Chapter Eight
Once a week through November, Piers rode the bay out to Bramshaw and back, and gave nobody a reason for it.
There was no business at Bramshaw in November.
The rents were in, the ditching had been ordered in October, and Sowerby went out there himself once a week.
Piers went because it was six miles, and because for the length of six miles he was a man looking at land rather than a man waiting on a letter.
He had expected the wedding to end something, and the waiting was worse than he had allowed for. Sowerby brought the news in with his hat still on.
"It is discharged," he said. He did not sit, and the hat stayed where it was while he put the papers on the table.
Cecily was already in the room. She had been at the window side since breakfast with the cottage returns and her own book.
Piers read the thing once through. The words were not remarkable.
There was a recital, a figure, and the names of three Manchester trustees, and the name of a company in Bristol that owned nothing else and did nothing else.
The principal sum, together with interest to the fourth day of December, had been received in satisfaction.
The estate stood redeemed and discharged accordingly. Then he read it again.
"Is it done?" Cecily asked quietly.
"Yes." He heard how little of it came out and could do nothing about that either. Then he sat down, which he had not intended to do.
For two years something was behind every decision he made, but now it was gone, and what stood in its place, six feet away and holding a book of cottage returns, was the woman who had removed it.
Piers had prepared himself for a great many possible feelings but had not prepared himself for this one.
It was gratitude of a size he had no method of carrying, and it arrived so tangled up with something that felt like humiliation that he could not have told the two apart by any instrument he possessed.
He could not have said one word of that aloud.
He was not certain he could have said it to himself in the dark.
So, he sat with the paper in his hand, and said nothing.
"You asked to see it," he said after a while, and put the discharge into her hands.
Cecily looked down at the paper and stood there with the proof that Ferrers was free. She read the whole of it, both sides, as she read everything, and then she looked up at him.
"Thank you," she said, and kept hold of the paper.
Piers very nearly laughed, which would have been a catastrophe.
"You have just paid forty thousand pounds," he said.
"And you remembered a promise."
Neither of them had the least idea what to do with that. Sowerby, who had at last taken off his hat, remembered urgent business with the strapping of the deed box.
"Is there anything wanted from us?" Cecily asked him.
"Nothing, Your Grace. The trustees will have their acknowledgement from Bristol, and I shall have the office copy in a fortnight."
"Then send them a line from me as well."
"Your Grace?" Sowerby had his pencil out already and had stopped with it above the page.
"Three men in Manchester have done in weeks what nobody in this county would do in two years," she said. "They are owed a sentence."
Sowerby was halfway to the door with the box under his arm when Piers spoke his name, and he turned.
"Take the rest of the day."
Sowerby looked at him as though he had proposed something faintly indecent. Then he said that he would go and see his sister at Marlborough, whom he had not seen since Easter.
Kitty had it out of Mrs Tregarth before dinner.
"Is it gone? Truly gone, all of it, and nobody thought to come and find me?"
"Sowerby brought the paper this morning," Piers said, and put the discharge back into the box and shut the lid.
"Then we are…" She stopped, and started again. "What are we, then? I do not think I know what we are."
"Solvent," Piers said. "That is not the same as rich, and I would rather you did not go into Devizes tomorrow and behave as though it were."
"I have no intention of going to Devizes."
"You have had an intention of going to Devizes since November."
"Am I to have a season?"
"We shall talk about it in the new year."
"That is what men say when the answer is no," Kitty said crossly. "Papa said it about the pony, about Bath, and about the harp, and I never had the harp."
"It is also what men say when they have not yet seen the Lady Day rents. So, I am not going to promise you a thing in December that I cannot pay for in April. You have had enough of that from this family."
She was quiet, which she seldom was, and pulled at a loose thread on the chair arm.
"That was almost kind," she said at last.
"It was arithmetic."
"With you," Kitty said, "one takes what is going."
The other condition was honoured within the week.
The discharge was entered publicly, because she had required it in daylight and he had signed the requirement without argument, and the county had it by the middle of December.
He heard three versions of what the county was saying, but Mrs Tregarth heard nine.
The county said that Ferrers had been in difficulties, that the difficulties had been great and of long standing, and that they had been cleared by the Marchbank fortune.
All three were true, and the third was the one that would still be said at dinner tables in two years.
What was not said, because nobody knew it, was how the difficulties had arisen.
That was in the marbled book in the deed box, in Sowerby's head, and now in Cecily's.
Rupert Chaloner remained, in every drawing room within twenty miles, a charming man who had died too young, and his son had spent two years permitting that and had never once sat down and asked himself why.
***
Cecily began the next morning and did not stop.
She had asked for two things that evening and had been given both without argument.
The first was a key to the estate room. The second was that Sowerby should come to the house twice a week instead of once, and be paid for it, because a man who rode two miles in the wet to answer a question ought not to do it out of goodwill.
She had Sowerby in the estate room for a whole morning, and Piers, coming in late for the drainage figures, found the two of them at the table with four years of repairs laid out in order and Sowerby talking.
"Which of them have waited the longest?" she was asking.
