High Society novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Price of a Name

Effie sets her terms in Hugh's study: fifteen hundred pounds, the court's lease, and nothing else bought; the Dowager walks in and says her ear needs hiding.

I got into the coach because the alternative was the cart.

Tilly climbed in behind me with the flat iron still in her fist, and the Duke did not tell her to put it down.

"She comes," I said.

"She may sit where she likes," said the Duke.

The coach smelled of leather and cold ink.

He sat opposite me and looked out of the window until the lane was behind us.

"Lord Marchbank is my creditor," he said.

"Lord Marchbank is my landlord," I said.

"Yes. I know."

"You knew before you stopped?"

"I knew when my coachman told me whose carts were in Mill Court."

I did not like that he had planned it, and I liked even less that it had worked.

We were not in Southwark long.

By nine o'clock the coach was rolling into a square so large and so clean that I could have eaten off the pavement.

Denholm House had eleven windows across the front, and every one of them had a footman behind it.

Tilly breathed in sharply.

"I'm going to be sick on a duke," she whispered.

"Please wait until after the pantry," I whispered back.

He took us through a marble hall into a study that smelled of old paper.

A desk stood in the middle with a single sheet of paper squared on its blotter.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand," I said.

He considered that and stood too.

"My father died in January," said the Duke.

"He left me a title, a house and a debt of forty thousand pounds to Lord Marchbank, borrowed against my farms."

"And a contract."

"How do you know about a contract?"

"Because a duke does not hire a washerwoman to be his sister for fun."

For a moment I thought he might laugh.

He did not, but the corner of his mouth moved.

"My father signed an agreement before he died," said the Duke.

"I marry the Earl's daughter, Lady Rosamund, by Michaelmas."

"If I refuse, the debt falls due that day and Marchbank takes the land."

"So refuse the girl and sell the land."

"The land feeds three hundred tenants, Miss Tapper."

I thought of forty families on a wet green and shut my mouth.

"My father's will has a clause," he went on.

"No marriage of this house may be made without the consent of my eldest living child."

"That's you."

"That is what everyone has assumed, including Marchbank."

He picked up the sheet from the blotter and held it out to me.

It was a copy, in a clerk's handwriting.

I read the clause twice, because I read slowly when I am nervous.

"There was a child before you," I said.

"My grandmother told me in February, when she thought she was dying."

"My father had a daughter by a Cornish girl, born in 1784, before he married my mother."

"The Dowager Duchess says she put her out of this house."

"She would not say where, or whether the child lived."

"So she may be dead."

"Perhaps."

"If she is alive, I cannot find her before Michaelmas."

"But if there is an elder sister," I said slowly, "and she says no."

"Then the contract is dead and Marchbank has no claim."

He looked at me.

"I need a Lady Charlotte Wrenfield," said the Duke.

"She was raised in Cornwall by a nurse, and she comes to London this week to refuse her brother's wedding."

I put the paper down.

"You want me to be your father's daughter."

"I want you to be a name."

"I am a laundress's daughter from Southwark," I said.

"My mother has been a washerwoman for forty years."

"I am no more your blood than the fireplace is."

"I know," he said.

"I will never claim otherwise, in this room or any other."

He said it plainly, and I believed him.

I did my sums for a moment.

"Fifteen hundred pounds," I said.

He blinked.

"In coin, to my mother, tonight."

"Done."

"Mill Court's lease, in my mother's name, once you can buy it."

"Done."

"I may leave whenever I like, and you will not stop me or follow me."

"Done."

"One more thing."

I walked around the desk until I was close enough to see the scar in his eyebrow.

"This buys a name and nothing else," I said.

"I'm not to be touched, or tipped, or thanked in a bedroom."

He did not step back.

He looked down at me from a great height, and his voice went very level.

"Miss Tapper, I would not buy a woman in a hundred years."

"If that is what you've been braced for since the lane, you may put it down."

My face went hot.

"Good," I said.

"Good."

We looked at each other a moment longer than we needed to.

Then the door opened without a knock.

A very small old woman came in, in black silk, leaning on a stick.

She had white hair under a cap and the kind of eyes that make footmen check their buttons.

"So this is her," said the Dowager Duchess of Denholm.

She did not ask my name.

She walked around me once, tapping her stick on the floor, and then she took my right hand and turned it over.

She looked at the lye burns for a long time.

"The height is right," she said at last.

"The hands will have to be kept in gloves."

She let go and lifted my plait off my shoulder with the end of her stick, and looked at my ear.

"And that will have to be hidden," she said.

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