Chapter One

 

 

“Havering,” Lord Frayne said, and leaned back until the chair complained beneath him. “Seventh duke. The creation is Restoration, but the family is a great deal older than that.”

Cecily did not look up from the coal merchant’s letter. It had reached the stage of politeness that arrived shortly before a solicitor did.

I remain, my lord, reluctant to trouble you further upon so small a matter, and hopeful of your convenience before the quarter day.

The small matter was the coal, and it had been small since February. The year was fourteen and September half gone, and the sum stood no larger than when it was first sent.

“Wiltshire,” her father went on. “Ferrers Abbey. Eight hundred acres of park, and a Chaloner in the chapel from every century since the fourth Edward.”

“Nine hundred and twelve acres,” Mr Loxley said.

“There. Nine hundred.”

Cecily laid the letter face down on the pile of letters she would answer herself, and took up the glazier, who had been waiting since Lady Day.

The fire had been lit because the solicitor was coming. Her father had taken the chair nearest it, and the decanter as well, though the hour was barely noon. He poured for Mr Loxley first, as he always did when he wished his own glass to look like an afterthought.

“You will want to know about the family,” he said. “Chaloner. Not one of your new creations. The mother was a Sedley of the Norfolk branch, and there is a portrait of the fourth duchess at Ferrers that people used to travel to see.”

Mr Loxley turned a page of the papers on his knee and let that go by.

“He is thirty-four,” Rufus said. “Exactly the right age. A man of twenty-two has opinions. A man of thirty-four has arrangements.”

Cecily wrote a line to the glazier promising him half by Michaelmas, but blotted it, and her quill pen slowed in the second sentence, because neither of the men behind her had yet said what the duke wanted.

They had been talking for a quarter of an hour. Between them they had produced the park, the chapel, the duchess in the portrait, the age of the creation and the age of the man, and not one of those things was a figure.

She put down her pen.

“How much does he require?” she asked.

Her father smiled at her the way he smiled at a servant who had come in during a story.

“My dear. Havering is not a tradesman presenting a receipt.”

“How much?” Cecily said curtly.

“There is a proper order to these things.”

She turned a little in her chair. “Then tell me the improper part first.”

Rufus laughed and began on the Chaloner again, and had got as far as a lieutenancy in the last reign before Cecily gave up and looked at Mr Loxley instead.

Mr Loxley had been her father’s solicitor for nine years, and in that time the household had taught him several things. One of them was that Miss Frayne never stopped asking.

“Forty thousand pounds,” he said.

Nothing in the room altered. The fire kept burning coal that had not been paid for, her father kept holding his glass, and out in the yard a boy dragged something metal across the cobbles and back again.

The sum was not merely large. It was the figure her grandfather had tied to her name ten years ago, in an instrument drawn so tightly that Rufus had been complaining ever since.

“Grandfather’s money,” Cecily said.

“Your settlement,” Rufus said easily.

She waited, hands in her lap, until he set down the glass he was not drinking from and looked into the fire. From him that was as good as an admission.

Silas Marchbank had spun cotton in Manchester for forty years and had come south twice: once for his daughter’s wedding and once for her funeral. He approved of neither occasion. On the first he gave Maria eighteen thousand pounds and a piece of advice about solicitors, and Rufus spent the eighteen thousand in nine years without ever once doing anything that could fairly be called theft.

There had been a roof, then a season, and then an investment in a canal that was going to be the making of the county. A horse was also going to be the making of the investment.

Maria’s fortune went out of the house by respectable increments. The last of it was the small property at Kelby with a garden in it, which her mother asked him not to sell in the only raised voice Cecily ever heard her use.

He sold it though, and Maria died in the October of the year after.

Silas came south the second time, stood at the graveside in a coat better than anybody expected and worse cut than anybody could forgive, and said eleven words to his son-in-law. Then he went home to Manchester and made his will again.

“The duke is aware of the source, I take it?” Cecily said.

“Of course he is aware.”

“And he wishes to marry me notwithstanding?”

“My dear,” her father said, spreading his hands with great good humour, “forty thousand pounds has never suffered from a want of admirers.”

Mr Loxley looked at the fire.

Cecily let the line sit where it had fallen. She had heard her father say worse things about her mother’s money and had never once heard him say a thing he thought unkind. He would have been easier to hate if he had ever meant it.

“When does he want an answer?” she asked.

“There is no want about it. He would be honoured to be received.”

“His Grace has not yet said so,” Mr Loxley said.

Rufus made a gesture that disposed of the objection. “He will.”

Cecily looked past him. “Mr Loxley?”

The solicitor put his glass on the floor beside his chair, having no confidence in her father’s tables.

“The matter has some urgency,” he said.

“How much urgency?”

“The Havering obligation falls due at the Christmas quarter day. Notice was served in the spring. It will not be renewed.”

“Three months,” Cecily said.

“Rather less, once the settlement is drawn,” Mr Loxley replied.

Her father had never in twenty-six years given her a date. He gave her seasons, intentions and the general direction of his hopes, and when the thing failed to happen, he was as surprised as anybody and rather more forgiving.

