Chapter Ten
There was water on the floor of the long gallery on the second morning after Christmas, in a line four feet long, and it had been coming down for some hours before anybody found it.
Piers stood and looked at it with a candle while the housemaid went for cloths.
It was in the east wing. He had walked that wing every quarter for two years, and had walked it in September, when there had been nothing wrong with it.
The rain had come in on a south-west wind and had gone on for thirty hours, and somewhere above the third bay a valley gutter had failed.
The water had found the space between two joists and come down the wall in the dark with nobody in the house to hear it.
He got Dowling out the next morning and stood in the rain in the roof space with him for an hour and a half.
Dowling came down, wiped his hands and gave it to him straight, because Dowling had been giving it to Chaloners straight for twenty years and had never once been thanked for it.
"The valley has gone," he said. "The lead is perished across about nine feet, and the boarding under it is soft. That is not all of the trouble."
"Say the rest." Piers had his hand flat on the newel post and had kept it there since Dowling came down.
"The rafter feet on that side are wet. Not rotten yet. Wet." He turned his hat round. "If it stands until spring, you will be taking off forty feet of slate and putting in new feet and a new plate, and I would not care to price it. If it is done now, you want the lead, the boarding and two days."
"How much now?"
"Fifty-eight pounds, or thereabouts."
Piers took his hand off the post. "And in the spring?"
"Three times that, Your Grace," Dowling said bluntly, "and I am being kind."
The gallery already smelled of wet plaster, and that was a smell a man did not forget once he had paid for it. Two of the sheets had been taken off the furniture and put on the floor instead, and the housemaid had wrung them out twice.
Piers stood in his own doorway in the rain and did the arithmetic he had been doing for two years, and it came out the way it always came out.
The sum was the Netherton north walls, or the kitchen range and half the mill leat, and either way it was Ferrers's income being spent on a wing nobody lived in, at the direction of a man who had been solvent for three weeks and had not yet had one quarter day of his own.
"It will have to wait," he said.
Kitty found him in the passage later that morning and asked whether the gallery was spoiled. He said it was a stain on a wall in a room nobody entered. Kitty, who generally had three more things to say, looked at him, and went on up the stairs.
He told Cecily before the morning was out, in the estate room, because she had a right to be told and because she would have had it from Sowerby within the week in any case.
Cecily heard him through without interrupting.
"Fifty-eight now and a hundred and seventy in June," she said.
"Approximately." He had the figure to the shilling and gave it to her rounded, and could not have said why.
"Then we shall do it now."
"We shall manage until the spring."
"Manage how?"
"By putting a sheet of lead over the valley and a bucket under it," Piers said, "which is what has been done twice before in that wing and has held both times."
"It has held both times because both times it was August." She turned the page of Sowerby's note round. "The rafter feet are wet. Mr Dowling has written it here. In a wet January they will not dry, in February they will freeze, and in March you will not have a repair, you will have a rebuilding."
"I am aware of what Dowling wrote."
"Then what is the objection?" she asked.
There was no objection he could put into a sentence that would survive being said aloud in front of a woman holding a note from his own mason, but the next thing came out of him anyway.
"It can wait until Lady Day."
"It cannot," Cecily said quietly, and she stayed in her chair.
"Then it will have to," Piers said, and went out.
He worked for two hours on the Netherton figures, and afterwards could not have repeated one of them.
Twice he got up and went as far as the door of the estate room and turned back.
What he had meant to say on both occasions was that he would look at the thing again after the quarter day, and that was neither a concession nor a refusal and would have committed him to nothing.
He was in the yard when Sowerby came out to find him, with his hat in his hand and the look of a man carrying something he had been paid to carry.
"Her Grace has instructed me about the east valley," he said.
Piers put down the bridle he had been holding for no reason.
"Instructed you?" he asked slowly.
"In writing, Your Grace. Dowling on the second of January, two days, the sum he named and any necessary boarding, out of estate income." Sowerby held his eye. "She has asked me to tell you that she has done it, rather than let you find it in the book at quarter day."
Piers went into the house and found her in the estate room with the note already written and Sowerby's pen still lying across it.
"No," he said from the door with Sowerby behind him.
Cecily turned round in the chair. She had picked the pen up again, and she held it a little away from the paper.
"The roof requires it," she said.
"I said no." He had come as far as the end of the table.
"And I am saying yes." Her hand stayed on the page.
