Chapter Six
The morning after the terms were signed, Kitty had the newspaper open on the breakfast table and was reading the shipping column for the second time, having never in her life cared what went in or out of Bristol.
She had heard the whole of it the evening before. Piers had told her himself, in the small drawing room with the door shut, because the alternative was letting her find out from Mrs Tregarth or from the county, and the county already had two versions running.
He had given it to her in the order it happened, the nine years, the forty thousand, the notice, then the terms, and the fact that Miss Frayne had written them herself and he had signed each one.
Kitty had asked three questions and gone up to bed.
"You have read that page twice," Piers said.
"I am very interested in Bristol."
"You are not," he replied.
"Do not," she said. "If you are kind to me before nine o'clock, I shall be no use to anybody all day."
He let her have the rest of the column.
Then she turned the page and said, without looking at him, "My season is to be paid for by her."
"Your season is my responsibility."
"With what?"
The coffee went on being poured somewhere behind him. Piers had several answers available, but the trouble with all of them was that they were arrangements rather than money.
"With what remains to me," he said.
Kitty put down the newspaper and looked at him. She was nineteen, and she had been managing her own disappointment for two years without ever being told the size of the thing she was managing, and she said the truest sentence in the room.
"Nothing remains to you."
Piers put down his cup, stood and said he would be at Netherton until three.
Halfway down the passage he heard her lay the newspaper on the table, not hard, and the restraint in it was worse than throwing. He got as far as the yard before it came to him that he had left in order not to say something, and by then it was too late to go back and say the other thing instead.
Ranter, his horse, had gone to a man at Marlborough that week for eighty guineas. It was less than he was worth and more than anybody else had offered, and the sum had gone into the private column under Sowerby's hand with no description against it.
Sowerby had brought the paper to be signed and had stood there afterwards. He had been at Ferrers eleven years and had watched the horse foaled on the place.
"You will want a horse in spring, Your Grace," he said.
"I shall ride the bay."
"The bay is fifteen years old."
"Then she will be glad of the work," Piers said flatly.
Sowerby had put the paper away and said no more, and Piers had been grateful, but had kept that to himself as well.
What the horse bought was a room.
He had gone up to the south-west rooms himself with Mrs Tregarth and stood in the middle of them, and it was plain that four days of a visit and thirty years of a marriage were not the same proposition. A guest may be given new curtains, but a wife lives inside the room.
"The carpet," he said.
"It is sound, Your Grace."
"It is sound, but it is eighteen years old, and the pattern has gone out of the middle of it."
Mrs Tregarth folded her hands. "There is a better carpet in the blue room."
"Then have it up and look at the state of it, and if it will do, use it.
" He went to the window. "The chimney wants sweeping before the wedding, not after.
The sash in here does not shut. There is a draught along the floor that I could feel from the door, and I want to know where it is coming from before December. "
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Is there anything else in this house that does not shut properly? I would rather have the list now than in January."
"The window on the second landing," Mrs Tregarth said. "The larder door and the green room, but nobody uses the green room."
"Give it to me in writing by the end of the week. And the dressing room is to be made habitable. It has been a lumber room since my mother died and I will not have my wife's maid working in it as it stands."
Mrs Tregarth wrote all of that down and then stopped writing.
"Your Grace," she said carefully. "What am I to spend?"
He gave her the figure, but she took longer over it than she had over anything he had said to her in years.
"That is a great deal more than this house has laid out on such things."
"I know what it is."
"Miss Frayne can clearly afford…"
Piers turned his head and looked at her.
Mrs Tregarth stopped. She was a woman of considerable dignity, and she did not colour, but she closed the notebook and presently inclined her head.
"I shall see to it," she said. "And the sweep while Dowling is here for the stack."
"Have him do my study while he is on the stack."
"Your study, Your Grace?"
"It has smoked since September," Piers said. "I am told that is my own fault for not saying so."
He had not meant to look at her like that, but he let it stand. An apology would have needed an explanation, and that was not one he could give a housekeeper, or anybody else.
It was not a question of whether Cecily Frayne could buy sheets. She could buy the linen, the carpet, the sash, the chimney, the dressing room, the house and the county, and she was about to buy most of it, and there was not one thing on earth he could do to prevent it.
What he could do, once, and only until the quarter day, was see that she did not walk into Ferrers as its duchess and find a room that told her she had married a charity.
***
Tolley came out from Devizes at the end of the week to measure Kitty for two gowns and to look, as he had looked every autumn for four years, at the Duke's winter coat.
He turned back the left cuff and held it up towards the window without a word, and that was how Tolley made a speech.
"It has another season in it," Piers said.
"It has been turned once and patched twice, Your Grace. Here, and here."
"Then patch it again."
"I can patch it," Tolley said. "I would be obliged if you would not tell people in Devizes that I did."
"Nobody in Devizes has looked at me in two years," Piers said drily.
"They will look at you at the end of the month," Tolley said. "There is a wedding."
