Terms

You don't take the paper. You look at it in her hand, and then at her, and then at the door behind her, because if anyone in the house wakes and finds Lady Evadne Ormond in the groom's quarters at midnight, the paper won't matter. Nothing will.

"Close the door," you say. "Please, my lady."

"So you'll hear me out."

"So nobody hangs me."

She closes it. The candle flame leans and straightens. There's one stool in the tack room, and she looks at it and then at your cot and then sits on an upturned bucket by the stove instead, cloak pooling around her, as if she's done it every night of her life.

"Sit," she says. "You're making the ceiling look low."

You sit on the cot. Your knees are three feet from hers.

"You heard what I said in the yard," she says. "About Algie."

"Forty thousand pounds."

"Forty thousand and some odd hundreds. At hazard, over one winter, at a table where the Duke of Stratherne was always the one holding the bank." She says Duke like a word she found in her soup. "Algie signed vowels. The duke bought up the rest of his debts besides. If he presents them, Algie sells Kingsmere. All of it. The house, the land, every horse you've ever trained."

The stove ticks. You think of Pilgrim's head against your chest, the bay mare finally quiet. "And the duke doesn't want Kingsmere."

"The duke wants me." She lifts one shoulder. "Not me, precisely. My mother's father, who was a banker in Bristol, left me ninety thousand pounds in trust. It becomes mine outright on my twenty-fifth birthday. The second of July."

"And if you marry before then?"

Her mouth twists. "Then it goes to my husband on my wedding day, by the terms of a will written by a man who thought women ought to be married by twenty. The duke's estates are mortgaged to the chimneys. Nobody knows that but me and his bankers. He has offered Algie a bargain. Algie's debts torn up, the moment I say yes in church."

"And your brother said?"

"My brother said, 'Evie, he's a duke.'" Her imitation of Algie is so exact you nearly laugh, and she sees it and almost smiles. "He's started telling people we have an understanding. The duke has. He sends flowers to my aunt. He dances with me first at every ball, and nobody else dares ask. By June the whole ton will think it settled, and Algie will be desperate, and I'll be the ungrateful girl who ruined her family over a bit of temper."

"So you need until the second of July."

"I need," she says, "to be engaged to somebody else. Visibly. Publicly. To a man the duke can't buy off, frighten off or drink under the table. Until my birthday. Then the money's mine, I pay Algie's debts myself, and I quietly jilt my fiancé, and everyone says poor Lady Evadne, so particular, she'll die an old maid with her horses." She holds out the paper again. "Which is what I intended all along."

You take it this time. Her handwriting is fast and slanted and perfectly legible.

Articles of Agreement between Lady E. Ormond and the undersigned.

1. The undersigned shall, from the first of April until the second of July 1815, appear in London society as the betrothed of Lady E. Ormond, under such name and history as she shall supply.

2. For which he shall be paid the sum of five hundred pounds, half upon signing, half upon the second of July.

3. The engagement is a performance for the public only. Neither party shall expect or require of the other anything beyond what is proper to a betrothed couple seen in company.

4. Neither party shall reveal the nature of this agreement to any person whatsoever.

5. Upon its conclusion the undersigned shall be free to go where he likes, with a character written by Lady E. Ormond, and the gray stallion called Pilgrim.

You read it twice. Then you read clause five a third time.

"You'd give me Pilgrim."

"He's never let anyone else on his back. He's yours already. I'm only making it legal." She watches your face. "Five hundred pounds, Ethan. Zebedee tells me you've been saving for land. A little farm on the downs, he said, for breeding. He also said you'd never in your life take money you hadn't earned, so I've made it as dreadful as I could. You'll earn every penny."

Five hundred pounds. Sixteen years of wages. A farm, a paddock, a house with your own name on the door, if you had a name.

"Why me?" you ask.

"Because you caught his whip."

"That's not a reason."

"It's the only one that matters." But she looks away when she says it, at the saddles in their rows, the bridles hanging clean. "You're the right height. You ride better than any man in England. You don't drink, you don't gamble, and you don't talk. And the duke has never once looked at a groom's face, and neither has my brother. Put you in a good coat and nobody will know you."

"Somebody will."

"Then we'll be very clever." She leans forward. The candle makes gold of the edge of her face. "I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to help me. Nobody else I trust would know which end of a fork to hold."

"I'm not sure I do."

"You'll learn. You learned to ride Pilgrim. Forks bite less." A pause. "Please."

You've never heard her say it. Not at fourteen, not at twenty-four. You sit there with the paper in your hands and the rain dripping off the eaves, and you think about the welt under Pilgrim's eye and the word family in that beautiful cold voice.

"One thing," you say. "Clause three. It stays exactly as it's written. I'm being paid to stand beside you. Nothing else is for sale."

Her eyes come back to yours. Something in them goes still and serious.

"Nothing else was ever on offer," she says quietly. "From either of us. I'd sooner die."

"Then I'll do it."

She lets out a breath like she's been holding it since London. She produces a pencil from her cloak pocket, of all places, and you sign on the cushion of your knee: Ethan. Just that.

She frowns at it. "Your surname."

"I don't use one. My mother called herself Thursby. I don't know if it was hers."

Evadne looks at you a long moment. Then she looks past you, out the little window, to where the gray head of the stallion has come over his stall door to see what the light is.

"Pilgrim," she says.

"That's the horse."

"And now it's you. Mr. Ethan Pilgrim, of Northumberland. A small estate, very remote, no family to speak of, and a dreadful habit of silence. Northumberland is a long way off. Nobody in London has ever been there on purpose." She writes it under your name and blows on it. "There. You exist."

"Northumberland," you repeat.

"You'll love it. Lots of sheep." She stands, gathering the candle. At the door she stops. "There's one difficulty."

"Only one?"

"Algie's giving a ball at Ormond House in nine days. The whole ton. That's where we announce it." She turns. "Can you dance, Ethan?"

"No, my lady."

"Not at all?"

"I can do a jig at harvest supper if someone's had enough cider."

Lady Evadne Ormond closes her eyes like a woman counting to ten.

"The duke," she says, "waltzes like an angel. God help us both."