Hannah looked at the paper. "Thank you," she said.
"There is a condition."
"Say it."
"You will not tell anybody in this house that it was your doing," said Nicholas Ware. "Not Trant, and not the agent, and not one servant. Let them think it was mine. Because if they think it was mine, then what has happened is that the master of this house has ordered an orchard planted that will not fruit for six years. And every one of those forty people is going to do the sum you have just made me do, and I should like them to do it about me, and not about you."
Hannah Sedge sat with that for a moment, and then understood the whole of it, and found that she could not immediately speak. "You are telling them you expect to be alive," she said.
"I am telling them I have stopped saying that I shall not be," said Nicholas Ware. "It is a great deal less than the other thing, and it is the most I have got, and I want you to be entirely clear about that before you look at me like that."
The house found out about the orchard inside four days, and did not say one word to either of them about it. What happened instead was that Mrs. Trant came to Hannah in the stillroom at the end of that week with a list. It was two pages, and it was in her own hand, and it had plainly been written over about three evenings. And it began with the chimneys on the west side, and went on through the dairy roof, and a bridge on the north drive, and about nine other things. And at the bottom of the second page, it said: The long gallery: not this year, but it should be looked at by somebody who knows.
Hannah read the whole of it, standing up. "How long have you had this, Mrs. Trant?"
"I wrote it this week." The housekeeper's chin was up. "But I have had most of it in my head about six years, Your Grace. And I want to say that plainly, because I have been three days deciding whether to bring it at all. Every single item on that paper is a thing I have looked at and thought, 'That wants doing,' and then thought, 'Not yet.' And I have been doing that so long that I stopped noticing I was doing it. And then His Grace ordered nine trees planted in September, and I could not sleep."