Chapter Fourteen
Piers stood in the stable yard one morning in February with no reason to be standing there, watching two rooks going at a stick that neither of them wanted, and the mill leat did not once cross his mind.
It happened more than once that week. He came round the corner of the kitchen garden and found himself looking at the glasshouse, glazed now and empty, with a stove in it that had not yet been lit.
There had been two years, in which every object at Ferrers was a question with a figure attached to it, and he had got so used to reading the house that way that he had forgotten there was another.
***
Dowling lit the stove for the first time to prove the flue, and Piers went down that afternoon because Hodge had sent word that it drew.
The old man was standing in the middle of a hundred and ten feet of glass with his hat off.
"It draws, Your Grace," he said.
"So I am told," Piers said.
"Come and feel." Hodge kept his hand on the pipe, eighteen inches above the floor, and Piers came and put his beside it. It was warm, and forty feet down the range the air had begun moving along the staging.
"It has not drawn for years. I told the sixth duke the brickwork wanted taking down and he said we should see about it in the spring." Hodge put his hat back on. "That was the spring the pipes went."
"I know what happened to the pipes," Piers said.
"Indeed, Your Grace." Hodge looked up at the roof. "She has had it done properly. There is no want of anything in here now but plants."
Piers stayed on in the warm after the old man had gone, and kept his hand on the pipe until it was nearly too hot to hold.
He found the book on the table in the small drawing room, face down and open at the last page.
Piers turned it over. It was a novel in three volumes; this was the third, and the mark was in the first forty pages.
Cecily came in behind him with the seed catalogues she had sent to Bristol for.
"You have read the last page," he said.
"I have." She put the catalogues down on the sofa.
"And not the first?"
"I have read the first forty," she replied. "That is where the mark is."
"Then you have read the last page," Piers said, "and you are forty pages into the book."
"That is what I said." She held out her hand for it, and he kept hold of it.
Piers stood there holding the third volume of somebody else's novel and could not think of a single thing to do with it.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because I dislike uncertainty."
"That defeats the purpose of the thing entirely."
"Only if the purpose is anxiety," Cecily said, and took the book out of his hand and put it back face down where it had been.
He thought about that for the rest of the morning, and for longer than he would have admitted to anybody.
He had assumed she read the ending first out of impatience. It had not crossed his mind, until that morning, that a person might find not knowing how a thing came out actively unpleasant.
A person who reads the end of a book before she begins it has been taught, by somebody, that endings arrive whether you are ready or not, and that it is better to have the worst of it in hand early. He had a fair idea who had taught her, and that it had not been done on purpose.
They went round the Bramshaw side that week because she had asked to see it, and he found halfway through the morning that he had been talking for forty minutes.
"That is Coles," he said. "Sixty acres, and the top nine of it will not grow wheat and never has. His father put barley in it for thirty years, and Coles put wheat in it twice out of pride and lost both."
"Does he know it will not?"
"He knows now."
"Since when?" Cecily asked.
"Since June, when the last of it went down, and he stood at the gate and told me the season had been against him."
"And what will you do about it?"
"Nothing. He is fifty-one, and he has been proved wrong twice, and a third time will not improve him.
" Piers turned the mare at the gate. "I put Sowerby to walk the top nine acres with him two summers ago and pace it out, and Coles agreed with everything and put wheat in it again the following spring. "
"Then he does believe Sowerby," she said.
"He does not believe anybody who has not lost money in that field himself."
They went along the lane, and he gave her the next one, and the one after.
At Ford's he mentioned that the second girl there had a weakness of the lungs and had been sent to her aunt at Poole for the winter two years running, and that it had helped both times.
Cecily looked at the cottage rather than at him.
"What is the aunt's name?" she said.
"I have no idea," Piers said shortly.
"Not even the name?"
"I could not tell you the name of anybody's aunt in this county."
"You know the child has weak lungs and goes to Poole."
"Yes," he said.
She let it go at that, and they came back by the water meadow, and she asked about the leat. She said that she had read the estimate twice and that it was the only paper Sowerby had ever handed her with nothing in it to argue about.
