Chapter Four #2
He went and changed, and stood a long while in his own room, which had a candle and a fire that had not been lit, and thought about their conversation.
***
Dinner was a catastrophe conducted at low volume.
Kitty had dressed for it with great care and was being nineteen and perfect, which is to say she spoke only when asked, answered in complete sentences, and passed things before they were wanted. She had never in her life been so well behaved, and it was appalling to watch.
Piers was worse than his sister. He had decided somewhere between the study and the dining room that the correct posture for the evening was courtesy without content, and he held it through the soup and most of the fish.
She was given the history of the room, the date of the ceiling and the name of the man who painted it even though she had asked for none of it.
Mrs Ollerton ate steadily and watched everybody.
Lord Frayne carried what he could.
Some time after the fish, Miss Frayne put down her glass.
"Do you always dine this quietly?"
Piers turned his head towards his sister.
Kitty looked back at him with the composure of a girl who had been silent for an hour and had just been handed a door.
"No," she said. "Usually, my brother is telling me not to buy something."
Lord Frayne laughed too loudly, and Mrs Ollerton made a small approving noise into her wine. Piers shut his eyes, and when he opened them, Miss Frayne had her napkin at her mouth and was not entirely winning.
"And do you buy it?" she asked Kitty.
"Sometimes. Then it arrives, and he pays for it, but doesn't say a word, and that is much worse."
"Kitty," Piers said.
"You did ask me to be conversable."
"I asked you to be civil."
"I have been civil for an hour," Kitty said crossly, "and it has done nobody any good. Not one of them wants to know about the ceiling, and neither do you."
"What was it?" Miss Frayne said.
"I beg your pardon?" Kitty said uncertainly.
"The last thing you were told not to buy."
Kitty glanced at her brother and decided, visibly, to risk it. "A bonnet. In June. It was seventeen shillings, and it was ridiculous, but I wanted it very much."
"And did it arrive?"
"It did." Kitty was enjoying herself now, and had stopped checking her brother's face first.
"Then he paid for it and never said a word?"
"He said the ribbon suited me," Kitty said, "and I would rather he had shouted, because it meant he had looked at it properly. He does not look properly at anything unless he is going to have to pay for it."
Lord Frayne began to say something jovial about young ladies and millinery, and Miss Frayne let him finish and turned back to Kitty.
"I have never had a season either," she said.
Kitty put down her fork. "Not one?" she asked, and forgot to be perfect.
"Two half ones. My father took me to Bath twice, and both times something more interesting happened to him."
"That is a terrible thing to say at dinner," Kitty said, with her eyes very wide.
"It is a terrible thing to have done at Bath."
After that the evening became survivable. Miss Frayne asked Kitty what she was reading and got an honest answer, and asked Mrs Ollerton about Manchester and got a better one. Twice she turned a question of Lord Frayne's away from money so neatly that her father did not notice it had been done.
Piers said very little, and somewhere towards the end he stopped composing his sentences before he said them.
***
She saw his study by accident, or so he assumed.
He had gone in after the ladies rose, to put away the plan of the Netherton bridge, and she came to the door looking for Mrs Ollerton's workbag and stopped there with the candle in her hand.
He watched her take the room in.
The chair by the fire had split along the top of the right arm in the spring, and the horsehair showed.
The rug in front of it was worn through in a line where his feet went.
The curtains had been at that window since before he was born, the fire had been laid small before dinner and had not been touched since, and there was one branch of candles on the desk but nothing lit anywhere else in a room thirty feet long.
"Is this where you work?" she asked.
"Most of the time," Piers said from the desk.
"And the estate room?"
"Sowerby's. He prefers a stone floor." Piers put the plan down. "Mrs Ollerton's workbag is in the small drawing room. I will have it sent up."
"Thank you."
She did not go at once.
"Your Grace… The chair."
"It is comfortable," he said.
"It is split." She had not come into the room, and the candle stayed where it was.
"It is also comfortable," Piers said shortly. "The one does not prevent the other."
She looked at the chair, then at him, and then she said good night and took the candle away. Piers stood in the middle of his own study with a rolled plan in his hand, read from end to end by a woman who had been in the house nine hours.
He caught her again on the main stairs, going up, late.
She was three steps ahead of him, counting under her breath.
"Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven."
"What?" he said.
She turned on the landing with the candle low, and it was a breath before she seemed to know what he meant. "Nothing," she said.
He let it go.
There were twenty-seven stairs from the hall to the top. He had lived in the house thirty-four years and had never once counted them, and the number went away somewhere he would be able to reach it again.
At the top she did not go along to her own door. She went to the tall window on the half-landing, the one that looked east over the park, the river and everything beyond it, and stood there with the candle set down on the sill so that she could see out.
Piers waited, because leaving would have been rude, but staying was worse.
The moon was up, and there was enough of it.
The park went down to the water in one long fall of grass, and past the water the land lifted again.
On that lift, spread along two miles of it, were the roofs, thirty or forty of them from that window, each with its own thread of smoke going straight up in the still air.
Each one of those was a house with somebody asleep in it.
"Which of those is Bramshaw?" she said.
He came and stood at the other side of the window and pointed. He named the boundary, the four farms at Netherton beyond it, and heard his own voice saying the names of the land his father had pledged to a man neither of them had ever seen.
"How many of those are Bramshaw?"
"A hundred and sixty-two." He had that number as readily as the other.
"And they do not know?"
"No," Piers said, and left it there.
"Will you tell them?"
"If it fails, they will be told in the spring by somebody else," Piers said, "and I would rather it were me. I have not settled how." He had not meant to say the last part.
She looked for a long time but let it alone.
Then she picked up her candle, wished him good night, and went along the passage to the new sheets and the swept chimney. Piers stayed by the glass, watching the smoke go up in straight lines over four hundred and eleven houses, and did not go down for another quarter of an hour.