Chapter Nine
"The Michaelmas arrears," Cecily said, and put the sheet down where he could see it. "Fourteen tenants. Nine of them are the same nine as last year."
Piers looked at the sheet without touching it. "Sowerby will have the reasons."
"Sowerby has given me the reasons. I am asking what was done about them."
"Nothing was done about them."
"In two years, nothing?" she asked.
"There was nothing to do about them with," Piers said. "A man with no money cannot forgive a rent. He can only fail to collect it and call it something else."
She put her finger on three of the names. "These are Netherton, whose roofs you mended the year your father died."
"They are," he said, and left it there.
"Then they are not idle. They are wet." She turned the sheet round. "I should like to go and look."
"At Netherton?"
"At all fourteen."
He was quiet. His hand went to the edge of the sheet and squared it against the desk. "Sowerby can take you."
"I did not ask for Sowerby."
"No," Piers said. "If you will excuse me, I am wanted at the stables."
The door shut behind him without any particular force. Every door in that house shut like that when he went through it.
He was not wanted at the stables. There were three horses in them, and two men to look after them, and nobody at Ferrers had wanted the Duke in the stable in two years.
Cecily sat where she was after he had gone.
It had taken her weeks to assemble the pattern, and it was not one she cared for.
He was scrupulously polite about all of it.
He answered every question she put about the estate, and never once told her that a thing was not her business.
But the money could not be named in his hearing.
If she mentioned the mortgage, he found something that wanted him elsewhere.
If she said the word settlement, his face went back to the civil arrangement he had worn on the day they met.
When Mr Blythe had said at dinner, meaning nothing but kindness, that it was a fine thing to see Ferrers coming back to itself, Piers had agreed with him in four words and had left the rest of the course to Kitty.
The conclusion was not difficult. He had married forty thousand pounds because there had been nothing else left to do, and he was too well bred to say so, and he was going to be civil to her about it for thirty years.
Cecily had prepared herself for this before she came and thought herself proof against it. Somewhere in December it had turned out that being proof against a thing and being indifferent to it were not the same arrangement.
Mrs Tregarth came in with the week's books, put them down, and stood.
"Sit down, Mrs Tregarth."
"I am quite able to stand, Your Grace."
"I am aware that you are able," Cecily said. "I am asking you to sit, because it will take half an hour and I dislike being stood over."
Mrs Tregarth sat on the edge of a chair like a woman conceding protest, and they went through the household account. Every figure was correct to the penny, but every answer was six words long.
At the end of it, Cecily said that the books were the best kept she had seen anywhere, and it happened to be true.
"Thank you, Your Grace," Mrs Tregarth said stiffly.
"You have run this house on nothing for two years."
"I have run it on what I was given."
"That is the same sentence."
"No, Your Grace," said Mrs Tregarth, and gathered up the books. "It is not."
The linen room stood at the end of the north passage, on the shortest way between the still-room and the back stairs.
In the week before Christmas Cecily went along it with the laundry book under her arm and stopped.
The door was open eight inches, and there were two of them inside it, and neither had heard her coming.
"Mrs Tregarth's face…" one of them said. "I wish you had seen it. She went the colour of the ceiling."
"It was never so much as that."
"It was more. And then the man from Salisbury sent the second lot up on approval, the plain twill, and His Grace put his hand on it and said no."
"He never did," the second voice said.
"Too rough. He said, too rough, and sent it back, and had the other."
There was a pause with a great deal of laundry going into it.
"His Grace," said the second voice. "Our… His Grace."
The two of them laughed at that, and stopped for a while before starting again.
"I had forgotten what it was like," the first one said, more quietly. "Buying a thing that was not to replace something already beyond mending. Four years I have been mending. I had forgotten it was ever any different."
"Where did it come from, though?"
"Where did what come from?"
"The money for it. There was no money in September, Bess, you know there was not, and then all at once there was new linen in the house and a man in from Devizes."
"Ask Mr Sowerby," Bess said.
"I asked him," said the other. "He wanted to know whether the sheets were hemmed yet, and I said they were, and that was the end of it."
Cecily stood in the passage with the laundry book against her chest. A girl came up the back stairs with an armful of something and went past her with her eyes on the floor, having been in service long enough to know when not to have seen anybody.
He had bought them, in September, before he had ever set eyes on her. While the notice was running, out of a purse she had read down to the shilling in a cold room in October.
He had sat in a split chair, in a room with one branch of candles, with a chimney that had smoked since before she came, and had refused to have it seen to because Dowling had not been paid for the first one.
And he had put his hand on a bolt of plain twill and said too rough.
"They say she was refused by three of them," Bess said.
Cecily stayed where she was.
"Three what?" the other asked.
"Houses. In London. Three of them, in one spring. Lady Somebody would not have her, and then the other one would not, and then a third, on account of the grandfather."
