Chapter Five #2
"I am aware of the arithmetic."
"Then you are aware that putting it off has cost you more than doing it would have."
Piers took a moment over that, and then said, with an evenness that cost him something: "The mason's time went to the cottages instead. If you are asking whether I would do it again in the same order, I would. If you are asking whether it has cost the estate money, it has."
"I am asking both."
"Then you have both answers."
She found the lead as well, the gutter, and the eight weeks of standing water in the north-side room, and the thing that made her put down her pen was in the private column at the back.
His own allowance had been four hundred a year at his father's death, which was modest for a duke and would have been thought eccentric in any house she had ever visited. By the second year he had cut it to ninety. Against the ninety there were a handful of entries, and she read them twice.
There was a coat patched, a pair of boots mended, and a subscription to the county infirmary standing at the figure his father had given. There was also a sum of twenty-six pounds in September for linen, a mattress and curtains.
Cecily looked at the twenty-six pounds for rather a long time. She did not ask about it. There was only one room at Ferrers with new curtains in it, and she was sleeping in it.
She sat back. "There is a great deal in here that you did well."
"Most of what is in there I inherited."
"I have not finished. There is also a man in here who thinks that if a thing is uncomfortable, it must therefore be right."
Sowerby, at the far end of the table, turned a page with unusual concentration.
"You will have to explain that," Piers said.
"You put off the bridge and the lead, and both of them are now dearer, but in the same two years you did not once put off a thing that would have inconvenienced anybody but yourself. That is not economy. Half of it is economy, and the other half is penance."
He did not answer, and she let the silence do a certain amount of the work.
"I am not saying it is a vice."
"You are saying it is expensive."
"I am saying you could have had the bridge for nine pounds," Cecily said.
He looked at the ledger between them and turned it back a page, and she watched him look at the bridge entry as though it had been written by somebody else.
"That is fair," he said.
She had been ready for the explanation, the account of why it had been necessary, and the small jest at the end that turns the whole business into a story about how difficult everything is.
He had said that is fair and stopped.
He had turned the page back with one finger and left it there, so Cecily went on reading the next year with the distinct sense of being in a room where somebody had just moved.
Towards the middle of the day, she closed the eleventh book and put her hand flat on the cover.
"You could have taken more from the tenants."
"I could." He said it to the ledger.
"You did not. You could have turned off the pensioners, but you did not do that either." She kept her hand where it was. "Why?"
He looked properly irritated for the first time that morning, the way a man did when he was asked to justify the floor he was standing on.
"Because they are pensioners," he said tonelessly.
Cecily had nothing to put against that. She kept her eyes on the ledger cover while Sowerby fetched the second box, because she did not entirely trust her voice.
She left the eleventh ledger closed under her hand a little longer before she asked the next thing, because the next thing had been sitting at the bottom of her list since September and she had left it there on purpose.
"Who holds it?" she said. "The paper. Not the company."
"Cargill and Membury act. Behind them there is a company that owns nothing else and does nothing else."
"And behind that?"
Piers left the answer to Sowerby.
"The company was formed in the year six," Sowerby said. "Two subscribers, and one of them is a clerk in the Bristol office who has subscribed to seven other companies. The other is the principal."
"His name."
"Mr Ellis Pike."
The room did not alter for anybody but her. Sowerby went on setting out the vouchers, and somewhere along the passage two women were carrying something heavy and complaining about it.
Sowerby was the first to look up, while Piers was a moment slower. When he finally did, he did not ask her what the matter was, which most men would have done immediately and out of kindness.
"Miss Frayne?" Sowerby said.
"I know him." Cecily started to say something else and stopped. "Mr Pike offered for me two years ago. In June."
Piers put down the paper he was holding.
"You refused him?"
"I did."
There was a pause, and it was Sowerby, of all people, who worked it through aloud.
"He bought this paper," he said and stopped for a while. "Six years before he could have heard of Miss Frayne, and eight before this. It is not a plot, Your Grace. It is a coincidence."
