Chapter Fifteen
"He has written to Sowerby about the release of the securities," Piers said, and put the letter down on the breakfast table where she could reach it. "He proposes to bring the papers himself on the twenty-fourth."
Cecily read it through twice before she said anything.
"He could send a clerk," she said.
"I do not doubt it."
"Then why does he not?"
"Because he does not want to," Piers said, and went out to the yard.
The letter was four lines long and beautifully written, and there was nothing in it that anybody could have objected to.
Mr Ellis Pike presented his compliments, understood that certain formal releases remained outstanding upon the redeemed securities, and would be happy to wait upon His Grace at any hour convenient to the house.
Cecily read it a third time and could not find the thing that was wrong with it. She folded it along its own crease and put it under the edge of her plate, which was not where a letter with nothing wrong in it needed to go.
They asked him to dinner because there was nothing else to be done.
Piers said so at breakfast, and Mrs Tregarth said that there had better be others, and there was no arguing with that either. A man alone at a table with three people could be looked at. A man among nine could not.
So, certain people had come: the Marleighs, Mr Blythe, and Mrs Ollerton, who was at Ferrers for a fortnight and whom Cecily had not once regretted asking, and a Mr Whitlock who farmed his own land at Chalke and talked about nothing else.
Cecily spent the two days before it doing what she had done before every difficult dinner at Frayne House since she was nineteen.
She fixed the seating first and let everything else arrange itself round it.
Pike went between Mrs Ollerton and Mr Whitlock, at the far end, with his back to the window, and her pencil stopped over his name once she had put it there.
She was arranging a room against one man, and he would see it within a minute.
Ellis Pike arrived in the middle of the afternoon.
He had not altered in two years. He was a compact, unhurried man of about fifty in excellent plain clothes, and he came into the hall at Ferrers, looked at the arch at the south end for just as long as it deserved, and turned to Cecily first.
"Your Grace," he said, and bowed.
"Mr Pike." She gave him her hand, because there was no reason not to.
"I hope you will allow me to say that I am glad to see you well."
There it was, before he had got his gloves off. A sentence entirely proper, that nobody in the hall could have objected to, but that meant I asked for you and you refused me and here we both are.
"Thank you," Cecily said.
The business took forty minutes in the estate room, and she sat through all of it.
Pike went at it in a way that took Sowerby by surprise.
He produced the releases, a schedule of the securities, and the memorandum from Cargill and Membury.
He went through each one with Sowerby in a flat, exact voice that had nothing offensive in it anywhere.
Twice he corrected his own clerk's arithmetic.
Once he pointed out an error that was against himself and cost him nine pounds, and mended it without being asked, and without making any observation.
Cecily watched him do it. He was extremely good at this, and the nine pounds had been spent on purpose, in front of her.
"You will want the schedule read," Pike said to Sowerby. "Ferrers, Bramshaw, Chalke Coombe, the four at Netherton, and the strips beyond the mill."
"That is the security as it stood," Sowerby said cautiously.
"Just so." Pike drew a line under it with a flat pencil. "Nothing else was ever charged under the mortgage."
Sowerby wrote something down in his own book. Cecily, at the window side, had the sense of a sentence having gone past her at a slightly different speed from the rest of them, and could not for the life of her have said which one.
"That completes it, I think," Pike said, and squared the papers. "Your Grace holds Ferrers unencumbered."
Piers said that he was obliged to him.
"Not at all. It has been a satisfactory business throughout." Pike put his pen away. "I have held that paper for eight years and I never once expected to see it redeemed. I had made other arrangements."
None of them asked what they had been.
He was charming at dinner to everybody, and that was harder than charm aimed at one person.
Every so often he put something on the table and left it there.
"The house looks remarkably revived," he said, over the fish. "I came here once in the sixth duke's time. There was a want of paint about the place."
"There is a want of paint about it still," Cecily said. "We have made a list."
"A list." Pike smiled at that. "Marchbank money has always had a talent for building."
Down the table, Piers put his glass on the cloth, and then he moved his knife a half inch until it lay square with the edge of the place.
Cecily kept her eyes on Pike. She had the whole of it anyway, from six feet off, in the corner of her eye, what the knife meant and roughly what it was costing him, and the pleasure it gave her was not a nice one.
It sat somewhere under the ribs and was closer to ownership than she cared to examine at a dinner table. There was a thing about her husband in her keeping that Ellis Pike, the cleverest man at that table, did not have and would have paid for.
"My grandfather built four mills," she said, "and a Sunday school, and a road. If it is a talent, I hope it is a heritable one."
"I am sure of it," said Pike. "Your grandfather and I had one piece of business together, years ago. He was the hardest man I have ever sat opposite, and he was straight with me from first to last, which I have not often had from a gentleman."
