Chapter Twenty
Piers went down to the glasshouse at seven in the morning. He had not done such a thing once since the day it was finished.
The door lifted and shut behind him, and all hundred and ten feet of it was warm, because Hodge had kept the stove in without being told. The beds were dug and raked but empty, the path was set out, and nothing was growing in any part of it.
The seed papers were on the bench where she had left them the week before, five of them in a row, a sixth folded and put aside, with a line of dust along the edge of the board.
He stood and looked at that for longer than he meant to, but then he went back up to the house without touching anything.
Trescott and Rudge answered him that same morning, three days after Sowerby's copy had come, and Piers read the bond standing at the hall table with his coat still on.
Three thousand pounds, dated November in the year six, secured on eleven acres of the north bank with the fishing and the hedge. No annual payment was reserved anywhere in it, and the principal was repayable on demand. Ellis Pike, of Bristol, and no other name upon it.
The bond he took in at once. The second thing took longer. Sowerby had commissioned a search of his own in February, and the office copy had come back to this house on the ninth.
He went and found Sowerby in the estate room, and stood in the doorway with the office copy in his hand until the older man looked up.
"You had this on the ninth," Piers said.
"I did, Your Grace."
"And you took it to my wife."
"I took it to Her Grace," Sowerby said, "because she reads things."
"And I do not?"
"You have not read a paper I have put in front of you since the end of February." Sowerby kept his eyes on him. "I was not going to have it in a drawer at the home farm for a fortnight while I waited for you to come back to yourself."
Piers put the paper down on the table, and the silence went on longer than either of them cared for.
"That is fair," he said at last.
"It was not meant to be fair, Your Grace. It was meant to be useful."
So, she had had it three days.
He worked that out standing in the estate room, and then he worked out the rest of it, walking up and down the stone floor with his hands behind his back while the clock in the passage went round.
She had had the bond on the ninth of April, the day Ellis Pike had been in this house from two until four, and he and Pike had been alone in this room, but the passage door had been standing open all that time because he had opened it himself when the fire smoked.
She had come along that passage in the middle of the afternoon. Sowerby had put that in his head without meaning to, mentioning that Her Grace had wanted the tithe map.
Piers stood in the middle of the estate room and went back through that conversation, sentence by sentence from the first word to the last, and found the one she must have heard.
The marriage was a transaction, and I have never pretended otherwise.
Every word of it had been true. True in October, true of the whole arrangement, written down in six conditions in her own hand. The plainest and most defensible sentence he had produced in eight years.
And she had heard it through an open door on the same afternoon she was handed an undeclared debt with her third condition sitting on top of it.
He sat down on the edge of the table and stayed there, in a room with a stone floor and one window.
He did not ask her.
He got as far as it four times over the following days and each time turned back, and he could have given a different reason each time.
The truthful one was this. A woman who had read a document and drawn a conclusion from it did not want a man standing in front of her offering to explain the document, and he had a fair idea by now what such explanations were worth in her family, and how many of them she had sat through.
The other one he liked considerably less. His wife had every reason to think the worst of him, and she had not accused him of one single thing.
The house had it too, and the house was managing it better than he was.
Mrs Tregarth had begun taking her questions to whichever of them was nearer and had stopped putting them to the room in general.
Prue had cried on the back stairs over a dropped tray.
Kitty had asked him at breakfast whether they had quarrelled, and he had said that they had not.
It was true, and it was the least useful true thing he had ever said to his sister.
Cecily was civil. She asked him about the walls and passed the coffee. She signed the second sheet of the Lady Day rental and put it back on his desk with a note four lines long about the Netherton arrears, and there was nothing in the note that a stranger could not have written.
Rufus arrived before he was expected and without sending anybody forward.
He came into the hall early in the afternoon saying that the roads had been better than he had any right to expect. Then he embraced his daughter and shook Piers by both hands.
He had heard something somewhere. He looked from one of them to the other twice before his coat was off, and asked Kitty about the assembly with rather too much energy, and Piers, taking the coat from him, did not need longer than that to be sure of it.
Before dinner, in the small drawing room, he began.
"I hope you will not think me interfering, my dear."
"I generally do," Cecily said drily.
"Then think it and let me say it anyway. There is talk. I have had it twice on the road and once from Lady Marleigh's sister, who is not a woman I would ordinarily attend to, and I did not care for it."
"What is being said?" Cecily asked.
"That the two of you have gone off. That the winter was warm and the spring is not." He spread his hands. "My dear, every marriage in England is cold in its first year somewhere about April. Mine was. Marriages survive disappointment. They survive a great deal more than that."
Piers had come in behind him with the drainage book.
He stayed where he was in the doorway, and then he put the book on the side table and sat down in the chair by the door.
Cecily did not look at him. Neither did she ask him to leave, and that was the only warm thing that passed between the two of them that week.
"What do you know about it?" Cecily said.
