Those Were the Terms

Thursday, November 14, 1816

“Five and forty, Your Grace,” Preece said at the head of the stair. “Every man is come. Old Lloyd of Stanway has not left his farm since Lady Day, and he is sitting by the fire with his stick.”

“Then we will not keep him waiting.”

The long room at the Feathers ran the width of the inn front, with black panelling and a plaster ceiling. Two tables had been set down the length of it and a third across the top. At the side stood a smaller one with a green cloth, the rent book, a pewter inkstand and the iron-bound box.

Gideon had last stood in this room at nineteen, behind his father’s chair.

The talk stopped when he came in. Chairs scraped, and forty-five men got to their feet in their market coats. He walked up between the tables to the chair at the top. He did not turn his head to favour one side. There was daylight from the street windows on his left, and he let them all look.

A year ago to the day he had refused to do this. Edmund had sat here in his place, and made his excuses for him, and laughed with these men. Then Edmund had sent for the carriage.

Gideon had read Arabella’s letter eleven times since Tuesday. He knew now what she had been thinking as she sat at the ladies’ fire below, with her ribbons, waiting for the dinner to finish.

“Sit, if you please,” he said. “I shall stand for a minute, and then I shall not trouble you with another speech till Lady Day.”

They sat. Gwilliam was halfway down on the right, with Bebb beside him. The old man had his arms folded.

“You have come to pay your Michaelmas half-year. Mr. Preece has the book open, and I see a good many of you have brought it in gold. I have ridden every farm on this estate since June. I have seen your hay black in the swathe and your wheat sprouted in the stook. I helped to pull one stack down, and I know what was in the middle of it. I know what your corn will make at the mill, and I know that most of you sold stock in September at half its worth to find what is in your pockets.”

Nobody stirred.

“You will put it back in your pockets. The Michaelmas rent is forgiven on every farm, the whole half-year. Mr. Preece will write ‘excused’ against each name, and I shall sign the page. It comes to four thousand five hundred pounds. I can bear that, and you cannot. Spend it on sound seed and on keeping your men through the winter. I had rather have forty-five tenants next Michaelmas than forty-five payments now.”

It was very quiet. Then somebody at the lower table let his breath go in a long whistle, and the room broke into noise.

He sat down. Preece was turning his hat round and round by the brim, with his eyes wet. They had argued it for two evenings, and the steward had lost. He looked very well pleased to have done so.

The landlord’s people brought in the beef. Gideon ate what was put before him. He answered Lloyd of Stanway about the new parapet, and a young tenant from the hill about drains. He found that he could do it. A year ago he had thought it would kill him to be stared at across a joint of meat. It turned out to be no more than a dinner.

It was the smallest of the things he had been wrong about, and he could take no pleasure in it today.

When the cloth was drawn, he stood again with his glass.

“There is one toast I shall give in silence. My brother took this chair last November, because I would not. Most of you were at the bridge that night, and four of you carried him home. I ask you to drink to Lord Edmund and Lady Edmund.”

They rose and drank. He drank with them. He had not known until that moment whether he could say her name aloud. He found that he could. She had been right, and he could not hold her letter against her.

He was about to sit when a chair went back on the right.

“By your leave, Your Grace.” Isaac Gwilliam was on his feet. He had a tankard in his fist. “I’ve a toast, and I’m not a man for them, so I’ll be short. There’s a piece in the Journal this week, copied out of some London paper. It’s about a duchess that was a parson’s daughter, and some flower pictures, and who drew what. My lad read it me. I didn’t follow the half, and I don’t want to.”

Gideon’s fingers tightened on the stem of his glass. He had seen that paragraph yesterday. Preece had tried to keep the paper from him.

“I know this,” the old man went on. “In June she walked into my wheat and told me the day I’d cut it, near enough. In October she told me my seed was two parts dead, and I gave her a short answer. That same night she stood in my rickyard till four in the morning with her bare hands in a hot stack. I’ve forty sheaves of sound seed in the ground this week that’d be ash else, and my barn and my bed with them. There’s not a man at this table she’s not saved a field for. Them in London may print what they like.” He lifted the tankard. “The Duchess.”

Forty-five men stood up. The benches went over at the lower table.

“The Duchess!”

It shook the windows. Bebb was shouting it. Lloyd of Stanway had got up on his stick.

Gideon stood among them with his glass raised. For a moment he could not swallow.

She ought to have been here to hear it. She was a mile from the far side of his bridge, with paint on her hands. Lawyers in London were sharpening their pens on her, and the men she had worked beside were defending her from a newspaper. They would read worse before Christmas. Skrine would see to that, in open court, and the reporters would have every word of it by the next morning.

