Chapter Twenty-Two
The house was asleep by the time the carriages had gone round to the stables.
There had been twenty minutes in the hall of the ordinary business that follows a late night in a large house.
Candles were handed out, and somebody said something about the horses.
Mrs Tregarth had waited up, unasked. She took Kitty's cloak, and looked at the three of them one after another with her mouth shut.
Kitty had been walked up to bed at half past one with her shoes in her hand, still talking. Rufus had wanted a glass and had been given one, and went up a little after her, saying twice on the stairs that it had gone off remarkably well and that he had always said the county would come round.
Piers went along to the estate room, because there was nowhere else to go and because he had no intention of lying down.
The candles there were out. He lit one from the passage lamp, carried it in and set it on the table beside the box.
He had been in that room perhaps nine thousand times but never once in evening dress. He stood in the middle of the stone floor and looked at the deed box on the table. He had just spent his father's name in a public room, and he was waiting to feel something about it, but nothing came.
He got as far as taking the box down and putting his hand on the lid. He did not open it. There was nothing in it that he needed, and he had done nothing but read papers for a fortnight with no answers.
Then the door opened behind him.
"The marriage was a transaction," Cecily said.
Piers kept his hand where it was, on the lid.
He had been waiting a fortnight for a sentence and had never once guessed which one it would be, and here it was, in his own words, in his wife's mouth, at three in the morning.
It was not an accusation. She had put it down in front of him as Sowerby put down a figure, and stood back from it, and waited.
"You heard that." He did not put it as a question.
"On the ninth of April, through the passage door, at about three in the afternoon." She had not come further into the room. "I had gone for the tithe map."
He took his hand off the box because it was not entirely reliable, and laid it flat on the table instead, and that was the first thing his body had done without consulting him in about eight years.
"You did not hear…"
"I heard enough to know it was true."
She had not said I heard you say a cruel thing. She had said the other thing, and it was accurate.
He had one half-sentence ready and had been carrying it about since the ninth of April.
It began you did not hear the rest of it, and standing there in evening dress at that hour he could see what it was worth.
It was true, and it was the thing a man says when he wants the end of a sentence back, and she would have listened to it politely.
"Yes," Piers said.
Cecily's chin came up very slightly, and she waited for the rest.
"It was a transaction. I have never pretended otherwise, and I do not propose to begin now, at this hour, standing in a room with a box on the table.
" He put both hands on the back of the chair.
"Frayne came to Sowerby with a fortune, and I had fourteen weeks.
If I say anything else to you tonight, you will be right not to believe the rest of it. "
Cecily was silent, and one hand went to the door frame beside her and stayed there.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?" He had genuinely no idea.
"For not telling me it was never that."
He turned that over afterwards a great many times and never got to the bottom of it.
She had thanked him for the least generous sentence in the conversation.
Somewhere in the last ten years somebody had trained her to be grateful for a plain unpleasant fact, and he had a fair idea who, and the man was asleep two floors above them.
"There was a second half to the sentence," Piers said.
"I did not stay for it. I had heard enough in the first eight words."
"No," he said. "I have known that for a fortnight, and I have not found how to put it in front of you."
"Then put it in front of me now, and do it badly if you must."
He did, and it was badly done, but that was probably the only reason it worked.
He said it standing on the other side of the table, with a candle between them, and he got it out in the wrong order, then stopped in the middle to begin again.
He had said to Ellis Pike that the marriage was a transaction and that he had never pretended otherwise. Then, because Pike had been sitting at his own table calling his wife a piece of sentiment, he had gone on and said that he would not have her hear him call it one.
And then he had said the last part, without intending it, and there had been no getting it back.
"Because it stopped being true in March."
Cecily did not answer that at once.
"Which part of March?" she said, and put one hand on the back of the chair nearest her.
"I could give you the week but I would rather not, because you would think I had prepared it, and I have not prepared any part of this."
"Give me the week," Cecily said levelly.
Piers watched the candle instead of her.
"The afternoon you came down to the glasshouse in February with the rain coming and put your hands in a bucket of putty for three hours," he said. "But I did not understand what it was until the spring."
She believed him, and he saw her do it, but it was not a large thing, and there was no relief anywhere in the room.
There ought to have been. He had gone over this in the small hours of a great many nights, and in every version, there had been something at the end of it.
What there was instead was a cold room and a bad candle, and a woman standing eight feet away with everything she had come down with still in her hands, and no part of the previous fortnight undone.
Then she said, "The bond. I heard of it first from a registry copy your agent paid for out of his own pocket, and second from a ballroom, and I have never once heard of it from you."
"No." Nothing came after it.
Piers came round the end of the table and sat down in the chair he had been holding, because he had been on his feet since before breakfast and because the answer was going to be poor and he preferred not to be standing over her while he gave it.
"I found it on the twelfth. Three days after Sowerby brought it to you."
"I know that now, but I did not know it on the ninth."
"I had never seen it before in my life."
Cecily nodded, and waited.
"My father executed it in London and kept no copy. It has never been in this house." He looked at his own hands. "I went through every box in the muniment room on my knees, and it was not there."
"I believe that as well," Cecily said quickly, and then stopped, as if she had heard herself.
"You should not do it so quickly," Piers said. "It is precisely what I would say if it were not true."
"I am aware of that. Go on." She had not moved from the end of the table.
"There is nothing further. That is all of it."
"There must be something further."
"There is not," he said.
"Piers." It was the nearest thing to a rebuke she had given him all night.
"I spent a fortnight looking for an arrangement of words that did not sound like a guilty man explaining a document." He shook his head once. "There is not one. I am not a foolish man, but I could not find it."
Cecily sat down on the arm of the other chair. It was the first time she had sat since she came into the room.
