Chapter One

 

 

“…convey Cranmoor to my son Frederick Aylmer if he shall marry before attaining the age of thirty-four years.” He read it aloud a second time, slower, and did nothing to keep the contempt out of his voice. “Even from the grave, a man contrives to interfere.”

“You have read the sub-clause the wrong way about, Your Grace.”

The voice came from the doorway, and he had not heard the latch. Before turning round he laid the paper face down. No gentleman cared to be caught quarrelling with the dead.

Since he was four and twenty he had been telling London that he would never marry, and London had taken care to write it down. It had not occurred to him that his father was listening.

“You read the second provision as though it named a punishment,” she said. “It names a gift. The son loses nothing by marrying, you see. He gains Cranmoor. I ought to know, since I wrote it out at my father’s dictation when I was twenty.”

At that, he put the pen away altogether and gave her his whole attention.

“You are Halbert’s daughter.”

“Prudence Halbert, Your Grace. My father is kept at the other office this morning and sent me with the fair copy in his place.” A few steps brought her into the room, near enough to read the copy upside down on the desk. “You hold the copy.” She nodded at the paper under his hand. “I made the one it was taken from.”

“Why did he want this at all?” Coming round the desk, he caught the heel of one boot on the curled edge of the Turkey rug. “He left me other estates and tied no ribbon on any of them. Why fence Cranmoor about with a wife? And why was the writing of it handed to a girl of twenty in another man’s office, when he kept a perfectly good attorney of his own? My father was the least sentimental man in England about land.”

She had a leather folder held flat against her front, and she did not put it down. Small and square, she had mouse-brown hair pinned up without ceremony and a snub nose that gave her face an air of permanent enquiry.

Her eyes were hazel and came to rest on him directly. The eyes of new acquaintances seldom did. Ink had got into the cuff of one glove and dried there in a grey smudge.

She took her time over the question. What she weighed, he could see, was the extent of her own knowledge, and a flattering reply formed no part of the sum.

“I can tell you what the paper permits and forbids, and I can tell you today,” she said. “Why he wished it, and how it came to my pen, I cannot.” Her chin came up half an inch. “I have never known.”

“Then who does?”

“The papers bundled round this one, I should think, and those have stayed tied up since the day they went into the box.”

For weeks he had endured sympathy from every quarter. Men at the club had lowered their voices over the port, and cousins by marriage had sent him long letters edged in black. His mother’s entire correspondence had arrived at the breakfast table in a heap.

Every one of them spoke of the will in the hushed voice kept for things beyond argument. None had said I made this with my own hand, as flatly as a clerk reading back a date.

“Come where I can hear you,” he said. “I have been shouting at a dead man all morning and my voice is worn out.”

Offered no chair, she crossed the room and stopped at a proper distance from the desk. She stood without fidgeting, her boots set side by side on the rug as neatly as candlesticks on a mantel. It was the stillness of a person long used to waiting in other people’s rooms until their business was decided, and then getting on with it.

Frederick righted the copy and this time read it through from the beginning, past the place where he had stopped and into the sentence he had refused to reach.

My trustees shall convey Cranmoor to my son Frederick Aylmer if he shall marry before attaining the age of thirty-four years. Should he remain unmarried on that day, they shall convey it to my nephew Sedgely Aylmer.

Sedgely had wanted Cranmoor for a long while, and would take it with a valuation in one pocket and a grievance in the other.

Cranmoor came to him whether he wished it or not, and came as always, as a grey stone front seen from the lane with the stable yard behind. There was the mounting block where he had first been heaved onto a pony. In the little room off the back passage his father’s saddles still hung on their pegs.

In that yard he had taken his first falls. In that house he had been left alone to be as silent as he liked, which no other house of his had ever allowed. The place was unassuming and had never pretended otherwise.

Of all the property in his name, Cranmoor was the only piece that asked nothing of him in the way of performance. Without it he would still be a rich man, and would merely have lost the single place where he had ever been glad.

Marriages he had watched at close quarters all his life, and he thought poorly of most of them. His own company suited him, his hours were his own, his house ran as he liked it, and he had considered the question closed. His father had considered otherwise, and left a sentence behind to go on arguing.

“You called it a gift,” he said. “I have been calling it a wall.”

“It is a door, Your Grace.” She laid the folder down between them. “A wall keeps you out. A door lets you through, provided you consent to walk a certain way. You dislike where this one opens, I grant you. It is still not a wall.”

Frederick set his thumb on the edge of the desk. “My cousin will hardly trouble himself with the distinction once he holds the deed.”

“Mr Aylmer reads it as you do, I expect, and likes it far better.” She turned a page. “But there are months in hand yet. You have been asking the wrong question.”

“And the right one,” he said, “leads me, I suppose, to a wife.”

“To a marriage.” The correction came without emphasis. “The instrument leaves the bride unnamed, and asks neither for a good match nor for a willing one.”

