CHAPTER NINE
“If Your Grace is set on the cottages today, mind the Burtons. There’s a temper in that lane, and reason for it, and you’ll get an earful you never went looking for.”
Mrs. Selby stood at the stillroom table while Ellen packed the baskets, disapproving of the whole undertaking in the particular way of a woman who would have done it herself years ago had anyone given her the hours.
“What reason?” Ellen wrapped a jar of honey in a cloth.
“Land, my lady. It’s always land, up that lane.
The Burtons held forty acres of river bottom in old Burton’s day, and now they hold stones, and the man broods on it.
He’ll tell you the duke turned them off, which he never did, His Grace would no more turn off a tenant than fly, but try telling Burton that with the gorse coming up where his father grew barley. ”
“And how did stones become the whole of his holding?”
“That I couldn’t say, Your Grace, and it isn’t my place to wonder.
” Mrs. Selby’s mouth thinned in a way that said she had wondered a great deal and learned the cost of saying so.
“Agents came. Papers were signed. The good land went and the family stayed, and nobody in the house was the wiser, which is how a great many things go in a house with no mistress to ask the awkward question.”
“Then it is fortunate the house has acquired one.”
“We shall see, my lady.” But she packed a second jar of the cordial into the basket without being asked, which coming from Mrs. Selby, was received as a peculiar blessing.
The first cottage was the Renwicks’, and Mrs. Renwick came to her own door wiping her hands on her apron with three children ranged behind her skirts in descending order of boldness.
“You’ll forgive the state of us, Your Grace. We weren’t looking for the house to call. The house has never once called, not in my time.”
“Then it is past time it began.” Ellen lifted the cloth on the basket. “Cordial for the children’s chests, and honey, and I have come to ask whether the cottage wants anything that has not been seen to.”
“Wants, my lady?” The woman laughed, surprised into it. “We want for nothing a duchess could carry in a basket. The chimney smokes when the wind’s in the east, but every chimney in the parish does, and we’d not trouble the house with the wind.”
“You may trouble me with the wind. I have nothing better to do with it.” Ellen crouched to the boldest child, who had crept out to inspect her hem. “What is your name?”
“Tom.”
“Tom, when the chimney smokes, who sweeps it?”
“Nobody, miss. Da does it with a holly bush on a rope.”
“Then we shall find your da a better arrangement than a holly bush.” She straightened.
Mrs. Renwick was looking at her with the wary, half-hopeful revising Ellen had begun to see on faces all over the estate.
“I shall send the sweep out from Wrenford before the cold sets hard. Two spoons of the cordial at bedtime, Mrs. Renwick, not the whole jar, or you will have these three bouncing off the walls till Lady Day.”
“May every happiness attend you, Your Grace.” It came out of the woman before she could dress it for company, and she flushed at her own boldness, and Ellen pretended not to have heard it so the woman need not have been ashamed.
The second cottage was the one Mrs. Selby had warned her of, and the roof told its tale before anyone came to the door. Half the thatch on the north pitch had gone black and fallen in, and a tarred sheet lashed over the worst of it had begun itself to perish.
A big slow careful man came round the side of the house with a billhook in his hand and stopped at the sight of her in his yard.
“Mr. Burton?”
“Aye, Your Grace.” He set the billhook against the wall, deliberately, his wife’s caution doubled in him. “Mary said you’d been by the gate. She didn’t say you’d come up the lane.”
“I said I should, when I had time for the longer tale. I have made the time.” Ellen looked up at the roof. “How long has it been like that?”
“Year and more. I patched it with the sheet last winter and the sheet’s near gone.” He said it without heat, a man long past the belief that heat would help. “There’s no money for thatch on a holding come down to what mine has.”
“And what has it come down to?”
He was quiet, the way his wife had been quiet at the gate, weighing whether a duchess was a thing you told the truth to.
“It ran to the river once, my lady. Forty acres of good bottom, my father’s, and his before him.
The bottom went four years back. An agent came, said His Grace had no objection, named a price that was fair enough I couldn’t fight it, and now the good land’s somebody’s I never set eyes on, and the high ground’s mine, which is stone and gorse and a roof I cannot mend. ”
“His Grace had no objection.” Ellen kept her voice level. “Did the agent say so in those words, or did you assume that the duke must have known?”
Burton looked at her, and something moved behind the broad slow face, the dawning of a question he had not let himself ask in four years.
“He said so, my lady. Or so near it I would not have been so rash as to accuse him of falsehood to his face. But now you put it to me plain, I never had it from any mouth but the agent’s that His Grace knew a thing about it. ”
“No,” Ellen said, more to the lost hedges down toward the water than to him. “I begin to think a great many people have not.”
She gathered the basket. “Mr. Burton. I am going to speak to the land agent about your roof. Not the duke but the agent himself. The thatch will be on before the hard frost, and you will not pay for it, and if any man tells you the duke objects, you will send that man to me.”
“You will find little favor for it, Your Grace, in inquiring who purchased my bottom land, and under whose name the deed was struck.”
“I have enjoyed remarkably little favor these past twelve months, Mr. Burton. I have long since learned to content myself without it.”
