Chapter Seventeen
"I trust you slept," Piers said, and put the coffee pot back down on the tray with more care than a coffee pot required.
Cecily had been married four months and had never in that time heard him produce a sentence so empty.
"Tolerably," she said. "And you?"
"Very well, thank you."
"The wind got up at about two."
"I did not hear it," he said without emphasis, and reached for the toast he had already buttered.
He had heard it. He had been awake at two in the morning, had shaved himself badly, and he was sitting eight feet away, being courteous to her about the weather.
It was the first of March, and the sun was out for the first time in three weeks. Cecily put down her cup.
She had spent an hour before breakfast deciding what to do about the morning and had arrived at the only conclusion available. A man who had told you the worst thing about himself would spend the following days retreating from it at speed, unless somebody stood in the road.
"Come to the glasshouse," she said.
"I have the Netherton figures."
"You had the Netherton figures three days ago, and you have not opened them since." She stood up, and the next sentence was harder to get out. "Come to the glasshouse. It is a quarter of an hour. It is not raining, and Dowling wants to know about the door."
He looked at the coffee pot rather than at her. She could read his pauses by now, the short civil ones and the longer ones that were arithmetic, and this one had nothing in it except a man who did not want to go and could not think of a reason.
"Very well," Piers said.
She wore the new cloak down. Prue had brought it up, and had hung it on the back of the bedroom door without one word about where it had been.
She had not intended anything by wearing it. It was the warmest thing in the house, and the frost was still on the north side of the wall.
Piers made no remark upon it. He looked at it twice on the way down; she counted both, and was glad of both.
The glasshouse in March with the sun on it was a different building.
The staging had been scrubbed down twice. The iron was black and new. The beds had been dug over by Hodge and a boy from the yard, and the place smelled of warm earth, paint and putty. The hundred and ten feet of it had a ringing brightness that made her stop just inside the door.
"It is finished," she said.
"The door is not finished."
"The door has never been finished," Cecily said. "I doubt it was finished the day they hung it."
In January it had been a ruin with the sky in it. What she was standing in now was a working house, and the only thing wanting along the length of it was something green.
Dowling was at the far end on his knees with a chisel, but he got up when they came in and said that the sill was in, the door would shut by the end of the week, and asked whether Her Grace wanted the bolt put back or a proper lock.
"The bolt," she said.
"It will want lifting still, Your Grace."
"Then I shall lift it," Cecily said. "I am not going to be the person who locked the glasshouse."
Hodge came in from the kitchen garden and stood at the second bay looking at the ground.
"Your Grace," he said, to Piers. "The middle bed. Do I set it out to the old marks or bring it forward two feet for the path?"
Piers did not look up from the door. "Ask the Duchess," he said. "It is her glasshouse."
Hodge turned round and asked her the same question in the same words, having been in service for years and knowing better than to improve on an instruction.
Cecily stood in the middle of a building she had paid for out of the only money in the world that was entirely hers, and heard her husband say four words to a gardener without thinking about them, and the answer did not come at once.
"Bring it forward two feet," she said. "I would rather have the path."
Hodge put the stake in where she told him, stood on it, and went away for the line, and that was the middle bed settled for the next forty years.
They went down to the river afterwards. The water was up from the February rain and running dirty, and the strip on the far side was eleven acres of tired grass with a hazel hedge along the road, and the two ash trees at Netherton were showing at the top of the rise.
"Did you always want Ferrers?" she asked.
"No." He said it to the water, flat and quick, like a thing that had been waiting some years to be let out.
Cecily waited him out.
"That is not the answer people expect," Piers said, "but I have given them the other one at nine dinner tables."
"It was always going to be yours."
"It was always going to be mine. That is the objection." He put his hands behind his back. "I was to have nine hundred acres and a chapel full of my own name for no reason except the order I was born in, and there was nothing in that a boy of fourteen could take any pleasure in."
"Most boys of fourteen manage it," she said drily.
"Most boys of fourteen have not been told about it every week of their lives since they were six."
Cecily let the river run past them a little.
"Then what did you want?"
"A ship." He did not turn his head, but the word had come too quickly for a man considering the question for the first time.
