Chapter Twenty-Four
There were three green things in the outside bed on the twenty-first of May and Hodge had counted them twice before breakfast.
Piers went down to look, because the old man had come up to the house to say so and had stood in the passage until somebody attended to him, but the three of them were about half an inch high and were not much to look at.
"Which of the papers?" Piers kept his hands behind his back and stayed on his feet, because Hodge had.
"The second, Your Grace. The one she could not read the label of."
"And the others? There were four more papers in that bed."
"The others will do what they do," said Hodge.
Piers stood in the middle of the range with the early sun coming through the south face and looked at three green things in a foot of soil.
Then he went back up to the house and asked his wife whether she would come down after dinner. She said that she would, and went on with the wages book without asking why.
The glasshouse at seven in the evening was the best room at Ferrers, and everybody in the house knew it by then, but nobody had said so.
It was not a beautiful building. He had never been able to explain that to anybody who asked what it had cost. The old frame still showed its age in every bay.
Fourteen feet of the north side was new timber against thirty-odd years of the old, and the difference was plain to see and would go on being plain for another decade.
The sill Dowling had put in was pale against the rest. Two of the reglazed panes did not sit quite level, because Ames had cut his hand and a duke and a duchess had faced eleven feet of putty in the dark.
It had not been made new, but it had been made to work.
Cecily came down a little after him with the seed tin. She had brought it from the east wing that afternoon and left it on the bench by the door, and Piers had seen it there when he came in and had left it where it was.
He would not have touched it if the building had been on fire.
The stove was not lit, because it was late May and had not wanted lighting since the second week. The door lifted and shut behind her, and would go on doing so, because she had refused a lock.
"You paid for the glass," he said.
Cecily held his eye. She had not sat down, and neither had he.
"I did," she said.
"And the timber."
"That too." She said it as she said things to a tradesman: not unkind and not anything else either.
"And most of the putty."
Her hand, which had been going to the tin, stopped and came back to her side. "What do you mean, most?" She turned round from the staging.
"I bought some in February," Piers said. "Before you forbade me."
"I did not forbid you anything. I have never forbidden you anything in my life."
"You said, over the estimate, that not a penny of the estate's money was to go into this building. I bought four pounds of putty out of my own pocket the week after and had it entered as nothing at all."
She came within an inch of laughing. He saw it get as far as her mouth and stop, and she had been doing that since September, and he had been watching her do it.
"What did it come to?" She put her hand flat on the bench beside the tin.
"Two and eightpence, and I have it in the private column under the fourteenth. You may look at it whenever you please."
Then he stopped being able to do the easy part.
He had come down here with the whole thing arranged. He had walked the Netherton walls with it twice and had gone over it again in the estate room, and it had been good, in the way that a thing is good when it is being said to nobody.
"I married you because I needed your money."
Cecily let that stand.
"I do not know how to make that prettier."
"Do not," she said flatly. "I have had a great deal of prettier, and it has never once been worth anything."
"So, I shall not."
He put his hand on the edge of the staging. It was oak, and it had held, and it had been holding since his grandmother's time.
"For about five months I looked at everything you brought into this house and saw the same thing in all of it."
"And what was that?" she said quietly, and left him to find the rest himself.
"Evidence," Piers said, to the middle bed.
She waited him out, as she had been doing all winter, and he had stopped resenting it somewhere around Christmas.
"Your bedroom. I had it made ready in September and then could not look at it. The discharge in December. The east valley in January. This." He moved his hand an inch along the staging. "Each one of them was a thing I could not do, done by somebody else, in my own house, at my own gate."
"You resented me." It was not a question, and she did not put it as one.
"No." He was quite certain about that, and had been since about Christmas. "I resented needing it. That is not the same, and I am not going to pretend it is, because I have watched what happens in a marriage when a man is allowed to blur two things that are not the same."
"I thought you hated me," Cecily said.
He looked at her properly then. He had been braced for a great many things that evening, but not for that, and it went through him with some force.
"I know," he said. "I saw it in April, and I have thought about very little else since."
"And did you?" She had gone quite still, with one hand on the lid of the tin. "Hate me?"
"No. Not for one hour of all the months, and I have gone back over all of it looking for one."
"Not once? All this time?"
Piers thought about it, because she had asked and because she would know at once if he did not.
"I disliked you briefly over the roof," he said.
Cecily stared at him across four feet of brick path. "Piers."
"For about four hours. On the twenty-eighth of December, between two and six in the afternoon."
"You kept the hours," Cecily said, in the voice she used on Sowerby's estimates.
"You were extremely determined," he said.
She laughed at that; it got away from her entirely, and she put a hand up too late to catch it, and it was the first time he had heard it since the day the bond came into the house.
Then he was serious, and it went considerably worse.