"That is a wicked thing to say about her," the other said.
"I am not saying it. I am saying it was said. It came down here before she did, from Devizes. Mrs Tregarth had it from the Marleighs' housekeeper, and she told it in this room."
"And what did Mrs Tregarth say to it?"
"Not a word," Bess said. "That is Mrs Tregarth."
Cecily went back along the front of the house instead, and put the laundry book on the hall table because it was still in her hands.
The three houses were not news to her. She had been in the rooms where the decision was taken, twice, and had understood it well enough at the time, and had stopped minding out loud somewhere around the second one.
What she had not had until this morning was that it had arrived in Wiltshire ahead of her, gone round a linen room, and been heard by every servant in the house before she got out of the carriage.
Both had come at her through the same eight inches of open door, and she could do nothing with either.
She went to Netherton two days later, and she did not take Sowerby.
The frost had gone out of the ground overnight, the lanes were the worst they would be all winter, and Sowerby would have advised waiting.
She took the gig and the boy who looked after the horses, and she called at fourteen houses in five hours. Nine of them showed her what she had come to see and told her nothing.
At the tenth, a cottage of two rooms with a wet north wall, a woman of about forty stood in her own doorway with a child on her hip and said that she was sorry about the rent and it would be paid.
"When will it be paid?" Cecily asked.
"Lady Day, Your Grace. Or the Michaelmas after."
"And what has kept it?"
The woman looked at her, and shifted the child to the other hip.
"Say it," Cecily said. "I have been round ten of these today and I have been told about the weather nine times."
"The wall, then," the woman said. "It takes water on that side, and it has taken it since my husband was alive. We have had the roof, and we were glad of the roof, and I am not saying a word against His Grace, who came himself and stood where you are standing."
"But the wall is the wall."
"It is, Your Grace," the woman said in a low voice, and looked at it rather than at her.
Cecily wrote Netherton, north walls, six in her own book, and that evening sat over the page long after there was anything left on it to read.
He had mended what could be mended in a fortnight with a mason and no money. She could mend the rest, and the difference between the two of them was not diligence or care. It was four hundred pounds.
She went up before dinner and shut her own door.
The dressing gown was on the back of it, where Prue put it every morning. It was thick wool, dark green, and it had never been worn by anybody before her.
Cecily put out one hand and turned the cuff over between her thumb and her fingers. Coming home in the gig, she had decided what she would say to him at dinner, but standing here with the wool between her fingers, she was no longer certain of any of it.
Then she let it go, stood with her hand on the door, and went down.
Downstairs the house was doing what it did at that hour, and it came to almost nothing. Somebody was carrying coal along the north passage, but nobody had mentioned it to her, because nobody at Ferrers mentioned anything to anybody.
Kitty caught her on the landing with her hair half down and a book she was not reading.
"Did you go to Netherton?"
"I did," Cecily said.
"By yourself?"
"With Robert and the gig."
"Piers will be furious," Kitty said hopefully.
"Piers offered me Sowerby, and I declined him," Cecily said. "There is nothing in that to be furious about."
Kitty sat down on the top step, which she had been forbidden to do at about the age of seven but had continued doing ever since.
"He is not furious with you. He is never furious with anybody, and it would be easier if he were. He goes and stands somewhere." She turned a page she was not reading. "He was in the estate room until eight last night."
"Doing what?"
"I have not the least idea. The house has never run to ideas." Kitty looked up. "May I ask you something disagreeable?"
"You may ask."
"Do you like him at all?" she said abruptly. "You need not answer. Only I have watched the two of you at dinner for weeks, but I cannot tell, and I have known him for nineteen years, and I cannot tell about him either."
Cecily stood on the landing with her hand on the rail.
"I do not know him well enough to like him," she said. "I have not been given very much to go on."
"No," said Kitty. "Nobody ever is."
At dinner she looked at his coat properly for the first time since September. The cuff had been turned, and turned again, by somebody expert who had been handed the same coat once a year for four years.
Her own sleeve, when she put her hand out for the water, was new. It had come from Devizes in autumn, paid for out of a fund she had never once had to think about.
She looked from his cuff to her own, and had got the two facts side by side when the sound of his knife stopped.
He was looking at the table.
"The Purnell roof," he said. "Sowerby tells me it wants doing before the winter is out."
"He told me the same last week," Cecily said.
"Then it had better be done."
The formality came down over him and stayed there for the rest of dinner. He asked her twice whether she wanted anything and once whether the room was warm enough, and his eyes went to Kitty, the footman, the salt, and anywhere at that table but her.
He thought she was ashamed of him.
She had watched it happen, and wanted to speak to him and tell him her thoughts.
I was not looking at your coat because it is old.
I was looking at your coat because I have worked out who paid for my sleeve.