“Almost generous of him.”

“Crude, if I am honest. Cruder than I should expect of a careful man, and your father was careful in everything else in this bundle.”

He waited for the retreat that always followed a remark of that kind, the small civility about his father’s memory that would take the edge off it. Miss Halbert turned to the next page and let the remark stand.

“That comes close to criticising the deceased.”

“It is a remark about drafting.” She delivered it with a gravity so complete that it came near to comedy. “Your father would have made it himself.”

“Most solicitors,” he said, “would have told me the will was a marvel of the drafter’s art, and hoped for a fee.”

“My father’s clerks have read fewer wills than I have, and are never asked their opinion either. I may give mine this morning because he is away. I mean to make use of it while it lasts.”

“And when he returns?”

“Then I shall write what he dictates and think what I please, and keep the thinking to myself. It answers well enough,” she said. Her shoulders moved, barely. “Though it makes for dull conversation at dinner.”

He discovered, to his irritation, that he wanted to provoke that gravity again. Crude. The word stayed with him. His father had corrected a groom’s spelling and a bishop’s Latin in the one afternoon. Such a man did not fence his favourite acres with a blunt instrument and call the result a will.

A reason lay behind the crudeness, and Frederick, who had avoided wanting anything from that will for years, wanted badly to know what it was.

A footman appeared with the wooden face of a servant bearing an inconvenient message. “Mr Loder is below, Your Grace. He was expected this morning.”

“Then he is admirably punctual and may wait,” Frederick said. “Bring coffee. Tell Loder I am detained on the estate business he is forever begging me to take seriously.”

“And if he asks how long, Your Grace?”

“Tell him I am reading my father’s will, and that it is a longer document than it looks.”

The man withdrew with the fixed expression of a man already composing his account for the servants’ hall.

Naturally I wish her to stay. She knows something I do not.

The thought seemed to Frederick entirely reasonable. Ordinarily he worked at a difficulty until the seam showed, and then argued at the seam until the thing gave way. In all these years the method had never failed. It had never before required him to want a stranger’s help.

Frederick pushed the hair off his brow, where it had grown too long again. Height had never been among his gifts, and he had stopped minding the lack long ago. His coat that morning was cut to a fashion some seasons gone, and his tailor could weep over it as often as he pleased.

“Sit down,” he said. “You may tell your father I kept you here against your professional judgement. Will you take coffee?”

“Thank you, no.” Prudence took the chair across from him and opened the folder on her knee. “I drank mine standing up at the office.”

“Begin with what it forbids, then.”

“Nothing you would wish to do, unless you wish to stay as you are.” Two pages went over together, and she frowned at the second. “It asks for a marriage and leaves the rest alone. Any lady you like, of any rank you like, with or without your mother’s approval, and not a word about heirs. It runs until the day you cease to be thirty-three.”

The coffee came, and cooled untasted at his elbow. Sitting had become difficult. He crossed to the window, where frost had set the garden hard as iron and the plane tree stood bare over the gravel. Cranmoor would be greener than this even now, in the depths of winter, as it always was.

“How long?” he said. “Give me the figure. Everybody else gives me seasons and studies the carpet.”

“Seven months, Your Grace.” Her answer came only after she had gone back a page to make certain of the figure. “You reach thirty-four on the tenth of August. After that, Cranmoor passes to your cousin, and there is no clause behind the clause to save it.”

For weeks the figure had lived at the edge of his attention, where it could be left alone. Now she had put the date on the desk between them in a clerk’s even voice. It stayed there, and no amount of talk would push the tenth of August farther off.

In truth, he had known of the condition ever since his father died, and could hardly have forgotten a sentence standing between himself and Cranmoor.

Declining to act had seemed wiser. Difficulties ignored long enough were apt to dissolve, or so he had trusted. Then the trustees wrote, and Sedgely gave notice that he meant to take possession at the end of summer.

“You have not asked why I will not simply marry.”

“I was not engaged to ask it.” She did not look up from the page. “I imagine others have asked you at length.”

“Daily.” He watched her face. “My mother keeps a list. Tell me, was any of it useful?”

The dowager had begun her list of candidates the week the trustees first wrote. At breakfast she read from it in the voice of a woman ordering fish, and he let her, since forbidding her took more effort than enduring her.

“I have heard the other part, too,” Prudence said. “That you swore never to marry, and had it written down where men could hold you to it.”

“Every word of it.” He picked up the coffee, looked into it, and put it back in the saucer with a click. “I meant it, and I mean it now. My cousin is fond of reading it aloud after dinner.”

“Then you have set a wager against your own house,” she said. “That is an expensive way of being proved right.”

Any answer would come out as a boast or a confession, and he had no wish to offer either to a stranger before the coffee was cleared, so he inclined his head.

