"And Lisle?"
"Lisle's creditors were not mine. They held his name, not ours." She said it quite steadily, and then, after a moment, less steadily. "One man, or thirty-one families. That was the arithmetic. I did it. I would do it again."
"Would you?" said Julian. "Or is that what you have told yourself every night for twelve years?"
Her face did not change. But her hands, folded on the ledger, tightened until the knuckles went white.
"I remember him in the hall at Hartsmere," he said, "the Michaelmas I was twelve, explaining to me why old Hesketh's rent had been abated because his barn burned. Father laughed at him. You did not." He came closer to the desk. "He was your friend, Mamma. I remember you walking in the garden with him."
"Do not," said the Duchess, and stopped.
He waited. The candles hissed.
"He was the only person in that house," she said at last, very low, "who spoke to me as if I had a mind. Your father did not. Your father's mother did not. Edmund used to bring me the estate accounts, when your father would not look at them, and explain them, and ask my opinion, and act on it. Everything I did afterwards to save this house, I could do because he had taught me how." She looked up at her son with eyes that were perfectly dry and perfectly terrible. "And I used it against him. Yes. Is that what you wished to hear?"
Julian found he could not speak.
"You think I do not know what I did," said his mother. "I have known every day. I knew it when I saw that girl's name on the list of Mrs. Fairleigh's party. I knew it when I watched you walk across the room to her. Of all the women in London." Her mouth twisted. "You have his taste, it seems. For honest people. It is a great inconvenience."
"And Miss Prestwick? Was that arithmetic too?"
The Duchess was silent.
"Haverstock let something fall today," Julian said. "When I went to him for the minority accounts, he was very reluctant, and then very careful, and then he said he hoped I understood that Mr. Prestwick's forbearance on the consolidated mortgage was a matter of some delicacy. I did not know we had a consolidated mortgage. I did not know Josiah Prestwick held it."
"There were twenty-two thousand still outstanding when you came of age," his mother said. "The old lenders were growing restless. Mr. Prestwick bought them out. He is a decent man and an ambitious one, and he has a daughter."
"So I am to marry the mortgage."
"You are to marry a pleasant, good-tempered girl whose father will forgive us twenty thousand pounds upon the signing of the settlements. There are men in this city who would sell their souls for such an arrangement."