"I am aware that it is a coincidence," Piers said. "I am also aware that it will not feel like one to him."
Cecily's pen had gone end for end twice in her fingers before she put it down.
The vouchers came out of their linen tape and went back into it, the light moved along the table from the window to the wall, and nobody sent for anything to eat.
Ellis Pike had come to Frayne House three times.
He had been courteous throughout, patient and a great deal cleverer than her father, and he had made his offer in the drawing room with his hat on his knee.
When she had refused him, he had thanked her for her frankness and asked whether she would object to his calling again in the autumn.
She had said that she would, and he had thanked her for that too.
He had not been unpleasant once, but she had been glad, in a way she had never examined, on the afternoon he stopped coming.
"Does it change your answer?" Piers said.
"It changes how carefully I read."
Whatever Piers thought about it, he put it away somewhere before he spoke again, and his hands squared the stack of papers in front of him while he did it.
Mr Loxley, who had come over that morning and had been waiting in the library, came in now with his case and took the head of the table as though it belonged to him, which in the matter under discussion it did.
"Before anything else," Cecily said. "Does the forty thousand clear it, or does it only postpone something worse?"
"It clears it," Piers said.
"How?" she asked.
Loxley answered that, taking his time, and Cecily made him take longer.
Her capital remained where her grandfather had put it.
It did not become Piers's on the wedding day and it did not become her father's on any day.
Upon the marriage, and upon the execution of the terms, her trustees would be authorised to apply all of it in one payment to the holder of the Ferrers mortgage, for the redemption of that mortgage and for nothing else.
The money would not touch Piers's hands, nor Rufus's, nor the household accounts.
"It goes from Manchester to Bristol," Loxley said, "and never comes to Wiltshire."
"And once it is paid?"
"The mortgage is discharged."
Cecily turned to Piers. "Your agent's figure in September was four hundred short of the whole."
Piers was quiet a moment, his eyes on her.
"It was in the schedule sent to Mr Loxley. I read the schedule," she continued.
"It was four hundred short in September. It is not now."
"Out of what?" she asked.
"Michaelmas came in better than he allowed for, and the north-side lead is deferred again. It is found, but it is not found handsomely."
"Is there a balance behind it? A second claim of any kind?"
"There is not," Piers said.
"You are certain of that?"
"I have read those books until I could recite the second year to you. There is one instrument, and it is in that box."
Cecily turned to Loxley. "I want that in writing from the holder."
"So do I," Piers said.
"You think I am asking too much," she said, and looked at him properly for the first time in an hour.
"I think you are asking the only sensible question in the room, and I would rather have the answer on paper than in my own memory." He pushed the box an inch towards Loxley. "Write to Cargill and Membury. Ask them to certify that no further claim subsists."
"I can put the question to the holder, and I can have his answer engrossed," Loxley said, "and Your Grace should understand that it is all I can get. I can certify what a man will certify about his own paper. I cannot certify what is not in front of me."
"Then get me what is in front of you," Cecily said.
"It is the narrower instrument, Miss."
Cecily was already back at her page. "It is the one that is worth anything."
Loxley wrote it down, and in the fullness of time an answer would come back on good paper over a clerk's signature saying that no further claim subsisted under the mortgage.
"There is one further item," Loxley said. "The provision to Lord Frayne. Two thousand pounds, payable upon the marriage with the trustees' consent."
"That does not come out of her forty thousand." Piers's head had come round before Loxley finished the sentence.
"No, Your Grace. It is provided separately under the trust, out of the residue."
"Say that again."
"Not one penny of Miss Frayne's forty thousand pounds goes to her father."
Piers sat back in his chair. Cecily, who had been watching him rather than the papers, saw his shoulders come down about an inch and stay there.
"You thought it did."
"I wanted to be certain."
"Why?" Cecily said.
He looked at her the way a man looked at somebody who had asked him to prove that water was wet.
"Because it is yours," he said.
Cecily put both hands in her lap and kept them there.