Chapter Two #2
"It is hers absolutely. Two thousand pounds is payable to Lord Frayne under the grandfather's instrument, with the trustees' consent. It comes out of a separate fund and not out of hers."
"You asked the next morning," Piers said. "Before I had said anything?"
"I knew that you would not hear the proposal unless those two answers came back as they have," Sowerby said.
Piers picked up one of the pens and put it down again. "Two thousand. Her grandfather wrote that in?"
"Ten years ago, Your Grace," Sowerby said, and closed the book on his knee.
Piers sat back in the chair. There was a cold competence in the thing that he could admire from a distance and not up close, because a man in Manchester had looked at his own son-in-law, priced him in advance and in writing, and had been proved right by every year since.
"What is she?" he said.
"Your Grace?"
"You have told me what she has. I am asking what she is."
Sowerby turned his pen once on his knee. "Frayne's man let one thing fall. She keeps her father's books, and has done since she was seventeen, and she keeps them better than his agent does. He mentioned it as a curiosity."
"Did he?" Piers said.
"He mentioned it twice."
Piers let that go by. Out in the yard the mare had reached the gate and stopped, and the man was doing something with the latch that he ought to have managed one-handed.
"And if I refuse?" Piers asked.
Sowerby's hand was already on the second book. "Then Your Grace will want to see the whole of it."
"Get it out, then."
The second book Sowerby took out of the tin box was not accounts but a list. Piers had never asked for it. He had known for some months that it existed, and the knowing had been easier than the seeing was going to be.
"The security is not the house," Sowerby said.
"Your father did not pledge the house, because the house is worth less than people suppose, and he knew it.
He pledged the land that carries the rents.
Bramshaw and the riverside, Chalke Coombe, the four farms at Netherton, and the strips beyond the mill. "
"And it was his to pledge?"
"The Bramshaw side was never in the settlement." Sowerby kept his eyes on the list. "Your great-grandfather bought it out of a financial ruin, and it was to be brought in at the next resettlement, but there has not been one since."
"And the house itself?" Piers said.
"Settled, with the park. It could not be touched by him, or by you, or by anybody."
Piers let that settle.
"So, the part I cannot sell is the part nobody wants, and the part that keeps four hundred families is the part he could take to Bristol on his own signature."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"How many tenancies?"
"Four hundred and eleven," Sowerby said. "I have counted them by name."
"Read me the first ten."
"I would ask Your Grace to consider whether that is useful." Sowerby's finger was on the place, and he waited.
"Read them," Piers insisted.
Sowerby read ten names in his flat voice. It took him rather less than a minute, and when he stopped, Piers had straightened the pens again.
There it was, then, laid out in the only language that had ever worked on him.
He could refuse Miss Frayne's money and keep the one thing his father had left him unspent, along with the ability to say that he had not been bought.
Or he could go down to Bramshaw in the spring and explain to every household on that list, by name, that their leases, their work and their roofs had been sacrificed so as the seventh Duke of Havering might be spared an unpleasant sensation.
His father had chosen his own comfort every time, for years, in small courteous increments, and every single one of those increments had felt reasonable at the moment of signing.
There was Kitty besides, and she was the harder arithmetic.
She was nineteen and would be twenty in February.
There had been no season for her, and there was not going to be one, because a season was four hundred pounds at the lowest reckoning, and that was two of the Netherton roofs.
She had never once asked him for it. She had stopped mentioning it in the spring, and he had let her stop, and had told himself that a girl of nineteen has time.
At least, that was what he had told himself.
With the list open in front of him now, he was less sure.
If Bramshaw went, she would have neither the Season nor the house to be quiet in.
"Arrange the meeting," Piers said.
Sowerby closed the tin box. "I shall write today."
"Do not call it fortunate."
Sowerby looked up, and something crossed the flat face that was not accountancy.
"I had not intended to," he said quietly.
***
He found Kitty in her sitting room later that morning with the window open, her eyes streaming, and the fire smoking as it had smoked since the wind went round to the north-east.
It was one of the four rooms in the house kept warm through the winter. She had chosen it herself two years ago, and had never asked why the choice had been offered to her in the first place.
"Don't say anything," she said. "I am perfectly well, and I don't want to hear about it."
"Your eyes are red."
"It is the chimney. I've opened the window, and now I am cold and blind as well as smoked.
Miss Harrow will be here within the hour to hear me play, and I shall look as though I've been weeping over a novel, which I have not, because there is nothing left in this house to weep over but the chimneys. "
Piers put his head into the passage and asked for Mrs Tregarth, who came within the minute and stood in the doorway with her hands folded and her opinion already formed. "The flue," he said.
"Yes, Your Grace. I sent for Dowling weeks ago. He came, and he says it wants taking down to the third floor and rebuilding, and he says the whole stack is the same age and the same trouble."
"The cost?"
"He would not put a figure to it in front of me, Your Grace. He said he would speak to you." Mrs Tregarth kept her eyes somewhere above his shoulder. "I should guess nine pounds, or thereabouts."
It was more than he had spent on himself since the spring.
"Have him patch it," Piers said. "Cheaply."
Kitty coughed at the window. She had been holding it, and she turned her head away to do it.
Piers stood where he was for a little while, with the smoke turning over above the fireboard.
"Repair it properly," he said.
Mrs Tregarth's expression did not alter. She inclined her head and went away to find Dowling.
Kitty wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, as she had done since she was six.
"You need not have," she said, with her face still turned to the window.
"It is nine pounds," he said without emphasis.
"And you've turned that coat," Kitty said crossly.
He looked down at his own cuff, which Withers had made a decent job of.
"It wears better the second way round," he said.
"Piers." Her hand came down flat on the lid of the pianoforte and stayed there.
"Play something before Miss Harrow comes," he said. "You are always better when you have played once first."
***
That evening he worked in the estate room until the light went, and then took the papers through to his own study, where the fire had been made up small, and the wind had gone further round to the north.
Late in the evening the grate began to smoke.
He sat with it for a quarter of an hour without being able to concentrate, and then he got up, opened the window eight inches, and sat down again in the cold.
Dowling would be at the house in a few days for Kitty's flue, and up on the stack for two days at least, and there was no sense in asking a man to look at a second chimney when the first had not been paid for.
He pulled the branch of candles nearer, took a clean sheet, and wrote to Lord Frayne that he would visit within the week.
He read it over twice. The hand was steady, the sentences were short, and there was nothing in any of them a man could be ashamed of having written. However, he had never in his life composed anything he wanted so little to sign.
He signed it, sanded it, and sat a while afterwards in a cold room with the window open and the smoke going out over the park.