Chapter Eleven
"Who has the key to the glasshouse?" Cecily asked, and set her cup down on the corner of the breakfast table where the letters were waiting.
Mrs Tregarth considered it with the care she gave to every question, whether it deserved the care or not.
"There is no key, Your Grace. There is a bolt. The door has dropped, and the bolt has not gone into the keeper since I came here."
"Then it opens?" Cecily said.
"It opens if you lift it. Hodge lifts it in October for the pots and lifts it back again."
"Who is Hodge?" She had not heard the name before.
"The gardener," said Mrs Tregarth, naming him the way a house names something it has kept on out of politeness. "There is one."
"How long has there been one?"
"Fifty-four years, Your Grace. He came as the second boy."
Cecily went down after breakfast on a hard morning in January, in pattens, with the frost still on the north side of everything.
The glasshouse stood beyond the kitchen garden along the south wall, a hundred and ten feet of it, and from a distance in winter light it did not look derelict at all. It looked like a building with a great many windows, but that impression lasted until she was ten yards off.
She lifted the door and went in.
The glass that remained had gone green at the laps.
She had asked her maid about the missing panes from the outside in December: two hundred and four of them, but standing inside she could see what the count had not told her.
The sky came through in a long, broken line the whole length of the roof.
The staging was oak and had held. The iron brackets under it had rusted through in nine places, and one whole bay had come down at some point and been left where it fell.
There were beds along the back wall under the glass, gone to willowherb, dock and something dead and woody that she did not recognise.
Against the wall itself there were still the wires and the nails where a peach or a vine had been trained, and somebody had trained it well.
The nails ran in courses, six inches apart, from one end of the wall to the other, put in by a man who had expected to come back the following year.
At the far end there was a bench with a board on it, and on the board, half sunk in old dirt, a row of lead labels.
Cecily turned three of them over.
The writing was scratched in with a point and thirty winters had not touched it. Muscat of Alexandria and Royal George, but she could not make out the third.
She stood there with the label between her finger and her thumb, and it was some while before she put it down.
Somebody had wanted grapes at Ferrers Abbey in the last century, and had written down which sort they were so that the next person would know.
Her mother had wanted a garden until the end.
Maria Marchbank had grown things at Kelby for nine years.
In the last week before the sale went through, she had gone out and taken seed off everything that would give it, and put the lot into a japanned tin for the garden she was going to have somewhere else.
She talked about that garden for a year.
Then she stopped talking about it, and a while after she stopped, she died.
She put the label back on the board, face up, where it had been.
"You are going to tell me to pull it down," Piers said from the doorway.
She had not heard him come along the path.
"I am not," she said mildly.
"Everybody who has been in here has told me to pull it down. Sowerby has told me twice. It is the only frivolous opinion the man has ever held."
"What would it cost to restore?"
Piers came in and looked up at the roof, and Cecily watched him do the arithmetic she had watched him do about the east valley.
"Too much," he said.
"That was not my question."
"No." He went on looking at the roof. "It rarely is."
"I want the frame looked at," she said. "If the frame is gone, there is nothing to discuss. If the frame has held, I should like the figures."
"Sowerby can get them."
"I asked him before I came out here and he will see to it." She brushed the dirt off her glove against her skirt. "He told me the door has dropped because the sill has gone at the house end, and he told me about it as though he had been waiting nine years for somebody to ask."
***
Sowerby brought the figures at the end of the week, and brought something else with them.
Cecily had gone down to the estate office at the home farm rather than have him come up, because it was two miles, it was raining, and he was sixty-one, though nobody at Ferrers had ever said so aloud.
He put the glasshouse estimate on the table, frame and sill, iron and glazing and a stove, with one sum at the foot of the sheet.
Then he put a second book beside it.
It was a plain ledger, half bound, and it had not come out of the house because it had never been in the house.
"What is this?" Cecily asked.
"It is a private book, Your Grace. It is not the estate account, and it does not tie to it. I have kept it since the seventh duke opened the deed box."
Cecily opened it. It was not money at all, or not written as money. It was a list of things not done, in date order, in his flat hand, with a line for each.
Purnell, Chalke Coombe. Roof. Deferred. She has a pail under it.
