And he took his sister out in her chair to the mounting block in the pale sun. And Cecily Vane put her thin hand on that gray neck and cried and did not stop crying and laughed while she did it. And Silverwood stood like a rock exactly as she had been promised to. She is perfect, Cecily said. Ambrose, she is perfect.
Who chose her? Miss Ren chose her. Then why? said his sister. Is Miss Ren not here? He went back at Christmas.
He told himself it was about the ford. He paid for the ford. It cost him £240, and he had it done properly in stone. And he did it through the parish so that no one should say she had been bought. And Tabitha Ren found out inside a fortnight and rode eleven miles in sleet to tell him exactly what she thought of a man who did a woman a kindness behind her back. She stood in his own courtyard at Grantmere Abbey with her habit soaked to the knee and her hair coming down and told him he was high-handed, patronizing, and incapable of distinguishing between generosity and control, and that if he ever again mended anything of hers without asking, she would send him the bill for it.
And Ambrose Vane stood on the steps of a house with 200 rooms and listened to her with his heart going like a hammer and thought that this was the thing he had been waiting the whole of his life for and had never once known the name of. Are you finished? he said when she had run out of breath. No, take as long as you like, said Ambrose. only come inside first because you are soaked through and my sister has been asking for you since November and if you catch cold in my courtyard being magnificent at me I shall never forgive myself. Tabitha Ren stayed at Grantmere Abbey for three weeks. She and Cecily were thick as thieves inside two days.
He would come into the long gallery and find them with their heads together over a stud book or a novel or once the household accounts of Grantmere Abbey which Tabitha had gone through with a red pencil and about which she had a very great deal to say. Your steward is not dishonest. She told him he is worse. He is comfortable. You are being charged one shilling and three pence a bushel over the market for oats because nobody has asked the price of oats at Grantmere since the year '06.
And the reason nobody has asked is that you are a duke and nobody asks you anything and you have let them. And what do you propose? I propose that you get up at six tomorrow, said Tabitha Ren. And come round the home farm with me, and that you look at your own drains with your own eyes for the first time in your life. He got up at six.
He was 39 years old, and he had never in his life been happy at six in the morning. He walked the home farm of Grantmere Abbey in the frost with a woman in a plain gray habit who told him what was wrong with it and he laughed aloud twice and Cecily watched them come back across the park from the window of the long gallery and said nothing at all and smiled. It was Cecily who forced it in the end she had a year and she knew it and she had no patience left for anything but the truth. You are in love with her, she said on a black afternoon in February, with the fire built up and her hands cold in his. Do not tell me you are not Ambrose. I've not the time.