Nicholas Ware sat in that chair. "Nobody has looked at me in eight years," he said.
"Then I shall look at you," said Hannah. "And you may tell me to stop, and I shall stop, and I would rather you did not, because I think it would be worse for both of us."
The thing she did not say to him, and did not say to anybody for about four years, was that she had begun to be frightened. Not of the episodes—she had watched her great-aunt die over four years, and there was very little left in a sickroom that could startle Hannah Sedge, and she had known exactly what she was marrying, and had made the arithmetic on a doorstep in June with four shillings in her pocket. What frightened her was that the arithmetic had stopped working.
She wrote it down in the last week of October, at about midnight, and burned the page four days later—which she almost never did with anything:
I married a man in June because I had nowhere to go and he had a house, and I told him so, and he told me the same, and it was a clean bargain, and I have not one word to say against it. And I have sat at that table every night for two months, and I have found out that he is the cleverest and the loneliest person I have ever met, and that he has not had one honest conversation in eight years, and that he laughs about four times a week and cannot finish any of them. And the whole of the arrangement I signed in that library depends on his dying. Everything I have got is his death: the house is for my life after it; the settlement begins on it. He said so in that library in nine minutes, and I agreed to it standing up, and I have not been able to look at that sentence for about a fortnight. I am married to a man whose death is my entire security, and I have begun to want him to live. And I have got no idea how a woman is supposed to hold those two things at once.
She never told him about that page. What she did instead—and it was about the fourth of November, and it was four days before the garden room—was to go to his agent without saying anything to anybody, and ask what would happen to her if she left.
The agent was a careful man of about fifty who had been at Corvedale nine years, and he answered her exactly, because a duchess had asked him a plain question: the settlement stood. It was hers whatever happened—on his death, or on a separation, or if she walked out of that house tomorrow and went to Bath and never came back. Drawn by Nicholas in the week of the wedding, irrevocable, in her own name.
Hannah Sedge thanked him, went upstairs, and sat on the edge of her bed for about a quarter of an hour. Because that was the whole of it, and she had it now in a sentence she could look at: he had made her free on the day he married her, before he knew one thing about her, and had never once mentioned it. And she was going to stay anyway. And there was now no possible way of proving to anybody, including herself, that she was not staying for the house.
She found him in the garden room in the first week of November, at about two in the morning. She had not been looking for him; she had come down for a book because she had been awake since about midnight with the household accounts going around in her head. And there was a light in the garden room, and the door was ajar.