Mr Loxley had handed her a day of the year and a reason, but together they did more damage to her composure than all the acreage in Wiltshire.

“They call him the ruined duke,” she said.

Her father made a small noise of distaste. “People will say anything at a card table.”

“Then what do they mean by it?”

“Nothing that would bear repeating. He shut the east wing, he sold some pictures, he has not been seen in town in two years and he does not keep a pack. In this county that is enough to be going on with.”

“And what do they think he ruined?”

“Himself, my dear. Cards, or a woman, or an Italian singer. It varies with the hostess.” Rufus turned his glass. “Nobody has ever troubled to ask whether it might have been his father.”

“Has he tried other houses?” she asked.

“Three, to my knowledge,” Mr Loxley said.

She lifted her eyebrows at him and waited.

“All three declined,” he said. “The terms his father accepted were drawn to make the paper difficult to move.”

“Drawn by whom?”

Mr Loxley took his time over the question.

“That is not in my instructions,” he said at last.

Rufus refilled the solicitor’s glass and looked pleased with the room.

“You are making it sound like a ruin,” he said. “It is a settlement. Settlements have terms. Every marriage in England is a set of terms, and the ones with affection in them are merely less honest about it.”

“We owe Nash eleven pounds four,” Cecily said.

Her father looked round. “What?”

“Coal. Since February. Bassett wants six for the glazing, Denton has been waiting since Easter for the wheelwright’s account, and the girl who does the dairy has had no wages this quarter because I could not make the money do both.” She squared the letters against the desk. “I know what terms are because I respond. I write to them every week.”

Her father waved his hand as though clearing smoke from in front of a picture.

“Which is precisely why you would be happier at Ferrers,” he said. “The match answers on both sides.”

“Both sides,” Cecily said. She had turned fully round now. “What is yours?”

He picked up the glass again and found something in it to look at.

“Your grandfather’s instrument is a long one, my dear. I have never pretended to follow every clause of it.”

“Mr Loxley has,” she said.

The solicitor did not look at her father before he answered, and she marked him up for it.

“Upon your marriage, with the trustees’ consent, a provision of two thousand pounds becomes payable to Lord Frayne.”

The boy in the yard stopped dragging his piece of metal, the fire settled in the grate, and both of Cecily’s hands were flat on the desk before she had decided to put them there.

“My grandfather provided for my father?” she asked.

“Indeed, but with the trustees’ consent,” Mr Loxley said.

“Read me the clause.”

“Miss Frayne, I hardly think…” he began, and stopped, because she had shaken her head.

“You need not,” she said gently. “I have it.”

She had the whole of it before he closed his mouth. Silas Marchbank had not softened towards Rufus in the last year of his life. He had sat in an office in Manchester with a man who spent his daughter’s money by respectable increments, and had reckoned that such a man would obstruct any marriage which paid him nothing. So, he had decided he would rather name the price himself than let his son-in-law invent one afterwards.

Her grandfather had bought her father’s consent ten years in advance, had thought the price worth paying to be certain of it, and had been right.

“So, everybody is to be paid,” she said.

“Do not be theatrical,” Rufus said reprovingly.

“Except the bride.”

Rufus sighed comfortably.

“The bride,” he said, “becomes Duchess of Havering.”

“Titles have never appeared on my list of necessities.”

“A home has,” her father said.

Cecily turned back to the writing table, because her hands wanted something to do and there was a glazier who needed telling about Michaelmas.

Her father had watched her long enough to see where her resilience was thin.

“You cannot mean to live with me the whole of your life,” he said, more gently. “Nor to go from my house to your cousin’s at Wantage and be useful to a woman who will never ask your opinion of anything but the fish.”

“No,” Cecily said, to the glazier’s letter.

“Then what is your plan? I have never once heard it.”

It was a fair question, and she disliked how fair it was. She had forty thousand waiting ten years for a signature, a room at the back of a house that would belong to her cousin the day her father died, and nowhere in England she could shut a door in.

“Havering’s debt would be discharged entirely,” Rufus said. “The estate saved. Four hundred families left where they are. You would have rank, security and a house of that size to be mistress of. I cannot think what more a father is expected to arrange.”

He believed every word. He had made the identical argument to a Manchester spinner thirty years ago concerning a girl called Maria, and had believed that one too. He had gone on believing it through eighteen thousand pounds, a sold garden and a wife who stopped speaking at meals.

“Does he wish to marry me,” Cecily asked, “or does he wish to marry forty thousand pounds?”

Her father laughed, and there was nothing cruel anywhere in it.

“I doubt the distinction has yet troubled him.”

Mr Loxley shifted in his chair.

“There is no want of applications for a duchess,” Rufus said, recovering himself. “I merely happen to think this one honest.”

“You have not met him.”

“I have had his agent’s letter, and I have seen the figures.” He turned his glass by the stem. “And I will tell you what I have never been able to say about any other man in this county. He did not once try to make them look better than they are.”

Cecily wrote Michaelmas at the foot of the glazier’s letter and underlined it and her hand was steadier than she had expected.

“I will meet him,” she said.

“My dear,” Rufus said warmly.

