Page 73 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“You are buying the river land back to spoil his hold on it. That is well, as far as it goes, but it goes only halfway, because it beats him in the dark and leaves him whole to try again.” She laid Crewe’s survey on the desk between them and put her finger on the blue river. “He wants a navigation. An Act, a cut, locks, tolls, the fortune the sugar bill never gave him, and he has spent three years buying one bank of the river through agents who lead nowhere, dispossessing your tenants to do it, the Burtons among them. He cannot have his Act without the bank, and he cannot have the bank now, because you have put the Burtons’ closes back in the middle of it. So far we agree.”

“We do.” He was watching her the way he watched a thing he had underestimated. “And where do we stop agreeing.”

“You would leave it there. A quiet hole in his bank, a scheme that withers, Greaves never certain who stole its life.” She lifted her chin. “I want the rest. I want the manner of his buying laid out in front of the very House he means to ask for his Act, the deceiving agents, the families turned off ground their grandfathers held, the whole shabby business of it told plainly by the people it was done to. I want his own peers to look at how he got his bank, and refuse him his Act on the strength of it, and know exactly why they are refusing, so that it is not a hole in the dark he can patch but a public no he can never walk back. I want him beaten in the light, Theodore, in front of the only people whose opinion he still has a fortune in. And I want it done that way because the dark way is your way, and your way has cost me a very great deal, and I have come to think it is not, in the end, the better way. Only the safer one. For you.”

“There is a difficulty,” he said slowly, “and you will have seen it before I name it. The reason I stayed my hand against Greaves at all was that to bring him into the light meant bringing the folly into it with him, and the folly means your name. If I rise in the Lords against the man, he has only to whisper the word folly in the right ear and the whole chamber turns to look at you instead of at him.”

“He has only to whisper it in any case. He has already had it printed at a ha’penny the sheet.” She did not flinch from it. “But you are fighting the wrong war, Theodore, which is the whole of my point. The folly is a story about a woman. The navigation is a story about land, and tenants, and a peer who turned poor families off the very ground their grandfathers held by means of agents paid to be untruthful to them. The two need never touch each other. You will not rise and speak of me at all. You will rise and speak of Jeremiah Burton, and of a great scheme got up on stolen frontage, and of whether this House intends to grant compulsory powers to a man who could not come by his own riverbank honestly. Let Greaves whisper folly all he wishes. A man defending himself against the charge of robbing the poor does not mend his case by reminding the room that he also once tried to ruin a duchess. The folly makes him blacker, not me. Let him reach for it.”

He was silent, taking it in.

“You have thought further into this than I had,” he said.

“I have had a great deal less else to think about these four days. And I have one advantage over you in it that you will never have.” She held his eyes. “I am not afraid of the folly. You are afraid of it, because you blame yourself for it and cannot look straight at it. I was in it. I have nothing left in there to be frightened of. That makes me the better general for this particular field, and you are going to have to let me command it, which I am aware will cost you more than the whole campaign put together.”

The study was quiet. The clock on the mantel, eleven minutes fast as ever, ticked into it.

“You are entirely right,” he said at last, and there was something in his voice she had not heard from him before, which was a man being glad to be corrected. “It is better. It is also far harder, and slower, and it requires me to stand up in the Lords and make a private matter public that touches my own house, which everything in me has spent a lifetime refusing to do.” He looked at the survey, and then at her. “I will need the tenants. Their own words. A man cannot stand up and say my wife’s enemy dispossessed some families. He can stand up and read the House what Jeremiah Burton understood himself to be signing, and what he signed, in Burton’s own plain words, and let the shame do its own work.”

“Crewe is getting it. In their words where he can.” She allowed herself, for the first time since the dining room, to look at him directly. “I have done the part you would never have thought to do, which is the human part, the part that requires sitting in a cottage and being trusted. You will do the part I am not permitted to do, which is to stand in that gilded room and say it. That is the bargain. Not the matrimony. I have not decided the matrimony. The bargain.”

“I accept the bargain.” He inclined his head, gravely, and did not try to make it more than it was, and that restraint told her, more than any speech could have, that some part of what she had said in the dining room had gone all the way in and stayed. “Ellen. I will not say the other thing, because you have told me not to, and I am learning, very late and very badly, to do as you ask instead of as I judge best. But I want it on the record between us that there is another thing, and that I am holding it, and that I will go on holding it for as long as you need me to, with the bolt drawn or undrawn, and ask nothing.”

