Chapter Twenty-One
"You are not to think about it in the carriage," Kitty said, and pulled her glove straight at the wrist. "Either of you.
There will be four miles of it, and I will not have the pair of you being civil at me the whole way.
And on the way home I mean to talk the entire four miles, and you will both be grateful for it. "
That half of the room did not answer her.
They went the four miles in a carriage with three people in it and one lamp, and Rufus in the second carriage behind with the Marleighs. Cecily had arranged that beforehand, and it was the most useful thing she did all week.
Kitty talked for the first mile and a half. Piers answered when he was asked, and Cecily asked about the roads.
At the turn by the mill, Kitty gave it up and sat looking out at nothing, and the last two miles were quiet. Cecily sat with her hands in her lap, in a good dress that had come from Devizes in October, and watched the hedge go past.
She had promised in February.
That was the reason she was in the carriage, and she had gone over it several times that afternoon and arrived at the same place, though once she had got as far as a note half written to say that she was unwell.
A girl of twenty was going to walk into a room in a county where everybody knew her brother's business, with two gowns, a ruled list and a great deal riding on the evening, and none of it was going to be spent on a quarrel between two other people.
The assembly rooms at Devizes held about two hundred and had rather more than that in them by ten o'clock.
Cecily had not been in the room a quarter of an hour before the shape of the evening was plain to her.
It was not hostility, which would have been simpler, and which she had been braced for all week. A room divides quietly into the people who come and stand near you and the people who do not, and neither party does anything that could be complained of.
Her rank did most of the work. Women who had not the smallest wish to speak to her came and spoke to her, because a duchess is a duchess and the county is not London, and there is a limit to what can be sustained across four miles of country.
Her grandfather did the rest.
She heard the word cotton twice in the first half hour, both times from behind her, both times from people who stopped when she turned.
Lady Ancrum was by the third window with her daughters.
Cecily had never met her and knew exactly who she was, because four years ago a note went to Frayne House regretting that Lady Ancrum's list was unfortunately made up. It had been the second of the three refusals, and Cecily had cried about it for one evening and never again.
She was talking to Ellis Pike, and had been for some minutes, and appeared to be enjoying it.
Pike had been in the room since nine.
He was not dancing, and he was talking quietly to a great many people, who appeared pleased to be talked to. Cecily watched him work along the north side of the room while she drank one glass of wine. He bowed to her when their eyes met, from thirty feet, precisely as much as was correct.
Kitty danced twice in the first hour, once with a Marleigh and once with a young man called Hollis who farmed eight hundred acres. She had blushed, and had come back to Cecily with her face lit up.
"It is tolerable," she said breathlessly. "I had expected much worse, and Mr Hollis has asked whether I ride, and I said I did, which is very nearly true."
That was somewhere after half past ten, and Cecily was still turning over the word tolerable when the thing itself happened.
She was at the end of the second window with Mrs Whitlock, who was kind and dull and had been talking about her sister at Warminster, and heard Lady Ancrum behind them speaking.
"And Havering has come out of it extremely well, whatever anybody says."
"He has come out of it dry." That was Lady Ancrum. "There is a difference. One does not congratulate a man for having been rescued."
"Well, but the estate is…" That was one of the Marleigh cousins, and it got no further.
"The estate is exactly where it was in the sixth duke's time," she said coolly.
"Come." Mrs Whitlock said it, half turning, and she had no weapons at all.
"It is standing on the Marchbank money, and everybody in this room knows it." A fan moved. "She is a perfectly pleasant creature. I have nothing to say against her."
"Then do not say it here." That was somebody else, too late.
"But that is what she is. That is what he married."
Mrs Whitlock had stopped talking about her sister.
Cecily stood with the glass in her hand and did not turn round. She was not particularly hurt, and that was the first thing. She had been called the Marchbank money in three counties for four years and had worked out the correct expression to have on her face.
The second thing was that she had heard the phrase before, in February, at her own table, from a man who was at that moment standing beside the fourth window with his hands behind his back.
Marchbank money had always had a talent for building.
