Chapter Thirteen
"Wind has gone round," Hodge said, and put his thumb up over the wall as he had been doing for years. "There is weather in that."
Cecily looked where the thumb was pointing and saw a mild grey afternoon with nothing in it.
"How long?" she asked.
"Before dark." He had not taken his eyes off the line of the wall while he spoke to her.
"Are you certain?"
"No, Your Grace," said Hodge, who had been asked to be certain about the weather most days of his life. "I am sixty-eight."
"What sort of weather?"
"Rain by six and a wind behind it." Hodge put his hands back under his arms.
***
The mild week had come at the start of February and Dowling had taken it, as he said he would. Six days of it, no frost at night, and the glass had gone in along the whole of the south face and three quarters of the way up the roof, and it had been the best week Ferrers had had since October.
Then Dowling's man Ames had cut his hand that morning and had been sent home, and the last stretch of the roof had been bedded and not faced.
Dowling had said he would come at first light next morning.
"Can it not wait for him?" Cecily had asked Hodge, and could have given the answer herself before it came.
"It can wait for him," Hodge said. "There will be nothing there in the morning but wet meal."
Now the wind had gone round.
Piers was already there when she got down.
He had come straight out of the estate room without changing anything. He had the ladder up against the end of the range, a bucket of putty on the staging, Hodge's knife in his hand, and he had got about four feet along.
"It will not do," Cecily said.
"It will do if it is faced." He said it without coming down off the ladder, and that was as good as telling her to go back indoors.
"I mean, you will not do it alone before dark. There are eleven feet, and you have four fingers of daylight."
Piers looked along the roof and did the sum, and she watched him arrive at the same answer she had.
"Send Hodge for one of the men from the yard," he said.
"The men from the yard are at Netherton until after dark. There is Hodge, who should not be up a ladder at his age. There is Prue, and there is me."
He came down two rungs and looked at her properly for the first time since she had come through the gate.
"You are in a good dress," he said.
"It is an old one."
"It does not look old."
"That," Cecily said, "is because I take care of my things."
He did not answer.
She watched him look down at his own sleeve, at the cuff that had been turned twice and reworked by a man in Devizes, and her own words came back to her a breath after she had said them.
"I did not mean…" she began.
"I know." He was already reaching for the next length of putty.
He said it evenly and went back up the ladder, and it was the first time either of them had said anything about his coat aloud.
The work was harder than she had expected, and colder.
Putty in February is not putty. It comes out of the bucket in a lump with no give in it, and it has to be worked in the hands until it warms and takes the oil back.
Her hands were not strong enough to do it quickly.
She got through the first lump in a quarter of an hour and had raw places along both thumbs by the end of it.
Prue came down with a lantern she had not been asked for, and a pair of her own mittens with the fingers cut out.
"Mrs Tregarth says I am to say she does not approve," Prue said carefully.
"Does she say I am to stop?"
"No, Your Grace. She says the mittens are hers and she wants them back."
Cecily put the mittens on, and they were the most useful thing anybody gave her that afternoon.
Holding the pane came first. Piers taught it without a word of instruction by putting her hands where they were to go and taking his own away.
"Not the edge," he said. "Underneath."
"Why underneath?"
"If you hold it at the edge, you will push it out of the rebate when I press."
"How much pressure?" she asked.
"Enough that it does not move."
"That is not a quantity."
"It is the only one I have," Piers said. "Enough that it does not move and not enough to hear anything."
She heard something on the fourth pane and stopped.
"Was that it?" she asked.
"That was it. It is the sound the rebate makes when you have gone past enough and into too much."
"Is it cracked, or have I only frightened it?"
"Frightened it. You will hear the difference when it is cracked," Piers said, and passed her down the next one, and let the matter lie.
They fell into an order after twenty minutes.
She worked the putty, rolled it and passed it up in lengths, and held the glass while he set it.
He faced the joint and cut it off clean, and Hodge stood at the bottom of the ladder, moved it along every three panes and told them both that the wind was still going round.
"Who put this house up?" she said, somewhere around the seventh pane.
"The glasshouse? My grandmother. Out of her own money, before my father had the place, and against considerable opinion."
"What opinion?"
"That a woman of fifty had no business building anything." He held out his hand for the next length, and she put it into it. "She had grapes off it for thirteen years and gave most of them away, and my father remembered chiefly that it was expensive."
"Did you know her?" Cecily asked.
"She died when I was fourteen. I have her handwriting on the labels and nothing else." He set the pane and took the knife. "I was sent down here in the summers to be out of the way."
Cecily rolled the next length and left a silence, because the weeks in that house had taught her how to get a second sentence out of him, and the method was to leave a space where an exclamation ought to be.
"There was a vine the whole length of the back wall," Piers said presently. "It went in a hard frost, eight winters ago. The house had not thought to keep the cold off it."
