Chapter Eighteen
In the first week of March, Piers asked his wife four questions he would not have put to her in January.
Whether the ditching men should go to the leat first or the Netherton walls.
Whether Coles was to have his rent forgiven or spread.
Whether the Purnell roof wanted slate or reed, on which the parish had opinions.
And whether Kitty ought to be told the figure for her season before Lady Day or after it.
The Coles question took them the better part of an evening.
"Forgive it," Cecily said flatly, without looking up from the quarter's rental.
"He put wheat in that ground twice after being told," Piers said. "Once by me and once by Sowerby with a chain in his hand."
"I am aware of what he put in it. What is he this quarter?"
"Nineteen pounds behind, and nine of it carried from Michaelmas."
"And if you spread it over four quarters he will be behind for a year and will know it every day," she said, "and he will put wheat in that field again in the spring to make it up."
Piers looked up at her.
"That is precisely what he will do."
"Then forgive the nineteen and tell him it is forgiven because the top nine acres will not carry wheat, and that you will forgive nothing else on that ground while he is alive." She turned a page. "He will believe the second half because you have given him the first."
"And if he does it anyway, and comes to me at Michaelmas with the same face?"
"Then he is not a man who can be reached, and you have spent nineteen pounds finding out," Cecily said, "which is cheap."
He asked all four before deciding rather than after, and only noticed that he had done so when Sowerby put a paper in front of him one afternoon and he heard himself say that he would speak to Her Grace about it in the morning.
Nothing very much happened that month and Piers could not afterwards account for any of it.
There was no scene of any kind. What there was, through the whole of that month, was a series of ordinary mornings in which two people who had been civil to one another for four months began, without arranging it, to be comfortable instead.
She came into the estate room without knocking, which she had not done once since the wedding and then did four times in ten days.
He stopped going out to the yard when she mentioned the settlement, and one morning he stayed and answered a question about the trustees that he would have walked away from in December.
Twice in one week she told him things that had no bearing on Ferrers.
Once it was that Mrs Ollerton had gone home to Manchester and that the house was worse for it.
The second time, at the end of a long evening about the leat, she said that she had not slept properly for the first fortnight after the wedding, and that she had counted the panes in her own window instead, and that there were sixty-three.
"Sixty-four," Piers said.
She put down her pen. "I counted them a dozen times. Sixty-three."
"One of them is behind the shutter on the left," he said, "and you will not have counted it, because nobody does."
"Then I shall count them again."
"Do," he said, and went back to the leat.
She counted them again that night, and came down the following morning and said that he was right and that she disliked it, and Piers had been waiting to be told since before he was dressed.
He did not tell her how he knew. He had been ill in that room at nine years old, a fortnight in bed, and had counted the panes on the second afternoon and had nothing else to do with the rest of it.
The shoes came the following week.
She had worn out a pair in six weeks going down to the glasshouse twice a day across wet grass, and Tolley had brought three pairs up from Devizes on approval, and Piers came through the hall while they were on the table.
Cecily had her hand on the plainest of them. She had said, coming in, that she had already decided, and her hand went on resting there without picking them up.
"Those," he said, and nodded at the sturdier pair, the middle one, with a double sole and a proper welt.
She looked at them and then at him. "They cost more."
"They do," Piers said.
"You object to unnecessary expense."
"They will last longer. They will not let water in at the seam, which those will do by the end of April."
She looked at him with the particular expression she used on Sowerby's estimates.
"Is that the reason?" she asked.
"It is a reason."
"Is it the reason?"
He opened his mouth to say that it was, and shut it again. "No," he said.
"What is?" She waited.
He had walked into it himself.
"You walk too much," he said.
Cecily took her time over the answer. "I do."
"Down that path many times a day at this time of year. The grass does not dry until noon, and it will not dry at all for another month, and thin soles in wet grass will have you in bed for a fortnight."
"And you would rather I were not."
"I would rather not," he said quietly, and left it there.
She let that stand and did not decorate it, and Tolley, who had stood through it with the discretion of four years, remembered something requiring his attention in his own bag.
"Then I shall have the middle pair," she said. "Thank you."
He paid for them out of his own allowance and told Tolley to send the account to him privately, and Cecily either did not notice or decided not to say so, and let him do it.
