Lie With Me

by Patricia Spencer

  She knocked to let him know she was there.

  “Come in.”

  She went to his desk and stood in front of him. She held up her letter from Ernest. “Informants,” she said. “Two Skylark appraisals. One for 1,800 pounds and the other for 2,000. The Duke thinks at most you’d go 1,000 over for sentimental reasons. So why have you offered me 4,000?”

  “Well,” D’Avenant said, setting down his quill. “David slews Goliath.”

  “I never wished to slew anyone. I merely sought fair terms.”

  “And now do they seem fair?”

  “They seem overly fair. I cannot accept them.”

  “You have three small children to provide for.”

  “Surely you realize how compromised a woman would be to receive such a gift?”

  “Forgive my vulgarity,” he said. “But if I were seeking a woman’s favours, I could obtain them for well under that price. Zut alors! I am not so unattractive that I would have to pay anywhere near that amount.”

  Her cheeks burned.

  “In a very short time,” he said. “You will be out of a home without money. You cannot begin to imagine compromise, My Lady. Cannot. Begin. To imagine.”

  “I’ve cared well for my children, D’Avenant, without your interference.”

  “Well, I scarce see how, if this is the extent of your skill. A clever woman negotiates upward, My Lady. Not down. You lack even the rudiments of financial sense.”

  Maryam opened her mouth to rebut.

  He held up a hand. “Forget your pride,” he advised. “It will not save you. Count up your expenses. Envision your children’s needs in the years to come. Ascertain your financial needs and then decide if you’ll refuse my offer.”

  “Why? Why do you offer me so much?”

  His eyes coursed over her but he said nothing until he picked up his pen. “Do the numbers,” he said. “And close the doors as you leave, please. I have a long night ahead of me.”

  At her writing desk, as the night deepened, Lady Maryam calculated income and expenses. No matter what items she added to or subtracted from her columns, no matter how she whittled them down or tried to incorporate the little she had left, all her sums brought her to one conclusion.

  Long term, with care and adequate investment, she needed at least 4,000 pounds for Skylark in order to live comfortably and take care of her children.

  She threw down the pen, and growled. Confound it! How did D’Avenant know? And why, if he was such an astute businessman as Ernest said, would he offer that much for a property he didn’t need?

  She had other options, of course. Clarissa and Ernest, two separate options now becoming one. Maryam could come clean about her financial situation. She knew they would not leave her on the curb. But D’Avenant had been right. Ernest was older, a statesman whose home also served as a centre for gathered heads of state. Children would simply not fit in. Or, they would be severely constrained to be seen but not heard, to not have jam on their fingers, to not Higgy Pop. Clarissa did fine with the tumult of children, but Ernest was past the stage of living with a young family. If Maryam sought refuge with them, all their relationships would be sorely strained. And they were her two dearest loved ones.

  There was a distant relative in Scotland who would take her and the children in—to become a country mouse, the poor relative taken in out of pity. Once that far away, with her finances so diminished, she would never be able to return to London, to Clarissa’s friendship, or the life she knew there. She would be utterly under the thumb of a man she met once in adolescence and instantly despised.

  She also had a second cousin in France, whom she loved, but that was the wrong side of the water for an aristocratic English woman, especially with France still in chaos and the little Corsican Bonaparte reappearing on the horizon.

  The worst prospect, of course, was to remarry. Lord Chichester Dumaresq had been making overtures for some time. He was nearing fifty, with no heir. His station required a Lady of Quality for marriage but the marriageable women in the ton at present were either too young or too old.

  Maryam shuddered to think of him atop her—and atop he would be until he sired a son. And, Lord. Another pregnancy? Delivering Megan had nearly killed them both.

  And even if she did survive and give Dumaresq an heir, his bloodline child would become the little prince of the mansion, while Elizabeth, Edward, and Megan fell to second-class status.

