Chapter Two
Piers came out of the east wing a little after breakfast, locked the door behind him and put the key back on the ring at his belt, where it had hung for two years and had come off four times a year since.
The wing was sound. He walked the length of it every quarter to be certain of that himself rather than by report, since a roof that is not looked at goes at the valleys first and gives no warning until the plaster comes down in a room nobody has entered since Michaelmas.
Nothing had come down anywhere, and the sheets over the furniture were grey with the particular dust of closed rooms. The long gallery smelled of cold stone and of the linseed the joiner had used in April.
In the third bay the wall carried a pale rectangle a little over five feet across, where a Cuyp had hung until the January before last.
He had sold the Cuyp for nine hundred and eighty pounds, the pair of Lelys in the same month, and a service of plate in the spring after that, and all of it together had bought the estate a few months' grace and nothing more.
The corridor at the top of the south stairs was warm, because the sun reached it early and the house held heat well in September but badly in every other month.
Below him somebody was moving furniture again.
Two of the parlour chairs had gone into the morning room in July when the parlour was shut.
The morning room now held nineteen chairs for the four people who ever sat down in it, and Mrs Tregarth arranged them every week as though the number were not remarkable.
Sowerby was waiting at the foot of the stairs with his hat in one hand and a black tin box under the other arm.
"Your Grace," Sowerby said. He kept the box rather than setting it down.
"You are early."
"I came by the mill road," Sowerby said. "It is dry, and Hallett has hung the gate at last."
They went through to the estate room, which had been the still-room in his grandfather's time and had a stone floor, one window and no picture on any wall. Piers had chosen it for that reason, and Sowerby put the box on the table, opened it, and remained standing.
"I have the final position," he said.
"Then give it to me in the order it happened."
Sowerby had a way of reading figures that made no allowance for the person he was reading them to. That was why Piers had kept him, but there were mornings when it was also the reason why he could hardly bear the sight of him.
"Notice was served on the ninth of April. The whole sum falls due at the Christmas quarter day, the twenty-fifth of December. The holder will not renew, and has said so twice in writing."
"How long?"
"Fourteen weeks," Sowerby said levelly, as though it were a distance on a road.
Piers already had the number. He had been carrying it since spring and had done the arithmetic again at four that morning, lying on his back in the dark, in case some previously undiscovered fortnight had attached itself to the calendar.
"Go on," he said.
"Three houses were approached. Marleigh in the spring, then Hallam, then the Bristol men in August. All three declined, but none of them declined on the security."
"Then on what?"
"On the terms. The paper was drawn to be difficult to move, and every man who has read it has understood that within an hour.
" Sowerby turned a page. "Your father's instrument permits the holder to refuse a transfer at his own discretion and gives no reason for doing so.
There is nothing anywhere else in the county drawn that way. "
"Rupert signed it," Piers said, and heard how flat his own voice had come out.
"He signed all nine." Sowerby turned the page round so that the signature faced across the table.
"Who is the holder?" Piers said. "Not the company. The man."
Sowerby's finger stopped on the page. "Cargill and Membury of Bristol act. Behind them there is a shell, and behind the shell there is somebody who has never once appeared in person, has never sent an agent to look at the land, and has never asked for a valuation."
"Nine years," Piers said, "and he has never once come to look at it."
"Not to my knowledge, and I have asked."
"A man who lends forty thousand against land he has not seen."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Then he has seen it," Piers said.
He went to the window and stood with his back to the room. Out in the yard a man was leading the bay mare towards the far gate. There were four horses now in a stable built for twenty-two, and that was arithmetic as well.
Two years ago, he had come home from his father's funeral, sat down in the library with a glass of his father's claret, and opened the deed box to find out what a dukedom consisted of.
Nine years of quiet borrowing was the answer.
Money had gone out, year after year, to a company in Bristol nobody at Ferrers had ever heard of.
Mortgages had been taken, renewed and taken again, and not one line of it appeared in the accounts Rupert had shown him every Lady Day of his adult life, with the air of a man doing something faintly indelicate.