“That is not an agreement. I will meet him, and I will look at what he owes, and then I will tell you.”

“One does not ask a duke for his accounts,” Rufus said plaintively.

“Then he may refuse.”

Her father began to explain how these things were done. Cecily gathered her letters, and Mr Loxley rose with the promptness of a man who had been waiting an hour to leave a warm room.

At the door the solicitor stopped.

“Miss Frayne. The trustees will require a written request under your own hand before anything is drawn. Nothing moves without it.”

“I know,” she said.

“I am aware that you know,” he said. “I wished it to be said in front of your father.”

He carefully slipped on his gloves, one finger at a time, as if weighing a decision.

“There is one further matter,” he said. “The duke’s agent wrote to me directly two days ago. Before anything else, before the sum, the date or the security, and he asked two questions.”

“Which were?”

“Whether the forty thousand is yours absolutely, and whether any part of it passes to Lord Frayne.”

Cecily set the letters down.

“And you answered him?” she asked.

“That it is, and that none of it does. He wrote back the same day to say that his principal would not proceed on any other footing.” Mr Loxley took up his hat. “I have drawn forty marriage settlements. Nobody has asked me that first.”

“What did you make of it?”

“I have not made anything of it yet,” he said carefully. “I thought you had better have it before you meet him.”

He bowed and went out. Rufus watched him go with mild affection and observed to the room that Loxley was an excellent man who had never understood the difference between a rule and a person. Then he went to see about the horses, there being a mare at Lambourn he had been meaning to look at.

Cecily stayed in the study.

The fire had dwindled to a point where it seemed poised either to consume the coal or to die out on its own. She chose to let it be, standing quietly at the window with letters still clutched in her hand.

There were nine servants at Frayne House, and there had been nineteen when her mother came to it. The kitchen worked to a book Cecily had begun keeping at seventeen after the cook gave notice over a quarter’s wages that had gone to a horse. Her father had never asked to see that book. He praised the dinners, and praised her to visitors as a great manager, but had no more idea of what managing cost than of the price of coal. Somewhere towards the stables her father was being charming to a groom.

Forty thousand, and fourteen weeks less the drawing of a settlement, and a man in Wiltshire she had never seen, with an old name, a dead father and a house that ate money. Four hundred families would be told to move on if she said no but something better arrived too late.

She opened the second drawer of the writing table.

The seed tin sat where it had sat since they came to this house. It was japanned in black, with a spray of yellow flowers on the lid rubbed nearly to nothing along one side, and it was the only thing of her mother’s that Rufus had never thought worth selling, because it was worth ninepence.

Maria Marchbank had entered the garden at Kelby in the last September before it was sold, diligently gathering seeds as she always did, and storing them away in preparation for the spring to come, when the house would belong to them. However, no house had yet been built. Instead, there had been three different sets of lodgings, accompanied by much discussion about the canal.

Cecily was sixteen when her mother died, and the tin came to her. She had carried it through four removals and ten years without once opening it, and could not have said whether she was keeping it or refusing it.

She turned it over in her hands. The lid was still tight, the hinge had a little rust on it, and something inside shifted when she tilted it.

Her mother had money, a husband, a title to be addressed by, and a settlement drawn by two firms of solicitors who both went on to prosper. What her mother never had was one square foot of England that Rufus could not sell without asking her.

Cecily went upstairs, took the travelling case down from the top of the press, and put the tin in the bottom of it beneath her stockings.

If she was going into Wiltshire to look at a man who wanted forty thousand pounds, Maria could come and look at him too.

She was calm about it, or near enough to pass. She had already worked out what she would find at the other end, after twenty-six years in a house with one of them, and the only question was whether this one would be charming about it or ashamed. At least, that was what she told herself on the stairs.

Then she sat down on the edge of the bed thinking that a man who wanted the money badly enough to be refused by three houses had spent his first letter asking whether any of it would reach her father.

It was not a question her own father would have thought to ask, and she doubted he would have understood it if somebody had asked it of him.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

Piers came out of the east wing a little after breakfast, locked the door behind him and put the key back on the ring at his belt, where it had hung for two years and had come off four times a year since.

The wing was sound. He walked the length of it every quarter to be certain of that himself rather than by report, since a roof that is not looked at goes at the valleys first and gives no warning until the plaster comes down in a room nobody has entered since Michaelmas. Nothing had come down anywhere, and the sheets over the furniture were grey with the particular dust of closed rooms. The long gallery smelled of cold stone and of the linseed the joiner had used in April. In the third bay the wall carried a pale rectangle a little over five feet across, where a Cuyp had hung until the January before last.

He had sold the Cuyp for nine hundred and eighty pounds, the pair of Lelys in the same month, and a service of plate in the spring after that, and all of it together had bought the estate a few months’ grace and nothing more.

The corridor at the top of the south stairs was warm, because the sun reached it early and the house held heat well in September but badly in every other month. Below him somebody was moving furniture again. Two of the parlour chairs had gone into the morning room in July when the parlour was shut. The morning room now held nineteen chairs for the four people who ever sat down in it, and Mrs Tregarth arranged them every week as though the number were not remarkable.