  Maryam rested her forehead on her hand. She felt nauseous, literally sick. D’Avenant’s offer was her best. But wasn’t that just another man, laying claim to her? What she really needed was—

  What.

  What did she really need?

  She threw down the pen and crumpled up her pages of calculations. She was exhausted, tired of going around and around her unyielding problem. She was going to bed. She got up, stripped off her clothes, and slid between the bedsheets.

  Folding her hands behind her head, she stared at the ceiling, wide awake. What she really needed was...

  Independence.

  5. Proposition

  D’Avenant closed his ledgers at two in the morning, spent an hour thinking about the impasse over Skylark, and finally, with a new idea, slept for five hours before coming down for breakfast.

  Today he was riding out to the estate to collect a couple of overdue rents, talk to three farmers, and verify that the barley had gotten into the ground at North End Field where planting had been delayed because of wet conditions earlier that Spring.

  Edgemere, through a combination of outright land ownership and financial agreements with freeholders, grew wheat, barley, oats, peas, clover, and hay, as well as turnips for livestock and horse feed on 3,500 acres of strong loam soil. Though the estate was located at the eastern edge of the best dairying land in Suffolk County, D’Avenant still ran a small herd of Suffolk reds, whose milk was churned into the region’s renown butter. Unfortunately for his French sensibilities, though Suffolk made excellent butter it also made terrible cheese, a product so inexpertly processed that it made better wagon wheels than food.

  He was participating in an experimental multi-farmer breeding program to develop sheep that thrived on the local forage, birthed twins, and grew fine wool. As well as raising the usual other assorted chickens, hogs, and horses found in rural enterprises, he also financed a communally-operated flour mill and a malt house. These solid enterprises, along with riskier elements, like raising capital at the card tables and investing in the development of steam engines and railways, formed the core of Edgemere’s business.

  There were many projects to be kept running, but he believed in diversification so that losses in any one area could be offset by gains in another. His approach had taken the Edgemere workers by surprise. Normally a lord of a manor hired a steward to oversee the work and conduct the ‘vulgar’ task of handling money. After his experience with Grenville, however, D’Avenant had vowed to manage his own affairs.

  The challenge he was facing with Edgemere was that it had grown so much that taking care of everything himself was exhausting him. The riverside picnic had reminded him that he never did anything for pleasure any more. The experience of poverty had been so cruel, he had spent the last ten years trying to ensure it would never happen again. He had forgotten to enjoy his life.

  By the time he entered the breakfast room, the children had scattered to their pursuits and Maman and Lady Maryam were sharing a comfortable silence. He caught Maman’s eye and nodded in silent greeting. She tipped her head in Lady Maryam’s direction.

  “Good morning, My Lady,” he said, stopping at the sideboard beside the coffee urn.

  Maryam lifted her face to acknowledge him. He winced inwardly, shocked by the lines of exhaustion on her face. Alas, poor Maryam. You’ve had the night from hades. Their little talk must have kept her up. He hoped she’d spent it doing sums as he’d suggested. She needed to see sense.

  He picked up a café crème bowl
, poured in a measure of strong tincture of coffee, and topped it off with steaming milk. “Here,” he said, placing the bowl before her. “Try this. It kicks like a horse.”

  With two hands, Lady Maryam lifted it to her mouth. She took a sip and grimaced. “Oh my goodness.”

  D’Avenant brought over the sugar bowl, heaped a spoonful of sugar into the coffee, and stirred.

  “Now try.”

  “Better. Thank you.”

  “Once you finish that, let me know if you think you could spend a few hours on horseback with me. Or… rather—” he corrected, remembering her hard night “—let’s take the phaeton. I have some business on the estate.”

  “I suppose an outing might wake me up.”

  “Excellent,” D’Avenant said. “I have a new proposition to make.”

