Chapter Twelve
The state dining room was not painted that January, and that was the first thing Piers saw.
Bagnall came out from Salisbury with a folder of papers under his arm and an estimate for the ceiling, which had been cracked since before the old duke died and was, by his account, a disgrace to a house of that consequence.
Piers had been expecting the argument. He had been assembling it for days, and it was a poor one, because the ceiling was a disgrace but there was money now, and any reason he gave for refusing was going to sound like pride.
He came in at the end of it and found Bagnall putting the folder away.
"Her Grace does not require the work," Bagnall said, in the voice of a man who had been told something he did not believe.
"Not this year," said Cecily.
"The cornice, madam, is in a very poor state."
"It has been in a poor state for five years. The room is used three times a twelvemonth."
"Your Grace…" Bagnall said stiffly, and got no further, because she had already turned back to her letter.
"Come back to me when it is coming down on somebody."
Bagnall was given his dinner and a letter for his principal, and went back to Salisbury with nothing else.
"Was that necessary?" Piers said, when the door had shut.
"Was it?" She did not look up from the letter.
He had no answer ready. He had come down the passage with a hundred and forty pounds of argument in his mouth and had arrived to find the money already saved by somebody else, and it had cost him nothing. He would have preferred it to cost him something.
He stood in the doorway of his own state dining room, looked up at his own cracked ceiling and lost the shape of the afternoon.
It went on like that for a fortnight, and he watched it, but could not have said what he was watching for.
The curtains in the small drawing room were faded on the window side and had been faded since his mother's time, and they were not replaced, because they drew, they hung, and they kept the draught off.
The chairs in the morning room, all nineteen of them, stayed where they were.
Somebody suggested a carpet for the passage and got nowhere.
One day Cecily went down the servants' staircase, a thing no Duchess of Havering had done in living memory. She came back up and sent for Dowling.
"The fourth tread from the bottom," she said, before he had got his hat off.
"Yes, Your Grace. It has been propped these four years."
"The prop has slipped."
"I will have a look, Your Grace."
"The tread is standing on the nosing and nothing else," Cecily said. "Mary carries the breakfast down there at six, in the dark."
Dowling put a new stringer in over two days and was paid within the week.
Two days later she was in the kitchen about something else and came out knowing that the range door had been catching for three years, that the way round it was to reach over the top and lift, and that two of the maids had burns on the inside of the forearm from doing so.
The range was mended that week by a man from Devizes.
At the end of January Piers went through the estate room accounts and put the month in front of himself in one column, that being the only way he had ever been able to see anything.
Against the ceiling he had written refused, the same against the curtains and the carpet, and below them stood the staircase, and the Purnell roof at Chalke Coombe, ordered for the first dry week, the three of them together coming to less than the ceiling alone.
He sat and looked at it a long while.
He had spent two years making these decisions and had thought, in some part of himself he was not proud of, that a woman with three thousand pounds of her own and no experience of going without would come into a house like Ferrers and begin at the cornices.
She had begun at the stairs the servants used in the dark, at a door two women had been burning their arms on, and at a roof over a widow at Chalke Coombe that had sat in Sowerby's private book for two years with a line under it.
He could have borne that. The second column was harder, where his own two years were written out beside her one month, and the Purnell roof carried a date four years later than it should have had.
She was not spending more than he would have spent. She was spending the same money in a better order, and what separated them was neither principle nor care.
He had confused going without with going short, and she had never once made that mistake.
Mrs Tregarth had run Ferrers since before Kitty was born and had never, in Piers's hearing, said a thing she had not been asked.
Towards the end of January, he came through the hall and saw the household keys at his wife's waist.
There was no mistaking the ring. He had watched it go along these passages his whole life, at his mother's waist and then at nobody's, and Mrs Tregarth had not mislaid it.
"You have the keys," he said.
Cecily looked down as though she had forgotten they were there, and he was fairly sure she had not.
"She brought them up this morning."
"And said what?"
"That they belonged with the duchess." Cecily went on along the passage, and he followed.
"That is all she said?"
"No. I asked her whether she had thought so last week."
He stopped walking. "You did not."
"I did," she said, and kept walking, so that he had to catch up to her. "She said no. Then I asked her what had altered, and she thought about it for longer than I liked, and she said that she disliked preventable burns."
Cecily stopped at the estate room door. Piers stood in the passage with the estate post in one hand and no idea what to do with his face.
