He looked at her, at the dull black stuff and the red eyes and the gloved hands knotted till the knuckles stood up under the kid. He thought of the old man laughing by the fire. You have come a long way to be rude.
"Give me the codicil," he said.
She held it out. He took it to the window.
The lancet was narrow and the morning dull, and the clerk's copperplate was small and crowded. He tipped the sheet toward the light, then away from it, then held it a little to one side, so that he looked at the lines not straight on but slantwise, from the corner of his eye. It was a habit so old with him now that he no longer knew he did it. The words swam and steadied. At the foot of the page, below the clerk's hand, was the signature: a wavering black scrawl that ran downhill, the A of Aubrey enormous and the rest crushed after it, as though the pen had been too heavy to lift. Ellerholt.
He had seen that signature at the foot of every allowance draft for the first twenty years of his life. It had never wavered then.
When he turned from the window she was watching him, not his face but his hands, the angle at which he still held the page. There was a small line between her brows. She said nothing.
"You said I have a choice," said Ivo.
"You have. If you refuse me, your cousin Cordelia has the fen, which means Sir Digby has it, and you have Ellerholt and the settled estates and no further trouble from me. You can go back to your roads. No one would blame you. Half the county would cheer."
"And you?"
"I will go to my aunt in Wisbech, and I will fight Sir Digby for those families in every way the law will let a spinster fight, which is not many." She paused. "And I shall lose."
"Twenty minutes," said Ivo, looking at nothing.