"So, you took it to Devizes."
"I took it to a room where lying would have cost me everything I have left," he said. "It was the only place I could think of where you would have to believe me."
"You could simply have told me."
"Indeed," Piers said, and left it at that.
"Then why did you not?" she asked evenly.
He had nothing for that.
He looked for something, and there was nothing there, and the honest thing sat where it had sat for a fortnight.
"Because I am not accustomed to being believed about money," Piers said.
Cecily waited.
"The county has thought me a fool or a gambler for two years, and I have let it."
"And Sowerby?" She asked it as a point of fact and not as a feeling, and it was the only way either of them could have got through what came next.
"Sowerby has watched me for two years and held his tongue." He put his hands flat on his knees. "I have never in my life sat in a room and waited while somebody decided whether I was honest. I did not want to watch you do it."
"That is the first frightened thing you have ever said to me," Cecily said slowly.
He did not deny it.
"You have been afraid of me," she added.
"Since about the middle of February."
He heard himself say it and did not go back to soften it. It was the plainest thing he had ever put in front of another person, and it had taken him thirty-four years and a public assembly to get to it.
She was quiet after that, long enough that the candle guttered once and recovered, and somewhere above them a floorboard went, and that would be Kitty, who did not sleep.
Piers sat in the chair and let her be quiet, and it was the only useful thing he had done all evening. Something had gone out of the room while she sat there, and that something was the bond.
It had been evidence an hour ago. She had held it for a fortnight and built her whole position on it, and he had stood up in a public assembly and read it out himself.
That cost her something, and he could see it costing her.
"It was the only hard thing I had," Cecily said.
"I know," he said.
"I do not mean against you. I mean at all.
" She turned one of her rings without taking it off.
"I have had documents since I was seventeen.
They do not alter, they do not soften, they do not explain themselves afterwards, and every single thing I have ever been sure about has come off a piece of paper. "
"And this one was wrong."
The sentence was out before he had measured what it had cost her to hand the thing over, but he let it lie.
A woman who had been sure of nothing in her life except what was written down had been sure of a thing for a fortnight, and he had taken it away in front of two hundred people without warning her first.
"This one was left where a woman who trusts paper would find it," she said. "By a careful man, and long before I ever saw it." She turned the ring again. "None of that is the difficulty."
"No," Piers said.
"You know it is not."
"I have known it since your father sat in the small drawing room and cried about a garden."
"Then you know what I came down to say."
"Say it anyway," Piers said from the chair, and stayed in it. "I shall sit here until you have."
Cecily got off the arm of the chair and went to the window, which held nothing but the dark, and stood with her back to him.
"My father loved my mother."
"Yes," Piers said quietly.
"He is the only man I have ever watched do it at close quarters, and I watched him at it for sixteen years. He loved her, and he said so, and he meant it every time he said it." Her voice did nothing dramatic. "And there was less of her every year, and none of it was ever done unkindly."
Piers sat still and did not attempt to be useful.
"That does not comfort you," he said.
"No. It never has." She kept her back to him. "It is the opposite of a comfort, and it always has been."
Then she turned round.
"If you were a cold man, I should know exactly where I was. I have been clear-eyed about cold men since I was a girl and I have never once been damaged by one."
"And I am not a cold man."
"No," Cecily said. "You are not. That is the difficulty."
Then she asked him the thing she had come down for, and everything before it had been the ground being cleared.
"If I had come to you at Frayne House without forty thousand pounds. If I had been a baron's daughter with three hundred a year and a bad temper." She had come back to the chair. "Would you have chosen me?"
Piers took his time.
He could feel the shape of the quick answer. It was in the room with them; it would have taken four seconds, and she would have been polite about it for thirty years.
"Then?" he said, and his hand went to the candle and came away again.
"Yes," she said. "As things stood then."
"You will not enjoy the answer."
"I have not enjoyed much this fortnight," she said. "Say it." Her eyes went to the candle and not to him, and that was the only part of her that flinched.
"No," Piers said, and added nothing to it.
He had known it would hurt her but had said it anyway, because the alternative was four seconds of comfort and thirty years of the other thing.
He watched it go in, and it went in properly, and she took it standing up without looking away from him while it happened.
"I would never have met you," Piers said.
Her hands stayed on the chair.
"Frayne wrote to Sowerby in September because Frayne had a fortune and I had a quarter day coming. If you had had three hundred a year he would have written to the third house on the list."
"And?" Cecily said.
"And I should be selling the Bramshaw side in June, and you would be at Wantage with your cousin." He held her eye. "I am not going to sit here and tell you I would have found you across a room in Bath."
She let him go on.
"It would be a pleasant thing to say, but it would be a lie. I have spent one evening this week telling a county the truth about my own father." He put the candle straight. "I have not the stomach to begin lying to you at this hour."
Cecily nodded once, and her hands stayed where they were.
"Now?" Piers said. "You asked me about then. Ask me about now."
"Now?" Cecily asked, and her hand closed on the chair back.
"Yes," Piers said, and stood up to say it.
That was all of it. It went into the room as the other answer had, and it was true.
He built nothing on it. He had four or five sentences available, and one of them had been sitting in him since an afternoon in February with the rain coming, but he used none of them.
She had asked a question in two parts, and he had answered both parts honestly, and the second answer would not be improved by decoration.
Cecily stood at the back of the chair with her hand on it. She began to say something, but stopped, and let it go.
Then she said good night, and took the second candle off the table, and went out.
He sat where he was and listened to her go along the passage and up.
He sat in the estate room until the sky started to go grey over the stable roof. Nothing had been settled that he could put a name to, and it was the first conversation of his marriage in which nobody had been careful.