Love by Contract

An Untroubled World

The light that filtered through the heavy curtains into my bedroom was the same as on every morning of the last seventeen years. And yet it felt different. As I opened my eyes, I expected the familiar stillness of my home—a stillness that had always meant safety to me. But the walls that had sheltered me all my life seemed thin today, as though they could no longer keep out the new, cold wind that had been whistling through my life since the evening before.

I stared at the ceiling and felt the reality of that morning like a hard, unbraked impact. Only yesterday my greatest worries had been what one might call the carefree troubles of a girl: Which dress shall I wear today? When shall I call on my friend? What melody shall I play on the piano? They were the shallow, superficial thoughts of a sheltered seventeen-year-old. Last night, however, those safe walls had begun to sway. I remembered the smell of silk and powder, the hurried, almost nervous hands of my mother as she rouged my cheeks and coloured my lips, as though I were a doll to be dressed up for an auction.

“It is for your own good, Clara,” she had whispered, but in her eyes there had been something I only understood when Mr Wallace entered the house.

Wallace. Nearly forty, a man as empty in his words as a dried-up riverbed. My father had presented him to me like a new piece of business inventory, a “financial security,” set in stone at a dinner I had lived through as if behind a veil. I had nodded. I had smiled when it was required of me. I had remained neutral, because the girl I had been until that evening knew obedience as her only currency.

But now the truth struck home. It was no mere engagement. It was a contract. My life was no longer an open book but a file already sealed and signed off. I was no longer the daughter; I was the asset. A faint, almost imperceptible tremor ran through me. I was still Clara Ashworth. But my life was no longer my own.

Clara pushed the heavy blanket aside and set her bare feet on the cold wooden floor. The shiver that came over her had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. She went to the mirror, brushed a chestnut curl from her face, and looked into the eyes of a stranger. The remnants of last night’s lip colour were fading stains on her skin, yet the contours of her face seemed suddenly older, sharper than they had been only the day before.

Below stairs, the household had long since stirred to life. When Clara descended a short while later, the familiar warmth rose to meet her, and yet it seemed to her as though she were stepping onto a stage where everyone knew their parts—everyone but her, not any longer. In the dining room with its tall windows her mother already sat at the polished wooden table, and over her face lay a cheerfulness that Clara would have believed yesterday but saw through today: the relief of a woman who imagined her daughter safe. Miriam, the younger sister, prattled blithely about the swans in the park, and for a moment Clara wished for nothing more dearly than to be as untroubled again as the child beside her.

Her father folded up the newspaper as she entered and smiled at her—that smile which had always meant security to her. Mr Ashworth was a man who had fought for everything himself. Once a nobleman of an old name, his love for Clara’s mother, a woman of common birth, had cost him his inheritance and his title; afterwards, at the brokers’ tables, he had wrested a new fortune for himself, with a sharp mind and a steady hand. What he had learned there he had passed on to Clara in his offhand way—how a bill of exchange worked, why a ship that came in late could ruin a man, and how a single shipping paper broke apart into many shares, each of which found its buyer and its price. “Numbers never lie, child,” he was fond of saying, “but the people who write them down do so now and then.” And so Clara read a cargo manifest as effortlessly as a sheet of music—and perhaps it was precisely this knowledge that now let her sense that the engagement to Wallace was no whim, but an entry in an account whose full sum her father kept hidden from her. The evening before, she had seen him push a slim bundle of papers across the table before Wallace calmly took it and let it slide into his breast pocket; and without knowing what was written on them, she had sensed that this promise had not been sealed with a mere handshake, but with something that would one day have to be reckoned up. Only much later, in the ledgers of another old man, would she come to understand what she had seen with her own eyes that evening.

Across the breakfast table she watched her parents. She saw how her father laid his hand carelessly over her mother’s, how a glance passed back and forth between them that made whole sentences unnecessary—that natural tenderness, grown over years, of two people who had once chosen each other and went on choosing each other anew every day. Precisely this, Clara understood with painful clarity, would never be granted to her. She tried to imagine herself at Wallace’s side, his hand on hers—and the mere thought of his nearness made something within her contract, a physical revulsion that tightened her throat. No. A bond such as her parents lived was not even to be dreamt of with that old, hollow man; the very thought of being near him filled her with the deepest disgust.