London had applauded the wit of that oath when he swore it, and he had dined out on the joke for a season. Watching Miss Halbert decline to be impressed by any part of him, he wished he had kept the oath to himself.

“If you mean to offer me the post of a useful person,” Prudence went on, “my father will refuse before he is asked.”

“Then I shall have to show your father the advantages.”

“Spiting my father is a poor reason to undertake work, and pleasing a duke is a worse one,” she said. “I take it because it is work, and this is interesting work, and I am good at it. If you want me, those are the grounds, and there are no others.”

“I had no intention,” he said, “of rescuing you.”

“Men seldom set out to. They arrive at it by degrees.”

Her look took his measure and handed it back to him somewhat reduced. Years of standing in rooms where dukes talked in order to be agreed with had evidently left their mark on her. He had expected to enjoy her disapproval and was put out to discover how little he did.

“I will read before I promise anything,” she said. “Whether it can be broken is a question for the papers that made it. I will answer it when I have seen them, whatever your cousin may say in the meantime, or your mother, or you.”

He pushed the fair copy an inch towards her side of the desk. The inch was as near to a request as his pride would presently allow. She saw the gesture and let it go unremarked, and he liked her the better for that.

“Suppose your father refuses, as you promise he will. Where would a difficult man start, if he pressed the matter and did not much care what it cost him?”

“With the instructions.” Her hand stayed flat on the folder. “Find the memorandum. Find out who gave the instruction and who merely wrote it down. Then the prior advice, and then the drafts, one after another as they were written.”

“A winter’s work, then.”

“It is weeks of squinting at other men’s handwriting for a line that fails to match the rest, and most of the time it comes to nothing.”

A servant appeared to fetch her, and she rose. “My father keeps those papers in his strongroom, however, and he will not bring them out for you. So the question is an idle one.”

“Indulge me with an answer before you go.” Getting to his feet took him longer than he meant it to. “Can you break it?”

From the doorway she considered him, the folder clasped to her as it had been when she arrived.

“No,” she said. “But I should enjoy trying.”

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“You will send His Grace my refusal.”

“If you dictate it, I will send it,” Prudence said, carrying a figure down the column she was adding. “What I will not do is write your refusal in my own words and then hear that I refused on my own account.”

Lord Halbert made the sound he kept for things that were true and inconvenient at once. His desk was the larger, set by the window where the light fell. Hers was the smaller, by the door, where the light fell less generously, and she kept a lamp lit through the grey middle of the day.

The desks had stood so for years, and she no longer saw the arrangement, except on mornings like this one, when she did. The office oversaw the business of several ducal estates, and its pigeonholes were stuffed to the ceiling.

Tenancy disputes, timber valuations and the endless letters of men who owned whole counties and had forgotten half of them came up the stairs with every post. Most of the post went through her hands before it went under her father’s signature, and all of the work left the room in his name.

In her head she carried which trustee read his own letters and which had them read to him. She knew which tenant lied and which merely despaired, and the exact wording that would move each board. Any paper in the place she could have found blindfold, and once had, during a shortage of candles her father still blamed on the chandler. None of that knowledge was written down anywhere as hers. Finishing the column, she wrote the sum and dated the entry, and ruled a line beneath.

“The Draycott arrears,” Halbert said. “Have you an answer for the trustees?”

“The man is flooded out, Father, and no idler.”

“His father always paid on the nail.”

“And so would he, if the river kept to its banks. The mill leat came over his low field in the autumn and it has lain under water ever since.” Without hunting, she found the entry and swung the ledger round so that the column faced him. “Distrain on him, and you lose a good tenant and a year’s rent together. Abate the half, and he pays the rest by quarter day and remembers who was patient with him.”

“That is soft.” Halbert did not look up. “The trustees will say so.”

“It is the only way the trustees see any money from that farm this year. Put a man in the Fleet, and they may whistle for their rent.” She blotted the figure. “Give it to them as your view, and they will take it as yours.”

Halbert wrote abate one half in the margin in his own square hand and moved on without a word, and she had stopped waiting for one long ago.

She drew the trustees’ letter from the pile and began the abatement in her father’s phrasing, the trustees being minded to show indulgence in a season of exceptional flood. It was the sort of sentence that board liked to put its name to.

“You went to Penhale House,” he said. “Against my instruction.”

“I went with the fair copy, which you asked me to deliver, to the house you sent me to.” She reached for the next bundle and tugged at its tape, which had knotted. “His Grace detained me. I could hardly leave by the chimney.”

“You might have left the copy in the hall.” He addressed the window. “You might have come away.”

“He was reading the clause aloud, and he had it backwards.”

The knot gave under her nail, and she pushed the letter she had drafted for him over to his side. “Could I in conscience let a man argue himself out of his house on a misreading? You raised me to correct misreadings. I have never known you leave one standing yourself.”