Then a sleeve moved at the edge of her sight, and Piers was six feet away on her left, and had been for longer than she liked.
He had been at the other end of the room since the second dance, and had come along the wall unnoticed.
He did not raise his voice. Afterwards it was what everybody remembered, because a raised voice can be discounted the following morning but a level one cannot.
"Lady Ancrum," he said.
"Your Grace," she said. She had a fan half open and left it open, and that took a certain courage.
"You are perfectly correct," Piers said.
She had been arranging something at her wrist and stopped arranging it.
"Ferrers stands on the Marchbank money."
"Your Grace, I hardly…"
"It was paid in December. In one sum." He did not look at Cecily. "The whole of it went to Bristol and there is not a penny of it left anywhere in England."
"I am sure that is not…"
"I should like to tell the room what it bought, since the room is discussing it."
"Your Grace, I did not…" Lady Ancrum began, and nobody attended to her.
"How much?" a man behind her said, and the words were out before he had considered them.
"Four hundred and eleven households."
The nearest thirty people had stopped.
"Bramshaw. The river side. Chalke Coombe." He counted them off without hurry. "The four farms at Netherton. The strips beyond the mill."
"All of it?" Somebody's glass went down on a table with more noise than was wanted.
"Pledged as security, every acre," Piers said. "To be broken up and sold in parcels over the twelvemonth following the Christmas quarter day."
"Surely not sold." Sir John Marleigh had come up on the other side and had gone rather pale about it.
"Every acre," Piers said, and left the words where they were.
Sir John looked at him. "All four hundred?"
"All of them," Piers said. "I have the list by name. My agent counted them, and I did not ask him to." He put his hand flat on the window. "Each one of those families is where it was in September."
"The wages at Ferrers were paid at Lady Day," he went on.
"As they should be." That came from a woman near the door, who had plainly never once wondered whether they would be.
"For the first time in three years without anything being sold to pay them. That is what the Marchbank money bought."
"Your Grace, nobody has said…"
"Then say it accurately," Piers said. "The county is going to say it in any case."
Lady Ancrum had recovered enough to attempt the ordinary thing. "No one is suggesting that the connection is not an advantageous…"
"I have not finished," Piers said.
Afterwards, Cecily could not have said what she expected next.
She had thought the evening settled from about his second sentence.
He would give the room the arithmetic, the room would be uncomfortable for a minute or two, and everybody would go back to what they had been doing and repeat the story in a different key for a fortnight.
It would be more than she had ever been given by anybody.
What Piers did instead was put his glass down on the ledge of the second window, beside hers, and take a moment over it, the way a man did when he had arrived at a decision on his feet and was checking the figures one last time.
He looked at her before he began. It was, as things turned out, all the warning she was given.
He had come to the end of the part that could be got through with figures, and there was a second part that could not be. So, he stood at that window turning the glass a quarter round by its stem, working out whether a room with two hundred people in it was the place for it.
Then he decided that it was, and Cecily watched him decide it, and could think of nothing that would have stopped him.
"It is generally understood that the Havering estate was in difficulties," he said. "It has never been stated why."
Somebody at the back laughed, taking it for a jest, but stopped when nobody joined in.
"I have permitted that for two years and I find I have no further use for it."
"Piers," Rufus said, from somewhere behind, in real alarm.
"My father mortgaged this estate over nine years."
The room did not move.
"Privately. In nine instruments. Against the land that carried the rents."
"Havering, for Heaven’s sake." Rufus had got himself to the front of the group and had gone the colour of the wall.
Piers did not turn his head. "And on other things that are nobody's business and were certainly not the estate's. I found out at his funeral."
Somebody's fan shut with a click near the door.
"In the June of the year six I was in a room in London when he signed the largest of them."
"You were present?" Lady Ancrum said it, and appeared to regret it at once.
"I was twenty-six. I read the schedule. I understood exactly what it was." He said it in the voice he used for drainage figures.
"And you…" It was Sir John, and he did not finish.
"I said nothing," Piers said. "Not a word. Contradicting my father in front of his own solicitor would have been discourteous. I was polite."