She had what she had come for, and no business reason to stay, and she found herself staying half a moment past the business regardless, looking at the man behind the desk who had ruined the best thing she had and was now, plainly, with visible effort, doing the single hardest thing she had ever set anyone, which was to want her and not reach for her.

“You may hold it,” she said. “I am not promising you it will ever be wanted again. But you may hold it, and I will tell you honestly that I would rather you held it than let it go, and that is more than I could have said a week ago. Do not build a cathedral on it.”

“A cathedral. No.” The ghost of something crossed his face. “A lean-to, perhaps. Something I can take down again quickly, if it should come on to rain.”

She almost smiled, and caught it before it reached her mouth, and did not give it to him, because he had not earned a smile yet and they both knew it. But the word hung suspended between them, carrying a weight far greater than anything they had shared a mere hour before.

“Noted,” she said, which was Pearce’s word, and she saw him recognise it, and she went out before the corner of her own mouth could betray her, and left him with the survey and the river and the beginning of a war they were, for the first time in the whole of their matrimony, going to fight on the same side and in the open.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“You are certain, child. Be certain before we go down, because there is no leaving in the middle of something like this. Half the people who will look at you tonight have read that filthy paper, and the other half have had it described to them by the first half with improvements.”

“I am certain.” Ellen turned from the glass, where Bess had just set the last pin. “A woman who hides confirms the story. A woman who comes to the opera in the front of the ducal box, in her best gown, and looks bored, unmakes it. They cannot whisper that I crept out at midnight to a folly if I am sitting in plain sight where they expected to find an empty chair.”

“That is precisely the reasoning I should have used, and I am gratified to find it has occurred to you, because it means I need not pretend I talked you into it.” Augusta settled her own shawl with the air of a general approving the ground. “There is one thing more, and you will not like it. You will be calm tonight. Not defiant. Defiance tells them there is something to defy. You will be a woman who has heard a piece of nonsense about herself and found it too dull to resent. That is the hardest face of all to wear, and it is the only one that wins.”

“I have worn it before. For two years, to creditors.” Ellen took up her gloves. “I am out of practice. I am not out of the knack.”

“And the rest of it. His part. The House.”

“Moves on its own slow schedule, which is the one mercy of the Lords, that nothing in it can be hurried, least of all by the man it is aimed at.” Augusta drew on her own gloves finger by finger. “Theodore brings the navigation petition before the House a fortnight hence, with your Mr. Burton’s account read into the record in Burton’s own plain words, and Carrow tells him the votes are already counting his way, which is the entire reason Carrow’s wife is so very eager to be seen embracing you in public tonight. The drawing rooms and the House are the two halves of one nutcracker, child. The earl’s good name is the nut. Tonight is the night he first feels the two halves begin to close on it, and he will feel it the harder for finding you sitting in plain view looking as though you had never once heard his name.”

Theodore was at the foot of the stairs, and he watched her come down the whole length of them, and for once he said the right thing, which was almost nothing at all.

“You look as though you own the place,” he said. “Keep looking it. I will be beside you the whole evening, and I will say nothing clever, because nothing clever is wanted. A duke who jests is a duke who is worried. We are not worried.”

“Are we not?”

“We are terrified,” he said, very low, for her ear only. “We will not show it to a soul. After you.”

The King’s Theater was full, which she had expected and dreaded in equal measure. They came into the box at the front of the grand tier with the house lights still up, which was deliberate, Augusta having timed their arrival to the worst possible moment for privacy and the best for being seen, and Ellen took the front chair, the one nobody could pretend not to see, and arranged her skirts, and lifted her glass to the stage as though the stage were the only thing in the building that interested her.

The theater noticed. She felt it the way she had felt the Cresswell ball, the turning of heads, the leaning of one bonnet toward another, the small industry of comment running along the tiers like a fuse. She did not look at any of it. She looked at the curtain and let them look at her, a duchess entirely at her ease, and underneath the gown her heart was going like a hammer and not one beat of it reached her face.