Page 72 of Threads that Remain

It was the last thing in her instructions. Let there be a fire, and tea, and seedcake, the paper had said, and let Pettigrew read the will in the drawing-room at four o’clock, before anyone has had time to be sorry. I never could bear a house in which people are sorry over cold ham.

And it was accordingly at four, precisely, that the party assembled in the drawing-room. A small dry man in black, with white hair and a good many papers, sitting at the round table by the window, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead; and, ranged before him, in chairs, and upon sofas, and in the window-seats, the persons whom the will most concerned.

Besides family, there was Tom Hollis, in the doorway, in his Sunday coat, a very tall lad now, and red to the ears, who had been told that he must come, and did not know why; there was the old cook; there were two of the maids.

“I shall be as brief as the law permits,” said Mr. Pettigrew, and coughed.

It was a plain will. It began with a number of small sums to the servants, who received them in a state of speechless gratitude; it went on, with a certain gravity, through a series of legacies, so carefully considered that it was clear each had been the subject of long thought.

“To Thomas Hollis, my groom’s boy,” read Mr. Pettigrew, “the sum of one hundred pounds, to be applied to his being apprenticed to a farrier of his own choosing; and the brown pony, called Biscuit. He was thanked by a young gentleman once, in my stable-yard, and he has not forgotten it; and neither have I.”

There was a great hoarse sound from the doorway. Tom Hollis had put up a huge red hand and turned his face against the doorpost.

“To my nephew John Willoughby,” said Mr. Pettigrew, “whom I put out of my house and my will upon a certain occasion, and whom I received again into both, in a manner of speaking, upon another, the portrait that hung in the little parlour at Allenham, which I believe he has, and a letter, which is here.” He laid the letter upon the table. “And to his wife Sophia, in acknowledgement of a civility rendered by a woman who owed me nothing, and did it because it was right, my pearl brooch and my esteem. She will know what to do with both.”

Sophia did not move. She sat, in her small grey gown, as straight as a rod; but her hand, which lay in Madeline’s, closed slowly and tightly.

“To Charles Willoughby,” went on the lawyer, “my husband’s gold watch, and five hundred pounds, some of which he may choose to buy a horse with that will not throw him; and to Madeline Willoughby, my writing-desk, and my books, and the sum of five hundred pounds, in the hope that she will use both with more sense than I did.”

He turned another page.

“And to my great-nephew,” said Mr. Pettigrew, and his voice, dry as it was, thickened a little, “Henry, whom the world calls Henry Brandon, the son of my nephew John Willoughby and of Eliza Williams, whose memory I honour, and whom I have known and loved for seventeen years, I give the whole of my estate, real and personal, of what nature soever; to wit, the house and lands of Allenham in the county of Devon; the house and lands of Fernley, in the county of Dorset, with all that is in them; the house in Berkeley Square, in the city of London, which is currently let but falls into possession at the first of the new year; and all my monies, stocks, and securities, of whatever description, in the hands of Messrs. Coutts. I have made no condition, save one, which he knows. He is to do as he thinks best. He is to be useful. And he is to remember that I said so.”

He laid down the paper. He removed his spectacles, wiped them, and put them on again.

“That is the whole of it,” said Mr. Pettigrew. “I may say that the total value of the estate, as sworn, is a little over sixty thousand pounds in the funds, and that the whole, land and funds together, yields something above eight thousand a year; and that I have never in my whole professional experience known a bequest so carefully considered, or so entirely free of error.”

There was a long pause.

It was Charles, at the wall, who broke it. He crossed the room in three strides, in front of the entire company, and took his brother’s hand, and wrung it; and it was observed that neither of them said a word.

Willoughby rose, very slowly, and stood, upright. “She was right,” said Willoughby. He said it to nobody; it was a plain, low, wondering statement. “She was quite right, Henry. I am glad. I should like you to know that I am very glad.”

“Sir —”

“I am not going to make a speech.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, like a boy. “I have only just discovered that a man may be proud of a thing that he has had nothing whatever to do with. It is a most extraordinary sensation. I do not recommend it. But I should not have missed it for the world.”

And Henry put both arms round him and held him; and Sophia Willoughby, who had not been seen to weep in thirty years, was observed to put up her small, gloved hand to her face, and turn away her head, and stand for some time quite still, looking at the fire.

