Terms

CHAPTER 4 - TERMS

LUCIAN

The contract was forty-three pages long, and I read every one of them.

I read the way I had learned to do everything in that house: slowly, without moving my face, and without letting anyone see which lines had hurt. The fire burned lower. A clock somewhere below us struck the half hour, and I didn't look up. Elias sat across from me with a cup of coffee going cold on the desk and a newspaper he had stopped pretending to read, and he did not say a single word the whole time.

I think that was the worst part. Being watched while I worked, and knowing he had decided it was worth his morning.

On page nineteen I found a clause about my name.

The party known as Lucian Laurent shall retain the surname Laurent for all civil and private purposes, unless he elects otherwise in writing.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, because I didn't trust it.

It was the first thing in four pages that had been written for me and not for the arrangement. Someone had thought about what I might want. Someone had decided that a boy who had been given a surname at nine, and never once asked to keep it, might want the choice.

I turned the page before I could let my face do anything.

When I finally closed the folder, the light through the window had moved across the floor.

"Well?" Elias said.

"It's thorough."

"That isn't what I asked."

I set the folder on my knee and looked at him. "Page nineteen. The name."

Something shifted in his expression, the faintest adjustment, like a man who has heard his own footsteps echo and realised someone else has noticed. "What about it?"

"Who wrote it?"

"My lawyer."

"On whose instruction?"

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Mine."

"Why?"

"Because you'd have asked for it eventually," he said. "And I'd rather you asked before you had to."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and he seemed to find that acceptable. He reached for the pen on the desk and turned it end over end between his fingers.

"Ask me the rest," he said. "Whatever it is you're not asking."

There was a list in my head. Why did you choose me. What did my father owe you. Who was the man who said he'd seen me at the Harbour Street office three winters ago, copying invoices in the back room, and why did that matter. Who taught you to notice people who stand at the edges of rooms.

I asked none of them.

"Do I have to live in this house?"

"No."

"Do I have to see my father?"

"If you want to. I've made no arrangement for him."

"Will my sister be punished?"

Elias's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Vivienne is with a man who has nothing to offer her but his hands and his loyalty," he said. "Which is more than your father ever gave her. I have no interest in punishing her. I have an interest in what she does next, and that is her business."

That was not an answer to my question. But it was an answer to the one I had actually meant.

"And Evelyn?"

The pen stopped turning. "Evelyn will be fine," he said. "Evelyn wants to be seen. Eventually she'll find someone who looks at her as though she's the centre of the room, and she'll be very happy with him." A pause. "You won't be the one to tell her that, I think."

"No," I said. "I don't think I will."

"Good."

There it was again. That single word, quiet and final, that he kept handing me like a coin I hadn't earned.

He walked me down himself.

No one else was in the hall. The house was so quiet I could hear our shoes on the stone, and the faint tick of a grandfather clock somewhere to our left. At the foot of the staircase he paused, and turned, and looked at me the way he had looked at the contract: as if he were trying to decide how much I could carry.

"You'll be fitted tomorrow," he said. "Marcus will bring you. There's a tailor on Quarry Lane who has dressed my family for thirty years and has never once been impressed by anyone. You'll like him."

"Will I?"

"No. But you'll respect him, and that's better."

I almost smiled. I didn't, quite. But something in my face must have loosened, because his own expression eased by a fraction.

"Lucian."

"Yes?"

"The man in the drawing room last night. Your father's man, Peter." He said the name carefully, as though he had been turning it over since I'd mentioned it. "Does he still work for the house?"

"Yes. He's the butler."

"Good. Keep him close." He glanced toward the door. "Men like Peter are rarer than you think, and they're usually the first people in a house to be sacked when the house goes bad."

"Are you saying my father's house is going bad?"

"I'm saying I don't yet know what it is," Elias said. "That's why I'm keeping you close."

He opened the front door himself. The rain had stopped, and the air outside smelt of wet stone and cut grass. Marcus was waiting with the car, his umbrella furled at his side, and he gave me the smallest nod as I came down the steps.

I turned back before I could stop myself.

Elias was still standing in the doorway, one hand resting on the frame, watching me go. He did not wave. He did not smile. He simply watched, the way a man watches a thing he has bought and has not yet decided what to do with.

And I realised, with a jolt that settled somewhere under my ribs, that I had no idea which of us that made the more dangerous.

The tailor on Quarry Lane was a small, bad-tempered man with pins between his lips and a tape measure hung around his neck like a stole. He looked at me for three full seconds, then took the jacket off my shoulders without asking, turned me to face the window, and said through the pins, "Stand up straight. Nobody ever taught you to stand up straight, did they?"

"No."

"Good. Then nobody has to unteach you."

He measured everything. My shoulders, my arms, the length of my back, the distance from my collarbone to the floor. He muttered numbers under his breath and wrote them on a card with a stub of pencil, and when he reached my neck he stopped, frowned, and said, "Who measured you before?"

"Nobody."

"Someone did. The coat you're wearing was cut to you. Somebody took care."

I thought of the navy coat in the tissue paper at the back of my wardrobe. The one I'd bought with eleven weeks of copying invoices, the one I'd been too careful to wear. I'd had it made by a man on the far side of the river who had never asked why a Laurent boy needed a coat.

"I did," I said. "Myself."

The tailor looked at me over the top of his spectacles, and for the first time something other than irritation crossed his face.

"Then you have good taste," he said, "and no patience for being told what to wear. Those are rarer than you'd think, in this city."

He didn't say anything else about it. But when I left, an hour later, he pressed a card into my palm with a name and an address written on it in pencil.

If he ever sends you to me again, it said, send him away and come alone.

I stood on Quarry Lane for a long time, holding that card, and did not know whether it was a warning or an offer.

Marcus waited by the car and did not ask.

That evening, back in my room in my father's house, I took the card out and set it on the desk beside the window. The rain had started again. The lamp hummed. Downstairs someone was laughing, and I didn't recognise the voice.

My cheek had stopped stinging. The bruise under it had not.

I thought about the contract, and the name on page nineteen, and the way Elias had said Mine without a flicker. I thought about the tailor, who had asked who measured me before. I thought about Peter, who had nodded at the drawing room door, and the hand that had struck me that morning, and the way my father had said grateful as though it were a debt.

I thought, for the first time, that I might be the only person in either house who did not already know what I was worth.

It was not a comfortable thought. But it was mine.

I picked up the card and turned it over. On the back, in the same careful pencil, someone had written one more line.

Ask him what he saw in the corner.

I put it in my pocket, and I didn't sleep for a long time.