It was Gideon’s doing that there was a court at all.
***
He drove home himself in the gig, with Oakes up beside him on the left. Preece had stayed to see the last of the tenants on the road. It had begun to rain at dusk, a thin cold rain out of the west, and the lamps showed only the horse’s quarters and a yard of wet road.

Oakes had not said six words since Tuesday. He said none for seven miles.

The bridge came up pale out of the dark. Gideon drew the horse to a walk, and then stopped him on the crown, and gave Oakes the reins.

“Stand him here. I shall be two minutes.”

He got down. The masons had finished on Wednesday of last week. The downstream parapet stood a foot higher than the old one, in dressed stone from his own quarry, and it was so new that it showed almost white under the lamp. He laid his hand on the coping. It was cold and wet, and there was no gap in it anywhere.

He took out his watch and tilted it to the light. It wanted five minutes of ten.

Edmund had said that they would be home by ten.

The Corve ran under him, full and brown, a long way below the arch. Forty yards down he could just make out the willow. He looked at it as he had made himself look in June. Then he leaned on the stone and thought, in order, as he would have thought out a march.

There was Arabella first. She had sat at his breakfast table for three months and been kind to him. She had gone upstairs and written to her brother that he was not fit. She had seen her youngest scream at his face, and seen him shut a door on all three of them and call it grief. On the last evening of her life she had driven down this road with that opinion of him unaltered. He had given her no reason to alter it. He had not even taken the chair she was waiting below for.

She had known the children better than anyone, and she had not wanted them left with him. She was their mother. He had spent six months and a great deal of money proving her wrong to a Master in Chancery. He had begun to believe that he had done it.

Then there was his wife.

He was not angry with her. He had looked for anger on the Edge on Tuesday, in the rain, and had not found any. She had kept an old man’s secret because the old man was proud and his hands shook, and afterwards because he was dead and could not release her. Gideon understood that sort of silence. He had kept a worse one about this bridge.

But he could see what it had cost her to come into his house. In May she had been a rector’s daughter whom nobody in London had ever heard of. She had owed three hundred and forty pounds, and nobody knew of it but the parish. If she had gone to a lodging in Ludlow, Nettleship would never have been asked a question on oath. The book would have ended at plate sixty-four, and nobody would have looked at the lettering.

He had walked down a lane and asked her to stand up in front of lawyers for him. She had done it, and done it better than he deserved. Because she had done it, a corn-factor had sent men to turn over her whole life for something to use. Her name was in the Morning Chronicle. It would be in every paper in the kingdom by the fourth of December, with her father’s beside it. She had kept silent three years to spare the old man, and now it would all be told in open court.

Quince said that she must swear, and stand in Lincoln’s Inn Hall while Skrine read it out. She had told him in the hall that she would.

He knew she would. She paid every debt she believed she owed. He had told her so himself, in London, with his hand on a table.

His brother had gone to Ludlow to do a thing that Gideon would not face. Arabella had gone with him. Now Linnea meant to go to London and be torn to pieces in his quarrel.

He would not allow it a third time.

He could see what to do, and when he had seen it there was no more to think about. The suit was his. He was the party, and she was not. He would go up alone and tell Bellamy that the Duchess of Brackenhope would swear nothing and appear nowhere. The court had been asked whether he was fit. It had not been asked who drew a heath. If the Chancellor thought the worse of him for it, then the Chancellor would only be agreeing with Arabella.

And she must be made safe from the wreck. The glasshouse was hers already. She should have a roof that was not his, and money enough to be beholden to no one, so that if he lost she need not sit in an empty castle with the man who had lost them.

She would refuse. He knew that as surely as he knew the rest. She had told him in this very glasshouse of hers that she would have him if he came with nothing in his hands.

So he would have to see to it that she did not want to follow him.

He stood a moment longer with his palm on the new stone. Then he climbed back into the gig and took the reins.

“Home, Your Grace?” Oakes said. It was the first thing he had offered all evening.

“Yes. You will pack for London tonight. A post-chaise from the Angel is ordered for half past six. I gave the word before we left.”

There was a silence beside him. “For two, or for one?”

“For myself, and you on the seat.”

“And Her Grace?”

“Her Grace stays.”

Oakes said nothing more. Gideon could tell what he thought of it.
***
There was a light in the library. He had known there would be.

She was at the long table, where the maps had lain in May. She had a sheet of paper before her, covered in her round hand, and three letters already folded. She had her spectacles on and ink on her thumb, and she got up when he came in. Her face was tired and resolute. He saw her look at his coat for the wet, from habit.

“How was it?” she asked. “The audit.”

“It is done. I took the chair. They have their half-year back.” He stayed on his feet, on the far side of the table. “Gwilliam gave your health. They drank it standing, all forty-five.”

Her colour came up, and for a second her whole face softened. He looked at the papers instead.