“The duke is a byword,” Halbert said. “He has refused to marry, publicly, since he was four and twenty. Half the town has money on it.”

“They may keep their wagers. I am engaged to read his papers, and whatever the clubs suppose, his character is none of my concern.” She drew the sand-shaker towards her.

Her father pulled the letter over and read it as he always read her work, hunting for a place to make a mark that would leave the page looking corrected. A comma caught his eye, and he moved the comma a word along. Then he signed beneath, and the letter became his.

“Your comma was wrong,” he said, sanding the signature himself.

It had been in the right place. She tied the tape on the Draycott bundle and let him have it. That small economy she had watched more times than she could count. The signature had never troubled her, or so she told the junior clerk when he asked. She went on telling herself so while she followed her father’s nib across the foot of the page.

Once, long after midnight, over a settlement she had untangled when he could not, he had pushed the papers back to her and said I could not have done that tonight, Prue. Then he had taken his candle up to bed. Nothing like it had happened since. She kept the words put away like a coin from a mint that had closed. Her father could not say a warm word to save his life. He could not write a false figure either, and on her better days she believed she had inherited the more useful of the two.

“His Grace wishes to engage me,” she said. “Separately, for a fee, to read the papers behind the Cranmoor condition.”

“The answer is no.”

“You have not heard the terms.”

“I have heard enough.” He pushed back his chair far enough to see her past the lamp. “A daughter of mine, hired independently by a man whose estates this office manages, to go rooting through an instrument she helped prepare. It is improper. It will look like a girl making herself conspicuous.”

“In a ledger it will look like paid work, and that is what it will be.”

Her voice stayed at the pitch she used for trustees. A raised voice let a man attend to the noise and forget the point. “You object to the impropriety. Now tell me the rest.”

“That is all.”

“You taught me to look behind the first objection for the second.” She waited, and when he only reached for the sand, went on. “You are afraid of what a close reading turns up. You did nothing wrong, Father, I am sure of it. But a close reading shows how much of this office is my hand. Once a duke knows that, he begins to ask why he pays the name at the top of the letter when the work was done by somebody else.”

He picked up the Draycott ledger, looked at the wrong page, and put it down again, and she had no pleasure in the sight at all.

“The clause was considered,” he said. “Years ago. By men who knew more law than you will ever pick up at that desk.”

“Then a sound document has nothing to fear from being read.”

Prudence waited until he had to look at her again. “If it is sound, I shall report it so, His Grace pays for his disappointment, and the office stands exactly where it stood. So what are you guarding, Father, if it is not the paper?”

“You,” he said, too quickly.

“And the office with me. You may guard both, I daresay, but I would sooner have the whole answer than the flattering half.”

His eyes narrowed in the manner she knew and disliked, weighing how much she might be permitted to do and taking no account whatever of how much she could.

“I gave advice on that instrument, years ago,” he said. “It was not taken.” The next letter got the whole of his attention. “I do not care to see that advice dug up and spread across a table for a duke to read.”

“What did you tell them?”

“It is old history.” He had said more than he meant to, and he showed it by breaking the seal with a crack. “Leave it, Prudence.”

“You forbade the reading before I had so much as named a fee,” she said. “A father minding only his daughter’s good name would have argued about the money first. You flinched at a page.”

He took a long time sweeping the broken seal off the baize into his palm, and she had nearly given up on an answer when it came.

“The Draycott letter wants a second sheet.” He set the seal down in the tray. “See to it.”

She saw to the second sheet, for the present. The page he had refused to turn went into her memory beside the settlement and the midnight candle, and she meant to come back to it.

“You are able to do a great deal,” he said. “You are not allowed to. I did not make the rule.”

“You showed me the difference yourself, a long time ago.”

For a man who kept an answer ready for every trustee in England, he was slow to find one now, and she let the silence run on. The work was what she wanted from him, and a wound would be no use to the work.

“I am six and twenty,” she said, lower. “I have no need of your permission to accept an engagement. Your blessing I should like, and I am asking for it. But I will take the work either way.”

“And where would you sit, pray?” He did not wait for her. “In his house?”

“In his library, with his man of business and a chaperone, at a table rather larger than this office.”

“And while you are in the country playing at law,” he said, “who keeps this office?”

“It kept itself when you were at Bath, with my help.” She drew a clean sheet towards her. “Everything outstanding will be finished before I go. I will name the day I leave and hold to it.”

He did not look up from the letters. “So you always tell me.”

“And have I ever failed to?” Her pen went on heading the sheet. “What I refuse to do is stay for ever because another bundle has come in, and another after that. There will always be another bundle, Father.”

“And the office?” His chair creaked under him. “What becomes of it?”

“It will manage badly, and know why, and go on paying the name on the brass plate regardless. That is what I mean to change by degrees, and this is where I start.”

