‘And, besides, you are at your best when things are far from easy, Miss Marshwic. You are a fighter.’
She took the compliment, if it was one, uncertainly. ‘I asked you, that night, if you were offering a truce.’
‘I remember.’
‘I offer you one now. We have been enemies, and for good reason. No doubt we shall be again. For now, while both our lives are complicated by war, I will be civil and try not to hate you any more, if the same is offered in return.’
‘My, what a carefully worded treaty,’ he said. He had his pipe ready in one hand, but it remained unlit. ‘You hated me, truly?’
‘My family’s memory is long and clear.’
‘Ah, your family? So it was as a Marshwic that you hated me.’ He regarded the pipe intensely. ‘I never hated you, Miss Marshwic. And if I have not always been civil, it is because I feel you thrive on adversity. What would you crusade against, if not men like me?’ He smiled at her. ‘How unlike we are, you and I, but at the same time how much common ground there is.’
‘I do not see it,’ she said.
‘We question, Miss Marshwic, and we fight, and we are not prepared to accept the status quo. If you did, you would not pit yourself against me so frequently, and if I did, I would be a petty crook and not a great one.’
‘You are a civic-minded villain,’ Emily observed. ‘You do your duty by the King well enough.’
‘And better than an honest man could,’ he agreed. ‘If they won, the Denlanders would take by force what I would steal. It is in my interest.’
‘You are a truthful villain.’
‘To you, always.’
‘Do you accept my truce?’
His composure cracked just for a second, and something hungry and hopeful looked out at her. She thought it made him grotesque, but then she thought it made him human.
‘Willingly gratefully,’ he confirmed. ‘And should you wonder if I’m keeping to it, you may check on me here at any time. After all, who else do you talk to as openly as this?’
It was only after she had left his office and walked out into the clear crisp sunlight that she realized he was right.
*
Her two sisters did not take kindly to Emily’s truce with Mr Northway.
‘He is a hateful man,’ Alice declared, without hesitation. ‘How could you even want to speak with him after all he did to Father?’
Mary frowned, her steady gaze reminding Emily of their last conversation on this topic. ‘You know he tried to buy up Father’s debts. He would have taken Grammaine from us, if he could. We sold half the estate, just to keep the rest away from him. You know that.’
‘We are at war. There is a common enemy,’ Emily reminded them. ‘He does what he can – as do we. In wars, you have truces.’
‘I do not know what you think he is, but he has always been a wicked creature,’ Mary insisted with finality.
Alice went on, ‘Look at the way he dresses: he is a repulsive, shabby little thing. He’s horrible. I wouldn’t have him as a servant, and now you’re dancing with him and going to visit him as if he’s a real person.’
And all of it just brought home to Emily what Northway himself had said. Who else could she talk to about serious things? Who else was there who would not judge her words poorly?
Over that same winter, she went to see him four times. None of her visits was just an idle social call. Each time she went along as champion for some wronged party: a family going hungry, a widow without firewood, a woman accused of theft who had a family to support. She had clashed with him over similar matters before, and it had been a duel of hates, as she focused her dislike of the man into a crusading fury against his selfish and biased governance.
And now, when she came to him, she argued as fiercely as before, using ploy and counter-ploy as she chased him through the mansions of self-serving logic that he threw up to counter her. And yet whenever they matched wits, no matter how life-or-death the stakes were for those she spoke on behalf of, she felt as though she and Northway were playing a game. Sometimes she broke past his defences and forced some concession from him, and sometimes he led her down blind alley after blind alley, until she had exhausted her