"He would have said the same of you, I expect."
"He said rather less than that of me," Pike said, and turned to Mrs Ollerton about the Bolton trade, and that was the end of it.
The gentlemen were an hour over the wine.
Cecily gave Kitty the tea and listened to Lady Marleigh on the subject of her eldest son, and counted, as she always did at such times, the people she had not yet spoken to. There were two, and they were the two who mattered.
Late in the evening Mrs Ollerton discovered that she had left her spectacles in the estate room, and Cecily went for them herself rather than send Prue, because Prue would not have known which of four pairs was meant.
The shortest way back was along the passage past the dining room.
The door had not been shut. It stood open about a hand's breadth, and there were five men in there, but one of them was talking.
"And I would give a fair price for it," Pike was saying. "I am not proposing to haggle with you across your own table."
"No," Piers said.
"You have not heard the figure."
"It is not a question of the figure."
A brief silence fell; Sir John Marleigh laughed at something, and somebody moved a chair.
"Then I shall not press it," Pike said agreeably. "I had understood Your Grace's interest in that particular ground to be somewhat qualified. I am glad to be corrected."
"What do you mean by qualified?"
"Nothing in the world, and it is doubtless already among your own papers somewhere. I would not presume to instruct a man about his own property." The decanter went round. "Mr Whitlock, you were saying about the beans."
Cecily went on down the passage with the spectacles in her hand.
She had heard perhaps forty words but could make nothing of them. A man had offered to buy something and had been refused. He had said something civil about papers, and the exchange was over before she had crossed to the drawing room door.
She put it away because there was nowhere to put it.
When the door opened, the party had rearranged itself. Mr Whitlock came through still talking. Mr Blythe had gone rather red, and Sir John Marleigh made straight for the fire.
Piers came in last and was pleasant to everybody for the remainder of the evening but heard not one word that anybody said to him.
Pike sat down beside Mrs Ollerton and was excellent company.
Somewhere near the end of the evening he said, to nobody in particular and without any weight at all, that it was a pleasure to see a man grow sentimental about a piece of land at the precise moment somebody else took up the cost of holding it.
Sir John Marleigh laughed, because it sounded like a jest.
Piers turned round from the window and said that the Bramshaw side had been in the family since the fifth Henry, and that sentiment was probably the correct word for it.
They left after midnight.
Cecily stayed in the hall and watched the last carriage go down between the limes, and it was raining again.
Mrs Ollerton stayed a quarter of an hour after Kitty had gone up, on the excuse of her workbag.
"Well," she said.
Cecily sat down opposite her and waited.
"I have known that man's sort for thirty years, and I will tell you the difficulty with him.
There is nothing to take hold of." She put the spectacles into the bag.
"He was courteous the whole evening and accurate.
He gave money back that nobody would have missed.
If you complained of him tomorrow to any person in this county, they'd think you unwell. "
"I am aware of it," Cecily said wearily.
"Then be aware of this as well. He came here with a clerk's errand and did it himself. He drove fifty miles in February to do it, and no man does that for a release." Mrs Ollerton stood up. "He came to be in the room."
She went up, and the house began putting itself away, while the rain got heavier.
Piers came out of the drawing room with a candle.
"You wanted to strike him," Cecily said.
"No." He kept walking.
"You straightened three pieces of cutlery."
Piers stopped where he was, halfway across the hall.
He looked at her for a length of time that would have been rude in company, and she stood and let him.
"Three?" he asked.
"The knife at the fish. The spoon when he said the thing about the paint. And your own fork at about half past nine. I could not account for that one, so I have assumed something was said over the wine."
He did not answer at once, but it was not one of the silences she had learnt to read.
"I am beginning to know you," Cecily said gently.
Piers looked at the candle in his own hand.
"Yes," he said.
"Did he get what he came for?"
"No," Piers said flatly.
"Then it was a wasted journey, and he can drive back to Bristol in the rain." She took her own candle off the table. "Good night, Your Grace."
"Cecily." He had not moved from the middle of the hall.
She stopped at the foot of the stairs. It was the fourth time he had used it since October. She had counted each one; a foolish thing to do, but she did it anyway.
"Yes?" she said.
He stood there in his own hall with the candle in his hand, and the sentence, whatever it would be, did not come.
"Nothing," he said at last. "It will keep until the morning."
"Very well."
She reached her bedchamber and stood with her hand on the door.
Then she thought about the third fork, and that whatever had been said over the wine had not been about paint.
She would ask him in the morning.
In the morning Sowerby came up before breakfast with the insurance office at Salisbury wanting a valuation of the stables. Piers went out to Netherton early and did not come back until dark, and by then there were other things to talk about, and she did not ask him after all.