Her father turned the ring on his finger once round, the way he did in front of a client he did not intend to answer. Below in the street a coal cart was being unloaded, and the noise had the office to itself for a while.

“By working for a duke,” he said. “He will have forgotten your name by the autumn.”

“By working under my own name for a single client, once, and seeing whether the roof falls in. Either way I shall know.”

“You have it all worked out.”

“Mrs Bell will come with me, for the visits and the country stay, at a proper fee for her time. She has a life of her own besides sitting in corners, and I would not pretend otherwise.”

She ticked the points off against the ledger with the end of her pen, a schoolroom habit he had never managed to break. “My savings are small, but they are mine. My lodging is paid to the quarter. And I have read this engagement more carefully than any agreement that ever crossed your desk.”

“And your good name?” He tapped the ledger with two fingers. “You left that off.”

“It came first. It is the reason I take a chaperone, and the reason every hour carries a fee. It is the reason I will put in writing only what I could read aloud to the trustees without blushing.”

Sitting back, she felt the old chair creak under her. “I have kept your name safe all these years. I can keep my own.”

Her father rubbed the bridge of his nose. The gesture gave her neither consent nor refusal.

“You will regret it,” he said at last. “A duke’s notice is a fire in another man’s grate. Pleasant while it burns. Then it goes out, and you sit colder than before, and you have forgotten how to light your own.”

It was nearly kind, spoken in the only grammar he owned.

“Then I shall be chilly in lodgings of my own,” she said, “with my own name on the bell.”

“Your name is all over this office.”

“My hand is. Take any page you like off that shelf and find my name on it. You have spent your whole working life keeping those two apart for other people, and you taught me the trick without once meaning me to want it for myself.”

Instead of replying, he fetched his hat and greatcoat from the peg.

“You will want your muffler, Father.”

He went down the stairs without it. She took it off the peg and folded the wool over the back of his chair, where he would find the muffler in the morning. Then she sat down again at the smaller desk.

What she had kept back was that she had recognised the duke’s favour as a borrowed thing before she ever left Penhale House. She meant to enjoy the favour without forgetting whose it was. The clock on the mantel wanted winding. She wound it, as she always did, and the small grinding turns steadied her hand.

Afterwards the office settled into the hush of a room where she could stop looking busy. She allowed herself a slow breath, and then used the hour as she used most such hours, for the two things she never did while he watched.

First she took the office copy of the Cranmoor instrument out of the locked drawer and laid it before her, a ruler beneath the lines. She worked her way down the second sheet. The condition sat low on the page. It carried the same flourished capital on My trustees and the same long s she had been taught as a girl and had given up since.

A discrepancy was what she hunted, some sign that the wording she remembered had altered in the copying, and she found none. The marriage condition stood in the office copy word for word as she remembered writing it, and no slip of her pen at twenty had put the words there. Whatever ailed that sentence had ailed it before ever it reached her hand.

She left the page unmarked. The instructions were where she would begin, all the dull, voluminous, honest talk that lay behind the wording she carried by heart.

Among them, she suspected, was the old advice her father had put away so briskly. He had spent the morning forbidding a reading and told her, without meaning to, the page to turn first. The other thing was a small square of paper from beneath the office blotter, where it had lain flat and unseen for a week.

The paper held a landscape study no larger than her two hands, a wall and a stunted tree at the edge of a field she had passed on the Bath road. She had been unable to leave the field alone. The wall was right. The tree was nearly right, and the sky she had left bare. The light had gone, and a client had come.

Now she mixed a grey in the lid of her paintbox with a drop of water from the carafe. The grey took more blue than seemed sensible until it dried, and she put the sky in at last.

No client was waiting for it. If the brush took a wrong turning she could take another, and nobody would move her comma or sign his name beneath.

She painted ordinary things on purpose, a field gate, a leaning wall, a hawthorn that had lost its long argument with the wind, and she had never shown a single one of them to a living soul. The gate she had drawn from memory, with a bar too many, and she left the extra bar where it was.

When the paper was dry enough she slid it in among her own things, away from the office’s, and promised herself that the new work would leave her free afternoon alone, whatever the bundles said.

Then she drew the clean sheet back and wrote to His Grace the Duke of Penhale. She would undertake the examination on the terms discussed, subject to a written engagement to follow, and would begin directly. The first attempt thanked him, and she tore the sheet across. A clerk accepting work had no business thanking a duke for offering it. She began again on a fresh sheet.

She had not meant to think of the duke while she folded the letter, and thought of him anyway. His hair was golden-brown and worn too long, and he had a dimple that appeared precisely when it was useful to him.

His clothes were good ones, cut to a fashion some years gone. He was, stated without ornament, an uncommonly handsome man. Prudence found the fact faintly embarrassing, as she might have been embarrassed by a drawing room that was trying too hard. He could hardly help his face.