"About what, my dear?"
"About marriages surviving disappointment."
Rufus laughed comfortably, and then, unfortunately for him, went on talking.
"A great deal. Your mother and I were disappointed in one another a dozen times over, but we did very well."
"Did you?" she said.
"We did. You were a child, and children do not see these things." He was still quite easy. "Maria was not a woman who required much. She had her garden and her books, and she was of a quiet turn, and we understood one another."
"She asked you not to sell Kelby," Cecily said.
The room went still.
Piers, from the chair by the door, watched Rufus discover that a conversation had changed direction.
"She did," Rufus said, and put nothing on top of it, which in him was extraordinary.
"Say the rest of it."
"There is no rest of it. There were debts.
The canal had gone against me, and there was Wantage to keep up, and your grandfather had made it quite clear that there would be nothing further from that quarter.
" He turned the glass on the table. "Kelby was three hundred a year and a great deal of trouble.
She was fond of the garden, and I thought her attachment to it was sentimental. "
"Sentimental," Cecily said bluntly.
"I did think so. I have said so."
"And now?" she asked.
Rufus did not answer at once.
Piers sat forward a little in the chair by the door. In six months of knowing the man he had never once seen him hesitate over anything.
"I have thought about it," Rufus said slowly.
"When did you think about it? Give me the year."
"Latterly. One does, at my age." He was looking at the glass and not at his daughter. "I have thought that I should have listened to her."
"What else?" Cecily said.
"I do not say it would have altered the general run of things. It would not, and there is no use pretending otherwise." He turned the glass again. "But she asked me for one thing in nineteen years. I sold it in March, and I never once asked her again what she thought of it."
Cecily let that lie where it fell.
"She did not reproach me," Rufus said. "Not once. I have thought about that as well."
There was something under it after all, and it had been there the entire time. It was grief, and it was genuine, and it did not reach anywhere near far enough.
"You still speak of the garden," Cecily said, "as though that were the only thing you took."
Rufus looked up at her.
He had no answer to it. Piers watched him look for one in three or four places and fail to find it, and then reach for the thing that had always worked before.
"I did love your mother."
"I know," Cecily said.
That stopped him altogether. He had plainly expected to be contradicted and had come prepared for it.
"Then I do not see…" he began.
"That is why it was worse," Cecily said.
The room left the speaking to her. "If you had not loved her, she would have known where she was from the beginning.
She could have counted what was left and made her arrangements and been clear-eyed about it.
" Cecily's hands were flat on her knees.
"Instead, she was loved, and told so, and every year there was less of her own money and more affection.
She could never once say to herself with any certainty that she had been robbed and the man doing it wept at her funeral. "
Rufus opened his mouth and shut it again.
"My grandfather did not weep," Cecily said. "He stood behind you at the graveside but said eleven words and went home to Manchester and altered his will. I was sixteen years old, and I heard everything."
Rufus put the glass down on the table without troubling to look for a place to put it.
"I know what he said," Rufus said heavily.
"So do I. You had the use of her, and you had spent her."
Rufus was weeping now, quietly, and did not appear to know it.
"Cecily," he said, and got no further than her name.
"Being loved by you was not a protection. That is the whole of what I learnt in that house." She stood up. "It is not that I think you a villain, Papa. I have never thought that, and it would have been easier if I could."
She went out. The door was not shut hard, and they heard her go up the stairs counting.
Rufus sat on with his glass in both hands.
Then he said, to nobody in particular, that she had always been a hard girl, and that it came from the Marchbank side.
Piers did not answer him, and sat in the chair by the door until his father-in-law went up to dress.
He found her in the morning room an hour later with the wages book open in front of her and nothing written in it.
"Your father is asking for the fishing," he said.
"He may have the fishing," she said, without lifting the pen.
Piers stood by the door. He began a sentence about the assembly and let it go.
"What did he say to you?" he asked.
Cecily did not look up.
"The truth, finally," she said.
He waited for the rest with his hand still on the door.
"Not enough of it." She turned a page she had not written on.
That was all he got, and he took it away with him and went to the estate room.
More of it came to him than she had intended, and it came slowly, as everything did with him.
Being loved by you was not a protection.
He had a bond in a drawer that had not been declared before his wedding, and a wife who had held it for six days without once accusing him, and a sentence of his own she had certainly heard through an open door.
And now he had this, the shape of the thing she had been carrying since she was sixteen, and it fitted the other two.
He could have gone up that night. He got as far as the foot of the stairs.
The county assembly was on the twenty-second. Kitty had been promised it since January and had a figure she could hold him to, two gowns from Tolley, and she had said, weeks ago, that she had not decided what she wanted the room to see.
There was a week in it. The gowns had come, and Kitty had worn one of them about the passages for an hour and been happy for the first time since December.
Piers stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hand on the newel post and made the single worst decision of his life for entirely respectable reasons. He let his sister have her evening first.