She said nothing of it. She took her place, drank her tea, and let the words pass over her when it was decided at breakfast to spend the afternoon together in Hyde Park. It had been one of her dearest habits, and perhaps, Clara thought, the fresh air would drive away the cold wind that still whistled within her.

It was a brilliant day in London, one of those rare moments when the sky was cloudless and of a deep blue. The city seemed enchanted, the usually bustling streets full of life and yet filled with a certain lightness. The sun set the rooftops glittering, while a gentle breeze drifted through the avenues—and Clara moved through all that brightness as though through a dream in which the world did not know that everything had changed overnight.

In Hyde Park the Ashworth family passed a seemingly carefree time. Clara and Miriam watched the swans on the Serpentine, while their parents sat on a bench and spoke quietly to one another. The sunbeams fell golden through the trees, and the soft crunch of the gravel paths mingled with the laughter of the other visitors. Everything seemed perfect—until the moment they made to leave the park.

As Clara and her family headed for the gate, the harmony was abruptly broken when Clara, lost in thought, suddenly collided with someone. It happened so unexpectedly that for the blink of an eye her breath caught—a hard, warm resistance, a stranger’s shoulder against hers, the scent of sun and linen and something tart she could not name. An unexpected jolt, a startled “Oh, I beg your pardon!” from her side—and then she was looking into the irritated eyes of a young man.

He was perhaps in his mid-twenties, with dark, unruly hair, and he wore a pale summer suit that was now adorned with an unsightly brown stain. His eyes were a surprising grey, lively and alert, and they fixed themselves upon Clara with an effrontery that drove the blood to her cheeks before a single word had been spoken. “Do look where you are going!” he hissed, gesturing impatiently at the soiled spot.

Clara felt her face grow hot with anger. “You have stained my dress!” she retorted, pointing at the mark spreading across her pale summer gown.

“That is no concern of mine!” he replied sharply. There was a matter-of-course disdain in his voice, as though he were accustomed to the world giving way to him and not the other way round. “You ought to have paid better attention!”

Clara’s voice trembled with indignation, yet she did not lower her gaze. Whoever this man might be, she had learned that courtesy had nothing to do with fear—and that a boor was met least of all with tears. “How can you be so rude! I have apologised—decency demands no more than that. That you are a stranger to it is no failing of mine.”

And yet, as she spoke, something strange happened to her. Beneath the anger that burned so clear and just within her, a second, unfamiliar feeling stirred—quieter, warmer, more disquieting. It was a pull that began in the pit of her stomach and ran on to her fingertips, as though the touch at her shoulder had left a spark that now smouldered on beneath her skin. She was vexed with him, to be sure; but at the same time she could not tear her eyes from his face, from the defiant line of his mouth, from the unruly hair that fell across his brow. It was a thought she would never have admitted to herself, and yet it darted through her mind before she could chase it away: that this impossible creature was of a kind that pleased her. Hot shame rose to her cheeks at the notion, and she knew her blush did not escape him.

Indeed it did not. For the fraction of a moment his expression lost its mockery. He saw the colour rise over her cheeks, the spark in the hazel eyes that ill suited the indignation of her words—and something in him wavered. His heart, which a moment before had beaten evenly, began without his bidding to quicken, and for a moment even the practised young man did not quite know what to say.

“Apologies are of no use now either!” he said at last, but the cutting tone of before had deserted him, and he turned to go with a reluctant glance.

“Do you even know to whom you are speaking?” Clara called after him without thinking. “I am Clara Ashworth!”

The young man paused, turned slowly, and regarded her with an expression that wavered between surprise and mockery. “Ashworth, is it? Well, I suppose the name is meant to make an impression?” His lips curved into a crooked smile. “Jack, at your service.”

He stepped closer instead of leaving, and now it was Clara to whom words failed. She, who held a ready retort at hand in every drawing room, stood suddenly mute, her chin still defiantly raised but her heart pounding wild and unseemly. His grey eyes rested on her lips, and in his gaze lay something so brazen and at the same time so demanding that she grew hot all over and the world around her sank away for the space of a heartbeat.