One thing mattered more, and she would have denied that it mattered at all. When she corrected him, he had put his pen away and listened, and never reached for it again to correct her back.

She signed the letter Prudence Halbert, her own name at the foot of a page that was hers to refuse and hers to accept. The office seal was her father’s, so she closed it with a plain wafer and rang for the boy.

“The duke’s, miss?” The boy had his cap in both hands. “All that way?”

“Take the umbrella from the stand, and come straight back, or the Draycott letter misses the post.”

“And if His Grace is out?”

“Then leave it with whoever answers, and wait for no reply.”

He clattered down the stairs with it, and she sat listening until the street door banged behind him.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“This young lady is said to be an excellent companion.”

“So is a good spaniel,” Frederick said. “You would hardly marry me to one of those.”

“A spaniel does not bring a fortune and a house in Devonshire.” The dowager kept her pencil moving down the margin.

She sat at the head of the breakfast table with her list propped against the coffee pot, a shawl over her shoulders and a boiled egg cooling at her elbow. She wore the serene expression of a woman who had reduced a catastrophe to a morning’s occupation.

“And a spaniel asks only to be fed,” Frederick said, “which spares a household endless disappointment.”

Three sides of paper made up the list, all in her small upright hand. Twenty-three names ran down the column, each with a note beside it in a private shorthand he had once tried to read and got no further than sings, alas. Frederick had come to hate the sight of that paper more than he hated the clause. Several names had been struck through and written in again, and beside one a question mark had been gone over so often that the nib had worn a hole.

The breakfast room was her headquarters. She conducted the campaign from there daily, over toast, with the good humour of a general who believes the war already won and is merely settling terms.

That was the trouble with his mother. A tyrant he could have resisted without feeling a brute. She was cheerful and tireless and entirely certain she was saving him, and each morning she met him freshly persuaded that today might be the day he saw sense.

To refuse the list was to refuse to be rescued, and that made him the villain of any resistance, so he had long since given up arguing the centre. He argued the margins, lost them daily, and kept the centre by the simple expedient of having married nobody yet.

“Miss Fenwick,” she said, tapping the name. “Sensible, musical, and her mother visits only at Christmas.”

“You have put a woman’s mother down as a point in her favour.”

“It is the truest line on the page, and you ought to thank me for it.” She made a small mark beside the name and moved on. “The girl with the aunt in Bath plays no instrument at all, which you would prefer, but she laughs at things that are not funny, which you would never survive.”

Frederick set down his cup. “You have hardly met her.”

“Often enough. She laughed at the soup.”

“A comical soup, perhaps.”

“It was mulligatawny, Frederick, and there is nothing comical about mulligatawny.” She read on. “The tall girl who hunts.”

He looked down the column. “She rides to hounds and talks of nothing else.”

“Then you would never be obliged to talk at all. I call that restful.”

Frederick tried to read the next names through the steam off the coffee pot, and gave it up when they began to blur.

He buttered a piece of toast he had no wish to eat, his hands wanting occupation, and the knife scraped loud on the crust. Below the names she had read out, the column went on and on, each with a virtue and a defect weighed out like a grocer weighing sugar.

Every woman on that page was worth more than the exercise made her sound, and that was what galled him. His mother had taken a column of living girls, with opinions and bad colds and mothers of their own, and turned them into a solution. She had underlined poor against the next name and then, repenting, written but clean beside it.

“Now the Carteret girl,” she went on. “Clever, which you will like, and poor, which you pretend not to mind and do.”

“She reads Greek.” He set down the knife. “She told me so at a ball, in a whisper, like a confession.”

“Then she will be company for your library.”

“I mind her being poor for her sake. She would spend her life hearing how fortunate she was.”

“Most wives do, my dear. One gets used to it.” The dowager cut the top off her egg with one clean stroke and looked into it with disappointment.

Across the toast rack, Frederick studied his mother and let it go. The answer lay too near the bone to be spoken in front of a footman.

“You are going about this like a purchase,” he said.

“Like a mother whose son has a birthday coming and spends his mornings being clever at her table.” She wrote beside a name, pressing hard enough to dent the paper. “Cleverness never yet moved a birthday.”

Frederick set the toast down untasted. “It has occasionally found the flaw in a contract.”

“Show me the wife who was ever the happier for a lawyer’s trick.”

“I am trying to avoid a wife, Mother, and you keep hearing me ask for a better one.”

“And you are wrong, and I love you, and I should like you to eat something besides butter.” Her attention went back to the page. “You have been telling me all that for years, and the flaw has kept away, and the birthday has come closer.”

Over the top of the paper, her eyes came up at last, bright and unamused. “I would sooner you married a woman you merely liked than lost Cranmoor to your cousin out of pride.” About the stakes she was right, and about nearly everything else she was wrong, with such energy that being right about the stakes hardly slowed her down.