Sowerby was waiting at the foot of the stairs with his hat in one hand and a black tin box under the other arm.

“Your Grace,” Sowerby said. He kept the box rather than setting it down.

“You are early.”

“I came by the mill road,” Sowerby said. “It is dry, and Hallett has hung the gate at last.”

They went through to the estate room, which had been the still-room in his grandfather’s time and had a stone floor, one window and no picture on any wall. Piers had chosen it for that reason, and Sowerby put the box on the table, opened it, and remained standing.

“I have the final position,” he said.

“Then give it to me in the order it happened.”

Sowerby had a way of reading figures that made no allowance for the person he was reading them to. That was why Piers had kept him, but there were mornings when it was also the reason why he could hardly bear the sight of him.

“Notice was served on the ninth of April. The whole sum falls due at the Christmas quarter day, the twenty-fifth of December. The holder will not renew, and has said so twice in writing.”

“How long?”

“Fourteen weeks,” Sowerby said levelly, as though it were a distance on a road.

Piers already had the number. He had been carrying it since spring and had done the arithmetic again at four that morning, lying on his back in the dark, in case some previously undiscovered fortnight had attached itself to the calendar.

“Go on,” he said.

“Three houses were approached. Marleigh in the spring, then Hallam, then the Bristol men in August. All three declined, but none of them declined on the security.”

“Then on what?”

“On the terms. The paper was drawn to be difficult to move, and every man who has read it has understood that within an hour.” Sowerby turned a page. “Your father’s instrument permits the holder to refuse a transfer at his own discretion and gives no reason for doing so. There is nothing anywhere else in the county drawn that way.”

“Rupert signed it,” Piers said, and heard how flat his own voice had come out.

“He signed all nine.” Sowerby turned the page round so that the signature faced across the table.

“Who is the holder?” Piers said. “Not the company. The man.”

Sowerby’s finger stopped on the page. “Cargill and Membury of Bristol act. Behind them there is a shell, and behind the shell there is somebody who has never once appeared in person, has never sent an agent to look at the land, and has never asked for a valuation.”

“Nine years,” Piers said, “and he has never once come to look at it.”

“Not to my knowledge, and I have asked.”

“A man who lends forty thousand against land he has not seen.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Then he has seen it,” Piers said.

He went to the window and stood with his back to the room. Out in the yard a man was leading the bay mare towards the far gate. There were four horses now in a stable built for twenty-two, and that was arithmetic as well.

Two years ago, he had come home from his father’s funeral, sat down in the library with a glass of his father’s claret, and opened the deed box to find out what a dukedom consisted of. Nine years of quiet borrowing was the answer. Money had gone out, year after year, to a company in Bristol nobody at Ferrers had ever heard of. Mortgages had been taken, renewed and taken again, and not one line of it appeared in the accounts Rupert had shown him every Lady Day of his adult life, with the air of a man doing something faintly indelicate.

Forty thousand, and his father had died in June, comfortably, of a cold on the chest, with three hundred people at the funeral saying what a charming man he had been.

No one at Ferrers had known, and Piers had never found anywhere to put that down. Sowerby had known since the day the box was opened, and had carried it alone for two years without once letting it into his voice, while the families on the Bramshaw side went on paying their rents to an estate that had already been spent.

Piers had spent the two years since deciding which discomforts could safely be endured. Most of them could. Rooms could be shut, horses could go, the London house had gone in the second winter, and nobody had missed it but Kitty. He could read a coal bill now as closely as a lease, and he had got the household down by nearly a third without turning off one person who had nowhere else to go. It had bought him until Christmas, but nothing beyond.

“There is one further thing,” Sowerby said.

“I know what it is.”

“Lord Frayne wrote to me this week.”

“I know what it is,” Piers said again, and turned round.

Sowerby put the letter on the table and stood back. That was as near as he came to tact.

My dear sir, I write in the hope that a difficulty on your side and a circumstance on mine may be found to answer one another. My daughter has forty thousand pounds settled upon her, and I am told your principal has a want of very nearly that figure. I am a plain man, and I see no reason to be delicate about arithmetic between gentlemen.

“No,” Piers said.

Sowerby waited where he was and let the silence stand.

Piers picked the letter up, read the second paragraph, and put it back on the table with two fingers, where it had been.

“No,” he said again.

“I heard Your Grace.”

“Then why are you still standing there?”

“Because the debt remains,” Sowerby said stolidly.

Piers had a temper that had never once been loud. It worked on him the way weather works on a bad joint, and by the time it had passed, he had straightened the inkstand and the two pens beside it into a line.

“I am aware of what I owe,” he said.

“Then you are aware that pride will not pay it by Christmas.”

The room went quiet enough to hear a boy calling to the dogs somewhere past the brewhouse.

Piers came very close to putting Sowerby out of the house. He had the words ready, and they were short ones, but the only thing that stopped him was that Sowerby had said nothing Piers had not already said to himself in the dark that morning, in a different language.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I would rather not.”

“Sit down, Sowerby.”

Sowerby sat, put his hat on the floor beside the chair, and waited to be asked something.

