"Cockle. Curl up. The board pulls the leather and the leather pulls the leaves. And it happens over months. So nobody sees it happening." She wiped her hands on her apron. "May I show you something, your grace?"
He came down the room. She turned back the felts on the end of the table where 40 odd volumes lay in the ranks she had made for them, and she showed him.
"These will be as they were, not new, as they were. 62 done. About 90 more are only wet and dirty, wanting nothing but washing and sewing. These in the second rank have lost their bindings but not their leaves. They can be saved but they must be sewn again from the beginning and rebacked and that is a day and a half each. And these," she put her hand on the last rank. "These are what we call bricks. The leaves have dried into the block. If I bathe them I can sometimes get them apart. Sometimes I get half of them apart and the other half comes away as a paste. And then the book is gone and I have destroyed it with my own hands. I have opened four. Two came right."
The Duke stood looking down at the ranks of them. "How many altogether?"
"411."
"And you have £60?"
"I have £60. And until the 1st of June," Verity said, "I will get you 150 books. The rest will stand on those shelves, rotting quietly for another 20 years, and then somebody will burn them, and it will be nobody's fault, because it never is." She heard her own voice at the end of that and stopped and folded her hands. "I beg your pardon, your grace."
"Don't." He did not look up. "Say the rest of it."
"There is no rest of it."
"There is." He turned his head. "You have been in my house since December, and you have kept my agents accounts for him, and mended my grandfather's books, and fed a horse he ordered shot out of your own wages. You have a great deal of 'rest of it'."
Verity considered him. She had been in service after a fashion for 4 years, and she had learned in the first month what it costs to be interesting to the master of a house. She had learned it from a gentleman in Winderby, whose wife had been kind to her, and whose hand on the stair had not been kind, and she had left that house with 13 shillings and no character. So she knew the danger of the question exactly. She also knew what she had seen in the yard. A man who had been in the saddle for a day and a night, who had not looked into a stable box.
"Very well," she said, "The £60 should not be spent as your agent means to spend it. He means to have the shelves painted."
"Painted?"
"They are the visible part. £60 will paint the room and put new glass in the two broken panes and any gentleman who comes to dinner will say the library is very handsome. It will also seal a damp wall behind good paint and in 5 years the whole east side of this room will be past saving. And the books... the books do not show." Verity said, "That is the trouble with them."
The Duke was quiet for a moment. "What would you do?" he said.
"Take the shelves off the wall in the third bay. Dry the wall through the summer. Mend the gutter which is still split. Whatever Mr. SK has written down buy nothing that is not paste, thread, board, and leather. Give me the boy from the home farm for two days a week to turn the felts." She paused. "And let me stay past the 1st of June."
"On what wages?"
"On the same wages."
He looked at her then in a way that she remembered afterwards for years and never once described to anybody because there is no describing it.
"You have not asked me for anything for yourself," he said.
"I have just asked you for 4 months more of the hardest work in England, your grace, at 10 shillings a week. I would not call that nothing."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile. It was the place where one might have been in a better year. "The atlas," he said suddenly. "Is the atlas there? The great folio, the survey of the manors. My father used to have it out on this table. It was the only book in the house I was allowed to put my hands on."
"It is in the last rank," Verity said. "It is a brick, your grace. The worst one. It stood at the bottom of the bay and the water came out along the floor."
"Can you open it?"
"I do not know. It is 40 weight of paper and the boards are oak. If I open it wrong, I will lose the whole thing."