Chapter Four
The great hall’s runner was once crimson.
Piers had walked over it twice daily for two years, gradually blotting it from his sight.
One October morning, standing at the foot of the stairs before noon, he realised he saw nothing else.
The once-bright runner had faded to the colour of weak tea along the traffic path, worn through in three spots, with its fringe trimmed rather than replaced.
The plaster above the west door had a crack in it that ran a foot and a half and stopped. That had been there since March.
He had come down early to receive her, and the minutes in hand had gone on finding fault with his own house.
The hall itself was still what it was. Sixty feet of stone and light, with the arch at the south end that people came from Bath to look at in his grandfather's day.
It could not be diminished by a rug. But a great hall that is holding up and a great hall that is being held up are different rooms to stand in, and Piers had begun to suspect that the difference was legible from the door.
The carriage came up the drive a few minutes after the hour.
Miss Frayne got out first, which he had not expected, and stood a moment on the gravel with one hand on the carriage door, looking at the front of the house the way a man looks at a horse he is being asked to buy.
She was not what the county believed she was.
The county had imagined a cotton fortune with feathers in it.
What came up the steps was a woman of middle height in a good grey travelling dress with no trimming on it.
She was brown-haired, with a square jawline and a wide mouth that remained unchanged as she pondered.
Her eyes were the brown of strong tea, and they did not move about a room; they stopped on things.
There was ink on the side of her right middle finger, faded but not gone, of the sort that comes from writing every day for years.
"Your Grace." She gave him her hand with the glove still on it, and the grip was brisk and short.
"Miss Frayne," he said. "You had a tolerable road?"
"We had four hours of it, and one of your bridges is going."
"The one at Netherton."
"The one with the two ash trees." She was still looking at the front of the house while she said it.
"That is the one at Netherton," Piers said. "The mason comes within the week."
Lord Frayne arrived behind her at a volume suitable for the arch, and after him came a small stout woman in spectacles who was introduced as Mrs Ollerton and who shook his hand as though she had been doing business with men for thirty years.
He took them round the house himself.
He could have sent Mrs Tregarth, and she would have taken them the long way and stopped where the light was best and passed over the north side in silence.
He was not going to have his house shown to this woman in a version.
If she was going to pay for it, she could see it, and if seeing it ended the business, then the business would end anyway.
That was what he told himself at the foot of the stairs. By the top it had occurred to him that he had also arranged to be present while she did it, and that was a different thing, and less admirable.
She was thorough in a way that took him some minutes to recognise.
She looked up in every room, which almost nobody does, and she went to the outside walls in the corner rooms where the damp showed first. In the long drawing room, she stopped in front of a pale space on the wall where a picture had been and considered the pale rectangle, and then looked at him.
She did not ask, and he was obscurely certain that she had the picture and the price of it near enough.
"The north side," she said. "We have not been up it."
"There is nothing on the north side," Piers said, and disliked the sound of it as it went out.
"Then it will not take long."
He took her up the north stairs. Two of the rooms had damp in the corners, and one had a bucket in it that had been there since August.
"Is that from the roof or the gutter?" she asked.
"The gutter. The lead was taken up in the summer and half of it went back."
"Only half?" She had stopped in the doorway and did not come further in.
"Lead is expensive," Piers said shortly.
Mrs Ollerton, who had come up behind them unheard, put her head into the second room and studied the ceiling.
"How long has that stood?" she said.
"Since August." Piers offered no reason for it.
"Then you have had it dry eight weeks, and it has not spread. That is a gutter. A roof would have taken the ceiling by now."
"You know something of building?"
"I know something of warehouses," said Mrs Ollerton. "There is no difference except the company."
Miss Frayne did not quite smile, but something happened at the corner of her mouth and was put away.
"You will want to see the east wing," he said.
"Is it open?"
"No." He had the key in his pocket, as he had had it every day for two years.
"I will see it, if you do not mind."
