"Lavinia. Please. You taught me the subjunctive. Very nearly." The smile came and went. "And I came to tell you something, because I think nobody else will. The Duke of Hartsmere called on my father yesterday."
Honora went still.
"I was not supposed to hear. I was in the little room off Papa's study, where I go over the household books—Mamma thinks it unladylike, so Papa lets me do it in secret. The Duke told Papa that he would not offer for me. That he had learned the true state of his affairs and would not ask any woman to marry him to clear a debt. He asked Papa to set out the whole sum owing, and said he would find a way to meet it himself, if it took ten years." Lavinia's colour rose. "Papa was very angry. Then he was very quiet. Then he said, That is the first honest thing anyone in that family has said to me in four years, and gave him a glass of Madeira."
"And you?" said Honora. "Are you disappointed?"
Lavinia looked at her with an expression Honora had never seen on her face at school: amused, a little sad, and entirely clear.
"I have been bought and sold in my mother's drawing room since I was seventeen, and nobody has once asked what I thought of it. The Duke is a good man, I think. He is also a sombre one, and he looks at me as though I were a pleasant view. I should have married him if I were told to, because that is what girls like me do. But I am not disappointed to be told I need not." She hesitated. "There is someone—never mind. He is a lieutenant on half-pay, and Mamma would rather see me in my coffin. That is a separate trouble."
"It is not a small one."
"No. But it is mine." Lavinia drew a folded sheet from her reticule. "This is the other thing. Papa let me copy out the figures for the Duke, because I do them faster than his clerk. It is the whole of the Hartsmere mortgage, and the income, and what might be sold that is not entailed. I think he means to pay your father's debt as well. I do not think he can do both at once without selling the heart out of Hartsmere. Someone ought to tell him so who is not his mother and not mine."
Honora unfolded the paper. Columns, neat and quick, in a round schoolgirl hand that had grown up. At the bottom, underlined twice: Cannot be done in less than eight years without selling Lowfield.
Lowfield. Thirty-one families.
She sat looking at it for a long time after Lavinia had gone.
VII.
Mr. Haverstock called on Saturday, with a portfolio under his arm and the expression of a man asked to carry a lit candle through a powder magazine.
He was elderly and spare and exquisitely polite, and he had been the Marchbanks' man of business for thirty years. He accepted a cup of Mrs. Fairleigh's indifferent tea and set it down untouched.
"I come on behalf of His Grace," he said, "and, separately, on behalf of Her Grace. They are not, at present, of one mind."