She Stayed Silent as Her Husband Called Her Mute Before the Entire Table — Then the Feared Iron Duke Set Down His Fork, Defended Her Before Everyone, and Began Uncovering the Secret Behind Her Three-Year Marriage

PART 5 

“You look at me,” she said once in late April, folding a pressed violet carefully into the pages of her book, “as though you are trying to solve a puzzle, your grace.”

“Perhaps I am,” Haldane admitted. “Though I begin to suspect the puzzle is not you at all, Mrs. Rexol, but rather my own considerable surprise at how much I have come to look forward to Tuesdays.”

She smiled at that. A real smile, unguarded, the kind he had come to treasure precisely because he understood how dearly it was won from a life that gave her so little cause for it. She said nothing further, but the color that rose in her cheeks told him everything her silence did not.

He walked home through the April rain that evening with a lightness in his chest he had believed until that very spring entirely beyond his own capacity to feel again.

Marsh’s second report reached Hailwood House on a wet Thursday. This time Haldane did not merely set down his pen. He read the pages twice through, standing at his study window with the rain streaking gray down the glass. By the second reading, his hands — ordinarily so steady that his own valet remarked upon them — were not quite steady at all.

Marsh had, through channels he described only as “certain discrete inquiries among the Herefordshire legal fraternity,” obtained sight of the marriage settlement. Not the fair copy lodged with the family solicitor, which was correct in every particular a court would examine. But an earlier draft, retained by accident or carelessness in the files of the country attorney who had first drawn up the terms.

The draft told a different story than the fair copy.

In the draft, in the attorney’s own hand, was a note — struck through later, but legible still beneath the strike, the way old ink so often is to a patient eye. It recorded that Sir Aldis had, in the course of negotiations, expressed considerable reluctance to conclude the match, on the grounds that his daughter had given him to understand her own reluctance was greater still. And that Mr. Rexol had responded to this reluctance not with courtship, not with patience, but with a plain statement, recorded almost verbatim by the attorney, as though the man had wished even then to leave some record of what had passed.

The notes of hand representing Sir Aldis’s £4,000 of debt would be called in within the month in full — with Sir Aldis’s country house standing as the only security sufficient to satisfy them — unless the marriage proceeded within the quarter.

It was not, Marsh’s covering letter noted, evidence a court would readily call fraud. A hard bargain driven upon a desperate man was not, in the eyes of most judges, meaningfully different from any number of marriages contracted for material advantage across the length and breadth of England.

But it was, Marsh added in a rare departure from his usual dry economy of language, as plain a picture of coercion as this office has had occasion to examine in eleven years of practice.

Haldane read the closing line a third time. Then he folded the papers with great care, as though they were something that might shatter, and sat for a long while in the failing afternoon light, thinking of Githa’s hands folded in her lap at Fenwick House, and of the particular practiced stillness with which she had endured her husband’s cruelty.

He understood at last the true shape of what he had been looking at all along. Not a woman unhappily married, in the ordinary, regrettable way of so many society matches. But a woman sold by her father’s fear, her own reluctance recorded and then simply overridden as one overrides an inconvenient objection in an account book — and then required every day since to sit at that same man’s table and be grateful for the privilege.

He thought of Marianne then, unwillingly, as he had not let himself think of her in months. His own humiliation, when it came, had at least been swift. A broken engagement. A season of whispers. And then it was done, and he had been left only to rebuild whatever pride the whispering had cost him.

Githanoris’s humiliation had no ending written into it. It renewed itself nightly, at every dinner table where Rexol found it amusing to remind her and the room of the terms on which her compliance had been purchased.

It was at the Pelum ball, three weeks into April, that the careful arrangement Haldane had been so carefully protecting nearly came apart.

The ballroom blazed with wax candles, hundreds of them set in the great chandeliers and along every mirrored wall, so that the whole room seemed to shimmer, gold upon gold. Haldane arrived late, delayed by estate business, to find the dancing already well underway — and Githa standing at the edge of the floor in a gown of pale gray silk that did nothing to flatter her and everything, Haldane suspected, to satisfy her husband’s evident preference that she attract no particular notice.

He was still some distance across the room, working his way toward her through the crush, when he saw Rexol approach her instead. Flushed with wine. His voice pitched deliberately loud enough to carry.

“Not dancing, my dear? Though I confess I begin to understand why. A woman who dances so gracelessly does better to sit against the wall and let the rest of us enjoy the evening unhindered by the spectacle.”

Rexol’s laugh was ugly and practiced. The laugh of a man who had performed this particular cruelty enough times to have refined its delivery.

“Lady Pelum, forgive my wife her want of grace. Her family, I fear, could never quite afford a proper dancing master. Among the many economies her father’s misfortunes obliged them to.”

A ripple of laughter moved through the small crowd nearest them. Thinner than at Fenwick House, Haldane noted grimly, for word of the Duke of Hailwall’s interest at that earlier dinner had evidently traveled. But some did laugh.

And Githa stood very still amid it, her chin lifted in that same terrible practiced dignity.

Haldane crossed the remaining distance of the ballroom without any particular awareness of having decided to move.

“Mrs. Rexol.” He bowed before her, ignoring her husband entirely, as though the man had not spoken at all. “I believe this next is a waltz. I find myself without a partner, and I confess I should count it a very particular honor if you would consent to stand up with me.”

The ballroom went quiet.