She had not said that she could buy her own shoes, or that she had three thousand of her own, or that a man who would not have a new coat had no business buying anybody boots, which would have been the truest of the three.
She had said thank you and gone down to the glasshouse in them.
The month went on being unremarkable.
The ditching men came and the leat was finished four days inside Sowerby's estimate, and the Netherton walls were begun. Dowling hung the glasshouse door and it shut, and Hodge stood looking at it a long while.
Piers went down because Hodge had sent up about the outside beds, and found the old man leaning on a spade in the middle of the new path.
"She has been down three times today," Hodge said heavily.
"I am aware of it."
"Twice before eight." Hodge turned the spade over. "Your Grace, I have worked for four of you now, counting your grandmother, and I will say one thing, and then I am done."
"Say it, and then go back to the beds," Piers said, "because we are doing nothing useful standing in this path."
"Your grandmother came down here at seven in the morning for thirteen years, and it did not do her any harm at all," Hodge said mildly. "That is the thing."
Piers looked at the door that shut.
"Thank you," he said.
"I have not said anything at all, Your Grace."
"No," said Piers. "You have not."
Kitty came in that evening and sat down on the arm of the chair. She had said at dinner that she would have it out with him straight off, and then sat turning the button on the chair arm and was quiet for longer than he had ever known her.
"I have said a thing to Cecily and I do not know whether it was well done," she said at last.
"Then tell me the thing."
"I told her that I hated the marriage in October." Kitty was looking at the window. "Not her. I did not know her. The marriage."
Piers put down his pen.
"Go on," he said.
"I told her I had spent the whole winter being ashamed of a season I believed she was buying for me, and that when you both explained the rents in January it was worse for a fortnight and not better, because it meant I had been ungracious about a thing that had not even happened.
" The button came half off in her fingers, and she pressed it back.
"I have been carrying that about since January. "
"What did she say to that?" The pen stayed where he had put it.
"She told me to wear ugly gowns."
Piers put down the pen he had only just picked up.
"And I laughed," Kitty said, "and then I could not stop, and had to go and stand in the passage so that nobody should see me do it."
"That was well done," he said, "and I do not say so often, and you may have it in writing if you like."
"Which of us do you mean?"
"Both of you," Piers said. "Chiefly you."
Kitty got off the arm of the chair, having sat on it for the whole conversation without being told not to, and went to the door.
"This family did not say a single true thing to me before Christmas," she said crossly. "Now there are two of you at it, and I am quite tired."
The household arranged itself around the two of them that month without anybody proposing it.
Mrs Tregarth stopped coming to him about anything that was not a wall or a chimney.
She went to Cecily about the linen, the wages and the girl from Netherton who wanted a place, and she did it without ceremony.
One morning she came into the estate room while both of them were in it, put a question to the room in general, and took her answer from whichever of them spoke first.
Sowerby began leaving things in two places.
He had done it for a fortnight before Piers noticed. The week's papers went on the estate room table as they always had, and a second set of the same figures, written out fair, went on to the end of Cecily's desk in the morning room, next to his own private ledger.
Piers went in one afternoon for the tithe map and stood looking at the arrangement of that desk, and the tithe map went out of his head.
There was a ledger on it, a run of figures in Sowerby's hand, a seed catalogue from Bristol with the corner torn off, and her own book shut on top of the wages. At the back of the whole arrangement, black, with the rubbed yellow flowers on the lid, stood the japanned tin.
He came in at the end of the month to leave the Netherton account where she would find it.
The tin was open on the desk in front of the window, where the light was.
There were four or five squares of paper laid out in a row with seed on them, and a sixth had been folded and put aside. Some of what was on the papers had gone dark and light as a husk and would not have grown in a hothouse in July.
Piers stood at the desk with the Netherton account in his hand and looked at the papers. His hand went out towards the folded one but stopped. He put the account down at the other end of the desk where it would not disturb anything, and went out.
He went back an hour later because he had forgotten to say which figures were provisional.
The tin was shut and back at the rear of the desk where it lived.
The lid was on it, the papers were gone, and the desk was as it always was. Cecily was in the chair by the window with her own book open, working through the wages, and she looked up and asked whether the leat figures were the corrected ones.
"They are," he said. "The two at the foot are provisional until the audit."
"Then I shall not enter them."
"No," he said.