She did not sit down, and so neither did he.
"I am not going to plead with you," she said. "I want you to understand that. I was awake all night and I have not the strength to plead, and I should do it badly. I am going to tell you what is at stake, as plainly as I can, and then you will decide. You have forty minutes."
"Thirty-eight," said Ivo.
"Thirty-eight." She did not smile. "You heard the clause. It does not give me anything, Captain Ferrand—Your Grace. Do you understand that? Mr. Lusk drew it so. The land and the engine and the money go into trust. I may direct how it is spent, but I may not spend it on myself, not on a bonnet, not on a hired horse. I have three hundred and twelve pounds of my own, which my father left, and which I shall keep whatever you decide. If you refuse me, I walk out of this church exactly as rich as I walked in."
"Then why are you here?"
She was quiet for a moment. Through the lancet window behind him, he knew, she could see the edge of the fen: the flat black fields running out to the sky, the long straight scar of the Lode, the line of pollard willows along the bank.
"Do you know what the engine at Lode End does?"
"It lifts water."
"It lifts nine thousand tons of water an hour off four thousand acres of land that lie below the level of the river. Before it was built, Sallow Fen was under water five months of the year. People lived on the islands of high ground and cut sedge and caught eels and died of the ague at forty and dosed their children with laudanum to keep them quiet while they worked. Now they grow wheat. There are a hundred and sixty families on the fen, Your Grace. They hold their cottages from the Duke—from the old Duke's unsettled estate, I mean, from the land in that codicil. Sir Digby Rendell has wanted that land for ten years. He wants to sell the engine to the Middle Level commissioners for its iron and its boiler, and let the fen go back to wash, and run sheep on it in summer and wildfowl in winter, and turn the cottagers off. He has a plan drawn. I have seen it. So did the Duke."
"He told you so?"
"He told me so. He told Sir Digby, in my hearing, that he would sooner see the fen given to the French." The ghost of something crossed her mouth. "He was not senile, whatever they say. He was old and ill and very tired, and sometimes he could not find a word, and sometimes he wept at things that did not seem to call for weeping. But he knew exactly what he was doing with that land. He did it with Mr. Lusk across three afternoons and he argued every line."