Chapter Five
"His Grace said the estate room, miss," the housemaid said, and stood aside from the door without going through it herself.
"Thank you. What is your name?"
"Sarah, miss."
"Then thank you, Sarah."
Sarah went off down the passage at a good pace, and somewhere below a door opened and shut twice in quick succession. The house had been told something, and it had not finished discussing it.
Kitty said her piece on the stairs, having been told an impossible thing and having come to have it confirmed.
"He is truly letting you see them? The actual books, with the figures in?"
"He accepted."
"Piers has never let anybody see anything, not once in his life," Kitty had said. "He would not let the physician look at his hand last winter."
Cecily had filed that beside the card tray and the half inch of mantelpiece.
Her father had caught her at the bottom of the back stairs on her way there.
"A word, my dear," Rufus said, and lowered his voice, which he did rarely and always to the same effect.
"I am expected in the estate room," Cecily told him.
"You are expected to have some sense. Your point is made. The whole county will hear that you asked a duke for his accounts and got them, and there is no earthly need to sit in a cold room and read them as well."
"I am not going to humiliate him," she said.
"You are going to read nine years of his father's ruin at his elbow, with his own agent listening."
"I asked and he accepted." She did not move from the step.
"He could hardly refuse you." Rufus put his hand on the newel post. "Cecily, some things are better not looked at. I say that as a man who has had a life, my dear, and not always a tidy one."
She stopped on the bottom step. He might have been right.
It was the only argument he had ever made to her that came anywhere near the truth.
She was about to sit down opposite a man of thirty-four and go through the itemised evidence of the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and she was going to do it because she did not trust him, and he had agreed to it because he had nothing else to trade.
Then she thought about the small property at Kelby, the garden, and the years in which nobody had ever shown her mother a single page.
"Some things are better not looked at," she said. "I know. That is how it was done to Mama."
She went past him, and left him to take that however he liked.
Mrs Tregarth was waiting inside with her hands folded. The table had been cleared and wiped, and a chair was set on the window side where the light came in; somebody had put out a fresh inkstand, two pens, and a jug of water.
"The room is cold, miss. It has a stone floor."
"It will do."
"I could have had the small drawing room laid for you."
"The books are in here." Cecily put her portfolio on the table.
"There has not been a lady in this room in my time," Mrs Tregarth said, with her eyes on the portfolio. "Nor anybody else, if it comes to that, excepting His Grace and Mr Sowerby."
"Do you disapprove?"
"It is not my place to disapprove."
"That is not what I asked."
"No, miss," Mrs Tregarth said stiffly, and went out and shut the door with great correctness.
The jug of water was a small thing. Somebody in that house had decided, without being asked, that a woman reading for three hours would want something to drink and would not want to ring for it.
The estate room faced north and held the cold of the stone even in October, and she was glad of it within the hour, because a warm room makes a reader charitable.
Piers came in at ten with Sowerby behind him, and between them they were carrying more than she had expected.
There were fourteen ledgers, a bundle of vouchers tied with linen tape, a smaller book with a marbled cover that Sowerby set down separately, two deed boxes, and the correspondence in three files.
Cecily had prepared herself, in the smaller and less generous part of her mind, for a summary presented as the whole, with the difficult years absent and a great deal of talk about how the earlier books had unfortunately been damaged.
"That is everything?"
"That is everything," Sowerby said. "The private book is my late master's own. The vouchers are the last four years. Before that, they are in the boxes, and they are not in order."
"And the correspondence?"
"Cargill and Membury, the three houses we approached, and the notice."
Piers put the marbled book down on top of the pile, squarely, and his hand stayed on it a little longer than it needed to.
"Are you certain?" Cecily said.
"No," Piers said, and put nothing on top of it.
That stopped her, because she had asked it as a courtesy and had expected a courtesy back, and had got instead the first entirely honest syllable anybody had given her since the business began.
He pulled out the chair opposite and stood behind it.
"But you will see them," he said.
They were at it for three hours and a quarter.