A footman came in and bowed. “Miss Halbert, Your Grace. And Mrs Bell.”

“Show them up.” The dowager laid the list beside her plate with evident regret. “Miss Halbert. So you have really engaged her.”

“Against her father’s advice and, I suspect, your wishes.”

“My wishes stretch further than you allow.”

Prudence came in with a stout, grey-haired woman a pace behind her and the leather folder held against her front, in the manner Frederick was beginning to know. She wished them both good morning, presented Mrs Bell, and offered no apology for arriving at precisely the hour she had been given.

“Halbert’s girl,” the dowager said. “You have his chin.”

“So I am told, Your Grace. He has never mentioned it.”

“You may sit,” the dowager went on, in the voice of a woman conducting an interview she had appointed herself to conduct. “Have you eaten?” She glanced towards the footman. “Plates, if you please.”

“We breakfasted before we came, Your Grace.”

“Then you will breakfast again. Nobody can read a will on one egg.” The dowager pushed the rack of toast along the cloth towards them.

“You at least will take toast,” she told the chaperone, and watched her accept a slice with approval before turning the same eye on Prudence. “I am told you know my son’s document better than his lawyers do.”

“The document I know well, Your Grace. The difficulty belongs to His Grace.”

Prudence sat and put the folder on her knee, her gloved hands folded on top while a plate she had refused was set in front of her anyway.

“Eat that,” said the dowager. “You are far too small to be reading wills.”

“I have been this size for all of them, Your Grace, and I have brought the terms of the engagement.” Her hand moved on the folder. “They are short.”

The dowager’s hand flattened her list. “Presently. First, I must find out whether you are sensible. You are unmarried.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“And not promised elsewhere.”

“Nor likely to be.” The folder stayed shut. “That suits me, and it has no bearing on the commission.”

The dowager blew the toast crumbs off the paper. At the foot of the list, the pencil began to move. Frederick watched the pencil, and had a fair idea what it was doing before she spoke.

“Twenty-four,” the dowager said, with satisfaction. “You are practical, you know the whole miserable business already, and nobody would need to show you where the linen is kept.”

Mrs Bell made a small sound into her tea. Prudence’s folded hands tightened on the folder and went slack again.

“I charge a fee for reading difficult documents, Your Grace,” she said. “Joining one was never among the terms. If the second is added to the first, I shall have to decline both, and His Grace must find another reader, and you must find your twenty-fourth elsewhere.”

“It was a joke, child.”

“I guessed as much.” Her tone kept perfectly level. “In this room, I do not mind it. In the town, I should mind it very much. Any woman who works is talked of quite enough without a duchess pencilling her onto a marriage list. I would ask you to keep it where it cannot be carried.”

The dowager studied her for some time, and what Frederick saw in his mother’s face was respect, or its first cousin.

“Very well. It stays in this room, then.” She looked hard at the footman by the sideboard. “You heard me. This room.”

Frederick had held his tongue throughout, and was glad he had. Gallantry from him would only have made matters worse, and Miss Halbert had defended her own ground without a duke’s help.

“The terms,” Prudence said, and this time she opened the folder.

They were as short as she had promised. Frederick let his mother read them, a task that kept her busy, and Prudence had evidently written them for exactly such a reader. The dowager held the sheet at arm’s length and turned the page over to see whether anything was hiding on the back.

The engagement asked for a fee by the month and expenses, and a right to see the papers held by the trustees and by Lord Halbert’s office. It carried neither a premium on success nor any clause that hung on the condition being broken.

“By the month,” the dowager read out. “Halbert charges by the quarter and sends his bill at Christmas, when a household has no spirit left to argue with him. You ask no more if you win?” She sounded scandalised.

“The reading is the same work whatever I find.” Prudence took the paper back and laid it flat on the folder. “Pay me to find an escape, and I shall find you one, whether it exists or no. I would sooner be paid to tell you the truth.”

The dowager’s eyebrows went up. “That is an odd way to grow rich.”

“Riches were never my object, Your Grace.” She squared the sheet. “Being believed is.”

“And what are expenses? I will not pay for hackney coaches to carry you about London looking at churches.”

“Hackneys, paper, candles, and Mrs Bell’s time. Churches only if there is a register in one.”

The list came back under her hand. “And if the reading runs on into the summer?”

“Then you will pay for the summer, Your Grace, and I shall have earned it.”

The dowager put down her fork with a small clatter, and Frederick discovered that he had stopped attending to his mother entirely.

He was watching the thing his mother did without appearing to do it. She had taken trouble into the house, and here she was folding the trouble into the household, pouring it coffee, pencilling it onto lists, making Miss Halbert a fixture of the breakfast room before she had read a page.

Prudence had come to take the clause apart. His mother had already begun, with great good humour, to fit her in among the furniture.