***
She came back to the house as the light was failing, meaning to find Crewe the agent before he left for the night, and let herself in by the side door, and that was how she came to be in the passage outside the study while her own circumstances were decided through a half-open door.
“…the question only of which account it draws upon, Your Grace.” Crewe’s voice, dry and careful. “The duchess’s allowance. Whether it comes off the Wrenfield rents or out of London.”
“From neither.” Theodore, flat. “It comes from my own funds and from no estate. It appears on no rent-roll and in no steward’s book where a second hand might read it. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly, Your Grace.”
“One thing further, and I will say it once. No sum touching the duchess, no figure, no arrangement, nothing at all, is ever discussed with Lord Middleton, nor with any man who comes in his name, nor with any creditor of his who has persuaded himself a duke’s matrimony has made his paper good.
” A pause, and the voice did not rise, which somehow made it worse.
“If Middleton writes, he is told his sister is well. If he calls, he is told the same and shown the door. He is given nothing. Not money. Not the hour of the day.”
“Entirely understood, Your Grace. And the Hartside beasts for the Martinmas sale, if I may put in a word about the reserve price.”
Ellen did not hear about the beasts. She had stepped back from the door, soundless on the matting, and withdrawn to the foot of the stairs to wait, because the man she had come to find was inside that room, and she was not yet willing to be seen having heard the thing she had heard.
When the study door opened and Crewe came out with his folio under his arm, she was at the stair-foot before he had drawn it shut behind him.
“Mr. Crewe. A word, if His Grace can spare you.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” He had the careful blankness of a man who managed a great deal and committed none of it to his face.
“The Burton roof. The north pitch is down and the patch is failing, and the family cannot carry the cost. I want it rethatched before the hard frost, at the estate’s charge, and begun this week.”
“That is a matter I should ordinarily carry to His Grace, my lady.”
“Then carry it, and he will tell you it is the duchess’s prerogative to keep a tenant’s roof on his head, and you will have saved yourself the walk by simply doing it.” She held his eye. “Or will you tell me the mistress of Wrenfield may not mend a roof without authorisation?”
“No, Your Grace. The mistress may mend what she pleases.” Something almost like respect moved under the blankness. “It shall be begun this week.”
“Excellent. Then the Burton bottom land. Forty acres of river meadow that left the holding four years ago.” She held his gaze steadfastly. “Who holds it now?”
He checked himself before replying. “It was sold through an agent, my lady. Several such parcels were, all along the bottom. I handled the Wrenfield end of the conveyancing as instructed.”
“Instructed by whom?”
“By a firm in London, Your Grace, acting for the purchaser. The understanding was that His Grace had no objection, the land being poor and the price fair.”
“An understanding? Between whom? Did the duke instruct the sales, or did a London firm inform you he had no objection, and you took the informing for the duke’s own word?”
Crewe was silent a moment too long. “I took it that a firm of that standing would not misrepresent His Grace’s mind.”
“And it did not once occur to you to put the question to His Grace himself.”
“It is not my place to carry every parcel of poor meadow to a duke, my lady.” He said it without conviction now, hearing it as she heard it.
“No. I daresay it is not. But somebody has been spending my husband’s name up and down this river for four years, Mr. Crewe, buying the ground from under his own tenants on the strength of an objection he was never once asked to make.
I should like to know which firm, and whose money stands behind the firm, and whose name stands behind the money.
” She gathered the basket. “Find me that discreetly. Mend the roof. We will speak again when you have the one and have begun the other.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” And then, as she turned to go, lower, “Your Grace will forgive me. You sound very much like the late duchess. She had the trick of the awkward question too.”
“Then I am in good company. Good night, Mr. Crewe.”
She made no mention of anything which had transpired at dinner. She made her answers when they were wanted and allowed Augusta to carry the rest, and was aware, once, of the old woman’s eyes resting on her a beat too long.
“You are very quiet tonight, child.”
“I walked a long way. Two cottages, and the lane is steep.” She made herself smile. “I am merely a trifle fatigued.”
“Mm.” Augusta plainly believed not a syllable of it, and let it lie regardless, which was the second-kindest thing she did and the reason Ellen could bear being cherished by her.
She lay awake a long time, turning it over.
Her brother had sold her to clear his debts, and then, she understood now, had come scratching at the door of the man who bought her, looking for more, and her husband had built a wall around her so high and so quiet that she had lived two months behind it without knowing it stood.
He had not told her. He had not asked to be thanked.
He had decided, alone in a study, that she should never again be made to share a room with the man who had ruined her, and had made it so, and let her go on believing him cold.
It did not undo everything, and she was not ready for it to.
But she set it beside the mare bought without a reason given, and the ridge where he had told her the one true thing about himself, and the garden he had noticed and never named, and the wall she had only tonight discovered, and the man she had built out of all her fear of him shifted under the new weight, a small definite movement, the way a house settles in the night, and she felt it go.
She turned onto her side. Out of old habit her mind reached for Vance, the way a tongue goes to a missing tooth, and found him there still, the red coat and the practiced smile and the hand laid warm on her knee.
The thought had gone thin. Worn somehow, like a letter folded and refolded past reading, and she lay in the dark and did not understand why, and fell asleep before she could, which was its own kind of answer.