The house emptied, in the mellow after-glow, in a stir of leave-takings; the last cups were carried out; the fire sank; and it was quite late in the evening, in the deep blue dusk of the garden, that Henry, having seen the last of the neighbours out at the gate, and given his hand to a great many people that he had never seen before, and had a private word with Pettigrew about the roofs, came out upon the terrace at the back of the house, and stood under the great mulberry, in the smell of wet grass, alone.

The next morning, he said good-bye to Edward and Elinor. They were anxious to return home, having decided it best not to bring the children, leaving capable Mary over the youngest two who had recently got slight colds. He spent much of the afternoon in the library with his Willoughby and Brandon fathers, along with Charles, the only other male still in the house, and did a great deal of consulting on the running of an estate. He took notes on all the advice given.

The next day saw him saying farewell to his families, both of which assured him they were at his disposal were they ever needed.

He stood for a long time on the lawn, long after his family’s carriages had gone. It seemed to him that all the weight of the last four days, the long ride, and the dawn, and the small thin hand upon the coverlet, and the earth upon the oak, and the great sum of money, which he did not in the least know what to do with, had come down upon him at once, like a load of snow. And he was very tired.

Chapter XXXVII.

He made a tour of Fernley first, to look at the roofs. His Aunt had a steward but having not been to the estate in several years, she had commissioned him to do only what was necessary, thinking this enough. Upon inspection he found it was just enough. There was much work to be done to bring the estate up to where he felt it should be.

It was an errand that he would have been glad to delegate. He was a man of one-and-twenty, in the first fortnight of his bereavement, with a great deal of business upon his hands, and a good deal more upon his mind; but it was a point of principle with him, and one that he had settled in the small hours of the night after the funeral, that a person who had been given eight thousand a year by an aged relative on the strength of a good report had better find out precisely what he was responsible for. It took nine days to ride over the whole of the estate of Fernley, with many stops along the way each day, in the company of a stout, red-faced, and deeply suspicious steward, and to look into every barn and outhouse and cottage within its bounds.

He saw a great many things. He took meticulous notes. He saw a farmhouse in which the ceiling of the best bedroom had come down upon the bed; he saw a school with no floor; he saw an old woman named Hetty Barrow, who had lived for sixty years in a cottage the size of a bathing-machine, with the thatch coming off upon one side and a bucket set in the middle of the room; and he sat down at her table, in his wet coat, and drank a cup of her tea, and asked her a great many questions, and wrote the answers in a small book. He was not in the least ostentatious about it. He did not promise anything. He said only that he should like to know what was wanted, and that he would come again; and it was afterwards reported throughout the neighbourhood, with some awe, by the steward who had been in the family for thirty years, that the young gentleman had not once said I in the whole of the nine days, and had not once looked at his watch.

He sat in the library on the twelfth of August with a small book full of names, and a great deal more upon his mind than he had carried out with him; and it was in the course of that same week, sitting up late over Mr. Pettigrew’s accounts by a single candle, that he came to a decision which he did not trouble to announce to anybody, because it did not seem to him to be the sort of thing that wanted announcing. He was one-and-twenty. He had, by the stroke of an old woman’s pen, been made responsible for the roofs over some hundred families, on two large estates, whom he had never met and who had not asked to be his concern; and he found that this seemed to him, upon reflection, a great deal more pressing a matter than any other that a young man of his age might reasonably have upon his mind. The other matters - that of the estate of Allenham and the house in London - would keep, both being in excellent repair. He had known the steward of Allenham for some years. He had attended his Aunt’s funeral, and Henry was confident that it would remain well in hand through the necessary correspondence.

He hoped to, but in the end did not go home again that autumn. He wrote, instead, to Delaford, a short and cheerful letter, to say that Fernley wanted a new set of drains before the frost came, and that he did not think he could be spared; and it was the first of a great many such letters, written from a great many inns and estate offices over the two years that followed, each of them a little more assured than the last. The members of his Willoughby family came to Fernley, but, more often than not, his Father came alone, spending time, just the two of them, going about the estate during the day and enjoying a very good claret that Mr. Willoughby had brought with him, at night.