"She likes you," he said eventually.
"She has never given the slightest indication," Cecily said.
"That is the indication."
***
Kitty went about the house being helpful, and in his sister that was a signal of considerable distress.
He found the two of them in the morning room on the last dry afternoon of the month.
He heard it from the passage, a habit he did not care for and had found no way of breaking, since the alternative was announcing himself and hearing nothing.
"I would rather be told," Kitty was saying.
"I have been counting gowns since Christmas like a shopkeeper.
Two from Tolley and whatever else is to come, and each one of them out of your pocket.
I am to stand in a room in April and be looked at, and everybody in it will know how I was paid for. I'm not being ungrateful…"
"Sit down," Cecily said. "You are about to be given some figures."
"I do not want figures."
"You want figures more than anybody I have ever met. You have been going without them for years, and I have had quite enough of this family's habits about arithmetic. Sit down."
Kitty sat down, and Cecily pulled the second chair round so that they were not across a table from one another. Piers saw that from the passage and did not, until much later, realise what it was for.
"The forty thousand pounds went from Manchester to Bristol and paid off a mortgage," Cecily said. "All of it. It is not in a bank. Not one penny of it exists any longer, and I could not buy you a pair of gloves with it if I wished to."
"I know that," Kitty said impatiently.
"You know it, but you have not done the next sum."
Then she gave her the next sum, in the flat voice she kept for figures.
The mortgage had been eating two thousand one hundred pounds a year out of the Ferrers rents in interest, every year, for nine years.
It was not eating it now. The rents would come in at Lady Day, and they would stay where they fell.
"Your season is four hundred pounds," Cecily said. "It comes out of your brother's rents, which are larger this year than they have been since you were fifteen."
"Because of you." Kitty's voice had gone up. "You can dress it however you like. It is still your money at one remove, and everybody who can count will…"
"Because a charge has been taken off them," Cecily said steadily.
"By you."
"I removed a charge. I did not buy a gown." Cecily put the pen down. "Be angry with him if you want to be angry. It is his money, his sister and his decision, and he has been sitting on it since December."
Kitty opened her mouth, and shut it, but then said, "Why?" in a much lower voice.
"Because he will not promise a thing in winter that he cannot pay for in spring."
"So, I am not to be dressed at your expense."
"You are to be dressed out of your brother's rents, next spring, like any other sister," Cecily said. "You may take that up with him."
Kitty turned round in the chair and saw him in the doorway.
"How long have you been there?" Kitty asked.
"Since the mortgage."
Cecily did not look round. She squared the papers in front of her, got up, said that she had the Netherton walls to write about, and went out past him, leaving the two of them in the room together.
Kitty waited until the door was shut.
"Is it true?" she said.
"Which part?"
"Any of it. All of it. I don't know."
"Every figure of it," Piers said. "She is out by nothing. The interest was two thousand one hundred and forty."
"Then why did you not tell me in December?"
"Because in December I had not seen a Lady Day." He put the papers down on the table. "And because I have spent two years telling this house that things would come right, and been wrong every time. I did not want to promise you a season twice."
Kitty looked at her hands for a while. "That is a very stupid reason."
"It is the reason I had."
"You might have said it all the same." She stood up. "Kitty, the rents are coming back, but I shall not say the word until April in case I am wrong again. That is not a difficult sentence. I have just said it for you, and I am supposed to be the one in this family who cannot hold her tongue."
Piers turned that over.
"Yes," he said, and stopped.
"Yes what?"
"Yes, it is not a difficult sentence, and no, I could not have said it." He picked the plan up again, because his hands wanted something. "You shall have the Season. Next April, out of the rents, and I shall tell you the figure, and you may hold me to it."
Kitty went as far as the door and stopped there with her hand on the frame, as she had done since she was small when there was something further that she had not decided to say.
"She said something else," she said. "Before you came. She said that if I was going to be looked at in a room in April, I had better decide now what I want them to see, because otherwise the room decides it for me."
"That sounds like her."
"It is the only useful thing anybody has said to me about a season," Kitty said, "and she has never had one."
She went out and left the door open behind her, which in that house was practically a statement.
Piers stood in the morning room among the chairs nobody had moved since July. His wife had spent the last half hour doing for his sister what Sowerby had spent two years doing for him, and had done it by the opposite method entirely. She had given the girl the whole of the arithmetic.