Page 72 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Crewe was quiet a moment, and then his face changed. “He would want it, Your Grace, if he meant to bring a navigation through. A cut, locks, a towing-path the length of it, tolls on every barge of coal and lime that passed. There has been talk of a scheme these two years, to join the river to the canal at Wrenford and open the whole valley to the coal trade. It would want an Act. It would also want every foot of one bank in a single hand, for the towing-path and the works, and no Act would pass that did not show the land already secured, because the Lords will not grant compulsory purchase to a man who cannot prove he holds the better part of it willingly to start.”

“So he needs the whole bank to get his Act, and his Act to make his fortune.” Ellen put her own finger down on the map, on the Burtons’ two riverside closes, square in the middle of Greaves’s long stolen line. “And the duke is buying these back. Quietly. As we sit here.”

“His Grace gave the order a fortnight since. The Burtons’ ground first.”

“Then the duke has already, without quite knowing the whole of what he was doing, put a hole in the middle of the earl’s bank that the earl cannot close, because the moment Greaves goes to buy the Burtons’ closes a second time he will find a Pillard agent has been there before him, and a navigation with a stranger’s field sitting in the center of its towing-path is no navigation at all.” She straightened. “That is the half of it. The dull half. Thank you, Mr. Crewe. Leave me the survey, and the names of the agents, and your account of how the Burtons came to lose their ground, written out plainly, with the dates.”

“The account of it, Your Grace?”

“In their own words if you can get them, in yours if you cannot. How the agents came, and what they said, and what was not said, and what the Burtons understood themselves to be signing against what they were in fact signing. The truth of it, told plainly enough that a man who has never set foot in a water-meadow could read it and be ashamed.”

Crewe gathered his hat. “May I ask what it is for, Your Grace.”

“It is for the part the duke would never think of,” Ellen said. “He will fight this man the way he fights everything, by buying the land out from under him in the dark, and it will work, and Greaves will lose his fortune and never know certainly whose hand took it, and loathe the duke another nine years for it, and find another way. I do not want him beaten in the dark. I want him beaten in the light, in front of the very men whose good opinion is the only fortune he has left, so that he cannot come back from it. And for that I do not need a clever agent. I need the Burtons, telling the truth, to the right people.”

Augusta found her there an hour later, still bent over the survey, and stood in the doorway a moment taking the measure of the room before she came in.

“You have come out, then.”

“I have come out.”

“The last time you came out of a bolted room, it was because I drove you out of it with a stick, and you were furious with me for a week, and quite right to be.” Augusta lowered herself into the chair. “This time I did nothing whatever. I have sat in the parlor four days with my embroidery, fully prepared to come up and be intolerable to you again the instant it was wanted, and it was not wanted, and I find myself put out of work. What was different?”

“The last time, someone had broken something in me and I did not know how to mend it.” Ellen did not look up from the river. “This time someone has broken something, and I have decided to send him the bill for the repairs. It is a great deal more bracing. I recommend it to anyone.”

Augusta laughed, short and delighted. “Oh, he has met his match at last, and does not the whole house is fully aware of it.” She drew the survey toward her and studied the blue river, the agent’s small marks. “What are you about, child?”

“I am about to win something in the open that my husband would have won in the dark.” Ellen met her eyes. “And I should like your help with a piece of it, because you know every dowager in three counties and precisely which of them still dines with the Earl of Greaves. I am going to need the drawing rooms turned against him at the very hour the duke turns the Lords. A thing said in the House lands twice as hard when the wives have already had the worst of it over cards the week before.”

“You are asking me to engage in a bit of strategic tale-bearing, I see.” Augusta’s eyes gleamed like a young mischievous girl’s. “Ellen, I have been gossiping strategically since before your mother was christened. It is the one weapon they ever permitted us, and I have kept mine beautifully sharp for want of anything else to do with it. Tell me exactly what you wish known, and to whom, and in what order, and consider it already halfway round the county.”

When they had both gone she sat with the survey a long while, and then she drew a clean sheet toward her, and trimmed a quill and did not write to Greaves, or to a lawyer, or to any of the right people at all. She wrote to her brother.

She had not written to Henry since the wedding. She had received three letters from him in those months, two of them asking obliquely for money and one of them, the last, asking after her health in a hand that was almost steady, and she had answered none of them, because answering meant feeling, and she had been too busy being furniture to feel. She looked at the clean sheet now and understood, with the clarity the bolted door had given her, that she had been doing to Henry the exact thing Theodore had been doing to her. Managing him with her silence. Deciding, alone, that he was not worth the truth. Protecting herself behind a wall and calling it the only sensible course.

Henry, she wrote, and then sat a while, because honesty was harder than she had supposed, having gone so long without practicing it.

I have begun a great many letters to you in my head these four months and burned every one before it reached the paper, which is a thing I learned, I think, from a letter I once burned that I should have answered, and I am tired of burning things. So here is one I mean to send.

You sold me to clear your debts. I have loathed you for it with a completeness that frightened me, on the bad nights, and I am not going to pretend to you that I did not, because we have had a great deal of pretending between us and it has served neither of us at all. You sold me. That is true and it will never cease being true.

And it is also true that you were one-and-twenty, and frightened, and drowning in what our father left you with no tools to swim in, and that you did the worst possible thing for what you persuaded yourself was a reason, the way frightened people do. I have lately had cause to think a great deal about the harm that frightened people do to the people they are supposed to cherish and how certain they are, the whole time, that they are being kind. I find I understand it better than I should like to.

I am not writing to forgive you. I have not yet got there, and I will not insult you with a forgiveness I do not feel, which would only be one more managed thing. I am writing to tell you the truth, which is that I am alive, and well, and angry at a number of people of whom you are only one, and that I have stopped pretending you are erased from my regard because you are not, and the pretending was costing me more than the honesty would.

Do not ask me for money as I have none of my own to give and would not send it if I had, because money is the river you are drowning in and I will not add to it. But if you are ever sober, and ever ashamed, and ever willing to be written to as a person and not as a creditor, you may write to me as one. I will answer. That is the most I have, and it is more than I had a week past.

Your sister, Ellen

She read it over once, and did not soften the hard parts, because the hard parts were the honest ones and softening them would have made it a managed letter again, and she had had enough of those from both sides to last her life. She folded it and sealed it and rang for it to go, and felt, watching the maid carry it out, something she had not felt in a very long while, which was clean.

Then she went to find her husband, because the plan was hers but the Lords were his, and a woman in England could marshal the truth all she liked and still needed a man to stand up in a chamber she would never be permitted to enter and say it aloud.

He was in his study. He rose when she came in, too quickly, and then made himself be still, and she saw him decide not to ask how she was, not to manage the moment, not to reach for the sentence that would make it all right, and she gave him a small private credit for the not-reaching, though she did not say so.

“I am not here about the door,” she said. “The door is a separate matter and I have not decided it. I am here about Greaves.”

“Sit, then. Please.” He did not come round the desk. “Tell me.”