The small things accumulated that month without anybody arranging them.
One evening, apropos of nothing, she mentioned that she could always tell when he was angry because he began putting things straight, and that she had first seen him do it on a mantelpiece in Berkshire before she had any idea what it meant.
Piers put down the pen he had just squared against the edge of the blotter.
"I was not aware of it," he said.
"No. That is rather the point of it."
She went out with the seed papers under her arm, and he sat on with the pen where he had put it down, and left it there.
Kitty came into the estate room with a list, ruled at the left margin, in her own hand, and plainly carried about for two days.
"Tolley wants an answer about the sleeves, but I do not know what to tell him, and I would rather not ask Cecily because she will only say it is my money and my arm."
"It is your money and your arm," Piers said.
"You are both impossible," Kitty said crossly and put the list on the table. "There is a second thing. She has asked me to come to the assembly in April."
"You always came to the assembly."
"I was always going to be taken to the assembly," Kitty said. "She has asked me to come with her. There is a difference, and I have not decided what it is."
Piers looked at the list. It had fourteen items and a figure against each one, written by somebody who had lately been shown how.
"Say yes," he said.
"I have already said yes."
***
The rings came a few days after that.
She took them off while she was working, and put them down wherever her hand happened to be, and then forgot where that was.
He found them on the ledge of the estate room window, both of them, with the wedding ring inside the other one.
Piers stood and looked at them.
Then he took them along to her desk in the morning room and put them beside the inkstand, where she would find them without having to ask anybody, and went away.
He did it again a few days later, off the corner of the kitchen table, beside a basin and a pile of seed papers.
The second time it occurred to him, going along the passage with two rings in his hand, that he could not possibly explain to a third party how he came to know where she would look for them, and that he would very much rather not be asked.
The letter came at the end of the week.
He was in the hall when the post was brought in, and he saw the hand on it. He had seen it often enough since October to know it the way one knew a particular knock.
Cecily took it, and read it standing by the hall table with her thumb along the fold.
He could see the top four lines of it from where he stood, and they were the sort of lines Frayne wrote.
My dearest girl, I have this morning accepted for the county assembly on the twenty-second and shall come to you on the eighteenth, and I do not scruple to tell you that I look forward to it more than anything these two years.
You will forgive a father a little satisfaction.
There is a great deal of talk here and every word of it beautiful.
She folded it and put it into her pocket.
"Anything wanting an answer?" he asked.
"No." She was already turning for the stairs, and went up.
Piers had got as far as the estate room door when he heard it from the bottom of the flight, under her breath, half a landing up.
"Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven."
He came back into the hall, which he could not afterwards account for, since a man who wished to be discreet did not walk towards the thing he was being discreet about.
"Was the letter from your father?" he asked.
Cecily stopped at the top of the stairs and put her hand flat on the rail.
She said nothing at first, and he stood at the bottom in the half dark, and by the time she turned round he had heard his own question.
"How did you know?" she said quietly.
He looked at the stairs.
"The hand on the cover," he said.
Cecily looked down at him, and her hand moved on the rail and settled again.
"Rufus writes to tell me he is coming in April," she said. "For the assembly. He has taken it upon himself to be delighted for me at some length."
"Do you want him here?"
"No." She said it at once, and then her hand went to the pocket where the letter was and stayed there.
"Then he shall stay at the Marleighs'," Piers said.
"He will not stay at the Marleighs'. He will stay here, and be charming to Kitty, and tell everybody at the assembly that he arranged it." She turned to go up. "There is nothing to be done about my father. There never has been. I have only ever managed the weather round him."
"You could refuse him the house."
"And then it would be a quarrel, and a quarrel is a thing he can tell people about." She got two more stairs and stopped again. "Your Grace."
"Yes," he said, and waited.
"Thank you for asking whether I wanted him."
She left before he could arrange anything to say to that, and Piers stood in the hall afterwards with the post still in his hand.
Nobody had asked her, apparently, in twenty-six years.
He went back into the estate room and worked until the light went.