“Frayne is offering his daughter,” Piers said.

Sowerby considered the phrasing longer than the question deserved. “Her fortune.”

“There is a woman attached to it.”

“Indeed, there is,” Sowerby said.

“Then do not speak as though there is not.”

Sowerby’s pen stayed where it was. “No, Your Grace.”

Piers took the chair on the other side of the table. He had spent two years learning to hear things in the order they were said rather than in the order they hurt. It was a discipline, and this morning it was going to be a long one.

“Tell me about the money,” Piers said, and made himself sit still while it was told.

“The Honourable Cecily Frayne. Twenty-six. Her mother was a Marchbank, of the Manchester cotton house, and her grandfather settled forty thousand upon her alone, in trust, out of her father’s reach entirely. The trustees are Manchester men. Lord Frayne cannot touch a penny of it, and has not been able to for ten years.”

“She has it?”

“In trust,” Sowerby said.

“Then why does Frayne write as though it belongs to him?”

“Lord Frayne frequently writes that way.”

Piers turned that over. “Does she know he has written to us?”

“I do not know,” Sowerby said slowly. It was the first thing that morning he had not had ready.

“Find out,” Piers said. The note Sowerby made was two words long, and he made it with his head down.

“Under a marriage settlement,” he said, “the trustees are authorised to apply the capital. It could be paid direct to the holder of the mortgage, without passing through Frayne’s hands or the estate accounts. Direct to the holder.”

“Say the rest of it.”

“The rest of it is that the sum answers the debt to within four hundred pounds.”

Piers’s eyes went to the tin box and stayed there. It was a plain thing, japanned black, with the corners worn through to the metal.

“I put two questions to Frayne’s solicitor the next morning,” Sowerby said. “Before anything else. Whether the money is hers absolutely, and whether any part of it comes to her father on the marriage.”

“And?” Piers said.

“It is hers absolutely. Two thousand pounds is payable to Lord Frayne under the grandfather’s instrument, with the trustees’ consent. It comes out of a separate fund and not out of hers.”

“You asked the next morning,” Piers said. “Before I had said anything?”

“I knew that you would not hear the proposal unless those two answers came back as they have,” Sowerby said.

Piers picked up one of the pens and put it down again. “Two thousand. Her grandfather wrote that in?”

“Ten years ago, Your Grace,” Sowerby said, and closed the book on his knee.

Piers sat back in the chair. There was a cold competence in the thing that he could admire from a distance and not up close, because a man in Manchester had looked at his own son-in-law, priced him in advance and in writing, and had been proved right by every year since.

“What is she?” he said.

“Your Grace?”

“You have told me what she has. I am asking what she is.”

Sowerby turned his pen once on his knee. “Frayne’s man let one thing fall. She keeps her father’s books, and has done since she was seventeen, and she keeps them better than his agent does. He mentioned it as a curiosity.”

“Did he?” Piers said.

“He mentioned it twice.”

Piers let that go by. Out in the yard the mare had reached the gate and stopped, and the man was doing something with the latch that he ought to have managed one-handed.

“And if I refuse?” Piers asked.

Sowerby’s hand was already on the second book. “Then Your Grace will want to see the whole of it.”

“Get it out, then.”

The second book Sowerby took out of the tin box was not accounts but a list. Piers had never asked for it. He had known for some months that it existed, and the knowing had been easier than the seeing was going to be.

“The security is not the house,” Sowerby said. “Your father did not pledge the house, because the house is worth less than people suppose, and he knew it. He pledged the land that carries the rents. Bramshaw and the riverside, Chalke Coombe, the four farms at Netherton, and the strips beyond the mill.”

“And it was his to pledge?”

“The Bramshaw side was never in the settlement.” Sowerby kept his eyes on the list. “Your great-grandfather bought it out of a financial ruin, and it was to be brought in at the next resettlement, but there has not been one since.”

“And the house itself?” Piers said.

“Settled, with the park. It could not be touched by him, or by you, or by anybody.”

Piers let that settle.

“So, the part I cannot sell is the part nobody wants, and the part that keeps four hundred families is the part he could take to Bristol on his own signature.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“How many tenancies?”

“Four hundred and eleven,” Sowerby said. “I have counted them by name.”

“Read me the first ten.”

“I would ask Your Grace to consider whether that is useful.” Sowerby’s finger was on the place, and he waited.

“Read them,” Piers insisted.

Sowerby read ten names in his flat voice. It took him rather less than a minute, and when he stopped, Piers had straightened the pens again.

There it was, then, laid out in the only language that had ever worked on him. He could refuse Miss Frayne’s money and keep the one thing his father had left him unspent, along with the ability to say that he had not been bought. Or he could go down to Bramshaw in the spring and explain to every household on that list, by name, that their leases, their work and their roofs had been sacrificed so as the seventh Duke of Havering might be spared an unpleasant sensation.

His father had chosen his own comfort every time, for years, in small courteous increments, and every single one of those increments had felt reasonable at the moment of signing.

