Her brother came back from London on the fourteenth and was drunk by four in the afternoon and honest by nine at night, which was the usual order.
"Forty-one," said the Duke of Ashcombe.
"Forty-one what, Henry?"
"Thousand."
He was sitting on the edge of the desk in the library with his neckcloth undone and a decanter at his elbow that had been full at three.
"Forty-one thousand pounds, George," he said, "and eleven of it is Trescothick's and he will not wait past the quarter, and the rest of it is spread about in a manner that I have not the smallest intention of describing to you."
Georgiana Ashcombe put down what she was holding.
"How?"
"The usual how."
"Henry."
"Cards, some of it. About nine." He turned the glass round. "The rest is what it has always been. Our father died in 1815 owing thirty-one thousand pounds, and I have been paying the interest on it since I was two and twenty, and I have never once been able to pay a penny of the principal.
"And the interest is now the whole of my income," said Henry Ashcombe. "That is the sentence. I have said it out loud twice in my life and both times were tonight."
She sat down opposite him, which nobody in that house did.
That is a thing worth recording about Georgiana Ashcombe: she did not weep, and she did not scold, and she did not tell him what their father had been. She had been waiting eleven years for somebody in that family to say a true number out loud, and she was not about to spend the moment on any of that.
"Then we sell Fenny," she said.
"Fenny is entailed."
"Not all of it. Four hundred acres at Fenny were bought in 1801 out of our mother's portion and they are not in the entail, and I have read the deed, and I read it in the November."
Henry Ashcombe looked up.
"You have read the deed."
"I have read every deed in that muniment room," said Georgiana, "and I have kept your rentals since 1819 because your eyes are perfectly good and you cannot be made to sit down for two hours, and there is not one man on this estate who knows it and I would like it to stay that way."
"George — "
"Sell the four hundred at Fenny. Let the London house, do not sell it. Put the whole of it against Trescothick's eleven and the two worst of the others, and we live in this house on nothing for nine years and we do not go to London and I do not have a new gown until 1832."
"And that leaves?"
"Thirty-one thousand at five per cent," she said, "and one year — 1826 — in which it does not work at all, and we shall have to sell the Van Dyck, which is not entailed either, because our grandmother bought it."
Her brother was quiet for a long moment.
"How long have you had that?" he said.
"Since the November."
"You have had a plan for the whole of this estate in your head since the November and you have said nothing?"
"I have said it four times," said Georgiana Ashcombe. "In the November, at Christmas, in the January and in the February, and every single time you have been in this room and drunk and you have told me not to worry about it."
Henry Ashcombe put the glass down.
"There is another way," he said.
"No."
"You have not heard — "
"I have heard it four times since I was nineteen," said Georgiana Ashcombe, "and the answer has been no four times, and I have not the smallest reason to suppose the fifth man is any better than the fourth."
"His name is Trescothick," said her brother.