She gave the parchment to the Duke that night in the library with two candles on the table and the atlas between them. She had rehearsed it for a week at 4 in the morning, and none of the rehearsal was any use. In the end, she simply set the strips down in front of him under their card and said, "You must send this to Mr. Tunnacliffe in the morning and instruct him to search the enrollments. It will take 3 weeks and cost six guineas."
He read it standing. It took him a long time because the hand was old and because he read it twice. Then he set his palms on the table on either side of it and did not say anything at all for perhaps a minute. "£11," he said at last. "It is in Sket's own accounts. Quit rent ancient. Every Michaelmas and Lady Day since he came, and I have signed it eight times,"
"Yes," said Verity.
He laughed. It was not a good laugh. It was the sound a man makes when he has been hit somewhere that does not hurt yet. "800 a year," he said. "A,000. And the coal wharf. Ellisby would lend on that. Ellisby would lend 40,000 on that with his eyes shut at 5% over 21 years." He stopped. He had gone quite pale. "I do not need him."
"No," said Verity. "You do not need him."
"I could."
"No, your grace."
He looked up.
"You are to be married on the 29th. Verity said the settlement is signed and the notice has been in three papers and there are 30 people coming from Warrington. Suppose you go to Mr. Brindle on Friday with a piece of parchment. Suppose you tell him that you find after all that you can do without his daughter. Then you will have used her to hold your house up for 7 months and thrown her back the moment you did not need her. She will be 26 years old and jilted in every drawing room between here and Manchester, and it will be nobody's doing but yours."
"That is what you think of me."
"That is what I think of the position," she said. "I have no opinion of you that I am able to say out loud."
The candle nearest her had begun to gutter. She put her hand up and pinched it out, and the room went half dark, and she was glad of it. "I am going on the 24th," she said. "Mrs. Mossup has it in writing. The wall in the third bay is dry, and the shelves can go back in October, and there are 231 books on that table that are as they were. Do not let anybody paint anything."
"Miss Thornburn,"
"There is a woman in nether old town, Verity," he said, "whose thorn hedge is still down in three places."
And she went out by the chapel door and shut it behind her. She stood in the cold passage with her hand over her mouth for a while, and then went up to bed.
Ned Buick took her down to the road end on the 24th in the light cart with her box and her frame and the tin bath roped on behind. The Duke was not at Old Town. He had gone to Winderby on the Monday with the strips between two sheets of card in his own hands and from there to the county town and Mr. Tunnacliffe had a clerk in the enrollment office by Wednesday morning. It was a fine cold day and the moor was the color a moor is in the last week of September and neither of them said anything for two miles.
At the turn by the lime road. Ned pulled the horse up without being asked because a boy was running down the field on the other side of the wall with a milk can banging against his leg. Kit Gower came over the wall badly in a scramble and stood in the road with his chest going.
"Are you off?"
"I am."
"Who will do his mash?"
"His grace will do it," said Verity. "He has done it since May, and Mr. Buick will see that it is not too wet."
The boy thought about this with great seriousness, and evidently found it satisfactory, because he nodded once and put his hand out to be shaken, which somebody had taught him. "Ma'am says, 'Thank you for the hedge,'" he said, and went back over the wall.
Ned clicked to the horse. "He come down Tuesday," he said after a while, "himself with four hurdles on the cart and a bill hook. He was at that hedge from 9 while four. He never went in the house and he took his dinner, sat on the wall like a hired man."
Ned looked at the road between the horse's ears. "Best give him a mug of tea and cried after."
"Not while I am glad," said Verity.