Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Ashby was a man built for weather.
Not in the picturesque sense by which poets improved labourers into ornaments of landscape, but in the simpler fact that his body had accommodated cold, height, wet stone, and tool weight over years, so one could not imagine him anywhere a roof did not need mending.
He arrived before eight with a ladder on the cart, two village boys behind him with coils of rope and a crate of slate pegs, and a face shaped by wind that drove lesser men indoors.
Darcy met them in the yard, coat buttoned to the throat, gloves already on.
“You mean to go up yourself, then,” Ashby said, eyeing him once from hat to boot.
“Yes.”
“Can you keep your footing?”
“I believe so.”
“We’ll find out.”
Within ten minutes, Darcy discovered that was Ashby’s full extent of welcome to shared labour.
Hadley explained systems, while Ashby exposed failure by making a man face it directly.
He did not say the roof had been neglected.
He drove a hook under a slipped slate, lifted it, and revealed the rot-darkened batten beneath.
He did not lecture on false economy. He put one boot through a patched section over the old morning room and said, with bleak satisfaction, “There. That’s your late cousin saving six shillings in nails and costing sixty in timber. ”
They worked first over the west range where the winter leak had shown itself in the upper corridor and, below, in the drawing room ceiling.
The ladder shuddered under Ashby’s weight and groaned under Darcy’s, but held.
Frost still silvered the northern pitch.
The south side, touched earlier by sun, had gone slick instead, every slate edge sweating thaw.
“Mind that seam,” Ashby said, kneeling near the ridge. “It looks drier than it is. Put weight wrong there and you’ll come down in the blue chamber and scare the housemaid out of her next seven years.”
Darcy set his knee where indicated and kept working.
From above, the house looked less like an inheritance than a record of decisions one man had deferred.
Chimney flashings needing lead reset. Gutters clogged where November leaves had sat unemptied and frozen in place.
Two stretches of ridge badly patched, the work done in the economy of a man hoping another winter might pass if appearances were kept.
Ashby carried tools in silence until silence failed to serve.
“He used to come up here in the afternoons when there was company,” he said, levering out a split peg.
“Not to mend. To point. Standing where you are now and talking down the valley like he’d invented it.
Ladies liked the view. Gentlemen liked hearing him explain what each field was called, though he often got that wrong once the bottle had him. ”
Darcy kept his gaze on the slate in his hand. “You disliked him.”
“No use disliking the dead. They don’t benefit.”
“Yet you did.”
Ashby gave him a look under his cap brim. “Aye. We disliked him. First for being idle. Then for being slippery. Idleness is a nuisance. Slipperiness turns a nuisance into rot.”
He reached for another slate. “A wall gives way? He swore he had ordered stone. Men asked for wages? He swore he’d paid through Reeves.
Mrs Bannon complained the stores were short?
He swore the suppliers cheated him. There was always a reason with him, always another hand to blame, and by the time you discovered the reason wanted sense the week had gone and the work with it. ”
Darcy fastened a new peg and pressed the slate home.
“You told him so?”
Ashby barked a laugh without mirth. “Once. On this very roof. Told him if he put one more cheap patch over wet timber he’d have the whole run lifting by Christmas.
He said I loved the sound of my own authority.
I told him authority had nothing to do with it and gravity everything.
Then he said I had forgot my station. Men talk of station when they’ve run out of argument. ”
Darcy fitted another peg. “And the steward?”
Ashby took a slate across his knee. He spent a long time setting it before he spoke.
“Aye. Wickham. Now there was a man the village did love.”
“Did they?”
“Charm enough for three. Knew every tenant’s name, every wife’s name, every dog’s name.
Stood the lads ale on rent days. Asked Mrs Pemberton after her mother every time he passed her gate.
When he laughed, your worst week looked smaller.
There was no resisting it.” Ashby tapped the peg home.
“I have lived sixty-one years and met three such men. He was the worst of them.”
Darcy let go a long breath. “Indeed. I have been reviewing his accounts.”
