The eleven guests were in their carriages by twelve. The footman who had stood at that door was in the servants' hall inside the hour, and the Amberley servants' hall talks to Cleeve Manor's. By Thursday, there was not a house within ten miles without it.
The county did nothing dramatic—counties never do. They stop. Lady Wexford was at home to four callers in the whole of April, and three of those came to look. Lydia was not asked to the Ludlow assembly in May, which had never happened before, and there was no letter about it, and nobody to complain to.
Mr. Denning wrote to Loveday on the 12th of March, and had both receipts by return, signed at Cleeve Manor in the same sloping hand. Then he got Sir Roland's will out of the deed box at Ludlow, read the clause about the manner of a gentlewoman, and took counsel's opinion on it. The opinion ran to two pages and came down to one line: A woman who takes forty guineas earned by the girl she is charged to maintain, and tells that girl the work was a charity, has not maintained her. She has kept her.
The trustees moved in the June. No trial, no newspapers: an account taken, and an arrangement. Lady Wexford gave up the house on Michaelmas Day and went to her sister at Chester on an annuity of £90, which was what the estate could stand. Cleeve Manor and its income went to Cordelia from that quarter day, under the same will that had been read out over her head in 1811, and nobody had to add a word to it.
She was fifty-three. She lived another nineteen years, never came back into Shropshire, and told the story in Chester with herself in the part that came out best. Lydia married a hop factor at Bromyard in 1819, and turned out kinder than her mother. She and Cordelia wrote at Christmas for the rest of their lives, and never once mentioned that evening.
Mr. Loveday drove over on the second Tuesday in April with his hat in his hands. He had prepared something.
Cordelia stopped him at the second sentence. "You took the smaller of two wrongs, and you took it in the dark."
"That is a kinder account than I have been giving myself."
"If you had told me in the October, she would have shut the gate. I would have had no paper for two years, and no work, and nobody to talk to. I know exactly what you bought me, and what it cost you."
"It was not my money to give away, Miss Wexford."
"No, but it was your Tuesday, and you kept coming."
"I should have gone to the attorney—"
"With what? A tradesman's word against a baronet's widow, and me in the middle of it with nothing to live on? You would have been ruined, and I would have been sent to Chester with her."