Chapter Nineteen
"I have a thing here that I would rather not have," Sowerby said, and put the paper on the desk with both hands, the way a man put down something he had been carrying for twenty miles.
It was the ninth of April, and it had been raining for three days.
"What is it?" She had a pen in her hand and kept hold of it.
"An office copy. From the registry at Salisbury." He did not sit down. "I commissioned a search after Mr Pike's visit in February. On my own account, Your Grace, out of my own pocket, and I told nobody."
Cecily looked up at him properly for the first time.
"His Grace ordered a search of his own," she said. "He told you so. Trescott and Rudge."
"He did, Your Grace, and he has not had his answer. Mine came first." Sowerby's hands found each other behind his back. "I have brought it to you and not to him, and I will say why if you ask me."
"I am asking."
"Because His Grace has not read a paper I have put in front of him since February," Sowerby said carefully. "He signs them, but that is a different thing."
The pen went down then.
"Why did you tell nobody?" Cecily asked.
"Because I have been wrong once about what is on the books of this estate, and I did not intend to be wrong twice."
"And if it had come back empty?" she asked.
"I should have burned it and never mentioned it."
"You did not burn it," Cecily said.
"No, Your Grace. I have been carrying it about instead." He looked at the paper rather than at her. "It has come back with a bond on it."
She read it standing, because she had got up when he came in and had not thought to sit down again.
It was two sheets, engrossed, with the registry's endorsement in the corner and a clerk's copying hand that had never once wavered.
A bond, dated the fourteenth of November in the year six, granted by Rupert Chaloner, sixth Duke of Havering, for three thousand pounds.
Secured by a charge upon eleven acres of pasture on the north bank of the river at Ferrers, together with the fishing and the hedge, being the parcel known as the riverside strip.
There was no annual payment reserved, and the principal was repayable upon demand of the obligee.
The obligee was Ellis Pike.
"Three thousand," she said, and heard how flat it came out, and let it stand.
"Three, Your Grace. On demand."
"And it has stood since the year six." She turned the sheet to the light, though the hand wanted no help.
"Since the November of that year, Your Grace. Eight years and five months."
Cecily read it a second time and then a third.
Then she put it down on the desk beside Sowerby's ledger and the japanned tin, and sat with her hands in her lap.
"It was not in the redemption," she said.
"No part of it, Your Grace. The redemption discharged the mortgage, and the mortgage alone, and that instrument on your desk was never inside it."
"The strip is not on the mortgage schedule. Mr Pike read the schedule out in this house in February, and it was not on it."
"It was never on it," Sowerby said. "The mortgagee's security did not touch that ground, so the late duke could charge it separately without anybody's leave. And the conveyancers who did the title for the redemption searched the land that carried the forty thousand."
"And nobody searched the strip."
"There was no reason on earth to search it, Your Grace."
"Except that a man offered to buy it. In February, at that table." She kept her voice level. "And said that His Grace's interest in it was somewhat qualified."
Sowerby's head came up off the paper.
"I did not know you had that, Your Grace."
"I had four words of it through a door, and I could not make anything of them," Cecily said. "I can now."
He went to the door and stopped there, with his hat in both hands.
"What is to be done about it?" he asked.
"Nothing today," she said.
"Your Grace." He did not move.
"Mr Sowerby. How long would three thousand take out of the Ferrers rents?"
He did not have to think about it. "Two years, with nothing else touched."
"And if he calls it in tomorrow morning?"
"Then it is eleven acres, the fishing, and the north bank with it."
"Then why has he not? He has held it nine years and never sent a man to look at the hedge."
"Because a creditor who wants his money inspects the security, Your Grace, and this one never has." Sowerby turned his hat over once. "He was not keeping a debt alive. He was keeping a door open, and he has stood outside it for nine years waiting for somebody to want something."
She did not answer that, and he went on more quietly, to the hat rather than to her.
"I would not have brought it if I did not think you would rather have it."
