She Was Offered to the Highest Bidder to Settle Her Father’s Debt — Then the Ruthless Duke Laid Ten Thousand Pounds on the Table and Did the One Thing No One in That Room Had Imagined

 PART 8

Beneath Gideon’s refusal lay the others. Three letters in a girl’s over-rounded hand, sealed once and broken — and Sabine did not read past the salutation, because the salutation was enough.

And beneath those, in her father’s own small upright figures, a single sheet, headed in his dry particular way: An account of the matter of the river land, that my daughter may know, if ever it is needed, what was done, and why, and may do as her conscience directs — hers being better than mine.

Rafe read it standing, his hand not quite steady on the page. And when he came to the end he was quiet a long time.

“He kept the proofs,” Rafe said at last. “Copies of the very letters Gideon burned — made before Thomas Carr returned the originals to him.” He looked up, and his eyes were strange. “Look. Look at what he wrote. He kept them so that if the truth were ever needed to defend someone, it could be. And he left the choosing to you.”

He set the sheet down as if it were hot.

“Your father is a better man than every Vain who ever drew breath, Miss Carr. And I include myself. And I say it without the smallest hope of ever earning past it.” He looked at the packet. “Do you understand what you are holding? You could ruin my house entire. Estella. Cesily. My brother’s memory. The name. All of it. In one morning at the sessions your uncle would pay you for the pleasure.”

“I know precisely what I am holding.”

Sabine gathered the letters back together with hands that had gone cold in the warm shade.

“I have been valued at four thousand, and ten, and twelve since yesterday afternoon, your grace. I have had a very thorough education in what things are worth. And I will tell you what I have decided, standing here — because I decided it while you were reading, and it did not frighten me at all.”

She retied the green thread.

“I will not use these. Not against your dying sister’s reputation. Not against a woman I have met once. Not to buy myself out of my uncle’s trap by dropping other people into a worse one.” She looked up. “My father did not beggar himself to make a weapon for me. He made a shield, and left me to choose whom it covered. I choose to cover them.”

She held his eyes.

“That is not for your sake. It is for his. I find I would rather be my father’s daughter than a free woman in Bristol.”

Something happened in Rafe Ravensmore’s face that she would think about for a long while afterward — a kind of stripping, as though a wall he had built stone by stone since his brother’s accident had a single stone knocked from the base of it, and he had felt the whole of it shift.

“You would give that up,” he said. “The one lever in the county that could make everyone leave you be. Out of loyalty to a man who is past knowing whether you kept faith with him or not.”

“He would know. That is rather the point of the sort of man he was. One behaves as though they know.” She heard her own voice thin, and steadied it. “But I will not pretend to you that it leaves me anywhere to stand. Because if I do not use these, then I have nothing. No weapon. No protection. But a paper my uncle means to tear up, and a reputation Mr. Fessender priced this morning at nothing at all. I have kept my father’s honour and lost my own footing in the same breath, and I do not, in fact, know what I am to do next.”

She made herself say the last of it.

“I came here angry and meaning to catch you in a lie. And instead I find you are the only person in this entire business who has tried to give me something without first working out what it would fetch. And I do not know what to do with that either, your grace — because I have quite lost the habit of being handled gently, and it undoes me worse than cruelty.”

The wood pigeon fell silent. Overhead the beech leaves stirred and let down a shifting net of light across them both. The grey horse stamped once at a fly.

And Rafe took a step nearer to her over the cobbles, and stopped — plainly not trusting himself past that.

“Then let me tell you the last of it,” he said, “since we are past the point where I am permitted to be a coward with you. I told your uncle it was a debt of honour. It is. I told you I could not sit in London and let it be paid by you. That is true — but it is not the whole.”

His voice roughened.

“The whole is that when I found your father’s letter, there was a paragraph in it about you. He was setting his affairs in order, and he wrote of his daughter the way a man writes of the one thing in the world he cannot arrange to his satisfaction. That she was clever past the use the world would let her make of it. And proud in a way that would cost her. And that she read a room like a column of figures, and trusted no one who had not earned it. And that she would sooner break than bend — and God help the man who could not tell the difference.”

He looked at her.

“I read that a year and a half ago. I have, Miss Carr — I have wondered about you for a year and a half. And then I walked into a warm room full of men putting a price on you, and you were correcting Lord Merik’s grammar with a face like a queen at her own beheading, and every word your father wrote stood up off the page and walked.”

Sabine could not breathe. The amber silk was too warm. The letter was too heavy in her hand.

“That is not a debt,” she managed.

“No,” Rafe said. “It stopped being a debt somewhere on the road between here and your uncle’s gate. And I have been lying to myself about that too. I am, as you have now had ample cause to know, an accomplished liar in a good cause.” He drew a breath. “But I will not compound last night’s error by adding my own wanting to your account while you have nothing and I have everything. You came here owing me no answer. You still owe me none. The trust is yours. Whatever you decide about me, I built it so that not even I could reach it — precisely so that this conversation could happen with you free.”

He stepped back, deliberately, one pace.

“So you will drive home. You will let me deal with your uncle. And when it is settled, when you are safe and moneyed and free to snap your fingers at the whole county — then, if you find you can bear the sight of me, you will send for me.” His jaw set. “Not before. I will not have you choose me because I am the wall between you and Merik. I would rather want you the rest of my life than have you on those terms.”

“You keep telling me to wait,” Sabine said — and to her own astonishment there was the ghost of a laugh in it. “You keep handing me things and then instructing me to go away and consider them at a decent interval. Do you know, your grace, you dealt me six thousand pounds and half a story and bid me good night as though you had returned a borrowed book. And now you offer me your whole heart on the mounting block of your stable yard and in the same breath tell me to drive home and think it over.” She looked at him. “Is it a family failing, this? Giving generously and then bolting the door?”

The hard mouth moved — and this time it went the whole way, and the smile transformed his face so completely that she understood at last how a man so grim had been so young all along.

“It may be that my brother gave your father a refusal and bolted. I am at least improving on the model.” He sobered. “Go home, Sabine. Let me earn the sending-for. It is the one thing your father asked that I mean to do properly this time, even if I am three years late and doing it backward.”

“He asked you to see me safe.”

“He asked me to see you safe,” Rafe agreed. “The rest I have managed entirely on my own, and against my own strict instructions, and I do not repent of it in the least.”

He handed her up into the gig, and his hand lingered over hers on the rail — one moment past what was proper.

“Lock that packet where your uncle cannot dream of it. And Miss Carr — do not, whatever else you do, marry Lord Merik between now and my dealing with your uncle. I should take it very much amiss.”

“I shall try to restrain myself,” Sabine said.

And she turned the pony’s head for home with her heart going like a struck bell and the whole green county tilting bright around her.