them still. “You have told me what I am free of. You have not said one word about yourself. What do you want, Gideon?”

His jaw tightened beside the scar.

“Wants were not in the settlement.”

“I know they were not. I am asking outside it.”

“I drew that paper so that I should never have to answer such a question,” he said. “I had no practice at it, and I thought I should never need any. I have no right to want things from you. I had a right to what was written, and you have delivered it.”

He did not look away as he said it. She saw what it cost him to stand there with his face square to her, and no clause to hold on to.

She had stood before a Master in Chancery and given him the worst of her case first. She thought that she could do as much for this man.

“Then I shall go first,” she said. “I am better at it than you are, and somebody must. Suppose there were no court. Suppose my father had left me three hundred and forty pounds in the Funds, and I were living at the rectory still, with nothing to fear from Midsummer. Suppose you walked down that lane tomorrow, with no lawyer behind you and no debts to pay, and you knocked at the door and asked me.”

He had stopped breathing. She could see it.

“I should say yes,” said Linnea. “I should say it to you. The glasshouse would not come into it, and neither would the coronet. I should not even be saying it for the children, though I would not give them up now for anything on earth. I mean the man who walked a mile in the rain when he might have sent a groom, and got down on his knee in the mud to look at an ear of wheat because I told him to. I would have him if he came with nothing in his hands.”

Her face was burning. She had never said so many words about herself together in her life.

“I should have to borrow Mr. Aldridge’s doorstep for the purpose,” she added, because the silence was more than she could bear. “But he is an obliging man.”

Gideon made a sound that was half a breath. He came the two yards. He did not touch her yet. He stood over her, in front of her father’s plant, and she saw his throat work above his neckcloth.

“Then I will ask,” he said. “I had rather do it here than on Aldridge’s step. Give me your hand.”

She gave him the right one. There was lake under the nails, and a grey shine of pencil along the side of the palm. He took it in both of his, as he had held it at the chancel step, firmly and with no grip in it. This time his hands were not quite steady.

“I have no terms,” he said. “I have a house and three children and one eye, and you know the worst of all of them. I am not easy to live with, and I do not sleep. I ask you anyway. I am asking you, Linnea Corfield, and no Master is listening.” He drew a breath. “No bargain. I choose you.”

It was said like a vow, in the same low, level voice he had used in St. Milburga’s. But she had heard him read those other words out of a book. These were his own, and he had plainly had some trouble finding them.

“I choose you, Gideon,” she said.

Her voice shook. She let it.

He lifted her hand and put his mouth against the stained knuckles. She felt his breath go out over her fingers, long and unsteady, like a man setting down a load he has carried up a hill. Then he bent and kissed her mouth, once and very gently. She tasted stone dust and cold air.

When he raised his head, he looked past her at the tub with its stiff grey blades.

“We have had a witness,” he said. “It is seven years old and has never said a word. I think it will keep our counsel.”

“Nine,” said Linnea.

“You are still counting something.”

“I am. I shall tell you what it is before long.”

He kept her hand. He turned it over and looked at the palm, and then he looked at her. There was something new in his face. It was too raw for her to call it happiness. She thought it might be what happiness looked like in a man who had lost the habit.

“I must ask you one thing more,” he said, “and it is not at all a proper question for a glasshouse. There is a door between our rooms. Is it still unlocked?”

The heat went through her from her collar to her hair.

“It has been unlocked since a minute after I locked it. That was on my wedding day. I shot the bolt like a girl in a novel, and I was so ashamed that I turned it back before I had taken my hand off the key.”

“I know. I heard it go both ways.” The unscarred corner of his mouth moved. “I stood in my dressing room with one boot off for a quarter of an hour, trying to work out what you meant by it.”

“And what did you conclude?”

“That I should never try it. I have not.”

“No,” she said. “I have listened to you not trying it for three months.”

She looked down the length of the glasshouse. It was nearly dark. The heaths stood in their tiers, and the stove glowed a little at its door. One pane in bay F showed the first star more clearly than all the rest.

There was nothing left to settle. She turned her hand in his, so that their palms met, and closed her fingers.

“Come into the house,” Linnea said.

She did not wait for an answer. She led him down the brick path and out through the glass door, which he shut behind them from habit, and across the wet garden toward the lit windows.
***