“I have been planning our answer,” she said. “I have not been idle since Tuesday, and I hope you will hear it. I have written to Mr. Nettleship to say that I do not blame him, and to ask for the names of the subscribers. I mean to write to each one and tell them the truth myself before a lawyer does it. I have written to Dr. Yarrow. Mr. Quince’s draft of my affidavit came from the Angel this afternoon, and I have corrected two dates in it. I can be ready to travel on Monday. I think—”

“I leave for London at dawn,” Gideon said. “Alone.”

She stopped.

“You will swear nothing, and you will appear nowhere. I shall tell Bellamy so. You are not a party to this suit, and you never were. I shall not have my wife put up in Lincoln’s Inn Hall to be examined over a book of flowers.”

“Mr. Quince says that I must answer.”

“Quince is my solicitor. He will take my instructions. He will have another from me on Saturday. He is to settle the Dower House on you for your life, and a thousand pounds a year, clear of the four hundred. It lies inside the park wall, a quarter of a mile from your glass. You may live there, apart from me, if you choose.”

She had taken off her spectacles. She held them shut in her hand.

“If I choose,” she said. “That is a curious word to end on, Gideon. Have I been asked anything?”

“No.”

“What have I done that I am to be pensioned off? Is it the plates? Say so, if it is. I should understand it.”

“It is not the plates.” That much he could say honestly, and it was nearly the last honest thing he would say. “The bargain was a glasshouse for a guardianship. You were to be a mother to three children and answer a Master’s questions. You did both. Since then you have saved my tenants’ seed and had your name dragged through the London papers. You have paid twice over. I will not take a third payment.”

“You are deciding for me.”

“Yes.”

She put the spectacles down on her list, very carefully.

“You gave me a deed so that no husband could touch what was mine. In London you held a door open and told me that you wanted me free to stay away. I thought it the most honourable thing I had ever met with.” Her voice was low and shook a little, as it had in the glasshouse. “Now you have shut it and locked me on the far side, with a house and an income, and you tell me that is freedom too. It is not, and you know that it is not. You stood in front of my father’s plant in August and said that there was no bargain. Those were your words. You took my hand, and you said them.”

He said nothing. He had his hands behind him, and they were gripping each other hard.

“So I will ask you plainly, since we agreed on it.” She was looking him full in the face, the left side and the right. “Was it only ever a bargain?”

He had drawn one clause himself, in a room made of glass. I will not lie to you. He had kept it for six months and five days.

If he told her the truth she would be in the chaise at half past six. She would stand in that hall and let Skrine do his worst, and she would do it for him. He would have brought one more person to harm.

“Those were the terms,” he said.

He watched it reach her. She did not cry out. The blood left her face, and she put one hand down flat on the table, among her letters, as he had once held on to a table in London.

“I see,” Linnea said.

She gathered up her spectacles. She left the list where it lay.

“Good night, Duke.”

She went past him and out. He heard her on the stair, slow and even. He stood in his own library until the candle had burned down a full inch, and then he went up by the passage to his dressing room.

Oakes had laid out the camp bed without being told and gone away. The white door stood open, as it had stood every night since August. There was firelight beyond it, on yellow silk.

Gideon shut it. The key was on the other side.

He lay down in his shirt and listened for that key until the stable clock struck three. It never turned. She would not lock a door on him even now, and that was harder to lie beside than a shot bolt would have been.
***
The chaise was at the steps at half past six, with its lamps lit. It was not yet day. The rain had stopped, and there was a grey line over Brown Clee.

Oakes strapped the valise on behind. He did it more slowly than a man needed to.

“You’ll not go up to them?”

“No.”

“Miss Tabitha’ll ask at breakfast where the pirate is. What’s Mercy to say?”

“That he has gone to London on business.”

“And the boy? He’s ten, and he’s no fool. He shook your hand on a promise six weeks since.”

“Get up, Sergeant.”

Oakes got up onto the seat. Gideon put his foot on the step. He had not meant to look back at the house, but he did.

The east front was dark, except for one window at the top. A candle burned there, in the schoolroom, behind a thermometer nailed to the sash.

Crispin stood at the glass in his nightshirt. He must have heard the wheels on the gravel. He had his ledger held against his chest, and his other hand was flat on the pane. He did not wave, or open the window. He only looked down at the chaise and at his uncle beside it, without a movement, like a boy taking a reading.

Gideon stood with one boot on the step. He could have lifted his hand. He could have gone back up three flights and said the things a man says.

He would have had to lie to the boy as well, or else tell him the truth.

He got in and shut the door. The postboy’s whip cracked. The chaise swung round the gravel sweep and down between the bare limes. Gideon looked back once through the small rear glass. The candle was still burning in the high window, and the boy had not left it.

Crispin would write it down at eight o’clock, with the temperature and the rain. He wrote down what he had seen for himself, and he had seen his uncle go.
***