She said, I have £300 in the funds, 1,100 acres, and forty people whose bread depends on me and I built every yard of it out of a leaking roof and a good spring and I did it alone. If I marry you, Your Grace, the law would give you the whole of it before the ink is dry. Renfield will be yours. My horses will be yours. My name will be gone.
And in ten years they will say, they will all say that the clever Duke of Grantmere bought up a nice little stud in the West Country and set his wife to play at it. Her voice did not shake and you would never say it. I know you would never say it, but I would hear it every day in the silence where it was not said. Ambrose Vane stood in the middle of the room he had first walked into in a rage in wet boots. Is that all?
Is that not enough? It is a great deal, he agreed. It is also entirely soluble by a competent attorney. And if that is your only objection, I shall have a conveyancer down from London by Thursday, and we may be married on Saturday. He took one step closer.
Tabitha, look at me and tell me you do not want it, and I will get on my horse, and you will never see me again. And I will not blame you for one hour of it. But do not tell me about the law. The law is a thing men wrote. I am one of the men who writes it. Renfield can be settled on you absolutely to your sole and separate use.
Beyond my reach, beyond my heirs' reach in perpetuity. It takes four sheets of parchment and a morning. She stared at him. You would sign that? I would have signed it in October, said Ambrose.
I did not offer because I have spent my whole life having things given to me and I have only just learned from you that a gift can be an insult if it is not asked for first. He held out his hand palm up. So I am asking not for Renfield, not for the horses. I am asking whether the woman who took my coat and let me stand in my own arrogance for 20 minutes and then gave me a mare for my sister and would not take my money for it and mended my accounts and got me out of bed at six in the morning and shouted at me in my own courtyard until I understood myself for the first time in 11 years whether she could bear to be looked at for the rest of her life by a man who thinks she is the finest thing this country has produced in a hundred years. Tabitha Ren put her hand over her mouth.
Because they will look at you, he said more quietly. I will not lie to you. The county will look and the drawing rooms will look and there will be evenings when it is very hard. I cannot stop that. I can only tell you then every one of those evenings I will be standing beside you, and that I would rather be cut by the whole of England with you, than be bowed to by it alone.