Her left arm, held up above her shoulder for a minute at a time, began to complain somewhere about the seventh pane, and by the ninth it had gone from an ache to a shake.
She did not mention it. She had come out to be useful and not to be a difficulty, or so she told herself, though with the glass trembling against her mitten she was less sure which of the two she was being.
At the thirteenth pane Piers came down the ladder, moved it himself, and went up on the other side.
"The light is better this end," he said.
It was not better at that end. It was distinctly worse, and Hodge, who had spent his whole life knowing which end of a glasshouse the light came from, moved the lantern without comment. What was true was that the pane on the other side was carried at waist height on the staging and not overhead.
They disagreed about the fourth pane from the end.
"That is not level," Cecily said mildly.
"It is level."
"It is down at the left. Not much. A quarter of an inch across the pane."
Piers came down two rungs, looked along the line the way a man looked along a gun barrel, and said that it was level.
"Then fetch the string and prove me wrong."
"The string is in the shed," he said, "and it is nearly dark."
"It is on the staging behind the bucket, because I put it there an hour ago in case of this."
He went and got the string, and took his time about coming back with it, and Cecily was careful to be looking at the putty when he did.
He held it along the top of the four panes and looked at it. Then he moved it and looked at it again, and Cecily stood at the bottom of the ladder with her hands full of putty and waited for him to be finished.
"A quarter of an inch," Piers said at last.
"Yes." She did not enlarge upon it.
"At the left." He said the second part more slowly than the first.
Cecily nodded, and went on rolling putty.
"How did you see it?" he asked.
"I have been looking along the top of that line for an hour and a half. You have been looking at the joint six inches from your face."
"That is not an answer about your eye."
"No," Cecily said plainly. "It is an answer about where I was standing."
A little after that, he looked down at her and stopped working.
"What is it?" she said.
"Nothing."
She continued rolling putty; got through the better part of a length, but the knife above her had still not moved.
"What is it?" she asked again.
He came down three rungs, and she looked up. He was looking at her face with an expression she had never seen on him and could not place, but it quickly changed.
"You have put your hand to your cheek," Piers said.
Cecily put her hand to her cheek and took it away grey to the second knuckle.
She rubbed at it with the back of her wrist but made it worse, and she could tell she had made it worse from the length of the pause that followed.
And then he laughed at her.
It was not the thing she had seen twice before, a movement at the corner of his mouth and nothing else. He put his hand on the ladder, put his head down and laughed properly, out loud, in a walled garden in February with eleven feet of glass unfaced and the rain coming.
Cecily was extremely offended, briefly, but she started laughing as well, and then could not stop. Hodge looked at the pair of them from the bottom of the ladder with the expression of a man who had seen most things in a long life but had been surprised by few.
"Your Grace," Hodge said from the foot of the ladder, holding the lantern out at arm's length and looking studiously at the wall. "The wind."
They went back to work.
Cecily kept the other thing to herself. In all her weeks in that house she had never once heard him make that sound inside it.
The light went, and Prue held the lantern up under the last three panes with both arms. The last of the daylight went out of the top of the sky while they were working, and the glass over their heads stopped being glass and became a black surface with a lamp in it.
They finished the last pane a few minutes past five, and the first of the rain came on before Hodge had the bucket off the staging.
He went off with the bucket towards the tool house, at a speed that did not suggest his age. Piers came down the ladder and laid it along the wall out of the wind, and by then it was raining properly.
"Go in," Piers said shortly. "I will bring the lantern."
"You will bring the lantern, the knives and the string and be out here another ten minutes."
"I will be, indeed." He did not argue the point, or move either.
"Then I shall carry the knives, and you may bring the rest of it. We shall both be wet, and it will be quicker."
They ran for the gate.
The path from the glasshouse door to the kitchen garden gate was flagged, and forty feet of it was under the wall where the moss did not dry from November to April, and Cecily went down it faster than she had run anywhere in ten years.
Her right foot went on the wet stone, and it was not a fall. It was three inches of a fall, and it was over before she had finished making the noise, because Piers had her by the forearm.
His hand had come round it entirely, and it was warm.
They stood in the rain at the gate.
"Thank you," Cecily said.
"Yes." It was not an answer to anything, but neither of them appeared to notice.
Then he let go of her arm.
They came into the kitchen passage wet through with putty on their hands, and Mrs Tregarth took one look at the pair of them and sent for hot water but did not permit herself a single word.
Prue was given the mittens back at the kitchen door, with the information that they had been the making of the entire afternoon, and went off along the passage carrying them in both hands and looking as though somebody had given her something.
Cecily sat up on the kitchen table, which she was reasonably sure no duchess of the house had done before her. She had her hands in a basin of water hot enough to hurt, and looked at the grey along the line of her thumbnail but decided against mentioning it to anybody.
Dowling came at first light the morning after and went the whole length of the roof with his thumb on every joint, and found the last stretch faced and the putty holding, and asked Hodge who had done it.
Hodge told him.