  They drove out together at an easy pace, D’Avenant at the reins, the horses clopping comfortably. D’Avenant, lost in thought, seemed disinclined to converse. That’s a relief, Lady Maryam thought. After her wretched night she lacked energy for it. In her youth a lost night’s sleep scarcely affected her. Now the lassitude took longer to clear.

  She gazed silently out at the woods, the passing fields, the red brick cottages as he drove. When he stopped to converse with the men she stood quietly at his side after introductions had been made, listening and learning. In one hamlet, Lady Maryam was invited to duck inside a lacemaker’s cottage to see her work. It turned out to be surprisingly ornate. Throughout the day, Maryam found D’Avenant to be efficient and polite with the men who worked on his estate, as they reported the status of the crops and the livestock to him and received his instructions. His manner was attentive, engaged, and learned.

  At their final stop the overseer reported that two of the village artisans were leaving at the end of the quarter to go north, where a manufacturing industry was now burgeoning. The Industrial Revolution, the men were calling it.

  “Industrial slavery more like,” D’Avenant said. “Who are they?”

  The overseer gave D’Avenant the names, so that the ledgers might be closed after their final stipend was disbursed at coming quarter.

  They stopped for lunch late in the day after all the calls had been made and they were on their way back home. D’Avenant pulled the phaeton into a clearing beside the Edgemere River and let the horses out of their traces, tying them such that they could drink from the river and tug at the grass.

  She and D’Avenant ate Sophie’s picnic in silence. D’Avenant was lost in thought. He’d scarcely spoken to her all day—much less addressed his ‘new proposition.’ She took a bite of her sandwich, catching a crumb on her lip with her little finger, and tucking it back into her mouth.

  After swallowing, she asked: “Is it this business of the people moving north that concerns you the most?”

  D’Avenant looked up, almost surprised to find her there. “I do beg your pardon! It seems I’ve quite abandoned you today.”

  “This whole movement northward has me a bit confused. The men I hear at Clarissa’s salons are so effusive about machine manufacturing. They go on about economies of scale and mass production and the shift away from animal power to using machines. The maids I overhear at Covent Gardens, though—they tell of squalor and child labour and other abuses.”

  D’Avenant nodded. “I was invited to invest in the mills, and took a journey north not long ago. The maids are more accurate. It was filthy, noisy, dangerous. I decided that my money would be better spent trying to keep skilled labourers employed here in the villages, though... I fear it is a losing battle. The new age has arrived and there will be no stopping it. I keep returning to the problem of getting a living wage for the workers. So much of what they do is labour-intensive. It takes hours to make what one of those textile machines can do in a few minutes.”

  “But the fabric is nothing the nobility would wear, I assure you. The women in that settlement we just went through were making exquisite lace. It would bring a very good price in London if it were sold to the ton’s dressmakers as an exclusive product.”

  “Even with the improvements in our roads, getting goods to market is a problem for all our artisans. Given our distance to London and the cost of travelling it eats up any profit they could make even when sold at a good price.”

  “Could it not be done collectively? Could not one person or two take the goods of all the villagers? Or… you travel to London quarterly, do you not? On your own trips you might be able to transport certain of those goods and with an agent in London to sell the products... In any of those scenarios the travelling expenses would be incurred but once, and—” She stopped. “Am I thinking foolishly?”

  “On the contrary. I am the one who has been blind. All these months I’ve kept returning to this problem without seeing your concept. Exclusive product. Niche buyers. Collective marketing and sales.”

  “Perhaps you are too pressed. This has been quite a day and I know you return with much to do.”

  “Have I worn you out?”

  “I would have felt more tired at home, lacking the distraction.”

  “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “I lay down but slept fitfully.”

  D’Avenant brushed the last crumbs of his sandwich off his fingers. “The difficult thing about penury is that no matter how you try to divide what you have, ‘too little’ cannot magically be transformed into ‘enough.’”

  Lady Maryam lowered her gaze. “I feel it’s my own fault. Everything seemed so above-board, and yet our inheritance was dwindling so rapidly. I’m not a spendthrift. I wasn’t squandering it.”