There was Kitty besides, and she was the harder arithmetic. She was nineteen and would be twenty in February. There had been no season for her, and there was not going to be one, because a season was four hundred pounds at the lowest reckoning, and that was two of the Netherton roofs. She had never once asked him for it. She had stopped mentioning it in the spring, and he had let her stop, and had told himself that a girl of nineteen has time. At least, that was what he had told himself. With the list open in front of him now, he was less sure.

If Bramshaw went, she would have neither the Season nor the house to be quiet in.

“Arrange the meeting,” Piers said.

Sowerby closed the tin box. “I shall write today.”

“Do not call it fortunate.”

Sowerby looked up, and something crossed the flat face that was not accountancy.

“I had not intended to,” he said quietly.

 

***

 

He found Kitty in her sitting room later that morning with the window open, her eyes streaming, and the fire smoking as it had smoked since the wind went round to the north-east.

It was one of the four rooms in the house kept warm through the winter. She had chosen it herself two years ago, and had never asked why the choice had been offered to her in the first place.

“Don’t say anything,” she said. “I am perfectly well, and I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Your eyes are red.”

“It is the chimney. I’ve opened the window, and now I am cold and blind as well as smoked. Miss Harrow will be here within the hour to hear me play, and I shall look as though I’ve been weeping over a novel, which I have not, because there is nothing left in this house to weep over but the chimneys.”

Piers put his head into the passage and asked for Mrs Tregarth, who came within the minute and stood in the doorway with her hands folded and her opinion already formed. “The flue,” he said.

“Yes, Your Grace. I sent for Dowling weeks ago. He came, and he says it wants taking down to the third floor and rebuilding, and he says the whole stack is the same age and the same trouble.”

“The cost?”

“He would not put a figure to it in front of me, Your Grace. He said he would speak to you.” Mrs Tregarth kept her eyes somewhere above his shoulder. “I should guess nine pounds, or thereabouts.”

It was more than he had spent on himself since the spring.

“Have him patch it,” Piers said. “Cheaply.”

Kitty coughed at the window. She had been holding it, and she turned her head away to do it.

Piers stood where he was for a little while, with the smoke turning over above the fireboard.

“Repair it properly,” he said.

Mrs Tregarth’s expression did not alter. She inclined her head and went away to find Dowling.

Kitty wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, as she had done since she was six.

“You need not have,” she said, with her face still turned to the window.

“It is nine pounds,” he said without emphasis.

“And you’ve turned that coat,” Kitty said crossly.

He looked down at his own cuff, which Withers had made a decent job of.

“It wears better the second way round,” he said.

“Piers.” Her hand came down flat on the lid of the pianoforte and stayed there.

“Play something before Miss Harrow comes,” he said. “You are always better when you have played once first.”

 

***

 

That evening he worked in the estate room until the light went, and then took the papers through to his own study, where the fire had been made up small, and the wind had gone further round to the north.

Late in the evening the grate began to smoke.

He sat with it for a quarter of an hour without being able to concentrate, and then he got up, opened the window eight inches, and sat down again in the cold.

Dowling would be at the house in a few days for Kitty’s flue, and up on the stack for two days at least, and there was no sense in asking a man to look at a second chimney when the first had not been paid for.

He pulled the branch of candles nearer, took a clean sheet, and wrote to Lord Frayne that he would visit within the week.

He read it over twice. The hand was steady, the sentences were short, and there was nothing in any of them a man could be ashamed of having written. However, he had never in his life composed anything he wanted so little to sign.

He signed it, sanded it, and sat a while afterwards in a cold room with the window open and the smoke going out over the park.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“He has brought no valet,” her father said, and let the curtain fall back against the glass. “A duke, coming twelve miles for a morning call, with one man on the box and nobody behind.”

“Perhaps he did not think he would need dressing between here and Wiltshire.”

“It will be remarked on.”

“By whom?” Cecily said.

Rufus did not answer that, because the honest answer was by him, and he had already done it.

The drawing room had been ready for him two days before. The good chairs had come out of the parlour, the fire had been lit three hours before it was wanted, and there was a decanter of the madeira her father kept for people he wished to impress, bought in June on an account that was still open at Grantham. Mr Loxley had come over with his papers that morning and sat at the writing table under the window with his case open. Cecily had priced the morning before she came downstairs, and kept the figure to herself, because there was no version of saying it that would have altered anything.

She stayed where she was at the end of the sofa with her hands in her lap. She had spent four days assembling the man who was about to come through the door, and she had built him out of the only materials she had. He would be handsome, because they generally were. He would be charming about the money, because charm was what a man reached for when he had nothing else to offer. He would call it a settlement and never once call it a debt, and he would find some way of implying that she was fortunate.

From the window she had seen the carriage come round the last of the lime trees. It was a good carriage and had been one for a long time, and the man on the box got down and held the horses himself because there was nobody else to do it.

The door opened, the butler announced him, and the man she had built came apart before the real one had crossed the carpet.

He was tall enough to have to think about the doorway, black-haired, with a long face. Nothing about him was shabby. His coat was black and very well cut and had been brushed that morning by somebody who cared about it. The cuff of his left sleeve had been turned and reworked, and it had been done so well that she only saw it because she had been mending her father’s cuffs herself since she was nineteen.

