Chapter 2 The Contract

The gate did not open for her, which she had half expected, and it did not turn her away, which she had not. She stood on the crushed white stone and the wind came off the flats and lifted the ends of her hair, and after a while a man appeared on the other side of the iron, walking up the long drive with the unhurried patience of someone who had all the time in the world and no intention of hurrying for her. He was old and bent and wore a coat the color of wet slate, and he stopped at the gate and looked at her through the bars the way a man looks at a bird that has flown into his kitchen. You will be Miss Draycott, he said. I am Crispin. Mr. Lodegrave is expecting you in the west parlor. Follow the drive and do not leave it. She followed the drive. On either side the lawns had gone to seed in a careful way, as if the wilderness had been permitted rather than suffered, and the hedges grew tall and dark and leaned toward the path. The Hall grew as she walked, which was a thing she had not known a building could do. It had seemed large from the village. Up close it was a country of its own, gray stone and black slate, with windows like eyes and a great door bound in iron and a smell around it of salt and cold and something older, something like the inside of a chest that had been shut for a very long time. The door opened before she reached it, which she would learn was the house's habit, and a woman in a black dress took her coat and said nothing and led her down a corridor to a room where a fire had been lit and a man in spectacles sat at a table with papers before him. Mr. Lodegrave was round and neat and had soft hands, and he rose when she entered and smiled as though she were a client and not a debt. Miss Draycott, he said. Please sit. She sat. The chair was older than her grandmother. The fire cracked and settled and threw its light across the papers, and she saw her father's name on the topmost sheet, written over and over, each time a little smaller, as if the man writing it had been trying to fit a large sum into a narrow margin. I will not waste your time, Mr. Lodegrave said, though he took a great deal of it, shuffling and arranging and clearing his throat, and Romilly understood that this was a performance and that she was meant to be softened by it. The estate holds your father's debt. It has held it for eleven years. The estate has, until now, taken only the interest, out of consideration for your family's circumstances. That consideration, he said, has reached its limit. What does that mean, she said. It means the estate will call the debt. It means the boat is gone and the cottage secures the loan, and the cottage will be sold, and your mother and brother will have nowhere in Marrowgate to live, and the sanatorium at Wexley will not take a patient who cannot pay. He said all this in the tone of a man reading a weather report, and then he folded his soft hands and looked at her over the spectacles. She kept her voice level, which cost her. And the proposal, she said. Mr. Lodegrave smiled again. It was the smile of a man who had been waiting for the question. The Withergrave family, he said, is an old family. It is also a family that has, for reasons of its own, become reduced. The house requires a marriage. It requires a bride from outside the blood, and the bride must be of the district and of good health and of a temperament suited to the house. You, he said, are all three. She looked at him for a long moment. You are asking me to marry a stranger, she said, to save a cottage. I am offering you a contract, he said. For one year. At the end of the year, the debt is forgiven, the cottage is yours outright, and your mother's care at Wexley is paid in full, for as long as she needs it. During the year you will live at Withergrave as a wife of the house. There will be duties. There will be rules. You will be told them, and you will keep them, and if you keep them you will never want for anything again. And if I do not keep them, she said. Then the contract fails, Mr. Lodegrave said, and the debt stands, and the cottage goes. She had known the shape of the trap before she came, and she had walked up the hill anyway, and she sat now in the old chair with the fire at her back and understood that she had already begun to be a woman who would say yes. She hated that. She hated the arithmetic of it, the way the columns balanced no matter which way she turned them. She hated that her mother's face had rearranged itself at the window that morning, and that Amias had laughed about a bride and not understood, and that there was a sum in the world that could only be paid with her own life, and that it had been placed in front of her with soft hands and a soft smile. She was still sitting there when the door opened and the room changed. She felt him before she saw him, which she would learn was how everyone felt him, the way you feel the cold come in under a door. He was tall and black-coated and he moved without noise, and when he came to stand at the end of the table the fire seemed to lean away from him. His hair was dark and cut close, his face was all planes and stillness, and his eyes were the color of the flats in winter, pale and grey and patient. He did not smile. He looked at her the way a man looks at an entry in a ledger he has not yet decided whether to accept. Miss Draycott, he said. His voice was low and even and gave nothing away. I am Severin Withergrave. I am the Keeper of this house. The Keeper, she said. I keep its rules, he said. I keep its accounts. I keep its order. Every house has a rule it lives by. This house has nine, and I am the man who sees that they are kept. Mr. Lodegrave made a small noise and gathered his papers. Then I will leave you, he said, to discuss the terms. Miss Draycott, the contract. He slid a document across the table, and then he left, and the door shut behind him, and the room was suddenly twice as large and half as warm. Romilly looked at the contract and did not touch it. She looked instead at the man who had called himself the Keeper, and she asked the question that had been waiting behind her teeth since she read the letter. Why me. Because you are in debt to us, he said. Because you are healthy. Because you are unmarried and of the district and because you have a family you would do anything for, and a woman who would do anything for her family will keep a rule she does not understand, which is the only kind of woman this house can use. That is not an answer, she said. That is a description of a tool. He regarded her for a moment, and something moved behind the grey of his eyes, some small acknowledgement that she had said a true thing, and then it was gone. Read the contract, he said. It is four pages. The important terms are on the first and the last. The middle is the law of the house, and the law of the house is the rules. If you sign, you will live here. You will be seen as my wife. You will keep the nine rules. At the end of one year you will leave, if you still wish to, with your family and your debt cleared. And if I do not sign, she said. Then you will walk down the hill, he said, and the cottage will be sold within the month, and your mother will not go to Wexley, and your brother will go to the workhouse at Wexley if he is lucky and the docks if he is not. He said it without cruelty, which made it worse. He said it the way a man states the depth of water he has measured. She picked up the contract. The paper was thick and cold, and her father's name was at the top of it, and under it a blank line waited for hers. She read the first page twice. She read the last page and read it again. The words were plain and had no mercy in them and made no promises beyond the money and the year and the rules, and she looked up at the man who was to be her husband and found him watching the fire, not her, as if her answer mattered to him less than the weather, and she understood that he was lying with the whole of his stillness, because a man who does not care does not wait. Tell me one true thing, she said, and then I will sign. He looked at her. Anything. She held the pen and did not yet put it to the paper. What does this house keep, she said, that makes a man promise his daughter never to take anything from it. For a long moment the Keeper of Withergrave said nothing. The fire cracked. Somewhere in the house a door closed with a soft sound, and something in the walls settled, and the salt wind worked at the windows, and when he answered his voice was lower than before and had lost, for the first time, its perfect evenness. It keeps its dead, he said. ---