  “My Lady. My family also fell prey to Grenville. We were in France relying on a man who serves himself before his clients. You at least tried. You reviewed his ledgers. You came to see Skylark for yourself. In contrast, my father—” D’Avenant’s voice became husky with undisguised anger. “My father was too besotted by my mother, too engrossed in his own pleasure, to even look at Grenville’s reports. He made no effort to monitor the conditions at Edgemere. A letter, even to the local parson. Arriving here, seeing it—it was crushing.”

  “How did you escape it? What did you do?”

  He shrugged. “A man has more options. I did not have three young children depending on me as you have. Also I’m good at cards, unlike my great uncle who lost Skylark. A bit at a time I turned what little I had into capital. I invested in Edgemere, made it prosper.” D’Avenant smiled. “In the last ten years I have not taken off as much time all together as I have during your visit.”

  “You’ve been most generous with me and my three little bandits.”

  “I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit, I’m constantly tired. Too weary to think well. My inability to articulate ideas such as yours…” He placed his fingertips on his forehead and flipped them like a bird taking wing.

  “You said this morning that you have a proposition to make.”

  “Ah, yes. Right.” He held up his index finger. “One, I don’t buy Skylark from you. I lease it from you for 35 years, at a rate of a pound a year.” Lady Maryam's eyebrows rose.

  “No sale,” D’Avenant explained. “Grenville gets no commission. Two, at the end of that period, Skylark title reverts to Edgemere. Three, Skylark’s natural resources—pastures, water, forests—are immediately integrated into Edgemere’s agricultural plan under my management or the management of such persons as I assign. A percentage of the revenue generated at Skylark would, of course, revert to you as the landowner, thus providing you with an annual income of steadily increasing value. In return, my financial resources would be used to restore Skylark to the standards kept at Edgemere.” D’Avenant paused. “Questions thus far?”

  “I believe I’m following you.”

  “Now.” He cleared his throat. “There’s a more… innovative… element.”

  Lady Maryam dipped her chin and looked up at him.

  “I would need you to manage the restoration of Skyl
ark. Create the plan for the reconstruction, work with the craftsmen on design, hire the workers, oversee their labour, keep track of payroll—all with reference to me of course until you become comfortable with the role. You have seen how much work I have. I can't do it all myself.”

  “You would… hire... me.”

  “Yes. I pay well, on a quarterly basis. Your wages, naturally, would be yours to do with as you pleased.”

  “I’m a Countess, D’Avenant, not some—”

  “Ah. You forget I am half French, Comtesse, and we have just lately deposed the Ancien Régime over exactly this issue. A new day has dawned and opportunity awaits everyone equally—even a Countess. As part of our arrangement… er… you and the children could live at Edgemere. I’d assign Brigid as your permanent nanny. All, of course, until Skylark was ready for occupancy. At that time, you would be free to move in and rent the premises from me at a rate commensurate with market value. That rental is to help repay the costs of repair.”

  Lady Maryam lowered her forehead onto her fingertips. She didn’t know what she expected when D’Avenant said he had a proposition this morning but this was not it. He wanted to hire her like a common overseer! He wanted her to live at Edgemere!

  “Take whatever time you require to recollect the calculations that kept you awake last night Comtesse.”

  “I would look like a kept woman, D’Avenant. Living under the roof of a male to whom I am not related. Accepting payments.”

  “If you desire freedom, My Lady, you must claim it. Life exacts a cost. And rest assured, you will pay, whatever path you take. Your only choice is whether to pay the cost of freedom or pay for the lack of it.”

  She pulled her kerchief from her sleeve and pressed it to her eyes.

  “Of course—” He chuckled. “You could still force me to buy Skylark for 3,000 pounds, so you could walk away with whatever fraction of that amount Grenville would let you have.”

  “You have a perverse sense of humour, D’Avenant.”