The fire moved.
"The man you owe eleven thousand pounds to," she said.
"Yes."
"You are proposing to settle a debt of eleven thousand pounds by giving him your sister."
"I am proposing," said the Duke of Ashcombe, "that a man of one and forty with a great deal of new money and no connection whatsoever wishes to be brother-in-law to a duke, and has said so, in writing, to my face, in a room in St James's Street on the eleventh of March.
"And that he has offered to cancel the eleven and advance thirty against this estate at four per cent, which is two below what I am paying now.
"And that I sat in London for four days trying to find any other door out of this house," said her brother, "and that there is not one."
"There is one," said Georgiana Ashcombe. "There is one and you have never once walked down to look at it, and it is four hundred yards from that window."
"George — "
"I am talking about the horses."
"I am aware of what you are — "
"You are not aware of anything at all," said Georgiana, and got up, and went to the drawer where she had put the ledger herself in the January, precisely so that this conversation could happen.
"Adam Callow came here at nineteen," she said. "Our father hired him in 1812 for eighteen shillings a week to break the grey that killed Peters, and he did it in six weeks without laying a hand on it, and he has been on this estate eleven years."
"I know who Callow is."
"You do not," said Georgiana Ashcombe. "You have not been in that yard on a working morning since 1817."
She put the ledger on the desk and opened it at a page she had marked.
"In 1815 he asked our father for the use of the far paddock and two mares that nobody wanted. Father said yes because he was drunk and it cost him nothing.
"There are now nineteen horses in that yard that are not ours. They are boarded and schooled for other men at eleven guineas a season, and there are four more at grass at Fenny.
"He has bred eleven foals out of those two mares and their daughters. Four have been sold. The one that went to Lord Pelham in the autumn made three hundred and forty guineas — three hundred and forty, Henry — and Pelham has written twice since asking for another, and both letters are in that drawer and you have not opened either."
Henry Ashcombe was looking at the ledger.
"That is your hand," he said.
"Of course it is my hand."
"George — "
"He can read a pedigree and he can write a name and that is the whole of it," said Georgiana. "He has kept the accounts of the best thing on this estate in his head for four years, because there is not one person in this house who would sit down with him for an afternoon."
"You have sat down with him for an afternoon."
There was a small silence in the library.
"I have sat down with him eleven times," said Lady Georgiana Ashcombe, "in the estate office, with the door open and Mrs Prewitt in the passage, and I have written down what he told me.
"And if you would like to make something of that, Henry, I would remind you that you have just proposed selling me to a man who owns four tanneries."