Chapter Twenty-Three
"The papers are still on the bench," Hodge said, in the passage outside the still-room, to nobody in particular. "Three weeks, near enough."
"I am aware of it." Cecily did not stop walking.
"The outside beds will not wait, Your Grace. Not past the end of the month."
"I am aware of that as well," Cecily said. "I shall come down at seven."
"Seven," Hodge said, in the voice of a man confirming a delivery. "Then I shall have the frames off the outside beds before you come down. And the beds outside first, if Your Grace will have it, because the glass will keep and the frost will not come back now."
"You have thought about this," she said.
"I have thought about very little else for a fortnight," said Hodge, and went off to the tool house.
She came down at seven on the second of May, in the mittens, and worked until eleven.
She did not decide anything, or if she did, it was done somewhere she could not afterwards find.
She had spent a fortnight arriving at conclusions and had been extremely good at it, and that morning she simply put on the cloak and went down the wet path and picked up the first of the five papers off the bench and shook it out onto her hand.
The seed was small and dark and there was less of it than she remembered from the tin.
She sowed the outside beds that week and the two under the south glass.
"Too deep," Hodge said, on the first morning.
"By how much?" She sat back on her heels with the trowel still in her hand.
"Half an inch, near enough, and it is the same on all four of them."
"That is not a great deal," she said.
"It is a fortnight," Hodge said mildly, "and some of them will not have a fortnight in them."
He was right, and having said it once, he left it to the trowel to say again, and within three days she was doing it without being watched.
The household at Ferrers remarked on none of it.
Mrs Tregarth sent a jug of something hot down on the second morning and again the day after and then stopped, having established whatever she had wanted to establish.
Prue found the mittens on the hall table and put them back on the hook by the garden door without being asked.
Sowerby left the week's figures in two places again.
Piers did not assume anything.
He did not say that he was glad she had gone back to it. Cecily was grateful for that, and the two of them went on in that fashion for a week and a half like people carrying something heavy up a narrow stair.
Kitty came down to the glasshouse a few days later, in a dress she should not have worn, and stayed two hours and got earth on both sleeves.
"You are not going to tell me what has been the matter, are you?" she asked.
"No." Cecily went on with the second row.
"I did not think you would." Kitty turned a seed paper over and looked at the back of it, which had nothing on it. "Piers will not either. He has taken to answering my questions with the drainage."
"That is what he does," Cecily said plainly, "and he has done it since long before I came here."
"I am aware of what he does. I have had twenty years of it.
" Kitty put the paper down. "I only wanted to say that whatever it is, I should rather it were mended in this house than mended somewhere else.
I have never in my life said anything like that to anybody, so you will oblige me by not looking at me. "
Cecily kept her eyes on the row.
"Give me the trowel," she said, and Kitty, who was never quiet for two minutes together, handed it over and was quiet for the rest of the hour.
The bill from Dowling came at the end of that week.
It was for the outside beds, the frames, the water butt and two days of a man to dig, and it came to nineteen pounds. Cecily had authorised it in April without consulting anybody, out of her own money, before Devizes.
She was in the estate room when Sowerby brought it in, and Piers opened it.
She saw what happened in his shoulders.
It was not a large movement. Four months ago, she would not have seen it; two months ago, she would have seen it and put a name to it; now she watched it arrive and watched him decide what to do with it, but she did not help him.
He read the thing once through. Then he read it again, slowly, and there were four lines on it.
"Is it what you wanted?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, and kept her pen where it was.
"Then pay it." He held it out across the table.
It was the third of her own accounts to come through that room since October and the first he had ever said a word about, and she had been braced since the seal came off.
"I had intended to," she said.
"I am aware."
"Then why say it?"
Piers put the bill down on the table and squared it with the edge. Her own hands had done that to her own papers for ten years, and he plainly had no idea of it.
"I am practising," he said.
"Practising what?"
He did not want to answer. She watched him not want to, but watched him do it anyway.
"Not treating your giving as an accusation," he said slowly.
The following week she came in from the garden at noon and could not find her desk.
The morning room had been rearranged. Her chair was where it had always been, the wages book was on the sill, but the writing desk she had worked at since November was not there.
Mrs Tregarth was in the passage.
"Where is my desk?" She had come in with earth on both hands and had not stopped to do anything about it.
"In the east wing, Your Grace," said Mrs Tregarth, with her attention on the linen she was carrying.
Cecily stopped in the middle of the morning room with her bonnet still on.
"The east wing is shut," she said.
"Not the whole of it," said Mrs Tregarth.
It was the small south room at the near end, and she had walked past that door in October behind a man unlocking a wing full of sheets and cold light.
It was not sheeted now. The floor had been washed and so had the window. The grate had been swept, laid and lit, and the room was warm. The paper was thirty years old, and there was a mark where a picture had been taken down. There had been no painting, no buying, nothing made grand.
Her desk stood in the window, facing the light. The ledgers were on a shelf to the left of it, arranged as she arranged them, so somebody had watched how she kept them. Sowerby's second book was on the corner where it always sat. The seed catalogues were in a box.
And on the desk, at the top right, where her hand went, there was a small white dish about four inches across.
Cecily stood looking at it. Her hand went halfway there but stopped.
She had noticed it in March, without paying much attention, and had assumed Prue had brought it.
There was no reason on earth for Prue to have brought up a dish.
She went down the back stairs without stopping, and it was the first time since the ninth of April that she had gone looking for him about anything that was not an account.
She found him in the estate room.
"You have opened a room in the east wing," she said.
"One room, at the near end. It was the only one worth the trouble."
"Why?" She had come as far as the corner of the table and no further.
"Somebody requires it," he said.
"It has a grate."
"It has, and it draws. Three of the grates on that side do not."
"And the best light on that side of the house."
"It has that as well," Piers said. "That is why it is the room I chose."
Cecily stayed where she was.
"The paper is thirty years old," he said when she did not speak.
"I like the paper."
"It has a mark on it where something was taken down."
"I have stopped minding about marks."
"The grate wants a screen," Piers continued. "It draws well, but it throws sparks, and there is a quantity of paper in there. I have told Mrs Tregarth."
"Thank you." It came out smaller than she had meant it to.
"It is one room in a wing that has been shut for two years, and it will cost about nine pounds a year to keep warm."
"Out of the estate?" she asked.
"The estate. It is a room in the house, and the house is the estate's. I have looked at it from every direction, and that is where it falls." He picked the pen up again. "If you would rather it came out of my own, I shall move it, but it would be wrong."
"No," she said. "Leave it where you have put it."
She went back up the stairs to the east wing.
***
Piers was in the doorway with the drainage book. He had begun coming up in the evenings, ostensibly because the light in the estate room was poor, and neither of them had examined that.
"May I buy you a new lamp?" He did not put the book down.
Cecily looked up from the sheet in front of her.
She had spent ten years arranging her life so that nobody could give her anything.
And a man was standing in a doorway asking whether he might buy her a lamp.
She had the sentence about there being no need ready, but it was not the one that came out.
"Yes," she said, and went back to the rental, and heard him go a step or two along the passage.
"It is thirty shillings at the most," she said to the rental, and loudly enough to carry.
He came back as far as the door. "Thirty-one, with the funnel and the shade, from the man at the end of the market who is not a rogue."
"You have priced it." She put down her pen.
"I priced it a week ago," Piers said without emphasis, "which you may make what you like of."
He brought it up from Devizes three days later.
It was a plain lamp with a glass funnel and a green shade, and it was not in the estate accounts, which she read every week, and it was not in them the week after either.