Chapter Twenty-One #2
Cecily could hear the second window rattling in its frame beside her.
Every eye in that end of the room was on her.
"It cost four hundred and eleven families their security for eight years. And my wife forty thousand pounds." He stopped, and for the length of a breath it seemed that he would stop. "It is the only part of the whole business I am ashamed of."
The room had gone entirely quiet; the particular quiet of two hundred people who had been handed something they did not ask for and could not now give back.
"If the county wishes to remember where the money came from," Piers said, "it may also remember what it preserved."
It was Lady Ancrum's eldest daughter, of all people, who said the next thing, and she said it in the interval, not meaning for it to carry.
"Still… Cotton?"
Cecily put her glass down on the ledge of the second window. Her hand was steadier on the stem than she had any right to expect.
"My grandfather spun cotton in Manchester for forty years," she said.
The girl had gone scarlet and had nowhere to look.
"He built four mills, a Sunday school, and a road," Cecily said. "He left a great deal of it to a granddaughter he had seen twice."
"Your Grace, I…" The girl said it faintly and got no further.
Cecily looked round that end of the room and was not, on the whole, frightened of it.
"I was refused by three houses in London in the spring of the year eleven, on account of the mills. My husband was refused by three houses last summer, on account of his father." She let that sit where it fell. "I have never yet heard anybody in this county remark upon the symmetry."
"I am sure nobody meant…" The girl's mother had a hand on her arm by then.
"The sixth Duke of Havering lost about the same sum at cards in nine years.
" Cecily did not raise her voice either.
"If the county would like to determine which of those two facts is the more shameful, it may do so at its leisure, and without my assistance.
I have never apologised for my mother's family, and I do not intend to begin at Devizes. "
No opinion was offered. Piers came and stood at her left shoulder.
He did not take it up, nor look at Lady Ancrum's daughter. He stood beside his wife with his hands behind his back and let the room finish forming its opinion in its own time.
Cecily looked down at her hands and had no idea what to do with the rest of the evening.
He was not finished with them yet.
She had no warning of it, and would think about that afterwards, because the next part he did entirely alone and without one word to her beforehand.
"There is a further matter," Piers said, in the same flat voice, "and I would rather the county had it from me tonight than from a solicitor in June."
"Your Grace, I beg you will…" Rufus said hoarsely.
"My father had granted a bond for three thousand pounds."
"Heavens," somebody said, before he could stop himself, and his neighbour put a hand on his arm.
"Secured on eleven acres on the north bank of the river at Ferrers. It was never entered in the estate books."
Cecily stood at the second window and stopped breathing in any regular way.
"It was not disclosed during my marriage settlement," Piers said.
"Then how…" That was Sir John again.
"Because I did not know of it. It was not in this house and never had been. I learnt of it a few days ago from a registry copy."
"Come, Havering." Somebody said it, uneasily.
Piers turned very slightly towards the window. "It is held by the gentleman at the fourth window."
Every head in that end of the room went round.
"His people were asked a direct question in October," Piers said. "In writing, by my wife's solicitor."
"And?" It was Mr Blythe, of all people, who asked it, and he was not being clever.
Ellis Pike did not alter at all. He had one hand behind his back and the other on the stem of a glass he had not drunk from, and he looked at the duke across forty feet of assembly room.
"I was asked," he said pleasantly, into the silence, "whether any further claim subsisted under the mortgage. There did not. I answered truthfully."
"You did," Piers said.
"Then we are agreed," Pike said, as though a schedule had been initialled. "I am glad Your Grace concedes it."
"I concede the whole of it. You were asked a question, and you answered the question you were asked." Piers picked his glass back up. "I have no complaint to make of you, Mr Pike."
"Your Grace is generous," Pike said, and his voice had not altered by a semitone.
"I have only observed, in a room, what the words were."
And that was the end of it, because there was nothing further to say and everybody there had already said it silently to themselves.
Nobody spoke of it afterwards, and that was the point.
There was no gasp and nothing was thrown, and the country dance began again at the far end almost at once.
Pike stayed another twenty minutes, which took nerve, and he talked to three people, and two of the three were looking somewhere else while he did it. Then he walked out of the room.
Cecily stood at the second window with an empty glass and watched him go, and what had just been taken from her was quite clear.
The bond had been her evidence. It had been the one hard object in a fortnight of soft ones, engrossed, endorsed and dated, and she had built the last two weeks on it and been certain of every step.
At least, she had told herself so. Standing at the window with the glass gone warm in her hand, she could not now have sworn to it.
Her husband had picked it up and handed it to a ballroom.
A guilty man does not do that. A guilty man lets a document like that sleep in a registry in Salisbury for the rest of his life, and if it wakes, he goes to a solicitor in June and settles it quietly, and never speaks of it in an assembly room with the county listening.
He had produced it himself, in public, at the cost of his father's name, twelve days after she had stopped calling him by his own.
Kitty danced the last two dances and was asked for both, one of them by Hollis again, and Lady Ancrum watched it happen from the third window with her fan shut.