The Duke Wrote Ten Rules for the Wife He Would Choose — She Broke Every One Before the Hunt Ball
Chapter 8
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
The clock on the tower still said 20 past 4:00, as it had for 11 years. He went in and sent for a man to mend it.Lady Sedgwick was waiting in Rosamund's room the next morning. She was sitting by the fire; it was the first time Rosamund had ever seen her aunt sit in a room of hers. On the washstand lay a letter, opened."This came for you," said her aunt. "There was 9d to pay on it. I paid it."Rosamund looked at the broken seal. "It was addressed to me, Aunt.""Everything addressed to you is my concern, Rosamund. I have been your guardian for eight years.""I have been of age for six."Her aunt did not seem to hear. "Mr. Godwin called on me last evening," she said. "He told me a most remarkable story: a gentlewoman in a duke's estate office reading his books for money, like a clerk, like a shopman's daughter.""Mr. Godwin was dismissed for robbing His Grace of £1,300.""Mr. Godwin was dismissed because a woman of no fortune and no family made herself useful to a duke in a manner that no woman of character would contemplate," said Lady Sedgwick. "Do you know what will be said when it is known? Do you know what it will do to Clarissa?""Clarissa has done nothing.""Clarissa will be the cousin of a woman who took wages under a gentleman's roof. You will go to Harrogate on Monday. You will go straight from this house. I have written to Cousin Margaret." She stood and shook out her skirts and went to the door. "You must see," she said, "how much I have tried to do for you."Rosamund waited until the door was shut. Then she picked up the letter from Mr. Aldridge and read it.It was short. Mr. Aldridge was sorry that she had never received the trust accounts, which he had sent every year at Michaelmas to her guardian by her guardian's own instruction. He enclosed a copy:£60 a year, paid in four quarters on Lady Day, Midsummer, Michaelmas, and Christmas. Paid every quarter for eight years into the hand of Lady Sedgwick for the maintenance of her niece: £480.Rosamund sat down on the edge of her bed.She had been allowed one candle. She had been given one gown turned twice. She had been told every quarter day for eight years how much she cost. And every quarter day, £15 of her own father's money had gone into her aunt's reticule—the same reticule the bookseller's £11 had gone into eight years before.She had always supposed that she was a charge on her aunt; she had been, all along, an income.She sat in the cold morning light and turned the paper over in her hands. And the strange thing was that she did not feel angry: she felt as she had in the estate office with Mr. Godwin's ledger open in front of her; she felt as though she had finally found the error in the arithmetic.Everything she had believed about the last eight years had been built on a false sum. She was not grateful; she had never owed anything. And the wall she had built around herself stone by stone to keep out a woman who counted every tear had been built by the debtor against the creditor all along.