Chapter Twenty-Five
"Five years," Sowerby said, and put the sheet down between them so that it faced neither of them particularly. "That is all of it, Your Grace, and I have not made it prettier at the bottom."
Cecily read it twice, as she read anything from Sowerby, and made him wait for it, which he had stopped minding in February.
It was a programme, in his flat hand, one line to a year, and it was the least encouraging document she had seen since April and by a considerable margin the most useful.
The Netherton north walls were done. The mill leat, the Purnell roof, and the servants' staircase were done, and after those four things there were nineteen more on the sheet and the earliest of them was two years off.
"The west parlour," she said, with her finger on the line.
"Shut, Your Grace."
"And the blue rooms?"
Sowerby did not need to look. "Shut also."
"And the north side above the first floor?"
"All of it, Your Grace."
"For how long? Give me a year, and I shall hold you to it."
"Until there is somebody to put in them," said Sowerby, "or until the roof over them requires it, whichever comes first, and I would not put money on which."
Cecily wrote agreed, at the foot of it, dated it and passed it back.
"And the great dining room ceiling?" she asked.
"Not in five years, Your Grace."
"Good," Cecily said mildly.
Sowerby waited, and then permitted himself a small "Your Grace?"
"I would rather have the walls at Netherton twice over than a ceiling nobody looks at."
Ferrers, whatever the county believed, was not rich.
The county had never quite grasped it and never would, and she had stopped attempting to explain it at about the third dinner in March.
The forty thousand had gone in one payment to Bristol in December and had bought one thing, the removal of a charge.
What was left afterwards was an estate of nine hundred and twelve acres with four hundred and eleven tenancies on it, producing a good and unremarkable income, with twelve years of deferred repairs standing against it.
They were working through those in the order that saved money rather than the order that showed, and it was a slower business than the county imagined and would go on being slow for a decade.
There was no new carriage. No picture had been ordered at Ferrers, no horse, no yard of new cloth for any room in the place, and the two hundred people at Devizes had gone home and told one another that Havering had come into a fortune.
By the last week of May there were beans and two rows of early carrots along the north side of the glasshouse, because Hodge had pointed out in a roundabout way that a hundred and ten feet of heated glass growing nothing but flowers was a thing the sixth duke would have done.
Cecily had given him half the range the same afternoon.
The flowers were at the south end and were doing what they were doing, and one of them had turned out to be a stock, but one was still refusing to declare itself.
The letter from Cargill and Membury came at the end of the month.
Sowerby brought it up and read it out standing, and Cecily had the shape of it before he was halfway through.
Mr Ellis Pike was willing to release the bond upon the riverside land for the sum of two thousand four hundred pounds, and would be glad to have the matter concluded without further correspondence.
"The second paragraph," Cecily said. "Read it again."
Sowerby read it again.
"Two thousand four hundred," Cecily said.
"On a face of three, and no interest reserved, so the six hundred is a discount and not a settlement of arrears."
"He is taking less than the paper is worth."
"He is taking less than the paper was worth in March," Sowerby said. "It is worth much less than that now, and he knows it better than anybody in this room, and I imagine he did the arithmetic on the way home from Devizes."
"He offered to buy the strip in February," she said. "He already had a charge on it."
"He did not want the grazing, Your Grace.
Eleven acres of it would not keep him in coals.
" Sowerby put the letter down. "A charge gets a man into a room once.
Land gets him a neighbour, a boundary, and a reason to be written to.
He has been trying to be somebody's neighbour in this county for nine years and has never once managed it. "
"Take it," Piers said, from the window.
Cecily turned. She had not thought he was listening. "Out of what?"
"Out of the rents." He came away from the window. "Over two years, and nothing on the five-year sheet is to be moved to make room for it."
"It will be tight in the second year, Your Grace," Sowerby said carefully.
"Then let it be tight in the second year."
Sowerby wrote it down.
The coat came to a head two days after the letter.
She found Tolley in the hall with it over his arm, looking like a man who had been asked to do a thing he had been asked to do four times already.
"No," Cecily said, from the second stair, with her hand still on the rail.
Piers came out of the estate room with a pen still in his hand, as he generally did.
"It is serviceable," he said.
"It is not."
"It has done four winters," Piers said.
