A marriage contract is mooted between the niece and a Duke’s younger son.19 When the child is almost seven the Duke falls ill and the contract is ratified as his dying wish. The son ‘seemed to consent, to please his Father’, but after the Duke’s death ‘did not at all reflect upon his contract’. He goes to war, fortuitously inherits the Dukedom on the unexpected death of his elder brother, and marries a rich widow who ‘claimed a promise from him’ (p. 185). The spurned niece recognizes the potential unhappiness of such an arrangement, and the value of her own financial independence, for ‘who are happier than those that are mistresses of their own fortunes?’ (p. 186). It is her uncle who seeks revenge, vowing to take his niece to the city and make her ‘a meteor of the time’. There he escorts her to lectures on natural philosophy, physics, chemistry, music, and to courts of law, always ‘masked, muffled, and scarfed’. At sixteen she is literally unveiled at court in a series of carefully planned and titillating appearances.

The niece designs her own clothes, and is thus partly the orchestrator of, and commentator on, her own spectacular singularity: ‘what doth my uncle mean to set me out to show? sure he means to traffic for a husband; but Heaven forbid those intentions …’. On her first appearance she dresses all in black ‘like a young widow’. Entering the masque after all the court is seated, ‘as if a curtain was drawn from before her’, she displaces the performance as the chief wonder. At her second appearance she dresses in white satin embroidered with silver, ‘like a Heaven stuck with stars’. Again, she enters late, without veil or jewellery, to be ‘more prospectious’ (p. 193), and is received as ‘some divine object’: ‘the beams of all eyes were drawn together, as one point placed in her face, and by reflection she sent a burning heat, and fired every heart’, (p. 193) The men wait on her, while the women watch with envy, but it is the two most prominent men in the assembly, the aged Viceroy and the unhappily married Duke, who are singled out as chief admirers. The young woman, unwittingly at first, desires only the man to whom she was betrothed as a child, faithful to the terms of the contract.

Against the wishes of his niece, the uncle verbally accepts the Viceroy’s proposal of marriage, while the Duke and the still unnamed young lady exchange letters declaring their love. The Duke confesses his youthful error, and repents his disobedience to his father and to the strictures of contractual and moral obligation, urging her to ‘place [her]self ’ (p. 203) by recourse to law. This boudoir scene in which the Duke asserts a husbandly prerogative is followed by another intimate confrontation, this time between the rival lovers in the Viceroy’s private chamber. It is only now that the name of the placeless and anonymous young woman is revealed as the Lady Delitia, by the man who is now prepared and able to say, ‘she is my wife, and I have been married to her almost nine years’. Once the obstacle of the Viceroy’s pre-contract has been disposed of by a combination of violent intimidation and legal nicety, the uncle agrees to support Deletia in a suit to establish her rightful claim over that of the current Duchess.

In the final movement of the narrative Deletia proves her excellence as a student. Her years as an obscure courtroom observer have prepared her to act confidently and argue eloquendy as her own advocate but, in fact, such a demonstration is legally superfluous. Its narrative importance is as another scene of seduction, for, as the judges inform Delitia, ‘the justice of your cause judges itself’ (p. 213). Similarly, though the mutual desire of the Duke and Delitia may be legally beside the point, it is narratively and generically essential to the satisfactory conclusion of the romance. This is the third ‘courtly’ spectacle at which Deletia proves to be the chief wonder and, once again, other women are her only opponents, for this contest is really between the current, inauthentic Duchess and her authentic replacement who ‘came not from nobility, but … the root of merit, from whence gentility doth spring’ (p. 211). Deletia fulfils her uncle’s plan for revenge by indeed becoming a ‘meteor of the age’, able to choose any man as her husband; but her revenge is not against the Duke for breach of contract, but rather in deleting the manipulative widow he married. Revenge is sweet, however: the spurned Viceroy proposes to the Duchess and the tale ends by foreshadowing a double wedding. This neat reversal (corresponding in rhetoric to the scheme chiasmus) privileges the force of the initial marriage contract, and the weakness of the second, realigning the couples according to the moral of the desirability of a younger wife.20

‘The Contract’ is a contained and elegantly structured narrative, with powerful set-pieces and confrontations.