"I would rather have it," Cecily said. "You were right to pay for it, and you will not be out of pocket by the week's end."
She sent him away and sat a long while with the two sheets in front of her.
Her third condition was the one she could have written out from memory in the dark, because she had drafted it at that table in October in her own hand with three men waiting.
Third. Every debt subsisting against the estate or against the Duke of Havering personally to be declared in writing before the marriage.
And she had not left it there, because she was not a fool and had never been one.
She had required a certificate from the holder.
She had said I want that written out loud in front of Loxley, Sowerby and her husband, and her husband had agreed, had pushed the box an inch across the table and told Loxley to write to Bristol.
The certificate had come back on good paper over a clerk's signature.
No further claim subsists under the mortgage.
She had read it twice. Loxley had read it once. Sowerby had read it twice and put it in the box.
Four words at the end of it had been doing all the work, and not one of the four of them had seen it. Ellis Pike had sat at her own dinner table and said the same thing again in the same shape, and she had noticed a sentence go past at a different speed and had not been able to say which one.
Cecily sat in the morning room with the rain going along the window and was extremely calm.
She had been extremely calm on the morning Mr Loxley said forty thousand, and on the afternoon her father told her that everybody was to be paid.
It was not composure. It was arithmetic running on ahead while the rest of her waited to be told the answer.
There was a debt on Ferrers’ land. It had been there nine years. It had not been declared before the wedding, and it was held by the one man in England who had asked for her and had been refused.
Pike came at two o'clock.
He was not expected. There had been no letter, and no clerk sent forward, and Mrs Tregarth had twenty minutes to get a fire into the estate room and did it.
He was civil, and he had driven from Bristol in the wet for the second time in weeks. Cecily heard the carriage from the morning room but stayed where she was.
Later in the afternoon she went along to the estate room for the tithe map.
The estate room door was shut, but the passage door at the end of it was not, and there were two men on the other side of a wall.
"And I will not press you after today," Pike was saying. "I dislike being a nuisance."
"Then do not be one," Piers said.
"I try. I am not always able to choose." A glass was set down. "I would ask you to consider that eleven acres of indifferent pasture is a great deal less trouble to a man than the alternative."
Cecily stopped in the passage with her hand on the frame of the open door.
"Say the alternative aloud, Mr Pike."
"I would rather not."
"Say it," Piers said evenly. "I have had enough delicacy from men in shut rooms, and it has never once been for my benefit."
"I am not fond of the sound of my own voice in that register." A chair moved. "Your Grace, may I say a thing plainly, since we are alone?"
"You have driven fifty miles. Say what you like."
"There is talk in the county this spring, and most of it is warm," Pike said, and his voice did not rise. "I have never had any use for warm talk."
"Then do not repeat it."
"It is being said that the Duke of Havering has grown fond of his wife. It is being said by people who enjoy a happy ending."
In the passage, Cecily's hand stayed where it was on the frame of the door. The rain had got into the window at the turn of the stairs, and she heard it go on doing it, and did not move.
"And you do not?"
"I do not believe it, which is a different thing. I was in this house, and I watched you at your own table." Something else was set down. "A man does not travel from a settlement in October to that, in five months."
"You are mistaken about a good many things, Mr Pike," Piers said, "and this is one of them."
"Am I? I am prepared to be told so."
"You are."
"Very possibly. I am mistaken about people constantly and never about paper." A chair took his weight again. "But it is a pretence, Your Grace, and you would do better not to conduct your business inside it."
The rain filled the pause.
"The marriage was a transaction," Piers said, "and I have never pretended otherwise."
Cecily did not hear the rest.
She had turned in the passage before he finished, because she had heard everything she needed in the first eight words, and she went back along to the morning room with the tithe map still in the estate room where it had been all along.
She did not go to Piers.
She sat in the morning room until the light went and gave it her full attention, as she had given her father's books at seventeen, and she arrived where the evidence took her.
