"This is a fair copy of the petition I signed in June," he said. "I read it properly at noon today for the first time. It's not for a survey. It's for a bill to enclose Coldwell Common and the Long Meadow and the Wendlebury Moor, with my consent as lord of the manor and principal proprietor, and it names Mr. Quarrendon as surveyor to the commissioners at a fee of four guineas a day, and it gives Sir Lionel Bastable a hundred and forty acres along the river in exchange for some old fields of his up by the turnpike that I'm told are mostly stone." He held it out. "You said I ought to have the decency not to put my name to a thing I hadn't looked at. You were right. I'd like you to know that you were right."
Kezia took the paper. She read it, standing at the window, with the grey light falling across the close lines of Mr. Quarrendon's beautiful hand. At the bottom, in a different ink, was a signature: Wendlebury, in a cramped, upright, unpractised script, as of a man who had been writing the name for only a few months and did not yet believe it.
"So I was not wrong," she said.
"About that, no. You were wrong about the funeral."
She looked up.
"I was at Ballinasloe fair in October last year when my mother died," he said. His voice was quite even. "I came home to find her buried. In February I was at Cahirmee buying remounts for a regiment of dragoons when the young Marquess turned his curricle over at Peterborough, and I didn't hear of it for three weeks because the letter went to Dublin and then to Cork and then chased me about Connacht. In May I was in Galway when the old Duke died. The letter from the lawyers reached me the day after he was buried. That's not an excuse. Only it wasn't that I couldn't be troubled. It was that I've a talent, it seems, for being in a field in the west of Ireland when the people I belong to are put in the ground." He stopped. "I'd have liked to meet him. He wrote to me once, in March, after his son died. A decent letter. He said the horses were the best thing about the place and he hoped I'd keep them. And the first thing I've done is sell them."
"Why?" said Kezia. It came out more gently than she meant.
"Because you can't eat a hunter. Or you can, but it doesn't go far." He sat down, uninvited, on the edge of Aunt Letitia's best chair, and then remembered himself and half rose, and Aunt Letitia said faintly, "Pray sit, Your Grace," and he sat. "I've been buying horses in Ireland all my life, Miss Thorley. I've seen what a wet year does. This year's worse. You know it is; you've been in the cottages. So when Quarrendon wrote in June to say the harvest would fail, I sold the hounds and I wrote to say the hunters would go after Michaelmas, and I cancelled the audit dinner, because it costs two hundred pounds and I thought two hundred pounds of seed corn would do the cottagers more good than one dinner of beef. I sent the money in July. I told Quarrendon to announce an abatement of fifteen in the hundred on every rent under fifty pounds, and to pay the indoor servants their quarter in full. I thought it was done."
The rain ticked on the window.
"No abatement was announced," said Kezia slowly. "Not to anyone. Not in July. There was a notice on the church door that the audit dinner would not be held, by His Grace's order, and that rents would be collected at Michaelmas in the usual way."
"I know. I found that out this morning, too." He looked down at his hands. "Mrs. Oddie and the indoor servants have had no wages since August. Pridmore's lads have had half. The seed corn's in a granary at Huntingdon in Quarrendon's name, and Quarrendon tells me the abatement was to be announced at the audit, at Michaelmas, to those tenants who have shown a proper understanding of His Grace's improvements. That's his phrase. It took me a while to understand it."
Kezia understood it at once. She felt it go through her like cold water.
"The ones who sign their assent to the enclosure," she said. "He means to give your abatement to the ones who sign, and call it your favour. And the ones who will not sign—"