"No."
"Then I could not ask." She turned from the window. "You would have ridden to Heston and brought her here with no training in the part. The cousin would have had his press. Sir Walter would have had his injury. Every tradesman we have held off with the promise of Holme money would have come in the same week. I watched my sister's house fall. It did not fall in a speech. It fell in lists. Servants went unpaid. Tenants feel a disgrace before a duke tastes it in his soup. I am not only protecting pride. I am protecting the laundry and the stable."
He was silent. The argument had weight. That was what made it foul. A foul thing with no weight can be thrown out the window. A foul thing that understands the laundry is harder.
"You might have told me she was in the house," he said at last. "You might have trusted me with the danger and let me carry it awake. Instead you put her where you could yank the cloth out of her hands. Do not tell me that was for the laundress. That was because you cannot bear a secret you do not also dominate."
Helena's chin lifted. "Yes. I wanted her useful with a needle and quiet in the mouth. I was hard because I am hard on work that bears my name, and because a man who wants your chair had just written. I did not know I was being hard on my son's wife. Had I known the ring was there, I would have been colder, not kinder. Kindness would have looked like fear."
"She does not want to undo you. She wants her name."
"Her name is the undoing."
They stood on opposite sides of the desk, the star between them like a small fallen crown. From the hall came the far sound of the great door. Sir Walter, early, because eager men call their eagerness punctuality. Helena heard it and her face closed like a fan.
"You will come to dinner," she said. "You will not declare yourself between the soup and the fish to a man who brought his daughter thirty miles. Sleep one night. Read the papers with a cooler head. If you still mean to acknowledge the marriage, tell me at breakfast and we will send for a lawyer instead of a guest. Speak tonight and you speak against me and against everyone this roof employs. Be the duke for twelve hours. Then be the husband, if you must."
Edmund pinned the star on again. His fingers were clumsy. "I will come to dinner," he said. "I will not lie if I am asked a direct question. And I will not let you send her away in the night while I am being the duke. If the tin is gone from under her bed when I ask for it, I will take that as your answer, and I will give mine in the hall."
"I am not a thief of tin boxes," the duchess said, offended in the midst of everything, because there were still orders of crime she refused to join. "Go. Change the coat if you own another. That one looks like a regiment that has lost its way."