Piers stood with his arm out while the man went round him with the tape, taking measurements he already had, and thought about the horse, the carpet and everything that was about to change.
"Again," he said.
Tolley wrote it in his book, in the same place he had written it the year before, and went to measure Kitty, who would not be told what the gowns cost.
***
He came up the back stairs the following evening because it was the shortest way from the estate room, and stopped on the half-landing. The door of Kitty's sitting room stood open, and there were two voices in it, and one of them was not his sister's.
"I did not accept to marry your brother for your thanks."
"You have not married him yet."
"No," Miss Frayne said, and the pause before it was long enough to hear from the stairs.
He stood there with a roll of drawings under his arm, in his own house, listening at a door like a footman.
"Then you may still escape," Kitty said lightly.
The sound Miss Frayne made was not quite a laugh, and it was not anything else either, but it was the first noise of that kind he had heard out of her in three weeks.
He went down again, round by the long way, and arrived in the hall from the other direction with his face in order.
***
A note came from Frayne House two days after Cecily had already left and was lying under a bill from the corn merchant.
Your Grace. Mr Loxley tells me the deed will be executed on the wedding morning and not before.
I should be obliged if you would confirm that the Netherton bridge is not to wait upon my authority, since I shall not have any until eleven o'clock that day and the mason is already there.
Pay for it out of the estate and let me see the account afterwards. C. Frayne.
Piers read it twice, and then sat with it in front of him while the rest of the post went unopened.
He wrote back that the bridge was in hand and would be finished within the week, and then, after some thought, added that the estimate had been nine pounds four years ago and was now thirty-eight, and that she was at liberty to say so when they next met.
Her reply came by return and consisted of four words.
I shall say so.
Lord Frayne, along with Cecily and Mrs Ollerton, came to Ferrers four days before the wedding to settle the last of it, and was in excellent spirits throughout.
He was delighted, and it was not performance. Piers watched him at dinner explaining to Mrs Ollerton how these things were arranged in the best families, and the man plainly believed he had done well by his daughter, and would go on believing it in comfort for the rest of his life.
On the second afternoon Piers went to the small drawing room to find the plan of the Netherton bridge, which he had left on the table there. The door was ajar, and he heard his own future father-in-law say, in the tone of a man conferring a favour: "You will thank me eventually, my dear."
"Mama did not."
Piers stopped with his hand on the door.
"Your mother was never unhappy because she married me."
"No," Cecily said, and nothing came after it for long enough, so her father began to answer.
Lord Frayne said something then that Piers did not catch, but there was relief.
"She became unhappy afterwards," Cecily said.
There was no answer to that. Piers stood outside his own drawing room through all of the silence that followed, and it was the only silence in two days that Lord Frayne had failed to fill.
The house began in the last week to behave like a house with something coming. Doors that had not been opened since the spring were opened. Somebody found the second-best linen and somebody else found the moth in it, and both facts reached him before noon on the same day.
The wedding was set for the twenty-eighth of October, in the parish church at Ferrers, with a special licence, two witnesses and no breakfast beyond what the house could do without hiring anybody.
There was much to be settled, and Sowerby settled most of it.
The engrossments went to Manchester and came back.
The trustees required two things Loxley had not anticipated and got them within a week.
The certificate from Cargill and Membury came on the twenty-second, certifying that no further claim subsisted under the mortgage, and Sowerby put it into the box with the rest.
Two days before the wedding, Kitty found her brother in the estate room, and it was some time before he noticed her in the doorway.
She had a book under her arm, to read in the estate room, which nobody had ever done and which she did not intend to do either.
"I am afraid," she said.
"You are afraid of what?"
"I like her. I did not in the least expect to, but I do." She turned the door handle back and forth once. "She asked me what I read. Nobody has asked me that since Mama."
He opened his mouth and shut it again.
"But Piers," Kitty said. "Will she mind me?"
"Why should she mind you?"
"Because I am nineteen and expensive and I will be in the house," Kitty said. "People do mind that."
"She wrote six conditions and not one of them was about you."
"That is the strangest comfort anybody has ever offered me in my life."
"It is the only sort I have," he said.
"I am going," Kitty said. "I only wanted it said beforehand."
On the evening before the wedding, with the licence in the box, the trustees satisfied and nothing left to do that could sensibly be done that night, he walked down to the church.
It was cold and clear, and the light was going off, but Piers stood there.
Rupert would have enjoyed the whole business enormously. He would have said something charming to the bride, and believed every word of it while he said it. He would have gone home afterwards and thought no more about the money than on any of the nine occasions he sat down and signed.
Piers had spent two years being angry with a dead man and had nothing to show for it.
He put his hand flat on the cold edge of the stone, briefly, and walked back up through the park in the dark towards a house that would still be standing after Christmas, because a woman he had known a few weeks had read his accounts and decided he was not his father.
He had not yet worked out how to be grateful for that without being diminished by it.
He had one night to find out, and then he was going to have to live in a house with her.