Ruined by Michaelmas

Sophia had taken hats from a great many men in her life, and not one of them had ever made her feel, for a single unclean instant, that she had no right to the hall she stood in.

She had done it for her father a thousand times, and for the rector, and for Mr Pargeter, and for men come about a gate or a lease or a sick horse, and it had meant nothing on any of those occasions beyond you are welcome and I am at home here. Done for the man who now owned every chair and every inkstand and every hat-peg in the house, it meant the other thing entirely; and she stood there with his glove warm in her palm and the dust of the road in its seams, and understood that she was in a great deal of trouble.

He had been in the house not five minutes.

The chaise had been heard before it was seen, which was the usual order of things at Marchhurst, the lime avenue being a quarter of a mile long and bending twice, so that a carriage announced itself as a sound in the leaves some minutes before it consented to become a fact. Sophia had been listening for it since one o'clock. She had heard it more times than she cared to count in the carter's dray, in the wind, and once in nothing at all, and had schooled herself out of going to the window, and was at the window when the sound came properly at last and did not stop.

There was no earthly reason to be frightened. That was the difficulty with the whole afternoon: everything in it was perfectly correct, and perfectly explicable, and had been foreseen for six weeks, and none of that was any use whatever to her stomach. Mr Edmund Falconbridge was arriving at his own house. She was standing in it.

She went out into the hall and found that Mrs Wace had got the servants drawn up already, which was kind of her and also a great deal too early, since they had now been standing there some while and would go on standing until it was over. There were five of them, which was two fewer than there had been in April and four fewer than in her mother's time, and they had arranged themselves with the exactness of people who have discussed the arrangement for two days. Mrs Wace at the head, in the black she kept for funerals and bishops. Nancy Doak, whose cap was, as ever, losing a quantity of black hair on the left side. The boy who did the boots and the knives, scrubbed to a shine that made him look ill. The two labourers who had been fetched in from the yard to make the line respectable, holding their hats and plainly wishing themselves anywhere; Bunning the groom was not among them, being still at the door with the chaise horses, which was where a groom would rather be. And at the end, because she would not be put anywhere else, Miss Honoria Falconbridge, seventy-nine years old and four foot eleven, upright as a poker in her good black, with her workbag over her wrist as though she had merely paused on her way to a chair.

Sophia took her place at the head of them, before Mrs Wace, because there was nobody else in the world to do it.

That was the part she had not managed to prepare for. A house receives its master, and the mistress of it stands at the door; and there was no mistress of Marchhurst and had not been for eleven years, and her father had been dead since the seventh of July, and the man coming up the avenue was the master, and she was — the word had been going round her head since breakfast like a fly in a jug — a guest. She was a guest in the hall she had learnt to walk in. She had done the flowers in it that morning out of a habit she had not thought to interrupt.

"You need not stand, Aunt," she said, close to Miss Honoria's ear, without any expectation of being heard, and was answered by a look of such flat and immediate comprehension that she was obliged to smile.

"I shall stand," said Miss Honoria, in the deliberate voice of a woman who has not heard her own for fifty-six years. "It is his first day. One stands."

The chaise came round the last bend and out from under the limes into the light, and the horses were poor, and the chaise was hired, and Sophia — who had been told all her life that she had no accomplishments beyond the pianoforte, and who had kept every account of this estate for two winters and could price a horse from thirty yards — noted both facts before she could stop herself, and felt ashamed, and then did not, precisely, feel ashamed.

He got down before the steps were properly let, and did not look at the house.

She had expected him to look at the house. She had expected — she had constructed, over six weeks, quite an elaborate gentleman, and had allotted him a moment on the gravel of quiet, disgusting satisfaction, standing with his head back to take in the front of it, eight hundred acres and a portico. Instead he said something to the postboy, and looked at the near horse's off fore, and stooped and ran his hand down it, and straightened, and only then turned towards the door.

He was long, and spare, and not young; dark, with a good deal of grey coming at one temple only, which gave him a lopsided look of being partly older than himself. His coat was decent and had been decent for some years. His face was weathered in the way of men who are out in all weathers on other people's business, and his hands, as he came up the steps pulling off his gloves, were not a gentleman's hands at all.

"Miss Falconbridge," he said.

"Mr Falconbridge."

It was absurd, and neither of them laughed, and she watched him decide not to remark upon it, which she counted to his credit and resented having to.

