I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Exchange

Odalys did not remember the carriage home.

She remembered Caelan's coat around her shoulders and the sound of the wheels.

She remembered his voice saying, "I'll buy every house your father's drinking friends own and have them thrown out of each one."

She remembered answering, "No. He's mine," and then nothing.

She woke at dawn in his bed with her boots off and her pearls on the pillow.

"Night thirteen," he said from the window.

"I was in your bed."

"You were asleep in my carriage from the opera house to the courtyard. You missed moonset." He shut the black book. "I carried you up at four. A night is moonset to dawn."

"You carried me up and put me to bed and watched me sleep."

"Clause one."

"You are a very strict man," she said into the pillow.

"Yes."

"I'm going to the Exchange."

He turned.

"Today?"

"Before breakfast. He called me your whore in front of two thousand people, and now it's my turn to stand up in front of the city."

"Take the carriage."

"Take the steward," she said. "He's the only man in your house who looks at the ceiling."

The Exchange stood at the end of Coin Street, a grey stone hall with a clock tower.

Every merchant in the capital climbed its steps at nine.

She got there at ten to nine with her father's notes in a leather case under her arm.

She had read page forty-one the night the bailiffs first came, and she had read pages one to forty before that.

She was good at reading.

It was the only thing her father had ever left her.

She stood on the steps under the clock and watched the coaches come.

Halcourt's black carriage pulled up at five to nine.

He climbed out laughing at something a man had said, and then he saw her, and the laugh slowed.

"Miss Marenne. Come to beg for a delay?"

"I came to read."

She opened the case in the middle of the steps with sixty merchants flowing around her.

"The Usury Act," she said, loud enough to carry, "carved on the wall behind the Registrar's desk, in your own Exchange, says that no loan to a private person may bear interest above eight in the hundred."

Heads turned.

"Page forty-one," she said. "Fourteen per cent for the first year, and then the Michaelmas penalty, and then the compounding clause at the foot, which my father didn't read and I did. By my arithmetic it comes to thirty-one."

Halcourt stopped smiling.

"A contract between consenting parties."

"Not above eight, my lord." She held the page high. "That's why they carved it on the wall."

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