“Tell me this, since you have read the paper and my lawyers only frown at it,” the dowager said, pushing the list aside. “Is there anything in it that can be made to help him?”

“There may be.” Her hands settled on the folder. “I shall know when I have read behind it. The wording is where the thing ended. I mean to read where it began.”

“There.” The dowager swung round to Frederick, pleased. “She tells me nothing I wish to hear. Nobody has done that in years.”

Frederick saw the manoeuvre clearly. He had engaged Miss Halbert because she gave him answers he could use, and here was his mother helping herself to the same convenience.

He disliked the sharing more than a sensible man should. A good adviser was a good adviser, he told himself, and reached for the marmalade he did not want.

Undaunted, the dowager drew her own paper back. “Before you begin your reading, tell me you have the sentence by heart, so that I need not send upstairs for the thing each time we speak of it.”

“I wrote it, Your Grace.”

“Then say it, and I will tell you whether you have kept it.”

It was an idle test, of the sort his mother set to remind a room who was its mistress. Prudence began the condition from memory, her voice falling into the flat pace of a clerk reading back.

“…if he shall marry before attaining the age of…”

“Thirty-four years,” the dowager said over her, before the number was fairly out. “And the years are in it. People always drop the years.”

Prudence resumed. “…within the time so allowed…” She finished the condition.

The dowager had come in ahead of her, as a woman supplies the next line of a song she has known since girlhood.

Frederick put his coffee back in its saucer.

“You have it more exactly than I do,” he said. “I have carried that sentence since my father died and I could not have given you the figure just now without looking. You bring it out like a birthday.”

“I have had years to learn it, Frederick.” The dowager went back to her list without a flicker. “So have you. You chose to spend them being clever.”

It was a complete answer and a fair one: a mother anxious over her son’s inheritance would know the offending line by heart, naturally. He assembled that explanation with the ease of a man who liked his difficulties solved before the breakfast things were cleared. He believed the explanation, too, until he looked at Prudence.

She had noticed what he had noticed. Her coffee had stopped halfway to her mouth and then gone on, and she drank, and set the cup down, and her face kept its own counsel. That small refusal on Prudence’s part to conclude disturbed him more than a conclusion would have. Presently she made a short note in the margin of her own paper and turned the paper face down beside her plate.

His mother knew the sentence too well. There was a reason, and the reason was almost certainly innocent. Miss Halbert, buttering the toast she had said she would not eat, declined to agree that it was almost certainly anything.

“Mrs Bell,” the dowager said, recovering, “do you disapprove of my list as well?”

“Nobody has shown it me, Your Grace,” said Mrs Bell placidly, “and at my age I disapprove only of cold toast and weak tea.”

The dowager laughed outright, and for a while the morning became an ordinary one, rare enough in that house.

Mrs Bell, it emerged, had a late husband who had farmed a low field in Somerset and opinions on the draining of that field. The two older women fell to talking of ditches and tile drains over each other, while Prudence bent over her papers and Frederick was left entirely to himself.

“My steward tells me the willows will drink it dry,” the dowager was saying, “and the ditch is still full.”

“Willows drink nothing in winter, Your Grace. It is the spring you want them for.”

“Then I shall plant more and wait for the spring. He told me that in the first place,” said the dowager, and gave the steward’s advice the credit it had never had before.

He used his freedom to watch Miss Halbert write. She was copying the terms fair, and she had spelt Carteret correctly where the name came up, a thing his mother never managed. She wrote small and fast, and a strand of mouse-brown hair had come loose over her ear and she let it hang.

He was supervising an employee, he told himself, and went on watching long after there was nothing left to supervise. When the visitors rose to go, the dowager folded her napkin and stayed where she was. In the doorway, Prudence stopped to button her gloves.

“You begin, then,” Frederick said.

“As soon as the papers come. The trustees’ man will want a letter in your hand before he lets a single bundle out of his room.”

“Before dinner.”

“I shall want his bundles as well as your mother’s memory of them.” The second button would not go. “And I shall want it agreed that what I find, I report to you, whatever it is, and on the day I find it.”

He offered to shake on it, and the offer surprised them both.

“You agree easily now,” she said, and shook, briefly, with a firm grip. “Men generally do, before there is anything to hear.”

“Then hold me to it when there is.”

She weighed the sentence against the man, and went down the stairs without telling him whether the sentence had passed. Frederick came back to the table for his cold coffee. His mother had the list open again beside the marmalade.

“You might rub that out now, Mother.”

“I might. There are plenty of names above it to see you to your birthday.”

She had drawn no line through the twenty-fourth name. It stood in soft grey lead below the other twenty-three, deferred rather than declined. While he drank he saw the pencil hover over that line, and touch down, and add one small word he could not make out from his side of the table, and lift away again.

Then the dowager folded the list in half, ran her thumbnail along the crease, and slid it under the toast rack, where a corner showed among the crumbs.