Miss Brindle looked at them a moment longer than was polite. "How singular. How very singular. You are not a servant, are you?"
"I am engaged by the quarter, ma'am."
"That is not what I asked."
"No, ma'am. I know what you asked."
Miss Brindle smiled. It was a lovely smile, and it went nowhere near her eyes. "You must forgive me. I have spent four years being looked at by people who cannot decide what I am, and it has made me curious about everybody else." She turned a little so that her back was to the two men at the far end of the room. "The daughter of an iron master with £80,000. Am I a lady? I am not. Am I a tradesman's girl? Not any longer. Papa saw to that with the schooling. So I am nothing at all until I am married, and then I am whatever my husband is." A small pause. "I imagine you know something of standing in a house and not being anything in particular."
"I know a little of it," said Verity.
"There we understand one another." Miss Brindle drew her glove back on. "It is a great pity about the books. I shall speak to Papa. It would be a charming thing, would it not, to have the whole library done by the autumn, when there will be somebody in the house who cares for such things?"
She said the last of it lightly, pleasantly, without weight of any kind, and she was three steps away before Verity understood that she had been told exactly when to be gone.
The Daer house stood a half mile off in the trees with its back to the water and its front to the moor. It had been occupied for 26 years by Lady Perpetual Carbry, the old Duke's sister, who had never married anybody. Verity was sent over on the Friday with three mended books and a note. She had expected to leave them at the door. Instead, she was taken through to a small hot room with a fire like a smithy in the middle of April. An old woman in a black gown and a lace cap sat there with a footstool and a magnifying glass. A bottle of very good madeira stood on the table at her elbow.
"So you are the binder," said Lady Perpetual. "Sit down. Not there. That chair is broken. I keep it for the vicar. Have you brought the Cicero?"
"I have, my lady."
"Give it here." She took it, opened it, put her nose almost into the gutter of it, and sniffed. "That is the same," she said after a while. "That is exactly the same smell it had when I was 9 years old. How have you done that?"
"I washed it, my lady, and sewed it again on the old cords and put the same boards back. The smell is the leather and the size. If I had given it a new binding, it would have smelled of my workshop for 10 years."
Lady Perpetual closed the book and held it in her two hands on her lap and did not give it back. "You will take a glass of Madeira."
"Thank you, my lady. No."
"You will take a glass of Madeira because I am 76 and I detest drinking alone and because I'm going to ask you impertinent questions and I do not care to do that to a sober woman." She poured it herself with a hand that shook and did not spill. "Now, my nephew is going to marry a young woman from Warrington with £80,000. What do they say in the kitchen?"
Verity took the glass and did not drink out of it. "They say it is 80,000, my lady, and that the wedding is to be at Michaelmas."
"And do they say why?"
"They say the estate is in difficulties."
"That is the polite word for it." The old woman set the Cicero down at last. "My brother, God rest him, put £17,000 into draining the low ground between here and the water. He did it on the advice of a man who had drained land in Lincolnshire and had never in his life seen ground like ours. The ditches are there. You may walk in them. They filled with the first winter, and they have been full ever since. After that he was ill for 4 years and a sick man signs what is put before him and Mr. Sket put a great deal before him. Then the corn came down after the peace and the rents came down with it and the mortgage did not come down at all. It stands at £38,000 and it falls in at Michaelmas."
"That is a great deal of money." Verity said.
"It is nothing at all in London. It is the world here." Lady Perpetual looked into the fire. "My nephew came home in the June of the peace, expecting to quarrel with his father for a year or two and then be forgiven. He had three weeks of him. Three weeks and a great many papers, and then the whole thing on his own shoulders at 8 and 20. He has not once complained of it in my hearing, which I consider a fault in him."
"Why a fault, my lady?"
"Because a man who never says what a thing has cost him ends by paying twice." She turned her head and looked at Verity with an eye that had lost none of its edge in 76 years. "You feed his horse." Verity did not answer. "There is nothing in this parish I do not hear within the day," said Lady Perpetual. "I sit in this chair, and it all comes to me like water into those beautiful ditches. Well, somebody ought to. That animal carried him for 4 years and came home without him, and has been in a box ever since, being fed by strangers, which is the exact history of everything else in this family." She picked up the Cicero again and held it against her chest. "You may come on Fridays," she said. "Bring whatever you have finished. I shall pay you nothing for it, and you will get very tired of me."
In May, the Duke began to come out into the yard in the mornings. He did it without any announcement and without explaining himself, which was how he did everything. The first time Verity came down the loft ladder with the scoop and found him standing at the bottom of it in his shirt sleeves, and she nearly dropped the corn on his head.