Her voice was shaking, which he had not heard before, not once, not even in the vestry. "Do you know what you have done? On Monday I said a thing to you at your own table in front of 11 people. On Tuesday I spoke against your surveyor. On Thursday, you sat five hours in the shop. And on Saturday, my uncle is given a 21-year lease at the old rent out of nothing by the Duke of Arlington."
She pressed her hands flat on the desk. "By Tuesday market, there will be exactly one story in this county, and it is not that you were persuaded about a roof. It is that Philippa Standen has been paid. Everything I have written for two years, every figure I ever gave that vestry, all of it is bought now. Nash, the surveyor, will say it, and he will be believed because it looks precisely like what it looks like."
The Duke of Arlington stood up. He had in his life been shouted at by two people, his father and a colonel at Salamanca. He discovered that he would rather be shouted at by this woman than agreed with by the entire county.
"You are right," he said. "Do not—I'm not being gallant. I'm being accurate. You are right, and I did not think for one instant past the pleasure of doing it. I wanted to hand you a good thing on a plate and watch your face, and I have instead handed a weapon to a man who dislikes you."
He came round the desk. "Very well. It cannot be undone. I will not put your uncle back into Pargeter's hands, and you would not really have it. You would not thank me for it in 10 years' time."
He held up a hand against her protest. "But it can be answered. Sit down, and let us answer it properly, because I am not going to have your two years' work spoiled by my Saturday morning."
They answered it at 10:00 on Sunday morning in the church porch at Arlingham in front of the whole parish coming out of morning service.
He had spent Saturday evening writing it and had torn up five versions and had ended by keeping the plainest. He stood on the step and asked their pardon for stopping them and read out the following:
That the almshouse roof was his liability and had been since 1811, as had been demonstrated to him by 14 public letters signed Candor.
That the author of those letters was Miss Philippa Standen of the bookshop.
That she had written the whole of them without his knowledge, without payment, and at some risk to her uncle's business.
That the lease granted on Saturday had been granted at his own motion and without her knowledge.
That she had walked 2 mi in the wind to demand that he take it back.
And that she had told him to his face he had been a fool to do it.
"Which he had been," said the Duke of Arlington, to 200 people in a churchyard. "The lease stands because Mr. Standen has done nothing wrong and shall not be punished for having a formidable niece. But every figure Miss Standen has ever laid before this vestry was laid there before she had one penny's benefit from me or any expectation of it. And if any man in this parish says otherwise in her hearing or out of it, he may come and say it to me on any morning of the week, and I shall be at home."
Nobody said anything. Somebody's baby began to cry and was hushed.
Then the Duke of Arlington turned to the young woman standing at the bottom of the steps in the gray gown and said quite clearly so that it carried:
"Miss Standen, on Monday last at my own table I said that no man wants a wife with opinions. I have had a week of your opinions. They have cost me 490 pounds of bad bridge, a roof, an apology in a churchyard, and a great deal of my dignity, and they are the only thing that has happened to me in seven years that I should be sorry to be without."
He came down one step and no further, because he was not going to crowd her in front of 200 people.
"So, I want a wife with opinions. I want yours at breakfast for the next 40 years, and I would like it understood by everybody here that I am asking, and that I know precisely what I am asking for. And that if she says no, she will have my whole support in saying it, and the lease still stands."
Philippa Standen stood in the churchyard in front of every soul she had known since she was two years old.
"Your Grace," she said, "you have done it again. You have put me in a position where I cannot say no without wounding you in public."
There was a horrified pause of about half a second, and then she added, "Fortunately, I do not wish to say no, which does not make it less high-handed, and I shall want that admitted before the banns are read."
"It is admitted before witnesses."
"Miss Standen, there are 200 witnesses, a canon, and my Aunt Renford, who has already begun to cry, and who will not enjoy the memory of having done so."
They were married in that church at the beginning of August. She would not be given away by anybody grand; she walked in on her uncle's arm past a pew full of millwrights.
The bridge at Standen Mill was built in the following spring: two arches, wide set, 11 yd upstream on the hard ground, at a cost of £548. It stood through the great flood nine years later when the Marchford Bridge and two others went in a night. And there is a small stone let into the parapet on the upstream side with two initials cut on it that the parish has never troubled to explain to visitors.
Mr. Nash, the surveyor, who was quite a decent man once he had got over himself, kept his place for 22 years and used to say after a glass that he had been beaten in open vestry by a bookseller's niece and that it was the best thing that ever happened to his professional character.
The letter signed Candor went on appearing in the Marchford Courant for another 31 years: on drainage, on coals, on the game laws, on the shocking condition of the county jail. And they were quite as sharp about the Duke of Arlington after the marriage as before it, which was the subject of a good deal of comment.
The Duke read everyone at breakfast in silence, with his wife sitting opposite him drinking tea and watching his face over the rim of the cup.
"Well," she would say.
"Spavined," he would say, "and walked out in public. I shall have to do something about it by Michaelmas."
And she would smile and pour him another cup, and they would begin.