Forty thousand, and his father had died in June, comfortably, of a cold on the chest, with three hundred people at the funeral saying what a charming man he had been.
No one at Ferrers had known, and Piers had never found anywhere to put that down.
Sowerby had known since the day the box was opened, and had carried it alone for two years without once letting it into his voice, while the families on the Bramshaw side went on paying their rents to an estate that had already been spent.
Piers had spent the two years since deciding which discomforts could safely be endured.
Most of them could. Rooms could be shut, horses could go, the London house had gone in the second winter, and nobody had missed it but Kitty.
He could read a coal bill now as closely as a lease, and he had got the household down by nearly a third without turning off one person who had nowhere else to go.
It had bought him until Christmas, but nothing beyond.
"There is one further thing," Sowerby said.
"I know what it is."
"Lord Frayne wrote to me this week."
"I know what it is," Piers said again, and turned round.
Sowerby put the letter on the table and stood back. That was as near as he came to tact.
My dear sir, I write in the hope that a difficulty on your side and a circumstance on mine may be found to answer one another.
My daughter has forty thousand pounds settled upon her, and I am told your principal has a want of very nearly that figure.
I am a plain man, and I see no reason to be delicate about arithmetic between gentlemen.
"No," Piers said.
Sowerby waited where he was and let the silence stand.
Piers picked the letter up, read the second paragraph, and put it back on the table with two fingers, where it had been.
"No," he said again.
"I heard Your Grace."
"Then why are you still standing there?"
"Because the debt remains," Sowerby said stolidly.
Piers had a temper that had never once been loud. It worked on him the way weather works on a bad joint, and by the time it had passed, he had straightened the inkstand and the two pens beside it into a line.
"I am aware of what I owe," he said.
"Then you are aware that pride will not pay it by Christmas."
The room went quiet enough to hear a boy calling to the dogs somewhere past the brewhouse.
Piers came very close to putting Sowerby out of the house. He had the words ready, and they were short ones, but the only thing that stopped him was that Sowerby had said nothing Piers had not already said to himself in the dark that morning, in a different language.
"Sit down," he said.
"I would rather not."
"Sit down, Sowerby."
Sowerby sat, put his hat on the floor beside the chair, and waited to be asked something.
"Frayne is offering his daughter," Piers said.
Sowerby considered the phrasing longer than the question deserved. "Her fortune."
"There is a woman attached to it."
"Indeed, there is," Sowerby said.
"Then do not speak as though there is not."
Sowerby's pen stayed where it was. "No, Your Grace."
Piers took the chair on the other side of the table. He had spent two years learning to hear things in the order they were said rather than in the order they hurt. It was a discipline, and this morning it was going to be a long one.
"Tell me about the money," Piers said, and made himself sit still while it was told.
"The Honourable Cecily Frayne. Twenty-six.
Her mother was a Marchbank, of the Manchester cotton house, and her grandfather settled forty thousand upon her alone, in trust, out of her father's reach entirely.
The trustees are Manchester men. Lord Frayne cannot touch a penny of it, and has not been able to for ten years. "
"She has it?"
"In trust," Sowerby said.
"Then why does Frayne write as though it belongs to him?"
"Lord Frayne frequently writes that way."
Piers turned that over. "Does she know he has written to us?"
"I do not know," Sowerby said slowly. It was the first thing that morning he had not had ready.
"Find out," Piers said. The note Sowerby made was two words long, and he made it with his head down.
"Under a marriage settlement," he said, "the trustees are authorised to apply the capital. It could be paid direct to the holder of the mortgage, without passing through Frayne's hands or the estate accounts. Direct to the holder."
"Say the rest of it."
"The rest of it is that the sum answers the debt to within four hundred pounds."
Piers's eyes went to the tin box and stayed there. It was a plain thing, japanned black, with the corners worn through to the metal.
"I put two questions to Frayne's solicitor the next morning," Sowerby said. "Before anything else. Whether the money is hers absolutely, and whether any part of it comes to her father on the marriage."
"And?" Piers said.