第9章 The Heir

She made him give her the contract a second time, and she read the last page with a lamp and a cold cup of tea and a rising fury, and when she was done she understood that she had been deceived in a way that was entirely legal and entirely honest and entirely unforgivable. The last page said this. The bride undertakes the duties of the house, including the duty of Confirming, which shall follow the customs of the family. And then, in a lighter ink, in a hand she had not noticed because it was so small, a footnote: the Confirming is the act by which the house acknowledges its heir, and its hour shall be set by the mistress, and its form shall be set by the custom, and the bride's part in it shall be explained to her at the proper time, which is not before. Romilly put the contract down and went to find Honoria. She found her in the great room, at the fire, with a maid turning the pages of a book for her because her eyes were old. Romilly did not curtsy and did not wait to be addressed. Tell me what the Confirming is, she said. Honoria looked up slowly, the way a woman looks up who has never in her life been hurried. The maid stopped turning pages. Leave us, Honoria said, and the maid left, and the room was the two of them and the fire and the dark beyond the glass. You have read the footnote, Honoria said. Good. I am tired of brides who come to the winter turning and are surprised by it. What is it, Romilly said again. It is an heir, Honoria said. This house is three hundred years old and it is dying, and you may not have noticed but there is no child in it, and there has not been a living child of the true blood since before the fire, and a house without an heir is a house that has begun to be kept rather than to keep. The Withergraves do not fade. We do not let a name go out like a candle. And so, when the blood fails, the house takes a bride from outside, and the bride gives the house what the blood cannot. Romilly stood very still. You are telling me the house expects me to bear it an heir. The custom is older than the law and the law bends to it, Honoria said. The bride is bound to the Keeper for a year. The Confirming is the night the house acknowledges the child of that binding, and until the Confirming the bride is of the house and may not leave it, and after the Confirming she is free, and the debt is forgiven, and the name is secured. She said all this without heat, the way she might have described the terms of a lease. It is an old arrangement and a plain one, and you signed it, and your mother is being paid. Romilly's hands had gone cold. The Keeper, she said. Severin. You are telling me that the contract binds me to him, and that the year is for a child. The contract binds you to the Keeper of Withergrave, Honoria said. It says so on the first page. Whether the Keeper is inclined to do his part is a separate matter, and between the two of you, and not mine to manage. She smiled then, a thin dry smile with no warmth in it at all. Though I will say, for a man who does not care for the arrangement, he has been remarkably attentive to your mother's bills. Romilly went out of the great room and up the stair and stood in her cold room with her back against the door and her heart going and her head full of a rage so clean it surprised her. She had been sold a story and given a chain, and the chain had a wedding ring on the end of it and a cradle at the top, and the whole of it had been set in front of her on cream paper by a man with soft hands while she was thinking about her mother's lungs. She went to find Severin. She found him at the wall, below the house, alone, and when he saw her face he set down the lamp and said, before she could speak, She has told you. She told me, Romilly said, that you and I are bound for a year so that this house can have a child, and that you knew it when you watched me sign, and that you have been paying my mother's bills as the first payment on it. He did not deny any of it. He stood in the lamplight with the numbered doors behind him and the tide pressing at the stones, and he said, I did not want it. None of that matters, I know. But I will say it once, and you may believe it or not, which is your right. I did not want it, and I argued against it, and I lost, because Honoria holds the blood and I hold only the rules, and the rules say the Keeper serves the house. That is what a Keeper is. He is the man the house uses to shut its doors, and I have shut them for eleven years, and I have not yet found the door I can shut on this. Then refuse, she said. You keep everything else in this house. You walked down the hill at night to keep a promise to me. Refuse this. I cannot refuse the Confirming, he said quietly. But I will tell you what I can do, and it is the only thing, and you must decide it for yourself and not for your mother. On the night of the Confirming, whatever the custom asks, you may say no. Out loud, in front of the house, in front of Honoria. No bride has ever said no. He looked at her, and in the lamplight the pale green of his eyes was steady and gave her nothing but the truth. If you say no, the contract holds. The debt stands. Your mother comes home. And I will find a way to pay the rest, and I will not tell you how, and you must not ask. She went up the stair with the contract in her fist and did not go to her room. She sat in the great room, where the fire was banked and the house was quiet, in the chair by the hearth that no one ever sat in, and she read the whole of it again from the first page to the last, the way her father had taught her to read a bill, which was to read the numbers first and the words second and then read both again as though they belonged to strangers. The numbers said she was bought for a year. The words said the same thing more politely. And in every line she found the same small hinge that the house had been opening for three hundred years: a poor family, a debt, a bride, and a document written by a man in a warm office who had never once stood at a gate in the cold and looked up at the Hall. She stood at the foot of the wall of doors and looked at the man who was to be the instrument of her binding, and she thought of her mother's hands, and Amias's laugh, and twenty-seven small iron doors, and one name stitched alone at the bottom of a cloth, and she did not know, standing there in the cold of the underhouse with the sea on the other side of the stone, which of the two of them had just been offered a way out, or which of them wanted it less. ---