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 9

He did not let her manage the thing alone, and she found she had not truly wanted him to.

He came to Car Court the next morning behind her by an hour, in the travelling chariot with the raven on the panel, and he brought with him a narrow, dusty man of business named Aldus, who carried a japanned box of papers and the manner of a terrier that has scented a rat under the wainscot. Sabine had barely time to warn Mrs. Puit before the knocker went.

And then she was in the drawing room again — the same long room, the candles cold in their sockets now, the July light pouring through the open windows, the smell of stocks coming in strong off the borders where last night’s rain still darkened the earth. And Sir Cassius was there, and Mr. Fessender with his ink-stained cuff, and the whole matter drew itself up for the second act, like a play the audience had begun to dread.

“Your grace.” Sir Cassius had put his pleasant face back on, but there was a weariness in it now — a man who has been robbed once in this room and does not mean to stand where the light can reach his hands. “This is unlooked for. I had understood our business concluded.”

“You had understood wrong. You generally do.”

Rafe did not sit. He stood in the middle of the turkey carpet where Sabine had been placed for auction, and he took the room’s measure exactly as he had the night before — and Sabine saw Sir Cassius feel the difference between being a host and being a subject.

“You have instructed Mr. Fessender to contest the settlement I made upon your niece on grounds of coercion. You mean to have it set aside, pay your own debts out of it, and dispose of Miss Carr to Lord Merik to stifle the talk.” He glanced at the attorney. “Do stop me, Fessender, if I have the shape of it wrong.”

Mr. Fessender studied his cuff and said nothing, which was answer enough.

“I do not know what you imagine you can do about it,” Sir Cassius said. “The settlement was signed under threat, before witnesses, and any court—”

“Any court will hear that the Duke of Ravensmore discharged a four-thousand-pound debt for a family in ruin and settled the surplus on the daughter of the house so that no fortune hunter could touch it. That is not coercion, Vain. That is charity — and the law is fond of charity.” Rafe’s voice did not rise. “But we need not trouble the court at all. And I think you would rather we did not.”

He held out his hand without looking, and Aldus put a paper into it.

“You owe a thousand to Garrow the corn factor. Six hundred and thirty to a wine merchant in the county town. And something above two thousand, at ruinous interest, to a gentleman in London named Speck — who does not advertise his trade, because his trade is other men’s desperation.” He let that stand a moment in the hot bright room. “I have bought all three.”

Sir Cassius’s face began, very slowly, to come apart.

“I hold your paper now, Cassius. The whole of it. I bought it yesterday afternoon while you were at your breakfast, planning to sell your niece a second time.” Rafe turned the sheet. “I can call it in tomorrow, at the assizes, in front of every man who bid on your niece and went home ashamed. Or I can put it in the fire in this grate this morning, and you may keep your house, and your consequence, and what shreds of your name the county has left you.”

He laid a second paper on the writing desk — the desk where the settlement had been signed, where the bead of ink had dried dark as a current into the wood — and turned it so that it faced the room.

“There is one price. You will renounce, in writing, before Mr. Fessender and my man both, every claim of guardianship over Miss Carr and every objection to her settlement. You will withdraw your contest, and you will do it now, at that desk, with the same pen you used to sell her.” He stepped back. “It is drawn. It wants your signature. And this time, Vain, it is you who is not for sale. You are merely being bought out.”

Sir Cassius looked at the paper. He looked at the grate.

Sabine watched him do his sums — the same sums as before, rage against ruin, his own skin against his pride. And she watched him find the same answer he always found. And something in her that had been clenched for three months came very quietly loose.

He signed. The pen tore at the paper as it had torn before. He flung it down.

“There,” he said, thick with hatred. “You have her. Much joy of it. She’ll dissect you like she does everyone. She gets it from her father.”

“She gets it from her father,” Sabine said.

She crossed the carpet and picked up the signed renunciation herself before Mr. Fessender could reach it, and she read the line at the foot aloud into the still room, so that no one might ever pretend to have misheard it.

“I do hereby wholly renounce and disclaim all right of guardianship, and all interest in the person, property, and marriage of my niece, Sabine Carr.”

She folded it once.

“Yes, uncle. From my father — who bought a family out of ruin and never sent the bill, and who kept the proof of it locked against my name not to spend but to spare. And who would, I think, be more ashamed of you this morning than of any debt he ever carried.” Her voice was low and even, and it did not break. “You had a brother’s daughter given into your hands, and you put a price on her before the tea was cleared. I shall not curse you. I find I do not need to. You will do it yourself, every quarter day for the rest of your life, when the corn factor is paid and the wine merchant is paid and there is still nothing left over — and you remember that you had ten thousand pounds walk into this room and choose everyone in it over you.”

She turned her back on him, which was the only blow she had ever wanted to land.

“Puit. Show Sir Cassius which of the rooms in his own house he may sulk in. I have done with this one.”

Sir Cassius went. His boots on the stairs did not rattle the lustres this time. A beaten man treads more softly.

Mr. Fessender gathered his hat, murmured that he would enter the withdrawal at once, and made his narrow escape. And the room was left to the sunlight, and the smell of stocks, and the small triumphant scratch of Mrs. Puit’s needles starting up again by the window.

“Well,” said Mrs. Puit, to no one in particular. “Two dukes at that desk in as many days, and the second one clearing what the first one’s brother broke. I said the world had turned clean over. I shall want a great deal more tea.”

They had barely stopped laughing — it had come up in all three of them at once, the helpless cracked laughter of people let out from under a great weight — when the knocker went a third time, and one of the two large livery boys put his head round the door with the air of a child announcing the sea, and said that the Duchess of Ravensmore’s carriage was in the drive.