She worked the way she had taught herself to work at seventeen, with the ledger open on her left, her own book on her right and a strip of paper for a marker, taking each year through the wages first, the repairs second and the interest last. Sowerby fetched what she asked for and put it where she could reach it without being told twice, and by the second hour he had begun anticipating her, which no man in her father's employment had ever managed.
Cecily had expected to be reading a disaster, and she was.
But a book of accounts is a record of what a man decided on the ordinary mornings when he could have decided otherwise, and before the morning was half gone, she had stopped reading for the size of the numbers and started reading for the shape of them.
In the January of the first year after his father died, the Cuyp had gone, and nearly the whole of what it fetched had gone straight out again to the interest.
Cecily put her finger on the column. "There is no increase in the rents that year."
"No," Piers said. "There is none in any year."
"Your father raised them, before he died."
"Twice." He did not need to look at the page. "I took the second one off again in the August after he died."
"Which cost you something over two hundred a year."
"Two hundred and thirty-one," he said.
She turned the page and went on, leaving the figure unwritten, because he had corrected it without being asked, and that was worth more than the difference.
It was in June of the year twelve that the handwriting changed. Rupert's entries had been generous, looping and frequently approximate. What followed was small, upright and correct to the shilling, and there was no year in which it wavered.
The Lelys had gone in the same month as the Cuyp, and the plate followed them, and in the second winter the London house went as well.
After the London house there was nothing left in the ledgers that could be sold without touching the land, and the entries changed character.
They stopped being sales and started being closures.
"The east parlour is shut in March, two years ago. The blue rooms in April."
"Yes," he said.
"What did that save?"
"Fuel, candles and two housemaids' worth of work. About seventy pounds in the year."
"You could have had double that by turning off Mrs Halloran, Wickens and the older Miss Neale, whose duties are all in those rooms. Their names are still in the wages book at Michaelmas."
Piers turned his pen over once and put it down again.
"Why?" she said.
"Mrs Halloran is sixty-one and came here at fourteen," he said, and looked at the window while he said it. "Wickens has a bad chest and no family in the county. Miss Neale is looking after her sister."
"That is not an answer about money."
"You did not ask me a question about money."
She let that go, and three pages later she found the wine.
Rupert Chaloner had spent several hundred pounds a year with a house in Bristol on hock, claret and something described only as the usual. The last entry was in the June he died. There was no entry in July.
"You stopped the wine at once."
"There was a great quantity of it in the cellar. It went with the plate."
"You sold your father's cellar?"
"I do not drink very much." Piers appeared to think that covered it.
The wine was not the largest figure in the books, but it was the one she came back to twice. A man spending that much on claret in the same decade he was mortgaging four hundred tenancies had not been in difficulty. He had been enjoying himself.
Further down the same page, and in every quarter afterwards, there was a payment of twelve pounds a year to a Mrs Anne Doggett.
"Who is she?"
"Doggett, her husband, was the under-keeper."
He gave her the rest of it in four plain sentences. The man had been killed on the Bramshaw side some years back, on Rupert's ground and at Rupert's direction, in weather nobody ought to have been out in.
"Your father paid her?"
"My father promised her," Piers said. "The payments begin two years after."
"And you found the promise where?"
"In a letter." He nodded at the nearer box. "In that one."
Cecily wrote a line in her own book, and kept it to herself.
Twelve pounds a year was the price of a set of good curtains, and it had gone out every quarter day for five years to a woman in a cottage at Bramshaw whom nobody at Ferrers had any legal obligation towards.
The cottages ran through the whole of it.
In the second year there was no plaster, paint, or glazing anywhere at Ferrers, and a note in Sowerby's hand that the north-side lead was to be deferred.
In the same year seven cottage roofs at Netherton and Bramshaw had been done properly and paid for out of the estate.
She wrote the seven roofs down in her own book with the dates against them, and underneath she wrote the year the great hall had last been repainted. It was in the old duke's time and it was not going to happen again soon.
There were other things she liked less.
"The Netherton bridge has been deferred four times."
"Yes," Piers said.
"The first estimate was nine pounds. The last is four times that."