Chapter Seven
"Stand still," Kitty said, and turned the cuff of Cecily's glove down half an inch so that it sat straight. "There. No one will look at anything else, so it may as well be right."
"Nobody will look at me at all," Cecily said. "There are seven people."
"Eight, then. Mr Dowling has come in at the back because of the stack, and he will not go out again."
They were in the church porch with a few minutes still to go and the rain holding off. Kitty's hands were not steady, but Cecily's were.
The deed had been executed earlier that morning in the estate room, with Mr Loxley and the two trustees who had come down from Manchester and had asked, between them, nine questions about the drainage.
Piers had signed it without comment. It took effect upon the solemnisation, so that for the present it was a piece of paper waiting on a sentence.
Inside, the church was cold and smelled of stone and of the candles they had lit for the look of it.
Mr Blythe, the rector, had a special licence in his hand and a cold in his head.
Rufus stood where he could be seen. Mrs Ollerton had put on grey silk and her spectacles and was the only person present who appeared to be enjoying it.
Piers was already at the chancel step.
He had a new neckcloth, but the old coat, and the coat told her more than he could have meant it to. He looked like a man who had come to hear a judgement read out, and he did not look round once.
"Are you frightened?" Kitty said suddenly.
"No," Cecily said, and then, because it was Kitty asking, she added: "I do not think so."
"I am," Kitty said unhappily. "I have been frightened for three days, and I cannot think why. Nothing is even happening to me."
"Something is. You are getting a sister, and you did not choose her."
Kitty considered that. "No. But I did not choose Piers either, and he has turned out tolerably." She leaned in and dropped her voice. "You are not to mind him. He looked just like that at our mother's funeral, and he was fonder of her than of anybody."
"I do not mind him."
"Everybody minds him. I minded him dreadfully until I was about twelve." Kitty tugged at the glove again. "He is quite restful once you stop."
It took eleven minutes.
Cecily said what she was asked to say and heard herself say it, but it did not sound the way she had half expected.
When it came to the ring, Piers took her hand.
His hands were not those of a duke. Two old scars marred the back of his left hand, and a knuckle, broken long ago, had healed slightly out of alignment. Despite the chill of October, they felt warmer than she had anticipated in the quiet of the church.
He put the ring on and kept her hand a moment longer, as he was meant to, but looked at the floor between them, as he was not.
Cecily did not cry, having not intended to, and afterwards she was glad of it.
They signed in the vestry at a table with one leg packed up on a hymn book. Rufus signed first as a witness, in a large hand, and stood back to admire it, and Cecily signed under him.
Piers took the pen, placed his hand on the register, but hesitated even though his face gave nothing away. Then he wrote his name in the small plain hand she had first seen on her own six conditions.
She had spent three hours reading the accounts of a man who had sold his father's pictures, cellar and a house in London, and had got as far as the last week of October with nothing left to sell but the signature. Now that too was gone.
He looked up and saw that she had been watching his hand, and took it off the page rather too quickly.
"Well," said Rufus, with tremendous warmth, and put his own hand on Piers's shoulder. "Well. You have done very well."
The vestry was small enough that nobody could pretend not to have heard it.
"Thank you," he said.
Cecily heard everything her father had meant by it. Forty thousand, a house saved, and a duke in a coat with a turned cuff, and you have done very well, said in front of the bride by the man receiving two thousand out of the same deed.
She looked at Piers, and Piers looked back at her.
Outside the vestry door, while the others went on ahead, Piers stopped.
"The bridge is finished," he said. "Dowling took the scaffold off last week."
"What did it come to?"
"Thirty-six pounds and some shillings. Under the estimate, because he used the old stone for the abutments."
"Then he is a better man than his estimate."
"He is a slow man with a good conscience," Piers said. "Sowerby has the account. You may see it when you like."
"Tomorrow, then," Cecily said.
He nodded, and they went out after the others. It was, she thought afterwards, the only exchange of the morning that had sounded like two people who were going to live in the same house.
There was cold meat, a cake and two bottles of her father's wine, and it lasted rather more than an hour.
"You will come to us in the spring," Rufus said expansively, over the second glass. "Berkshire in April. There is nothing to touch it, my dear fellow, nothing in England."
"You are good to say so," Piers replied.
"And you will bring Lady Katherine. We shall find her somebody."
Kitty went scarlet, but Rufus made a speech that nobody had asked for, and everybody applauded.
