Chapter Six
“The east avenue wants replanting,” Lucian said. “The limes are going.”
He had the pen already in his hand when he said it, halfway to writing the order in the margin as he wrote everything, and he felt a little foolish saying it aloud to a person instead. But the household books came up to the estate office each week now, and Miss Vane came with them.
“Then it should be done in November, Your Grace, while they sleep,” she said, without looking up from her marketing list. “And beech set in among them. The limes will not all take, and an avenue with gaps in it looks worse than no avenue at all.”
He had not known that. He started to write it down, caught her watching him do it, and put the pen down and told Felton to his face instead.
That was how it went now.
It had begun as a way of keeping an eye on the house.
It had become, without his quite deciding it, the fixture his week was built around: the household accounts and the stillroom book open on the long, scarred table among his own ledgers, and Miss Vane across from him, answering what he asked and, more and more, telling him things he had not thought to ask.
The estate office was the plainest room in the house.
A long table marked by generations of ledgers, a wall of pigeonholes stuffed with leases, a window over the stable yard so a man could see who came and went.
It had been his father’s room, and his grandfather’s, and Lucian had always worked in it alone.
Now there were two chairs drawn up to the table, and a second inkwell, and the room had stopped being only his without his ever saying that it might.
All his life he had given his orders to the house in writing.
It was easier than speaking. A note in a margin asked nothing back: no answer, no face.
But a note could not weigh a thing, or argue with him, or tell him where he was wrong.
Miss Vane could, and did, and he had begun, week by week, to ask aloud what he would once have written down and forgotten.
She earned the asking by being right. When the Combe Mill miller came up complaining that his wheel was failing and the estate must stand him a new one, she knew before Felton did that the man had let it go to ruin himself; she had it from the miller’s wife, who bought her sugar from the same grocer in the village.
When the winter charities came round, she knew which of the parish widows truly wanted coal and which only wished to be called upon, and said so plainly, and was right about both.
Felton, who had begun by looking askance at a lady in his office, had come round to consulting her without quite noticing that he did it.
Then came the Yarcombe farm.
Old Yeo had given it up at last, too rheumatic to work it, and gone to live with his daughter, and the farm wanted a new tenant by Lady Day.
Felton had two men for it: Mr Pringle, from over the county, with capital behind him and a higher rent in his hand; and young Coker, whose father held the next farm, and who wished to set up on his own.
“Pringle,” said Felton, “is the sounder offer. Thirty pounds a year the better, and money behind him. There is no argument on the figures.”
On the figures, Lucian agreed. He reached for the pen to write Pringle’s name, and found that he had stopped, and that he wanted to know what Miss Vane thought. He could not have said why. The tenancy was estate business, no part of the household, none of her affair at all.
He put the pen down.
“Miss Vane. Pringle or Coker?”
She looked up, honestly surprised. For a moment, he thought she would say it was not her place, the way she said such things when it suited her to disappear. Then she answered him as plainly as if he had asked her the price of candles.
“Coker.”
Felton made a small sound. “Pringle offers thirty pounds a year more, Miss Vane.”
“He does. And in three years he will have taken what Yarcombe will give, let the hedges go and the ditches silt, and carried his money off to do the same on another man’s land. It will never be his, so he will never love it. Coker was born in the next field. He means to die in this one.”
“You have met the man?” Lucian asked.
“No. But I have driven the Yarcombe road, and I have seen his father’s land from it.
The hedges are laid close, and the ditches run clean, and that is the father he learned farming from.
” She paused, and then gave the rest of it, a little reluctantly, like a woman laying down her last card.
“And I have heard, from the carrier’s wife, that Mr Pringle has been saying at the inn at Combe these past two weeks that the bottom field floods, and that he will want it drained at the estate’s charge before he signs.
Coker has said nothing in any inn. But his father told the carrier that the boy has been walking that bottom field every Sunday since Michaelmas, working out where he would cut the drains himself. ”
There was a silence. Felton looked at his figures, where none of this appeared, because figures do not drink at the inn at Combe or talk to the carrier’s wife.
“It is only talk,” Felton said, but without much force.
“It is, Mr Felton. But land is only talk, until you have lived beside it twenty years.” She drew her marketing list back towards her.
“You asked me, Your Grace. That is what I think. The figures are Mr Felton’s business, and they say Pringle, and the figures are not wrong. They are only not the whole of it.”
Lucian gave Coker the farm.
He gave it on her word, against thirty pounds a year and his steward’s first advice, and he was aware, as he watched Felton write the letter, that he had never in his life given a tenancy on the word of a lady some weeks in his house. He waited to feel uneasy about it. The unease did not come.
When it was settled, Miss Vane went back to the week’s marketing as though nothing at all had happened.
She did not wait to be thanked. She did not look pleased with herself.
She made a note about candles, and then said, “The Blue Morning Room, Your Grace. Does the family wish it kept aired, now that the cold is coming? It has been shut up, but it is the warmest room on that front, and it seems a waste of the best light in the house.”
The Blue Morning Room had been his mother’s. No one had sat in it in years; he could not now have said when it had been decided that no one would, only that the door had been shut one day and had stayed so, the way doors did in that house.
“Air it if you like,” he said, and was surprised to hear himself say it so easily.
“I should like it for Lady Amabel’s lessons. A girl learns better in a warm room with good light. The schoolroom faces north, and she sits in it like a prisoner at the bar.”
“Then take it. It is only a room standing empty.”
“Thank you. It will not be empty long.” She said it lightly, making her note. She could not have known what she had asked for, or what he had given; and he found he did not intend to tell her, because he could not have explained why a shut door being opened should feel like anything at all.
The clock struck noon. She began to gather her books and stopped over the last of them.
“There is one thing more. The maid you set on to me.” She kept her eyes on the strap of the book as she buckled it.
“Patty. She brings me a pot of tea every evening at eight, whether I will or no. She tells me it is your standing order, and that she would lose her place sooner than miss a night of it. I have told her she may surely be spared the trouble, and she looks at me as though I had asked her to rob the plate.”
“She has her instructions.”
“So I find.” She got the buckle done at last and looked up at him.
He waited to be told that it was unnecessary, that she wanted nothing, that it was no trouble to do without, all the things she said.
She opened her mouth to say them. And then, instead, with the air of a woman setting down a parcel she had carried further than she meant to: “It is good tea. I drank it last night. I thought you had better know your order was being obeyed.”
It was the smallest thing in the world, and the room was strangely warm with it.
“I shall tell Patty her place is safe,” he said gravely, and the corner of her mouth moved, the way it had moved once before in the housekeeper’s room, dry and quick and gone again.
For a moment, they were two people across a table who had very nearly laughed, and both of them knew it, and neither of them did.
She took up her books and went. Lucian sat a while after the door had closed.
There was a darned place at the wrist of her gown, neat as a seam, that the new maid had plainly not been allowed to touch.
She held her lip between her teeth when she added a column.
She had grown paler since Michaelmas, he thought, for want of daylight, working at the bottom of the house where the sun never reached.
He had been looking at these things for some weeks, the way he looked at everything that was his to keep in order.
He told himself that was what the looking was.
He went back to his letters. But the next week he found he had kept a question back to put to her, a matter of the church roof he could perfectly well have settled himself; and the week after that, a boundary dispute that was no household business at all.
He kept finding her things to decide. She kept deciding them.
And he sat across the long table with his own letters lying unanswered in front of him, watching her do it, and did not ask himself why.