He took her along the gallery, unlocked the door and let her into forty feet of sheeted furniture and cold light, and Lord Frayne, who had been talking since the second landing, stopped talking.
"Why is it shut?" she said.
"It costs money to heat rooms nobody requires."
"And if somebody requires them?"
"I shall open them." He said it to the nearest sheet.
"What was here?"
"The long library, my mother's sitting room, and four bedrooms nobody has slept in for years."
"And the books?" She had her hand flat on one of the sheets.
"Still there. Under sheets." He put his hand on the nearest of them and left it there. "They are not worth what people imagine. I had a man from Salisbury look at them in the first winter."
"You had them valued." She did not put it as a question.
"I had everything valued," Piers said.
She turned her head and looked at him, but he could not read what she did with the answer, and she went back out onto the gallery.
Every one of them, on the way down, walked past two footmen carrying up her boxes, two men being paid out of an estate that could not pay for itself past Christmas, carrying the trunks of the woman whose money would be paying them in the spring.
Piers heard himself say something to Lord Frayne about the age of the panelling in a voice he did not recognise.
He got worse as the afternoon went on and could not find where it had begun.
Every civil sentence came out one degree more formal than the one before, until by late afternoon he was addressing his own dining room like a man conducting a valuation, and she was watching him do it without any expression he could use.
Sowerby was in the estate room before he went up to change, with the boxes already out and the ledgers stacked in years along the table.
"All of them?" Piers asked.
"Everything, Your Grace. Ten years of ledgers, your father's private book, and the correspondence with Cargill and Membury."
"The correspondence as well?"
"You said the whole of it." Sowerby set the last box down and squared it with the others.
"I did." Piers ran a thumb along the edge of the table. "Is there anything in there I have not seen?"
"No, Your Grace. There is a quantity of it that you have seen once and would rather not see again in company."
"Put a chair on the window side," Piers said. "She probably reads by daylight."
Sowerby moved the chair without asking how he knew that.
Mrs Tregarth had put Miss Frayne in the south-west rooms, which were the best guest rooms and the only ones he had spent money on since he came into the title.
The order had gone down in September, three days after Sowerby wrote to Frayne. Piers had sent for Mrs Tregarth and told her that Miss Frayne was not going to arrive at a house of this size and find it could not furnish a guest.
"The linen in the south-west is adequate, Your Grace."
"Would you sleep on it?" he had asked. It was not a fair question, and he had not asked it fairly.
Mrs Tregarth had considered that longer than he liked, and had then said that she would order the sheets.
It had come to twenty-six pounds in the end, with the mattress and the curtains, and it had been paid out of his own allowance rather than the estate. Sowerby had entered it in the private column and had made no observation, which from Sowerby was an entire speech.
Passing the door on his way to change, he found her door standing open.
Miss Frayne was in the middle of the room with the new blanket in one hand. She had lifted a corner of it off the bed and was standing there. The writing desk had been moved to the window, as he had ordered, and her own papers were already stacked on it.
Her eyes came up, but she did not put the blanket down.
"These are new," she said.
"The room was made ready."
"The curtains and the mattress are new. There is a dressing gown in that press that has never been worn." She did put the blanket down then, and squared its corner with the mattress. "Whose were they?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your sister's, perhaps? Or an aunt who stayed here?"
"There has been no aunt at Ferrers in nine years."
"Then somebody has been shopping," she said, "in a house where the second footman's livery has been cut down from a taller man."
"You noticed the livery."
"I have been noticing liveries since I was seventeen. It is the cheapest thing to look at." She began to say something else, but stopped, and her eyes went to the desk instead. "Whose were they, Your Grace?" she asked evenly.
Piers kept where he was, one hand on the door frame.
There was a sentence available. It was nine words long, and he had a clear view of it.
Saying it would have meant standing in a corridor and telling a woman he had known three weeks that he had bought them from his allowance, so that she would not sleep badly for four nights in a house he could not afford.
"Dinner is at seven," he said. "The bell is by the fire if you want anything."