Terms

Thursday, May 9, 1816

The church clock struck eleven, and the garden gate clicked on the last stroke.

Linnea did not turn round. She was working down the lower staging with a short hazel stick, rapping each pot once on the rim and listening. A pot that rang wanted water. A pot that gave back a dull knock did not, and in this weather a heath watered on a dull knock would be dead of rot in a fortnight.

His note had come by a groom yesterday afternoon. The Duke of Brackenhope presents his compliments to Miss Corfield and will call at eleven on Thursday, upon a matter of business. She had read it twice and decided he meant to buy the glasshouse. He had looked at it hard enough on Monday. She had made up her mind to ask eighty pounds and take sixty.

She had also gone into the house at half past ten to scrub her hands and put on a clean apron, and she had been cross with herself the whole time for doing it.

The door opened and shut again quickly. He had remembered the draught.

“Miss Corfield.”

“Your Grace.” She rapped one more pot, heard it ring, and tipped the can over it. “Forgive me. If I stop in the middle of a row I lose my place.”

“What are you doing?”

“Asking them whether they are thirsty. Listen.” She struck a dry pot and then a wet one. “The first is singing. The second has its mouth full.”

He listened, with his head a little on one side. He was in a dry coat today, a dark blue one, and somebody had shaved him. He had stopped just inside the door with his hat under his arm, and he stood half turned from her, so that she had his right side and the window had his left.

“I can hear it,” he said, and sounded surprised.

“Most people can, once they are told. Will you sit? There is the stool, or the crate.”

“I will stand. I have a proposal of business to put to you. I ask you to hear the whole of it before you answer.”

“Then you had better put it.”

She set the can down and folded her hands in her apron. She was alone with him, strictly speaking, but she did not think it mattered. Mrs. Tranter could see every inch of the glasshouse from the kitchen window, and so could anybody in the lane who cared to look over the hedge. Nobody ever compromised a woman in a room made of glass.

He fixed his eye on the stovepipe above her head and began.

“My brother’s will named his wife guardian of the children and nobody after her. Since November they have had no guardian in law. Their mother’s brother, Mr. Pargeter of Clifton, has asked the Court of Chancery to give them to him. In August a Master of that court, a Mr. Pym, will inquire which of us is the fit person. My solicitor has come from London to tell me that as I stand I shall lose. I am a single man who shuts his gates, keeps no company, dines alone and leaves three children to a nurse. Mr. Pargeter has a wife.”

Linnea saw what was coming a moment before it arrived, and did not believe it.

“Your Grace—”

“The whole, if you please. I ask you to marry me. These are the terms. I pay your father’s debts of three hundred and forty pounds. The glasshouse is taken down at my cost and put up again in the walled garden at the castle. It is settled on you by deed, the house and every plant in it, so that neither I nor any heir of mine can touch it. You have four hundred pounds a year of your own, to spend as you like. In return you are a mother to my brother’s three children, and in August you stand before the Master as my duchess and answer his questions.”

He had not moved his feet. He might have been reading the orders of the day to a troop of horse.

“I shall not trouble you,” he went on, and his voice went flatter still. “Crispin is my heir and I want no other. The door between our rooms locks on your side.”

Her face had gone hot. She was a clergyman’s daughter of eight and twenty and she had helped at lyings-in from one end of the parish to the other, so she knew exactly what he was telling her. She ought to have been relieved, and she was. She noticed, quite separately, that he had said it to the stovepipe and that the back of his neck was red.

“One clause more,” he said. “Plain dealing. I will not lie to you, and you will not lie to me. I shall have to make a show before a lawyer. I cannot do that and make a show at my own table as well.”

He stopped. The rain ticked on the roof.

“Is that the whole?” Linnea asked.

“It is.”

“Then I am going to sit down, Your Grace, even if you will not.”

She sat on the crate, because her knees wanted it, and took off her spectacles and polished them. The glasshouse was a green blur around her, and he was a tall dark shape by the door. She found it easier to think without his face in it.

She put the spectacles back on.

“Why me?”

“On Monday you looked at my face once and then told me where to stand. Quince says the Master will watch my wife across a room to see whether she flinches. You do not.” He paused. “And Philippa has walked to you three times. She will not walk across a carpet to me.”

“And I am in want of three hundred and forty pounds.”

“Yes.”

“Who told you the sum?”

“My valet. He had it from the village.”

“The village is quite right, to the pound.” She almost laughed. “So I can be had cheaply.”

“You have a reason you would not be ashamed to say aloud,” he said. “Quince thinks the Master will believe a reason he can understand. So do I. A girl who took me for the coronet would have to lie about it, to him and to me. You need not.”

It was not a flattering answer, but she thought it was a true one. She found she liked it better than flattery.

He looked for the first time at the bench and at the sheet pinned to her board, the Erica ventricosa with its pink urns finished.

“I took down my brother’s parts of the book on Tuesday night,” he said. “Sixty-four plates. Edmund wrote the day each part came inside its wrapper. He was pleased with them. I had not known that he cared for such things.”

“Lord Edmund put his name down in the first month. He used to walk down and see the plants in flower, and argue with my father about peat.”

“There are eight plates wanting.”

“There are.”

“They cannot be drawn from a lodging in Ludlow, with the plants gone to a nurseryman.”

“No, Your Grace. They cannot.”

“They could be drawn in the walled garden.”

He knew where to press. She supposed that a man who had taken guns across rivers would know that, but it was strange to feel it done to her, and stranger that she did not much resent it. He had read the book. He had counted what was missing.

She got up, because she could not think about the glasshouse sitting down.