And that was all of it, the two of them standing between the table and the door in the middle of an afternoon in December. It was his wife, his house and his roof, and her name was at the bottom of the page.
He had signed it himself in October, with three men watching and a pen he had been handed, without disputing one condition, because the conditions were sensible and because he had wanted her to have exactly this. None of it was the smallest use to him now.
"Not everything in this house needs to be purchased for me."
The room went quiet.
He heard it after it had gone. A sentence left at one speed and arrived at another, and there was a space in between where a man could watch it travel and could do nothing about the distance.
"No," she said without raising her voice. "Apparently only the house itself did."
She put the pen down on the blotter, squarely, and went out past him, and the door shut behind her without any particular force.
He stood in the estate room a long while after.
The house had it inside the hour. He had grown up in the place where a raised voice carried a known distance from the estate room, and the door had been standing open the entire time.
"Sowerby," Piers said, and got no further with it.
"Your Grace." Sowerby waited.
Piers waited too, and whatever he had been going to say did not arrive, and the silence went on. It was the worst one he had spent in a house that had given him a good many.
"The roof still leaks," Sowerby said impassively.
"Have it repaired," Piers said.
"Yes, Your Grace." Sowerby had the ditching book under his arm and made no move to open it. "That is what Her Grace has written."
"Then it will not want altering," Piers said.
The house did not look at him for the rest of the afternoon. Going through to the library he passed two housemaids on the stairs who stood aside with their eyes down, and keeping their eyes down was the loudest thing that had happened to him in a fortnight.
Dinner was got through somehow. Kitty carried it single-handed, talking about a book she had not finished and a horse she had not seen, and neither of them helped her, but she did not once let the table go quiet.
He went up after.
He had spent five hours composing the thing and had thrown most of it away, because most of it had turned out to be explanation, and he had recognised the sound.
Rupert had always explained everything. He had explained the canal, the horse, the improvements and the temporary difficulty, and had been believed every time because each explanation had been true and had also been a way of not saying the other thing.
The passage between his door and hers was nine feet, and he had stood in it twice already that evening but had gone back both times.
She opened the door herself and let him in.
She had the cottage returns in front of her and left them open, and he could not quarrel with that.
"I have come to apologise," he said.
"For which part?"
"You tried to mend my roof," Piers said. "I made you ashamed of helping me."
Cecily looked at him a long while. "That is remarkably accurate."
"I had several hours," Piers said, "and I threw away most of them. I should not have spoken to you that way."
"No." She said it to the returns rather than to him.
"I know," Piers said.
He had a further sentence but did not use it.
There were reasons, and he had them arranged, and each one of them was true.
That his father had made four hundred and eleven people's roofs into a question of his own comfort.
That for two years he had been the only person at Ferrers with the whole of the trouble in his head, and had got used to it being his.
That a man who cannot mend his own roof out of his own income has not got very much left to be, and that when she picked up a pen, even though she was taking nothing from him, it had felt as though she were.
All of it was accurate, but none of it was owed to her, and offering it would have turned the apology into something else. So, he said none of it.
"Sit down," she said. "You are standing there as though I am going to serve you with something. You did that in October as well."
He sat down in the chair by her fire. It was lit, and it was drawing well, and that was the first thing he had done in that marriage that had cost him something and had not been paid for by anybody else.
They went through the cottage returns for half an hour, and for that half hour it was the easiest either of them had been in the same room since the wedding.
At the door he stopped, with his hand not quite on it.
"The lead," he said. "Dowling should take up the whole nine feet and not patch it, but he will offer to patch it because he is trying to save me money."
"I shall tell him." She wrote it in the margin of Sowerby's note while he was still speaking.
"He will listen to you. He did not listen to me two years ago, and it has been costing us ever since."
"Your Grace," she said, when he had the door half open.
"Yes," he said, and stopped again.
She had turned back to the table and kept her eyes on it.
"The building beyond the kitchen garden," she said. "The long one with the broken glass. What was it?"
"The glasshouse. My grandmother's." He came back a step into the room without meaning to. "There has been nothing growing in it since before I was born. My father took the stove out of it and sold the pipes."
"How many panes are out?"
"I have never counted them."
"Two hundred and four," Cecily said, and went on writing.
Piers stood in the doorway a moment longer than he needed to, then wished her good night and walked back along the passage to his own room, where the chimney no longer smoked and sat there.