Hodge, gardener. Boy not replaced when Weller went. Hodge is doing the work of two and is sixty-eight.
Netherton, six north walls. No money. Told His Grace the roofs only.
Lease, Tapper, not renewed. He has gone to his brother at Warminster. Did not tell His Grace it was for want of thirty pounds.
There were two years of it, close written.
"You never showed this to him," she said.
"No, Your Grace."
"Why not?"
"Because His Grace would have found the money."
"There was no money."
"He would have found it anyway," Sowerby said curtly, "out of something that mattered."
Cecily turned another page without reading it.
"So, you decided," she said.
"I decided. Each one of those is mine. I have not asked to be forgiven for any of them, and I do not intend to start."
"I have not offered."
"No, Your Grace," he said. "I noticed."
She sat with the book open in front of her.
It was two years of one man protecting another from his own arithmetic, and it was, to the shilling, the thing Piers had done to Kitty, to the household, to the county, and to her.
He would not recognise it, though, even if it were read aloud to him in his own study.
"Bring it to the drawing room," Cecily said.
Sowerby's hand moved towards his hat and stopped. "Your Grace…"
"Not to him. To me. Put it on my desk, let it stay there and let anybody who comes in see it." She closed it and pushed it back across the table so that he had to pick it up. "You have carried that on your own for two years. I am not going to have it in a farm office two miles away in the rain."
"Very well, Your Grace."
Sowerby took the book, put it under his arm, and stood with an expression she could not read.
Piers came to the estate room the next day and read the glasshouse figures through twice.
"Four hundred and ninety pounds," he said.
"It is a great deal of money," Cecily said.
"It is the Netherton north walls twice over," he said, "and it grows nothing that anybody has to eat."
"Yes. That is true."
"Then we understand each other."
"No," Cecily said, "because you have not asked me where it is coming from."
He stopped where he was.
"It is not the estate accounts. That is the first thing. Nothing on this paper touches Ferrers's income, and I would not put it there if you asked me to." She turned the sheet round to face him. "And it is not the forty thousand, which went to Bristol in December and no longer exists."
"Then what is left?"
"Three thousand pounds tied to me absolutely by my grandfather, and four hundred a year of my own beside it, charged on nothing in this county and answerable to nobody.
" She put her finger on the total. "That is where it comes from.
It is mine. I may spend it on a glasshouse, on a hat, or I may throw it in the river. "
His expression did the thing she had seen it do in a vestry in October.
"Before you say something unfortunate," Cecily said, "I am not repairing it for you."
"Comforting," Piers said, but he did not sound comforted.
She had meant to go straight on. Instead, she looked down at the estimate, and the sentence that came out was smaller than the one she had prepared.
"I want it," she said mildly.
And that was a different proposition entirely, and she watched him fail to find anywhere to stand against it.
He could refuse a gift because he had been refusing gifts since the twenty-eighth of October and had got extremely good at it.
He could not tell his wife that she might not spend her own money on a thing she wanted, merely because the thing happened to be standing on his land.
Piers turned the estimate towards himself again.
"Then we shall inspect the frame before spending anything," he said.
Cecily wrote inspection first at the top of the sheet and kept her eyes on the pen, because she did not entirely trust her face, and because he had said we and had not appeared to notice himself doing it.
He went out of the room and came back within a minute with a folded paper, put it on the table with no explanation, and went away again.
It was a list in his own hand, undated, of nine things about the glasshouse that would want attending to before anything else was begun.
The sill stood first on it. The stove flue was seventh, with a note that the brickwork had never been sound and had smoked into the house end since before he could remember.
The frame turned out to be sound. Hodge said so, and Dowling agreed the day after, but the two of them disagreed about the sill and with great enjoyment.
The work went in the order the weather allowed. The sill, the door and the fallen bay went through to the end of January, the iron was done in February, and the gutters waited on the frost letting go.
Sowerby's ledger came into the drawing room in the meantime and went on the corner of Cecily's desk.
She looked at it for a while, and then she went up, got the tin out of the bottom of the travelling case from underneath everything, carried it down, and set it on the desk beside the ledger.
She did not open it.
She simply stopped keeping it in a box under her stockings. That was not the same thing as planting anything, but it was as far as she was prepared to go in January.