Kitty laughed too loudly twice and then stopped talking altogether, and pushed a piece of cake about her plate.
Sowerby was persuaded to stay to eat, which he had not done at Ferrers in eleven years, and he and Mrs Ollerton talked about the drainage and were the two happiest people in the house.
Before entering the carriage, Rufus kissed her cheek and told her that she had done extremely well and that he had always said she would.
"You did always say so," Cecily said.
"Write to me, my dear. Write often."
"I shall write to Mr Loxley," she said, "and he will tell you whatever concerns you."
Rufus laughed at that as though it had been a jest, and got in, and was still explaining something to Mrs Ollerton when the door shut on him.
By the middle of the afternoon the carriages had gone, and Cecily was standing in a bedroom with a new carpet in it.
The carpet was the first thing. Then the sash, which shut now, the swept chimney, and the dressing room that had plainly been a lumber room in the summer but was not one any more. She stood with her bonnet still in her hand, and put it all down to the wedding, and left it there.
He came up at nine.
She had been given a maid, a Wiltshire girl of about twenty called Prue, who had been second housemaid until that morning and had plainly been told she was now something else without being told what.
"Shall I wait up, Your Grace?"
"No," Cecily said. "Go to bed."
"Mrs Tregarth said I was to wait up," Prue said doubtfully.
"Then tell Mrs Tregarth I sent you down, and that I shall also say so myself in the morning."
He knocked, which she had not been certain he would do, and came in only as far as the middle of the room, carrying a candle he did not need.
"I shall not keep you," he said. "There is something you had better be shown."
"Then show it," she said stiffly.
He crossed to the door in the panelling between the two rooms, turned the key that was in it, and turned it back.
"It locks from your side," he said.
"I did not ask for that."
"No." He took the key out of the lock and held it a moment. "You did not."
"Do you expect me to use it?"
"I expect you to decide," Piers said.
He put the key down on the table beside the door, in the middle of it, the way a thing is put down when it is being handed over rather than left behind.
Cecily sat down on the end of the bed, because standing had begun to feel like taking a side.
"Say the rest of it," she said. "You have been carrying it about all day."
Piers stood with one hand on the back of the chair.
"You have paid for this house," he said. "I want it said tonight, in this room, that nothing else was bought. There is no part of the settlement that touches this. Neither tonight nor in a year."
"Because I paid."
"Yes," he said, with the air of a man who would have liked a longer word.
"And if I had come to you with nothing? If I had been some girl your agent found in Devizes with three hundred pounds and a good temper?"
"Then I would be saying something considerably more awkward," he said, "but I would still be saying it."
Cecily turned the ring on her finger once. It was loose and would have to be seen to, but tonight was not the night to mention it.
"Then we are agreed on the first half," she said. "You have said it, I have heard it, and neither of us need say it again."
"I would rather it were said once and properly."
"It was." She looked up. "Now hear mine. Nothing is owed because of the money. And nothing is forbidden because of it either."
Piers took his hand off the chair.
She watched a man of thirty-four, who had that morning signed away the last thing he owned outright without moving a muscle in his face, entirely fail to arrange his expression.
"I do not follow," he said slowly.
"You do."
"Miss Frayne." He stopped there, because it was not her name any more, and the correction was not available to him at speed.
Cecily had meant to say the next part evenly. Her voice took a moment to be sure of itself, and while she waited, she was, somewhat to her own surprise, enjoying herself.
"Sit down," she said. "You are standing there as though I am going to serve you with something."
He sat on the edge of the chair, like a man who meant to be gone directly.
"I have made one bargain today, and I do not intend to make a second one in the same evening," she said. "I am only declining to have the whole of it decided by an account book. That is all. You may go to bed."
"Good night," he said.
"Good night. Your Grace."
"Piers," he said, from the door.
"Not yet. Ask me again when I have decided that you mean it."
He went out through the passage door rather than the connecting one, and she sat where she was, turning that over, until the candle guttered.
On his own side, Piers set the candle down without lighting another.
He had been married for ten hours, and he realised that four hundred and eleven households would stay where they were, on an estate that could keep them and Kitty could have her season.
None of it was going to be his doing.
He had done everything a man could do, for two years, and it had bought fourteen weeks.
What had actually saved Ferrers was a woman of twenty-six who read by daylight, who had asked to see his accounts in her father's drawing room in front of witnesses, and who had written six conditions in her own hand and signed them with a steadier pen than his.
He was going to be grateful to her for as long as he lived.