Nothing on him was new, but nothing was worn either. It had cost somebody trouble to arrive at that.

“Miss Frayne.” He bowed to her first, and to her father afterwards, and the order of it was not lost on anybody in the room.

“Your Grace,” she said, from the sofa.

His eyes were dark, near enough to black in a room with one window, and they went over her once, and no part of that was what she had prepared for. Most men looked at her twice, briefly, and then addressed her father.

Her father had already begun.

Rufus spoke for some minutes and was good at it, in the way he was good at everything that required no follow-through. He gave them Ferrers, the chapel, the fourth duchess, and the general sense that two ancient interests had been united through the straightforward application of good sense. He used the word settlement four times and the word arrangement twice. He did not use any other word that had a figure behind it.

The Duke stood by the mantelpiece and let him do it. He answered when he was applied to, and somewhere in the middle of it he put out one hand and moved the card tray a half inch until its edge ran true with the edge of the mantel.

“And I have always held,” Rufus was saying, “that where there is a real community of interest, the rest follows more easily than people suppose.”

“You require my money,” Cecily said.

“Cecily.” Her father’s hand came down on the arm of his chair.

The Duke turned his head towards her.

“Yes,” he said.

She had a second question prepared, but had to search for it, as the first had been designed to withstand resistance and had not been overcome.

“How much?”

“Forty thousand pounds.” He did not look towards her father while he said the figure.

“All of it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said plainly.

“And the debt is your own?”

“No.” He did not hurry to the next part, and the pause before he filled it was long enough for her to hear the clock. “My father’s.”

Rufus moved his hand. “These details need not trouble Miss Frayne.”

Neither of them looked at him.

“My fortune does not belong to my father,” Cecily said.

“I know,” the Duke replied.

“It does not become yours when I marry.”

He nodded once. “I know that as well.”

She sat forward a little. “What were you told?”

“That your grandfather tied the capital, that your father cannot reach it, and that its use would depend upon the terms of a settlement.”

“Who told you so?”

“My agent, who had it from Mr Loxley, who I understand would not answer him at all until he had put the questions in writing.”

That was true, but she had not known it, and her father had gone rather still on the other side of the hearth.

“And what do you expect those terms to be?” she said.

“That is for you and your trustees to decide.”

Mr Loxley looked up from the writing table for the first time since the Duke had come in.

“Your Grace understands that the trustees will require the capital to be applied directly. It would not pass through your hands, nor through Lord Frayne’s.”

“I should think less of them if they permitted anything else.”

“And that they will want the application recited in the deed, with the sum and the payee named.”

“Name them,” the duke said. “Name the date as well.”

Mr Loxley wrote something down, with his shoulder turned very slightly towards Rufus.

He had said you and your trustees, and had said it to her rather than across her.

Cecily put that beside the card tray and left it there.

“What is it secured on?” she said.

“Not the house. My father knew what the house was worth.” He said that without any expression. “The land that carries the rents. Bramshaw, the river side, Chalke Coombe, four farms at Netherton and the strips beyond the mill.”

“And tenanted?”

“Every acre,” he said.

“How many households?”

“Four hundred and eleven.” He gave the number the way another man might have given his own age.

She had been ready for an approximation, and for the ordinary vagueness of men who own a great deal and count none of it.

“Are you certain of the number?”

“My agent counted them by name,” he said. “I did not ask him to.”

Cecily folded her hands in her lap.

“When would the money be wanted?” she said.

“By the twenty-fifth of December.”

“And if it is not there?”

“Then the estate is broken up over the following year, and I am the Duke who lost it.”

He said it as Mr Loxley said figures, with no appeal anywhere in it and no invitation to comfort him.

She had heard a version of this conversation before, at second hand, from a woman ten years dead. Her mother had been asked for eighteen thousand pounds by a man who explained that it was not really being asked for, that it was a joining of two interests, that a settlement is not a price. No figure had been said aloud in that room, and it had taken nine years to find out what it had been.

This man had given her the figure at the second question, and nothing had been taken off it for her comfort.

It was not the same thing as being safe. It might only be a better grade of the same thing, though sitting there she could not have said where the difference lay, and she had to be still for a little and reorganise herself around it.

Rufus, who could not bear a silence with money in it, began to say something about the tenantry.

“I should like to see your accounts,” Cecily said.

The clock went on, and her father’s face performed several things in succession and settled on embarrassment. Mr Loxley, who had not spoken since the deed, became extremely interested in the third page of his own papers.

“My dear, that is not a thing that can be asked,” Rufus said hastily.

“I have asked it,” she said flatly, with her eyes on the Duke.

The Duke’s expression remained almost unchanged; however, a subtle tightening of his jaw and lips betrayed his internal tension. He cast a glance at the wall behind her head before meeting her gaze once more.

He disliked it very much. Cecily watched him dislike it and thought, with something that was not quite relief, that here at last was the ordinary place where it would stop, where pride would come up under the money the way rock comes up under a spade.

“Of course,” he said, and took his hand off the mantelpiece.

