Page 31 of A Gentleman’s Offer

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Dominic said slowly, ‘I asked my mother as much, and she had no answer to give me other than that that perhaps Lord Nightingale is a lunatic, which may be true, I suppose, but hardly takes us any further. But it’s a very good point. Nothing that you have told me about your father and nothing that I have seen in my short acquaintance with him leads me to think that he cares at all for your sister’s wellbeing, whether he is sane or mad.’

‘Certainly not enough to make him seek to blackmail an eligible gentleman into offering for her,’ Meg agreed. ‘As soon as you say it out loud, it’s quite plain how ridiculous the whole idea is. He cares a great deal for his mother and his youngest sister, or the idea of them at any rate, now they’re safely dead and can’t trouble him with any demands, but he doesn’t give a fig for any other woman alive. Not my aunt, not me, and not Maria. And he’s not in the least mad, just extraordinarily selfish and in love with the idea of his own consequence. It doesn’t make any sense! If he was so eager to see Maria well bestowed – which honestly I can’t believe he has ever been – he needed only to approach your mother like a normal person and suggest the match. It is , on paper, an excellent idea. I’m sure she’d have been ready enough to agree, since you’ve told me she was already eager to see you married. My sister’s a great heiress! Why should anything so extreme as blackmail be needed?’

‘You’re right, my dear. The curious nature of his behaviour is clearer now that we know about the coercion. Can we puzzle it out, do you think? It feels as though we have almost all the pieces, could we but put them together in the right manner.’

Meg jumped to her feet and began to pace up and down the small room, her skirts and petticoats swishing emphatically with every turn she made. ‘I keep thinking I know something!’ she exclaimed. ‘I keep thinking that the clue to it all is almost within my grasp, but then it slips away from me when I try to seize hold of it. What can it be?’

Dominic regarded her with fond amusement. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me on this occasion if I don’t get up and join you. There really isn’t room for both of us, and I should feel foolish standing watching you. Does the pacing help you think?’

‘Not so far, but I can’t be sitting still – I feel so restless. My mother has always taught me to break problems down into their separate parts, and deal with them that way. Can we do that, Dominic? What do we know for certain – I mean things that we are absolutely sure of, rather than things we merely suppose to be true?’

‘The main thing we know,’ said Dominic seriously, ‘is that your father is extraordinarily keen, one might even say desperate, to have your sister marry me. Not just anyone who might be equally eligible, but me. And we also know he has, or thinks he has, a hold over my family.’

‘That’s very well put. We do know both these things as facts. Can we say, then, that he is desperate for Maria to marry you in particular, just because he has a hold over your family, and no other?’ Meg asked. ‘I know that isn’t certain, not like the other two points, but can we test it as an idea for a moment?’

‘Of course. So, my extremely obvious eligibility lies, we may suggest, not – as one might have expected – in my many sterling qualities of person and character, nor even the numerous favours nature and circumstance have blessed me with…’

‘But only in the stark fact that my father has power over you,’ she finished for him triumphantly. They were both grinning. ‘Really, Dominic, it’s beginning to seem to me that apart from that you could be almost anybody.’

‘I’m sure it’s good for me, you know, to endure these constant blows to my self-esteem and nobly rise above them,’ he mused. ‘I might have been wandering around London at this very moment thinking myself the devil of a fellow if I hadn’t been drawn into the orbit of your family. Your sister flees from me as if I had the plague, your father doesn’t care what the hell I am as long as he can blackmail me, you jump to the worst possible conclusion…’

‘You’ll get over it, I’m sure,’ she said, blushing a little. ‘You don’t appear to me to be suffering noticeably from a deficit of self-esteem. But anyway, to prove the point sufficiently, it’s not all about you, you know. It’s not about who Maria must marry, it’s about why .’

‘Why your father needs your sister to marry someone who is in his power?’

‘Exactly.’

He frowned in concentration. ‘Logic suggests that the marriage itself might not be his end goal. There must be something further. In truth, he gains nothing financially from your sister’s union with me. It could be argued that he gains socially, of course. If his estrangement from your mother has somehow damaged his reputation, or the reputation of your family, and he wishes to rehabilitate it though this connection…’

Meg shook her head vigorously, still pacing though more slowly now. ‘I’m not sure it has been damaged, or not very much. Many married people in your world live apart. Many married people are notoriously and frequently unfaithful, for that matter, which my parents aren’t, and as long as they are reasonably discreet in their amours, nobody cares much. And according to Maria he never goes into society, and only spends time with scholars like himself, who barely know what century it is. The latest scandal they concerned themselves with probably involved the Emperor Commodus. I really don’t think it can be that.’

‘Very well, then. In which case, the power must be the important thing. The power that the marriage gives him over me, and my family, even after the wedding. I put this to my mother, in slightly different terms, and she disagreed. She thought that a threat to expose our secrets would be toothless once our families were inextricably linked, because the gossip would hurt him too.’

‘But that’s not true, is it, Dominic?’ she said excitedly, pausing and gazing at him. ‘If my father doesn’t care at all about being the subject of scandal, which I don’t think he does, he could very easily threaten to spread rumours about you at any time, and mean it.’

‘Spread rumours unless we do what, or to prevent us from doing what?’

‘That’s the point, isn’t it? How can we know?’

‘What if he has a secret of his own, one which might be revealed to me – or must be revealed to me – once the marriage has gone ahead? And one which I might otherwise be tempted to expose, only I won’t be able to, because of the hold he has over me. Imagine if your sister married anyone else, someone uncompromised, how would they react on finding out whatever it is? That’s a good question to ask, I think.’

‘If he has a secret, Maria does not know it. I’m positive of that…’ Meg said pensively. ‘If she knew it, she would surely have told me, and in any case I think she’d hold it over him in order to obtain what she wants from him: the freedom to live as she pleases.’

And then, ‘Oh, Dominic, my goodness, I think I know what it is.’ She looked at him without really seeing him, the cogs in her brain meshing together and turning one upon the other like the mechanism of a mantel clock that was about to strike noon. It all made sense now – the blackmail, her father’s urgency to see Maria married, and married to Dominic of all people in particular – everything. It was so elegant and nasty a solution that it surely could only be correct. ‘What it must be. If I’m right, this explains everything. And if I am – it’s a dreadful thing, but I hope I am right! Because then he can be stopped. And we can all be free.’