"You wanted to go to sea?"
"Certainly not," Piers said promptly. "I wanted to own one." There was no embarrassment in it anywhere. "There was a Bristol merchant in the house that summer with four of them, and he talked about the third one all through dinner."
"And?" she asked.
"And I thought it was the finest thing I had ever heard of. A thing you own that goes away, and comes back, and has something in it that was not there before."
"That is much more ducal."
"It is a great deal more ducal," Piers said, "and it is what a boy wants who has been handed the whole of his future before he has done anything to earn any of it."
He came within an inch of smiling. She saw it get as far as the corner of his mouth and then get put away, and she had stopped expecting anything further.
"And you?" Piers said.
"Me?" The question had not been meant to come back to her.
"What did you want at fourteen?"
"A garden." Her hand had gone to the edge of the cloak and stopped there, holding it shut against a wind that had dropped an hour ago.
She had answered without thinking, because it was true, and it came out barer than she had intended.
"My mother had one," she said. "At Kelby. It was not large. There was a wall on two sides and a slope down to a hedge. She was out in it every day of the year that it was possible to be out in it, and I went with her from about the age of five."
He did not fill the silence up, and she could have thanked him for it.
"And your father sold the property," he said.
"He did."
"Did she know it was coming?"
"She had nine months' notice and never spoke of it to me, because there was no purpose in two of us being unable to sleep.
" Cecily watched a stick go down the middle of the river.
"In the last week she went round the whole of it and took seed off anything that had any to give. All of it. There is a tin."
"I have seen it," he said. "It is on your desk."
"It has been on my desk since January and in a travelling case for ten years before that, but I have never had the lid off it."
She said the next part quickly. "She meant to plant it in the next garden, but there was never a next garden. There were lodgings three times over, and a house at Wantage that belonged to my cousin, but she died before she had a chance to do it."
The water went past, brown and fast, and neither of them spoke while a branch came down from the bend and went under the bank.
"You shall have one," Piers said.
Cecily went stiff all over, from the shoulders down, and she could no more have prevented it than she could have prevented a sneeze, and she was ashamed of it, but it happened anyway.
Because that was her father's sentence, delivered in his cadence and with all his confidence, and she had heard it about a garden, a season, a house at Wantage and a pony, and not one of them had ever arrived.
Piers saw it happen. He was three feet away and looking straight at her.
She watched him work backwards through his own words at considerable speed, and arrive.
"That was badly said," he said.
"It was kindly meant."
"It was badly said." He looked at the ground.
"If you want a garden, there is ground. There is the south side of the wall.
It has been under grass since before my father died and is doing nothing, and there is whatever else you like.
It is not mine to give you. It is there, and you may have the use of it. "
Cecily turned her head to him.
He had made a promise, and heard it land wrong, so he had put it back together as a fact instead of a gift. Her father had never once in twenty-six years amended a sentence.
"Yes," she said, and found she had nothing else to add.
She could not afterwards say which of them moved, and she was ordinarily a woman who could account for the sequence of a thing.
She had been looking up at him, and he had been looking down at her, and the space between them had been closing without either of them attending to it, and then there was no space at all, and he kissed her.
It did not last long.
There was nothing practised in it anywhere, and nothing of a question either. His hand came up as far as her jaw, stopped a half inch short and rested at the edge of the hood instead.
Then he stepped back from her, first and quickly, and Cecily could have written out what was happening in his head. He had gone back through the last three minutes and asked himself whether he had taken something from a woman who had already given him a house.
"You think remarkably badly of yourself," she said.
"That has recently been suggested."
She let that go.
They stood there a little longer, and the river went on doing what the river did.
"The ditching men come next week," Piers said.
"Sowerby told me."
"Yes," he said, and studied the far bank, where there was nothing to study.
They walked back up by the water meadow and along the front of the kitchen garden, but at the gate, he stopped.
"The south side of the wall," he said. "There is a well in the corner of it that has not been used since I was a boy. It will want the rope and a bucket. That is all it will want."
Then he went off towards the estate room, because Sowerby was there and would be waiting, and Cecily stood at the gate before she followed.