Chapter 5: Terms

Nobody answered him, so I did.

"Not me," I said. "I'm the one who isn't wearing it."

Finbar Hulme looked at my bare left hand for a moment.

"Then I've been misinformed," he said. "I was told on the phone that you'd cost me a great deal."

"By who?"

"By your uncle."

Torsten had gone very still in his chair, with the wine bottle in his hand.

"I only said she might have expectations," he said. "Understandably."

"Understandably," Finbar agreed, in a voice that closed the subject.

Lydia stood up and put her napkin on the table.

"The study," she said. "The two of you. Thirty minutes, and nobody listens at the door."

She looked down the table at five sons, and every one of them found something interesting in his water glass.

The study had a green desk, a fire and three walls of books nobody had read.

Finbar shut the door behind us and stood by the window with his hands in his coat pockets.

He had not taken the coat off.

I sat on the arm of a chair, because I had decided I was not going to be comfortable.

"Show me the contract," I said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The one you signed in April. If I'm engaged to you, I'd like to read what I'm engaged to."

He took a folded document out of his inside pocket without hurry and held it out.

I read the whole thing, standing, under the desk lamp.

It was ten pages, and a decent piece of work, with the loan on one side and the marriage on the other.

On page two it said that Hulme Holdings would extend credit to Ashgrove Marine upon the marriage of Finbar Hulme and the Ashgrove daughter.

It didn't say which daughter.

It didn't say Eliana.

It said the Ashgrove daughter, and nothing else.

I looked at the signature page.

Torsten's name, then Finbar's, dated the sixth of April.

"You signed this without a name on it," I said.

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