“Do you know what you are offering to move? There are six hundred and twelve panes in this roof and these walls. Every one must be numbered before it comes out, and every sash bar marked, or it will never go back square. The stove and the flues must be taken up brick by brick. Three hundred pots must travel a mile on springs, packed in moss, and they cannot stand out in rain like this for a single night. That tub in the corner takes four men to lift.” She nodded at her father’s great plant, with its tall paddle leaves. “It was sown seven years ago and it has never flowered. I will not leave it behind.”

“Nothing is left behind. My steward, Preece, will give you as many men as you ask for, and they will take their orders from you.”

“From me?”

“You know the ground and I do not.”

She looked at him. He was still giving her his right profile, the straight nose and the cropped fair hair and the one grey eye. When she had moved along the staging a moment ago he had moved too, a quarter turn, quite smoothly. He had done it twice now. She did not think he knew she had seen.

She thought of the coal scuttle, which held enough for tomorrow. She thought of three hundred pots loaded onto a London waggon, and of Mr. Aldridge’s furniture coming up the rectory path. She thought of a child standing on this crate with green on her chin, saying you’re not Papa, and of this man taking it without a word.

“You asked for plain dealing,” she said, “so I will begin. I will not marry for you, Your Grace. I do not know you. On Monday you spoke perhaps a hundred words to me, and today you have spoken to my stovepipe. I never wanted to be a duchess, and I can think of several women in this county who would do it more gracefully.” She drew a breath. “I might marry for the glasshouse and the children.”

His face did not change. “That is the offer.”

“You are not insulted?”

“I am relieved. I should not know what to do with the other kind of answer.”

“Then I ask for one day.”

“You shall have it. I will be in the library tomorrow at any hour you choose to send or come.” He bowed, short and correct. “Good day, Miss Corfield.”

“Good day, Your Grace.”

He put his hand to the door. To go out by it he had to turn all the way round, and for a moment the patch and the long scar were toward her. He got through the door quickly. She watched him up the brick path, bareheaded in the rain until he remembered his hat.

Linnea stayed where she was. She put her hand flat on the staging and felt the damp grit under her palm. She was shaking a little, now that nobody could see it.

He had offered her the plants alive, a bench with north light and the book finished. On Monday she had told herself she would get none of them, and a man she hardly knew had just named all three as a price.

She ought to distrust it, and she meant to as soon as she could breathe properly.

Somebody sneezed.

It came from under the staging at the far end, where the empty pots were stacked. It was a small, furious sneeze, like a kitten’s.

Linnea shut her eyes. “Come out, Pip.”

There was a silence, then a scraping. A pair of muddy half-boots came out backwards, and then a brown stuff frock, and then the rest of Philippa Kynaston, with a cobweb across one dark plait and a red mark on her cheek from the rim of a pot.

“I came by the gate,” Pip said at once. “You said by the gate.”

“I said by the gate, with leave, and somebody knowing where you were.”

“I was going to ask him for leave when he got here. I heard Oakes tell Nurse he was coming at eleven. I thought he was coming to say I mustn’t. So I got here first, and you were in the house, and then he came in and started talking and he didn’t stop.” Her chin was up, but her mouth was not steady. “It wasn’t my fault he didn’t stop.”

“How long have you been under there?”

“Since the clock said half past ten. My foot’s gone to sleep.”

Linnea picked the cobweb off her. She did not scold. The child had heard a grown man bargain for a wife, and that was punishment enough for hiding.

“What did you hear?”

“All of it.” Pip’s black brows came down. “Uncle Pargeter wants to take us away to Bristol and a master is going to say if he can. And Uncle Gideon will pay you three hundred pounds—”

“Three hundred and forty.”

“—and move all the glass, and give you four hundred pounds every year, and you’re going to be a duchess. And there’s a door that locks.” She frowned. “Why does it matter about the door?”

“It is a thing grown people put in agreements. It needn’t concern you.”

“And you said you wouldn’t marry for him.” Pip looked up at her, and the scowl broke for a second and showed what was under it. “You’re only coming for the plants.”

Linnea crouched down, as she had on Monday, until their eyes were level.

“I have not said I am coming at all. I asked for a day, and I mean to use it. But you heard me, so you may as well have it straight. If I come, I shall come for the plants, yes. I cannot keep them alive any other way.” She waited a moment. “And I shall come for you three. I said that too. Did you hear that part, or only the part that made you angry?”

Pip looked at her boots. “I heard it.”

“Do you want to go to Bristol?”

“No!” It came out like a cork. “I don’t want to go anywhere. Mama’s garden is here. Crispin’s thermometer is nailed to the window.”

“Then you and your uncle want the same thing, and he is trying very hard to get it. I never in my life heard a man make a speech he liked less.”

Pip thought about that. “He kept looking at the chimney.”

“He did.”

“Is he frightened of you?”

“I think he is frightened of nearly everybody at present,” Linnea said. “It doesn’t seem to stop him.”

The child said nothing. She rubbed the dead foot against her other ankle.

“Now listen to me, Pip, because this matters. You will say nothing of what you heard, to Crispin or Tabitha or Nurse Onions or anybody on the stairs. You will keep it until I have given my answer and your uncle has told you himself.”

“That’s a lie,” Pip said. “He said no lies. I heard him.”

“It is not a lie to hold your tongue for a day.”

“It feels the same.”

Linnea opened her mouth to answer, and found she had no good answer ready. The child was looking at her with her mother’s dark eyes, waiting.

“It feels the same because you are honest,” she said at last. “Very well. I will not ask it for longer than a day. Tomorrow, whichever way I answer, I will see that it is told to all three of you properly, and by him. You have my word on that. May I have yours?”

Pip weighed it for a long moment with her lip pushed out.

“You’ll come and see us before you say?”

“Yes. I will.”

“Then I promise,” said Pip. She drew a cross on the front of her frock with one grubby finger. “But only till tomorrow. I shan’t like it.”
***