Clause Eleven

The contract ran to four pages, and Clara Ashdown had written every line of it herself, by candlelight, in the back room of a printing house that would not be hers for much longer.

She had it folded in her reticule now, against her ribs, as the Pump Room filled with the eleven o’clock crowd. Steam rose from the fountain in a thin, mineral breath. Somewhere behind her a dowager complained about the waters to no one in particular, and a string trio worked diligently through something by a composer nobody would remember by Easter.

Clara had chosen the Pump Room because it was public. A lady could speak to a gentleman here without anyone assuming she had anything to say.

Captain Thomas Merrow was standing by the far window, exactly where Mrs. Pell had promised he would be. He was taller than she had expected, and more tired: a man in a good coat that had been good for several years. He held a glass of the waters as though someone had handed it to him and he had not yet found a polite place to set it down. Half-pay, Mrs. Pell had said. A Peninsular man. No family worth mentioning, and debts worth mentioning rather more. Clara crossed the room before she could reconsider.

“Captain Merrow.” She did not curtsey so much as incline. “Miss Ashdown. You’ll forgive the want of an introduction. Mrs. Pell assured me you would.”

He looked at her for a moment longer than was comfortable. His eyes were grey, and they had the habit, she saw, of measuring a room before they settled anywhere. “Mrs. Pell assures a great many people of a great many things,” he said. “She told me you had a business proposal. I assumed she meant a subscription to something.”

“In a manner of speaking.” Clara drew the pages out and held them, not yet offering. “My father owned Ashdown’s, on Westgate Street. Printing and binding. You may have seen the sign.”

“The one with the gilt swan.”

“The gilt swan was my mother’s idea. He died in January.” She said it evenly; she had practised. “He left the press to me, on a condition his solicitor was very sorry about and my cousin was not sorry about at all. I inherit if I am married by Lady Day. If I am not, it passes to Mr. Edmund Ashdown of Bristol, who has never set a line of type in his life and intends to sell the presses for scrap by summer.”

The trio reached the end of their piece. In the small silence that followed, Captain Merrow set his glass down on the windowsill with great care. “Lady Day,” he said. “That is in nine weeks. And you have come to the Pump Room to ask a stranger to marry you.”

“Eight weeks and five days. And I have come to offer a stranger terms.” She held out the pages. “You needn’t read them here. The substance is simple. You would marry me in March. You would receive four hundred pounds on the day, which I understand is somewhat more than your debts. You would have no claim on the press or its income, and I would have none on your time. Separate rooms. Separate lives, if you like. After a year, if either of us wishes it, we live apart and speak of it to no one.”

He took the pages. He did not unfold them. His thumb moved once along the crease, and she found herself watching it, the way one watches a hand held too near a candle flame.

“Why me?” he asked. It was the question she had rehearsed least, because every true answer embarrassed her. Because Mrs. Pell said you were honest to the point of ruin. Because you sold your commission rather than your horse. Because a man with nothing to lose cannot be bought by my cousin, and a man with debts can be bought by me.

“Because you are unlikely to want anything from me that is not in the contract,” she said.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile, but it had been one once. “You’re very sure of that.”

“I am sure of the contract.”

He unfolded the first page then, and read, and she watched him read. He read the way her father had proofed type, slowly, lips very slightly pressed, as if each word owed him an explanation. At the bottom of the second page he paused, and she knew which clause had stopped him. She had written it last, and crossed it out twice, and written it again. Clause eleven: Neither party shall be required to pretend affection in company beyond what civility demands.

“You thought of everything,” he said quietly. “Or nearly everything.” He folded the pages along their old creases and did not give them back. “Your cousin will contest it. A marriage made in eight weeks to a half-pay captain with a reputation for losing at cards? He’ll call it a sham, and he’ll find a magistrate in Bristol who agrees. If this is to hold, Miss Ashdown, it will have to look like something other than a contract.” He paused. “It will have to look like a courtship.”

The fountain breathed its steam. Across the room, Mrs. Pell had stopped pretending not to watch them. “Clause eleven,” Clara said, and her voice was not quite as even as she had practised.

“Clause eleven,” he agreed, “would have to be struck.”

He held out his hand, not for hers, but for the pen she had not realised she was holding: the little silver one from the counter on Westgate Street, still inked from the morning’s proofs. Eight weeks and five days. A gilt swan over a door. And a man who had read every line, and found the only one she had not been sure of.