Rufus turned in his chair.

“You ought to know what you are being asked to pay for,” the Duke said to her.

She had prepared for charm and for offended dignity, with a reply ready for each, but neither was any use to her now.

“The whole of them,” she said. “Not a statement. The books.”

“Sowerby will have them out on the table when you come. He would rather you had them than not.”

“Would he?” she said.

“He has been the only man in England allowed to look at them for two years,” the Duke said. “I do not think he has enjoyed it.”

“Then I may come to Ferrers.”

He hesitated, briefly and unmistakably, but she could not tell which part of the request was doing the costing.

“Yes,” he said. “You may.”

“I will not decide upon a drawing room conversation.”

“I would not ask you to.”

Rufus was recovering himself and had begun to arrange the visit aloud, dates, roads and whether the Lambourn horses could be spared, and the duke answered him civilly but looked no happier for it.

“You will stay to dinner,” Rufus said. It was not a question, and her father had been planning the dinner all week.

“Thank you. I am expected back tonight.”

“Twelve miles at this hour?”

“Twenty-two, from here,” the Duke said. “My sister sits up.”

“How old is your sister?” Cecily asked him.

“Nineteen.” Something went across his face and was gone before she could read it.

“Does she know what is being arranged?”

He did not answer at once. “She knows a great deal of it. Not all.”

“Which part have you kept from her?”

“The part where it does not answer,” he said, and took his hat from the table.

At the door Cecily asked the last thing.

“If I refuse?”

He turned the hat once in his hands.

“Then you refuse,” he said steadily.

“No persuasion?”

“Your father appears to have that covered.”

Rufus made a sound of protest that nobody attended to, and Cecily came near to smiling but stopped short.

Then he was gone, and the carriage went down the drive with one man on the box and nobody behind, and her father came away from the window looking as though something had been done to him personally.

“You might have destroyed the whole thing,” he said.

“Then it was not worth much,” Cecily said, and began putting the good chairs back where they belonged.

“You asked the Duke of Havering, in my house, to open his books to you like a corn factor.”

“He said yes,” she said, and lifted the second chair.

“He said yes because he is desperate,” Rufus said, but then he realised what he had said, and it was the only moment in years that Cecily had watched him wish a sentence back.

“I know he is desperate,” she said. “That is why I asked.”

“It was humiliating, my dear,” Rufus said plaintively.

“If the truth humiliates him, I had better know it before I marry him rather than after.”

Mr Loxley gathered his papers into their case and fastened both straps.

“Miss Frayne. You will want an opinion.”

“I want yours,” she said.

“I have acted against a good many men in difficulty,” he said. “Most of them explain. Some of them weep. Two have offered me money. That one answered nine questions as they were put to him and did not put a single one of them back to you.”

“Is that a recommendation?”

“It is an observation. I am not paid for recommendations.” He put on his hat. “But I have never in my professional life seen a man agree to open his books to a woman who had not yet agreed to marry him, and I have been at it twenty-nine years.”

She went out before her father could recover, and got as far as the second landing before she stopped with her hand on the rail.

He had been humiliated, and that part was not in question. She had watched it go through him, and had watched him decline to spend any of it on her.

What she could not place was the shape of it. A man ashamed of his figures did not hand them over, did not say that his agent would rather she had them, and did not stand in another man’s drawing room and give the quarter day in a flat voice with no word of how little of it was his doing. He had not defended his father once, but he had not blamed him either.

She stood there long enough that the housemaid coming up with the coal had to go round her.

 

***

 

At dinner, which her father ate with the appetite of a man who had been ill-used, it was settled that they would go into Wiltshire in the second week of October and stay four days. Mrs Ollerton would come with them, because Mrs Ollerton was a widow of fifty-one, was the relict of her grandfather’s junior partner, and was the only woman within reach whose presence her father could not object to and whose good opinion Cecily wanted.

“She will bring her Manchester manners into a ducal house,” Rufus said gloomily.

“She will bring her spectacles and read the leases.”

“That is not kind, my dear,” Rufus said reproachfully.

“You may have her manners, or you may have my agreement,” she said, and served him the fish.

In her own room afterwards, she wrote to Mr Loxley.

I have three questions, and I should like them answered plainly, and separately from my father: Whether a wife may hold written authority over the accounts of her husband’s estate. Whether such authority can be made to run for a fixed term of years and be enforceable by my trustees rather than by my goodwill. And whether it has been done before, or whether I am the first woman to think of it.

She read it over, sanded it, sealed it, and rang for it to go by the morning post.

Then she sat with both palms on the blotter. She had come downstairs that morning intending to look at a man, and had spent the last hour looking instead at a document nobody had yet shown her, and the difference between those two things was going to cost her something before Christmas.

The tin was still in the travelling case, packed and waiting, where it had been since she came down, and she did not take it out now.

Her mother had gone into her marriage without a single line of writing that was hers. Everything had been drawn between the two men and their two firms, and Maria had signed where she was shown, and had been content, because it had all been explained to her by people who loved her.

Whatever else happened in Wiltshire, Cecily intended to arrive with her own questions already answered.