The sentence had been true, and that was the difficulty. If he had lied, she would have had something to take hold of, but instead she had a man saying a plain fact about his own marriage to a stranger in a level voice, with nothing in it that anybody could object to.
She had heard that voice her whole life and could have produced it herself on request.
Rufus had described his marriage to Maria in this language, in front of Cecily, more times than she could count: a sensible arrangement, mutually advantageous.
But he had loved Maria. He had said so and had meant it, and he had spent eighteen thousand of her money in nine years and sold the one piece of ground she asked him to keep.
A transaction and affection could sit side by side for years. They had done so in a house in Berkshire while a woman's security went out by respectable increments.
And there was a bond on the desk.
Her third condition had required every debt declared. A debt had not been declared. She had the instrument in her hand, engrossed, endorsed and dated, and it said what it said.
She did not go and ask him.
She thought about going, and got as far as the door of the morning room twice, and the second time she stood with her hand on the latch until her fingers were cold.
It was not pride that stopped her, whatever she told herself later.
Asking a man to explain a document you had already read was what her mother had done.
Every time, for nineteen years, in that particular gentle voice.
And Rufus had explained beautifully on every single occasion, and not one explanation had ever altered by so much as a shilling what the document said.
The instrument was the only thing in her life that had never lied to her.
She did not leave Ferrers.
Leaving would have been simpler. She considered it long enough to think of the trunk in the dressing room, but put it aside. There were four hundred and eleven households on the Bramshaw side, and a girl of twenty with an assembly in a fortnight, and a glasshouse with nothing in it.
Instead, she went back to the terms.
She had written six of them at that table, and she had meant every word, and there was nothing in any of the six about affection.
The arrangement was the arrangement. It had been clear at the time, and it was clear now, and if she had allowed herself to think it had become something else in the middle of a wet February, that was a private error, and she would correct it privately.
The household books went on to his desk the following morning with a note on the top of them:
The Michaelmas arrears are worked through to the end, and the Netherton walls are entered against the estate. The Lady Day rental wants your signature on the second sheet. C.
At breakfast she said good morning and asked whether the roads were passable, and Kitty talked about the assembly all through the meal, and neither of them stopped her.
"Your Grace," she said, when he asked her about the leat.
Piers put down his cup.
"You have not called me that in this room since February," he said.
"Have I not?"
"You have not," Piers said, and left it there.
"Then I have been careless," Cecily said lightly.
"Cecily." He had come round the end of the table, which he did not do.
"Yes?" She went on with the second letter, and the pen stayed in her hand.
"Look at me."
"I am looking at you. I have been looking at you for five months, and I am tolerably well acquainted with the view." She dipped the pen. "Our arrangement remains entirely satisfactory, Your Grace. You need not be uneasy about any part of it."
She saw what that did to him. She was not proof against it, and afterwards she did not pretend otherwise.
He tried twice more that day.
Before dinner he came into the morning room with nothing in his hands, a thing he had never once done, and asked whether she was unwell, and she said that she was quite well and asked him about the Netherton walls.
After dinner he began a sentence with her name in it, and she answered the sentence he had not finished, pleasantly and completely, and offered him the second candle.
She declined, with great courtesy, to be quarrelled with. She had watched her mother fail at that for nineteen years.
Two days later Hodge came up to the house in the middle of the day, for the first time in years, and asked Mrs Tregarth whether Her Grace was unwell.
"Her Grace is perfectly well," Mrs Tregarth said repressively.
Hodge said that in that case he would be obliged to know what to do about the outside beds. They had been dug and left. The seed papers had been lying on the bench in the glasshouse for a week with nothing done to them, and that ground would not wait past the end of the month.
"Then ask Her Grace," Mrs Tregarth said drily.
"I have asked Her Grace. Twice." Hodge turned his cap in his hands. "She said she'd come down and look at it. She was civil about it, but she has not come down."
Mrs Tregarth wrote it in her book.
Then she shut the book, stood in the passage with it in her hand, and did not take it to Cecily.
She took it to the duke.