The house was the thing Hannah could not get out of her head, and it took her about six weeks to work out what was wrong with it. Corvedale was not neglected. That was the first thing she checked, because a house where the master is dying very often is, and this one was not. It was clean, and the accounts were straight, and the servants were paid on the day, and Mrs. Trant ran the whole of it with a competence that Hannah recognized inside a week, and was quietly relieved by.
What was wrong with it was subtler, and it took her six weeks and a broken sash cord to see it.
There were four rooms shut on the west side—not shrouded, shut—and had been for about six years. And when Hannah asked Mrs. Trant about them, she got a perfectly reasonable answer about the damp and the chimneys. The lower orchard had not been replanted: there were nine trees in it that had been dead about four years and had not been taken out, and about a third of it was gone to grass. The sash cord in the small drawing room had gone in the spring and had not been mended. And when Hannah mentioned it, Mrs. Trant said she would see to it, and did not. And Hannah mentioned it again in the fifth week, and got the same answer.
And in the sixth week, Hannah Sedge went and stood in that drawing room with a broken window cord in her hand, and understood the whole of it at once: nobody in that house was doing anything that would take more than a year.
It was not a decision anybody had made. She was entirely certain of that then and afterward. There had been no conversation and no instruction, and Mrs. Trant would have been horrified to have it put to her. It had simply happened over eight years, the way water finds a level. A household in which the master has been dying since a particular spring had gradually, and without discussion, stopped doing anything whose benefit was more than about twelve months off. You do not replant an orchard for a man who will be dead before it fruits. You do not open four rooms for a house that will go to Northumberland. You do not spend nine pounds on a chimney that somebody else will be looking at.
Hannah Sedge stood in that drawing room for about a quarter of an hour. Then she went and found Mrs. Trant and said, "I want the four rooms on the west side opened and aired, and I want the chimneys looked at, and I want a man out to that orchard about the dead trees, and I should like all of it begun this week."
Mrs. Trant put down what she was holding. "Your Grace—"
"And I want to say something before you answer me, because I have been six weeks in this house, and I have got a very great deal of respect for the way you run it, and I am not going to have this be a quarrel."
"Then say it."