"You will be tired," she said. "There is tea in the drawing-room, or there can be something more substantial if you would rather; you have come from Bury this morning, I think, and the Angel does not feed anybody before nine. These are the servants. Mrs Wace, who has been housekeeper here since I was a child and cooks besides since Christmas—"

She took them down the line. She gave him each name, and how long each of them had been at Marchhurst, because it was the one thing she could give them, and because it was the only speech in the whole afternoon she had actually rehearsed. He attended to it. That was the second thing that was not as she had built it: he did not do the thing gentlemen did, of nodding pleasantly along a line of faces at a point some inches above their heads. He looked at each of them, and said each name once after her, as a man does who intends to have it tomorrow, and at the labourers he stopped and asked whether the yard well was the one that had been deepened, and was told that it was, and said that he had seen the account for it.

He had read the accounts, then. He had read the accounts in a chaise between Bury and here, or else at some point in the six weeks in which he had written her four letters, all of them short and all of them signed your obedient servant, and not one of them containing a single word she could take offence at, which had been, she thought, deliberate, and which had made her want to break something.

At the end of the line he came to Miss Honoria, who put out her hand, and he took it and bowed over it, and Miss Honoria said, very loudly, "I am deaf, sir. You need not shout; it does not help, and it makes everybody uncomfortable. Sophia will tell me anything I require."

"Ma'am," he said, and did not shout, and did not, Sophia noticed, look at her afterwards to share the joke. There was no joke to share. He appeared to have decided that at once.

Then he handed his hat and gloves out sideways, in the ordinary way of a man in a hall who assumes the world will take them, and Nancy was three steps too far off and did not come forward — Nancy had been up since five, and had dressed Sophia's hair, and had carried water for the room that was being made ready, and had been standing in a line for twenty minutes with her arms at her sides; but Sophia did not think of any of that until much later, and at the time only thought, with a flash of impatience she would have been sorry to have overheard, she is always slow — and so Sophia put out her own hands and took his hat.

His glove came with it, and lay across the crown of the hat in her palm.

It was nothing at all. It was the smallest possible action, and she performed it faultlessly, and turned and gave both to Nancy with a smile that Nancy took at its face value; and something in her chest went over like a page.

The hall had not altered. The chairs stood where they had stood since 1789 and the barometer was still four days behind and the flowers were hers; and every single object in it had changed owner on the seventh of July without anybody moving so much as an inkstand, and she had just been the person who took the gentleman's hat.

"Thank you," he said.

"Not at all," said Sophia. "This way."

In the drawing-room the light came in from the south and lay along the carpet in the long stripes she had known all her life, and she sat him down in the chair that had been her father's because it was the best chair and because to have done anything else would have been a piece of theatre, and she poured out. Miss Honoria settled by the empty grate with her workbag and began on a stocking and did not look up, and heard nothing, and missed nothing.

He drank half the cup and set it down and said, "Miss Falconbridge, I would rather say the disagreeable part now than at dinner."

"I had rather you did too."

"I mean to sell Marchhurst." He said it plainly, and he did not soften his voice for it, and he did not look away from her while he said it, which she would afterwards think was the only decent way to have done it and did not, in the moment, feel like decency at all. "Not immediately, and not by auction if I can avoid it, but I mean to sell. My brother died in December owing money in London, and I am liable for none of it at law. I intend to pay all of it. There is no other means by which I can do that, and I will not pretend to you that I am here to look about me and consider."

The clock on the chimneypiece was doing what it had done since her childhood, which was to sound as though it were saying two words over and over.

"Thank you," she said. "For saying it at once, I mean. I have had six weeks of people not saying it."

"There is a second thing, and it is worse. I have looked into it, and the quarter-day is the earliest that anything can be settled — the rents, my brother's affair in London, the tenancies, all of it turns on Michaelmas. Your legacy is payable then and not before. And I cannot in conscience put you out of this house before you are able to go, and I cannot go myself, because the whole of what must be decided is here." He paused. "Which is to say that you and I are obliged to be under one roof, for six weeks, and neither of us can decently be the one to leave."

"Yes," said Sophia. "I had worked that out a fortnight since."

"Of course you had."

"You needn't be sorry about the entail, sir," she said. "It is eighty years old and it was made by men who never met me, and it is the law, and one cannot be angry with the law. It has at least the decency not to be a person." She put down the pot, and heard her own voice go on, pleasant and smooth, which was apparently what it did without her. "More tea?"

And she smiled at him, and he said that he would, thank you; and the ache under Sophia's ribs was not for the eight hundred acres, nor for her father, nor for the little legacy that would not keep a woman in coals. It was the six weeks. Six weeks of the teapot, and the good chair, and thank you and not at all; six weeks of being unfailingly pleasant to the man who owned the chairs, at the end of which she would go somewhere and be pleasant there instead.

He was turning his cup a quarter-turn on the saucer while he waited, twice, and then stopping himself. She was not certain he knew he did it.

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