Epilogue
One Year Later
Two rooms in the east wing were open by midsummer, and neither had been opened because anybody could afford it.
The first of them was Cecily's own. In thirteen months, it had acquired a second shelf and a screen for the grate, and nothing else.
The second was the room beyond it, which shared the stack and had been a lumber room since his mother died.
Kitty found the door standing open in the third week of June, with two men in it sacking on the floor, and came down to ask about it.
"The room by mine," Cecily said.
"I saw that it is the room by yours. It has men in it."
"It is being got ready," Cecily replied.
"For what? Nobody in this house tells me anything until it is done," Kitty replied.
Piers was at the other end of the table with the midsummer rents and kept his eyes on them.
"Somebody requires it," he said.
Kitty stood with the door handle still in her hand. "Piers," she said, and waited.
"Yes?" He turned a page.
When nothing came of that, he said, to the rents rather than to her, "I have said it properly, and I do not intend to improve on it."
"You have said three words to me about the most interesting thing that has happened in this house since the wedding."
"It is being got ready," Piers said without emphasis, "for about the middle of January."
Kitty waited a little longer. Then she put both hands flat on the table and said a great many things at speed, and Mrs Tregarth came in to find out what the noise was and stayed for the whole of it.
Ferrers was in better repair and looked much the same.
The west parlour was still shut, the great dining room ceiling was still cracked, and the pale rectangle in the long gallery was still where the Cuyp had hung. What had been done was what was on Sowerby's sheet, in the order that saved money.
The release of the bond had come in the July after Devizes.
Cecily read it, both sides, as she read everything, found nothing in the wording doing more work than it appeared to, and put it in the box.
The first year's payment had gone out of the rents since, as Piers had said it would, and it had been tight.
Ellis Pike did not come to Ferrers again. He was at the Michaelmas sessions and dined twice in the county that autumn, and nobody was rude to him anywhere. The invitations thinned by about a third over the following year, without one word being said by anybody.
Kitty had come home from London in June from a season paid for out of her brother's rents, without once giving anybody the impression that she considered herself in debt to a living soul. She had two offers and refused both, and explained her reasons over an entire afternoon in the glasshouse.
"She is a great deal of work," Mrs Tregarth said, with the linen book under her arm.
"She is. She has been a great deal of work since she was four."
"I have had the blue room aired twice," Mrs Tregarth said, "because she cannot settle where she is sleeping. Is she to have the blue room or is she not?"
"She is to have whichever she settles on," Cecily said.
"Then she will settle on neither, and I shall air both."
"Yes," Cecily said mildly.
"And she is extremely well," said Mrs Tregarth, and went out.
The glasshouse was producing, and had been since the previous August, and paid for much of what came into the kitchen between June and October.
There were beans, carrots and two frames of salad along the north side, and a vine going in against the back wall where the old nails were, because Hodge had talked about those nails from March until she gave in.
Of Maria's six papers, three came to nothing, and would have come to nothing in any garden in England.
Two came up in the first fortnight and turned out to be a stock and something Hodge maintained was a larkspur, and a larkspur it proved to be.
The sixth produced the thing in the middle bed that nobody could name for nine weeks, which flowered in August and was a common white pink of no distinction.
Cecily could have put her hand on each of them in the dark.
She had refused, from the beginning, to let anybody treat them as anything.
They were not roped off or labelled in a different hand.
Hodge watered them with everything else and moved one in the autumn because it was in a poor place, having asked her first.
They were her mother's flowers, and that was enough.
***
The carpet arrived on a wet morning, without warning to anybody. Cecily came down and found it half unrolled outside her own room, with two men, Mrs Tregarth and her husband at the far end pretending to have business there.
"There is a carpet in the passage," she said. She had got as far as the second stair and stopped there.
"I know," Piers said, from the far end of the passage.
"Whose is it?"
"Yours." His hands were behind his back.
"I did not order a carpet."
"No," he said.
Cecily looked down the passage at him.
"It is worn," Piers said. "There is a place by the second door where the edge has gone, and it lifts."
"What did it cost?"
"Nine guineas," he said. "Out of my own."
She came down the last two stairs. "Nine guineas because an edge lifts."
"It is nine guineas, and it is a passage you go along six times a day," he said. "I have had this argument with myself already, and I lost it."
Cecily leaned against the door frame, which she had begun doing for some time and about which Mrs Tregarth had opinions. "You have refused a new coat every October since before I met you."
"That was different," he said.
"Because you were the person at risk?"
Piers considered it, and saw him arrive at the answer and dislike it.
"Yes," he said quietly.
Cecily laughed at him in a passage in front of two men and a housekeeper, and he stood at the far end and let her.
He had improved in a year. He had not become a different man, and she would not have had one.
He kissed her on the landing that evening on the way down, with the house making its ordinary noise below them. It was neither long nor careful anymore.
"Whose hand is that?" Cecily did not look up from the wages book.
"Nobody's." Kitty put her arm across the page.
"Mr Hollis writes a very legible nobody."
"He farms eight hundred acres," Kitty said crossly, "and he blushes, and I have not decided about him in the least, and if you say one word to my brother, I shall be uncivil about it until Christmas."
She went down to the glasshouse after dinner, because the light was good until nine and she had no intention of getting out of the habit.
Piers came with her, carrying the seed box, a can of water and the frame Hodge had left out. She had carried that load down the path herself twice a day for fourteen months.
"Give me the can," she said at the gate.
"No." He had it in the hand furthest from her, and he had put it there before she asked.
"It is a can of water, Piers."
"I know what it is," he said, and kept walking.
"Then give it to me."
"No," he said, and went on carrying it.
She said his name once, at the turn of the path, and he shook his head.
She had spent ten years making certain that nobody could do anything for her, so she simply relinquished her pride and allowed herself to be cared for at last.
The End