“His accounts were beautiful. They were the most beautiful accounts I have ever seen and the least true. Rent received in full and entered as such, a portion of it never reaching the master. Stone ordered and paid for in the book, half the stone delivered, the rest in his pocket. Wages paid on the page, men paid in part, difference his. The mill wheel cracking for three winters before he told the master about it—and the timber for that mill wheel, do not ask me where it went. Always a smile. Always a story. Always a reason the figure looked as it did.”
“Did the late master know?”
“That is the question every man in this valley has asked. Some say they ran it together—that the master got his ease and the steward got his cash, and they liked each other well enough not to count too close. Others say the steward fleeced the master worse than anyone. I lean to the second. Edmund Darcy was lazy. Lazy is not the same as clever. Wickham was clever enough for both of them, and what he gave Edmund in friendship was no more than the cover he wanted.”
Darcy nodded. “They were always friends in our youth.”
“Aye. Thick as you please. Drank together. Hunted together. Took the same girl home on at least one harvest evening and laughed about it after. I never saw Wickham give him anything that did not first keep Wickham comfortable. When Edmund died, Wickham was in Yorkshire on a holiday Edmund’s estate had paid for, and within the week he was somewhere else again with a fresh recommendation in his pocket and not one tenant of Northmere a penny better off. ”
Darcy did not answer. The peg in his hand had gone still.
His father’s voice was suddenly in him, summoned by no one. That boy could charm a stick of furniture into thinking it was alive.
Your cousin Edmund makes friends in an hour where you make none in a year.
Wickham has more of his father’s gift than we shall ever see. You had better study how.
Two charming boys, summer upon summer, with himself the third—who had sat with the ledger long enough to know what it said and had been less liked for it.
He pressed the peg home. The slate clicked into place.
Hargrove rose in him. A man in his own service who had dressed falsehood as order for years. Wickham had done it charmingly. Edmund had done it lazily. Hargrove had done it competently. The poison was the same.
They worked a while in silence. The boys below fed fresh slates and gathered the broken ones.
From this side of the roof Darcy saw beyond the orchard to the mere, a pale oval in winter light, and beyond that the lower meadows where the carrier Hadley had cleared yesterday now marked the ground in a dark line.
Nearer at hand, the south windows of the drawing room caught the morning sun.
One curtain was already drawn back.
He looked away quickly.
Ashby, who missed little despite seeming to glance only at timber and sky, said mildly, “You’d do better to mind the ridge than the window, sir. Roof’s less forgiving.”
Darcy drove the hammer harder than necessary on the next peg. “I was minding both.”
“Aye. That is often the trouble.”
Under any other roof Darcy might have rebuked the liberty. Here, with wind off the height and the remark’s accuracy too exact to deny, he merely said, “Does your work always include commentary on your employer’s line of sight?”
“Only where the line of sight becomes part of the structural concern.”
That was impertinent. It was also, in Ashby’s way, not entirely impertinent. The man had daughters, sisters, perhaps enough memories to recognise a gentleman looking more often than he would admit at one particular room.
Darcy bent over the slate and said no more.
By eleven they had the west seam secured and the worst of the ridge patched with sounder work than the house had seen in some time.
Ashby descended first, Darcy after him with less grace than he wished and more success than Ashby perhaps expected.
In the yard the boys loaded broken slate into the cart for reuse in the lower path.
Mrs Reeves emerged from the kitchen door with a jug of small ale and four cups and distributed them to a grateful audience. Men doing roof work, in her view, belonged temporarily to the same species and might be served alike whether one paid the bills or not.
Ashby drank half his at one pull and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“If weather holds, the drawing-room stain’ll dry clean. If weather doesn’t, nothing in England will.”
“And the blue chamber?” Darcy asked.
“Needs the south gutter cleared and one length of flashing reset. I’ll take Will up after dinner.
” He tipped his head toward the house. “Miss Bennet was at the parlour window yesterday. My Mary saw her from the lane when she brought eggs. Said the new lady sits as if she’s measuring every crack in the place and considering whether the house deserves to survive. ”
Mrs Reeves, collecting the emptied cups, said, “Miss Bennet has better manners than to pronounce sentence before she has seen the breakfast parlour.”
Ashby grunted. “If she has seen the late accounts she’ll know sentence is due somewhere.”
Darcy looked from one to the other. “Does the whole valley now discuss what I bring into my own house?”