"It has ceased to possess elbows."
"That is an exaggeration."
"It is a small one, then." She came down the rest of the way, took the coat off Tolley, and turned the left arm over and held it up to the window, as Tolley had done to her husband every October for four years.
"There is more thread than cloth in that.
Mr Tolley, what would you do with it if it were nobody's in particular? "
Tolley looked at the ceiling.
"I should not care to say, Your Grace."
"Say it, Mr Tolley. I have never dismissed a man for the truth about a coat."
"I should put it on a scarecrow," said Tolley, "and I should feel for the scarecrow."
"Very well," Piers said, and studied the flags between his boots, and then let the subject go.
"You will have a new one," Cecily said.
"I will have a new one." He turned to Tolley. "A sensible one."
"I would expect nothing else, Your Grace," said Tolley, with great feeling, and got out of the house before anybody could change their mind.
Cecily did not make him extravagant.
She had thought about that since the lamp and had concluded that it would be a poor sort of victory.
A man who bought eleven guineas of wool for a woman whose hands were cold and would not have his own elbows mended was not a man who needed teaching to spend.
He was a man who needed to be told that care was permitted to include the person doing the caring, and it had taken her seven months to find a way of saying it that did not sound like an instruction.
In the end she had not said it. She had held a sleeve up to a window and let a tailor from Devizes say it for her.
What did not change was the money.
She had thought about that too, in April, in the fortnight when she believed the marriage was what she had feared it was, and she had come out of it with her position where it had begun.
Her three thousand was hers. Her four hundred a year was hers. The estate accounts remained under her written authority for two years and more, by deed, enforceable by three men in Manchester who could sue in their own names because she still could not sue in hers.
She had not offered to give any of it up. Piers had never asked, and the subject had not once been raised between them.
What altered was the direction the information ran.
She had spent ten years arranging her affairs so that nobody could reach them.
They were still arranged that way. The difference was that she no longer required the arrangement to be secret, and somewhere about the middle of May she had stopped checking.
The house was extremely noisy that week.
Kitty came into the morning room in a temper about a sleeve.
"Next spring," she said. "Next spring, and I am to decide about it now, because Tolley says the pattern will not be got after August and Mrs Tregarth agrees with him. I have nine months of this in front of me, and I shall be dead by Christmas."
"Then decide it now," Cecily said, "while Tolley is still in the county and the pattern is still to be got."
"I cannot decide it now. I do not know what I shall look like in April."
"You will look like yourself. You have looked like yourself since I came here and it has done you no harm."
"That is not a helpful observation," Kitty said darkly, "and I shall remember it."
Mrs Tregarth came in without knocking, having begun that in February and never stopped.
"The sweep comes next week, Your Grace, and he will want the east wing this time."
"Both rooms?" Cecily had the sweep's account from the autumn in front of her already.
"The one that is open and the one next to it, because they share a stack, and if we do not do the second he will be back before the year is out and charge for the journey."
"Then do the second," Cecily said, "and have him look at the flue in the passage while he is in the house."
"And Lady Katherine's sleeve is a matter for Lady Katherine," said Mrs Tregarth, on her way out, "and if she asks me again, I shall tell her what I told her before."
Kitty, who had come in to have it out with somebody, opened her mouth and shut it again.
***
The shoot in the middle bed was there at the end of the month, at the far end, about an inch from where she had put the sixth paper in.
It was perhaps a quarter of an inch high, and it was two leaves and a stem, but it was not like the others.
Cecily knelt on the brick and looked at it.
Then she went to the door of the glasshouse and called him, because he was at the far end of the kitchen garden with Hodge and a plan of the cold frame.
"There," she said. "About an inch in from the end, and do not put your knee on it."
Piers came down onto one knee on the brick beside her.
Neither of them spoke.
"What is it?" he asked.
"I have no idea. I have been looking at it for a quarter of an hour, and I am no further on."
"Is it one of hers, or is it something that was in the ground already?"
"It is where hers went in," Cecily said. "It may be a weed. Hodge will know in a fortnight, but he will not tell us before then, on principle."
They stayed there, and Piers put his hand out.
Cecily had watched that hand sign a register in a vestry in October, and had seen the pause before it moved, and everything it was signing away had been in the pause.
She did not think about any of that.
She took it.