Page 35 of Lady, Behave
Friday morning, Gylesalighted from his coach at the red brick building of his solicitors’ offices in the City. The plain white wooden sign, “Timmons and Hastings,” banged to and fro in the breeze. He entered the modest reception room to find the same thin, eagle-nosed clerk who’d been there when first Gyles came last year, sitting at the desk.
The man scrambled to his feet. “My lord.”
Gyles removed his hat and gloves. “Good afternoon. Mister Simpson, I believe your name is?”
“I am, sir. How do you do?”
“I am very well, thank you. I’m here to see Mr. Willard Timmons.”
“Certainly, sir. We received your letter of instructions. I shall alert Mister Timmons for you. May I bring you a tea or brandy?”
“No, sir. Thank you very much. I’m quite fine as I am.”
Simpson ushered him straight into his employer and closed the door behind him.
“Hello, Willard. How are you?”
“Very good to see you, sir.” Timmons was a youthful-looking man, perhaps forty, with a smile and handshake as strong as an ox. He offered the chair before his broad desk. “Please have a seat. I’m delighted you’ve come.”
“I am thrilled that you can see me so readily. I hope you have been able to look at my situation.”
“I have, sir. In fact, it has not taken me long to research most of the particulars of your case. I can give you a few answers.”
“Wonderful. I’m eager to resolve any challenge with my father’s requests.”
“We’ll start from what I have found. Your father continues on a regular basis each year to enclose his lands at the rate of one hundred acres up to nearly one thousand acres. The Enclosure Law of roughly thirty years ago allows him to do this. I have surveyed the numbers of tenants as best I can, and more than forty-odd have left in the past two years. From what I can tell, that land they tilled lies fallow.”
“Unproductive,” Gyles said with a sigh. There was another cause of his father’s failed income and his need for Gyles to support him.
“Many of those tenants who remain are angry at him, not only because their friends and family have gone, but also because the duke has given orders over the years to set fire to cottages of those who left.” Willard winced. “His Grace told them this assures those who go may not return.”
“And most likely never wish to.”
Willard nodded, looked at his notes, and settled back in his chair. “With crop failures on the rest of the duchy’s lands and no investment in hoes or plows or animals, the estate yields drop even more precipitously.”
Gyles wrestled with his anger at his father. It would be so easy to rant and rave, but he’d learned that doing so only brought him to the edge of one of his blinding attacks.
“You may continue to do as you wish in regard to administering your own land, my lord. Your father has never expressed interest in trying to control it. What you give to your father in terms of money—whether as gift or loan—is also at your discretion.”
“Can he refuse to sign any papers recognizing a wife of mine as my marchioness or later her becoming my duchess?”
“We cannot find such legal details on such short notice, my lord. Much of that is in your father’s solicitors’ keeping. I am sorry.”
Gyles rapped his fingers on the chair rest. Because Gyles’s title and lands came to the family via a second cousin of the Whitmore family more than a century ago, Gyles administered his own lands. But Gyles worried more that, to the terms of the dower and the coverture, his father might still be an impediment. “He can still object to the marriage.”
“Sadly, yes. He can refuse to sign.”
“We will have to make it impossible then for him to refuse.”
“You have means, my lord.”
“I do. We’ll use the power of my purse, Willard. That which matters most to him. We will start by telling him he may have loans from me semi-annually only if he follows my orders. I will stipulate that he cannot continue to sell unentailed land. He must stop all enclosure of other acreage. Finally, he may not destroy any cottages of any tenants, in use or vacated. Finally, there will be no more loanseverunless he signs the marriage agreement. Not a penny.”
*
At ten o’clockon Friday morning, Imogen wed the Earl of Martindale and became his countess. She wore one of her new gowns, a flowing aquamarine satin with a white corsage of shantung shot with silver. She sparkled in the morning light as she spoke her vows to the man who could not take his eyes from hers.
Addy sipped champagne and watched the groom hover so near his bride. He cared for her more than they knew. She could hope for the same beguiled look upon her own groom’s face the day they married and ever after.