"I gave you resentment where there ought to have been gratitude," he said. "And distance where there ought to have been the truth. For five months. And from the twelfth of April I let you carry a document about for ten days rather than stand in front of you and say four sentences."
"You have said this," she said, and looked at the middle bed rather than at him.
"I have not apologised for it. There is a difference, and I have had it explained to me."
Cecily stopped where she was.
"I am sorry," Piers said. "Not for the marriage or the money, because you would not believe me and it would not be true. For the five months."
She did not say that it was all right.
He was grateful for that, more than for anything else she did that evening, because it had not been all right, and they had both had a lifetime of being told otherwise by somebody comfortable.
"If you had nothing now," he said, "I would still choose you."
Cecily was quiet.
"Why?" she asked.
And there it was; he had known it was coming and had had four days to prepare for it, and what came out of him was not any of the things he had prepared.
"Because breakfast is intolerable when you are not there."
Cecily laughed at him again.
"I told you I was poor at this," he said.
"Continue," she said briskly, and sat down on the end of the staging to hear it.
He said that he liked knowing when she got to twenty-seven on the stairs, and what it meant, and that he had counted them himself once in December to find out what it was like.
She read the last page of a novel before the first, and he had considered it an offence against civilisation for three months and had come round to calling it one of the more reasonable things about her.
There was nobody in his life, he said, who had told him he was wrong in a room with nobody else in it and then stayed in the room afterwards, and she had done both since October.
He had got used, he said, to finding her hand in the margin of things beside his own.
The house sounded occupied now, and until the middle of April he had not understood what the noise of an occupied house was, and that it was largely doors.
And he said that she had changed a great deal at Ferrers and had not once erased anything that was there before her, and that his grandmother's labels were still on the board at the end of the range where she found them.
Then he came to the end of it.
He had never in his life said so many consecutive things about himself, but he had said all of them at a bed of soil rather than at her, and when he stopped, he was holding the edge of the staging so hard that he could have marked his hand.
There was one thing left and no further way round it, and he had been carrying it since a wet afternoon in February with the light going. He let go of the staging.
"I love you," Piers said.
Cecily got up from the end of the staging. "I love you too," she replied.
She said it without any difficulty, and he thought afterwards that this was extremely like her, and she was looking straight at him while she did it.
She let that stand in the building. He had not expected it and was afterwards glad of it, because nothing had been said on top of it.
Then she said the other thing, though she took a breath first, and a second one, and he had never seen her need two.
"A partnership, then."
Piers took his time over that, because it had been lying on the floor of his own study since the end of February and he had never picked it up.
"If you will have one," he said.
"I wrote it into the terms in October, at your own table, in my own hand."
"You wrote in three years, and I have had the deed out twice this month to be sure of it."
"I have been considering an extension," Cecily said. "I should want it drawn properly, and I should want Mr Loxley to look at it. I should want the term left out altogether."
He crossed the two feet of brick path between them, and it was the shortest distance he had ever taken any trouble over.
It was not a long kiss, and it was not a careful one. His hand came up to her jaw and this time did not stop short. She had earth on both hands but put them on the front of his coat anyway, and neither of them said anything about the coat.
When they came apart, she stayed where she was with her forehead somewhere near his collarbone, and it was the only unguarded thing he had ever seen her do.
"Your coat," she said.
"Yes," he said absently, and made no move to look at it.
"I am not sorry about it."
"No," Piers said. "Neither am I."
She fetched the tin from the bench by the door.
It was black and japanned, and the yellow flowers on the lid were rubbed away to almost nothing down one side. She had carried it for ten years, and she had had the lid off it once at her own desk and had put it back on within the hour.
She turned it over once in her hands as she had turned it over in her father's study in Berkshire, and the hinge still had the same rust on it.
"There are five papers sown," she said. "There is a sixth I did not open in March."
"Why not?" Piers asked.
"Because it is the whole of what is left."
She stood with it in both hands.
"Will they grow?" Piers said.
"I do not know. Hodge says the second paper is up and the others may do anything. They are ten years old, and they have been in four houses and a travelling case."
"Then they may not, and you will have knelt in a bed at the end of May for nothing."
"I know," Cecily said.
The light had gone yellow along the south face by then, and the range had about twenty minutes left.
She knelt at the end of the middle bed, got the lid off the tin and shook the sixth paper out into her palm.
Piers knelt beside her but did not offer to do it, and kept his hands on his knees.
She put them in with her fingers, one at a time, at the depth Hodge had told her, along nine inches of soil at the end of a bed in a building that stood on ground his grandmother had built on, and his father had stripped the pipes out of.
It did not take long, and neither of them said one word during any of it.
Then she pressed the soil down over them with the flat of her hand and sat back on her heels.
The sun had gone off the south face by then, and the whole of the range had turned the colour that glass goes at the end of a day. There was nothing to see in the bed and would not be for a fortnight, and the tin lay open and empty on the brick between them.