"The Netherton cottages, five years. Ridge tiles. Then the servants' staircase here, which has wanted a stringer since before the old duke died and has been propped."
"And which will not last the winter?"
Sowerby put his finger on three lines. "Those, Your Grace. The Purnell roof at Chalke Coombe, and that is a widow with two children under it. The kitchen range, which is not a repair yet but will be by February. And the mill leat, and that is every farm on the place at harvest."
"You have known all three since when?"
"Since the spring, Your Grace." He answered without turning round, and that was as near as Sowerby came to loyalty in company.
"And you told whom?" She had not looked up from the sheet.
"His Grace. Every quarter, in writing."
She waited. Sowerby turned the page over and squared it against the others.
"But there was no money," he said coolly. "There is no fault in it anywhere. I am simply pleased to be asked the whole question at last, because for two years I have only been able to answer half of it."
Piers stood in the doorway with the drainage figures under his arm, defended and exposed inside the same sentence, by a man he had trusted with everything, in front of his wife.
"The stringer," Cecily said. "Have it done this month, before the frost."
"Yes, Your Grace." He was already writing it.
"And send to Devizes about the range."
Piers had come in to say that the mill leat could wait until February. He took the drainage figures away instead and went out through the yard, where the bay put her head over the door at him and got nothing for it.
***
The trouble began in a bedroom chimney.
His own drew badly and had drawn badly for two winters.
Dowling had rebuilt Kitty's flue in the autumn and had done the study stack with it, and had said, standing in the yard with his hat in his hands, that the bedroom would want doing at the same time or it would want doing twice, but Piers had told him to do the two that were needed.
In the second week of December Cecily walked into his bedroom to return a book he had left in the library, and walked out again into a passage full of woodsmoke. She told Mrs Tregarth to send for Dowling.
Piers cancelled it but Cecily restored it, in writing, and had the note carried down before he had finished his coffee.
He countermanded it again on the reasonable ground that Dowling was at Netherton all that week and could not be in two places, but Cecily wrote to Dowling directly and asked him which of the two jobs he would rather do in frost. This went on for the better part of a week, and then Mrs Tregarth came into the breakfast room, where both of them were sitting, and stood at the end of the table with her notebook shut.
"If Your Graces intend to countermand one another every morning," she said, "I shall require a second notebook."
"Have Dowling as soon as he is free," Cecily said. "Both stacks."
"Yes, Your Grace." Mrs Tregarth went out, and Piers studied the tablecloth for a while.
"It is my own room," he said when the door had shut.
"It is the estate's chimney."
"That is a solicitor’s answer." He had not raised his voice, and he set the coffee pot down with some care.
"I had a great deal of practice in October." She went on with her own letters. "It is fourteen pounds now, and something else altogether if it burns the panelling out, and Mr Dowling told me so himself in a badly spelt letter which I intend to keep."
Piers turned his cup a quarter round on the saucer and did not drink from it. He looked at the door Mrs Tregarth had gone out by, and then at his wife, and the look was held a good deal longer than he had meant it to be.
"You wrote to Dowling?"
"I wrote to the estate's mason, about the estate's chimney, with the estate's money, under a deed you signed in front of two trustees and a solicitor." She looked up at last. "Would you like me to send you a copy of it?"
"I have a copy of it." It was in the drawer eighteen inches from his hand, and he had read it in November when he ought to have been asleep.
"Then you will know I am not required to ask you."
"No," Piers said. "You are not."
"I asked you all the same. Three times. You said no three times, and none of the three was a reason."
There was no answer to that. Somewhere behind his own irritation, the corner of his mouth had moved, and she had seen it happen.
The frost came in with the new year and held for nine days, and Dowling did both stacks as instructed. The passage outside Piers's room stopped smelling of woodsmoke for the first time in fourteen months.
***
There were pears at breakfast every morning that December, because there had been a glut in the autumn and the store was full of them and Mrs Tregarth was not a woman who let a thing spoil.
On the fifth morning Cecily looked at his plate.
"Do you dislike pears?" she sked.
"I do." He went on cutting the one in front of him all the same.
"Why have you never said?"
Piers considered the question for rather longer than it deserved. "It seemed survivable," he answered.
The following morning there were no pears, and nothing was said about it. There was cold beef and bread, and there was the ordinary business of a morning. The dish that had stood at his left hand every morning for a week was simply not there, but nobody remarked on the absence.
"Can the leat be done before the ground hardens?" Cecily asked.
"Not all of it. The upper forty yards, if Dowling is finished at Netherton in time."
"And the rest?"
"At Lady Day," he said.
"Why not now?"
"Because it will cost less then. We shall have the men on the place anyway for the ditching."
"Then do the forty yards," she said, and passed him the butter without being asked for it.
He took it and held it.
"You are not going to say anything about the pears?" he asked.
"No," she said mildly, and went on with her letter.
"Why not?"
"Because you would only tell me it was survivable."
He let that lie.
Later that morning, on his way through to the estate room, he stopped at the still-room door and told the cook that Her Grace took her tea a little cooler than it was being sent up, and that it might stand a minute before it was carried.
Then he went and did his work. Cecily never heard about it from anybody, and he had not the slightest intention that she should.