Ashbywasamanbuilt for weather.
Not in the picturesque sense by which poets improved labourers into ornaments of landscape, but in the simpler fact that his body had accommodated cold, height, wet stone, and tool weight over years, so one could not imagine him anywhere a roof did not need mending. He arrived before eight with a ladder on the cart, two village boys behind him with coils of rope and a crate of slate pegs, and a face shaped by wind that drove lesser men indoors.
Darcy met them in the yard, coat buttoned to the throat, gloves already on.
“You mean to go up yourself, then,” Ashby said, eyeing him once from hat to boot.
“Yes.”
“Can you keep your footing?”
“I believe so.”
“We’ll find out.”
Within ten minutes, Darcy discovered that was Ashby’s full extent of welcome to shared labour. Hadley explained systems, while Ashby exposed failure by making a man face it directly. He did not say the roof had been neglected. He drove a hook under a slipped slate, lifted it, and revealed the rot-darkened batten beneath. He did not lecture on false economy. He put one boot through a patched section over the old morning room and said, with bleak satisfaction, “There. That’s your late cousin saving six shillings in nails and costing sixty in timber.”
They worked first over the west range where the winter leak had shown itself in the upper corridor and, below, in the drawing room ceiling. The ladder shuddered under Ashby’s weight and groaned under Darcy’s, but held. Frost still silvered the northern pitch. The south side, touched earlier by sun, had gone slick instead, every slate edge sweating thaw.
“Mind that seam,” Ashby said, kneeling near the ridge. “It looks drier than it is. Put weight wrong there and you’ll come down in the blue chamber and scare the housemaid out of her next seven years.”
Darcy set his knee where indicated and kept working.
From above, the house looked less like an inheritance than a record of decisions one man had deferred. Chimney flashings needing lead reset. Gutters clogged where November leaves had sat unemptied and frozen in place. Two stretches of ridge badly patched, the work done in the economy of a man hoping another winter might pass if appearances were kept.
Ashby carried tools in silence until silence failed to serve.
“He used to come up here in the afternoons when there was company,” he said, levering out a split peg. “Not to mend. To point. Standing where you are now and talking down the valley like he’d invented it. Ladies liked the view. Gentlemen liked hearing him explain what each field was called, though he often got that wrong once the bottle had him.”
Darcy kept his gaze on the slate in his hand. “You disliked him.”
“No use disliking the dead. They don’t benefit.”
“Yet you did.”
Ashby gave him a look under his cap brim. “Aye. We disliked him. First for being idle. Then for being slippery. Idleness is a nuisance. Slipperiness turns a nuisance into rot.”
He reached for another slate. “A wall gives way? He swore he had ordered stone. Men asked for wages? He swore he’d paid through Reeves. Mrs Bannon complained the stores were short? He swore the suppliers cheated him. There was always a reason with him, always another hand to blame, and by the time you discovered the reason wanted sense the week had gone and the work with it.”
Darcy fastened a new peg and pressed the slate home.
“You told him so?”
Ashby barked a laugh without mirth. “Once. On this very roof. Told him if he put one more cheap patch over wet timber he’d have the whole run lifting by Christmas. He said I loved the sound of my own authority. I told him authority had nothing to do with it and gravity everything. Then he said I had forgot my station. Men talk of station when they’ve run out of argument.”
Darcy fitted another peg. “And the steward?”
Ashby took a slate across his knee. He spent a long time setting it before he spoke.
“Aye. Wickham. Now there was a man the village did love.”
“Did they?”
“Charm enough for three. Knew every tenant’s name, every wife’s name, every dog’s name. Stood the lads ale on rent days. Asked Mrs Pemberton after her mother every time he passed her gate. When he laughed, your worst week looked smaller. There was no resisting it.” Ashby tapped the peg home. “I have lived sixty-one years and met three such men. He was the worst of them.”
Darcy let go a long breath. “Indeed. I have been reviewing his accounts.”
“His accounts were beautiful. They were the most beautiful accounts I have ever seen and the least true. Rent received in full and entered as such, a portion of it never reaching the master. Stone ordered and paid for in the book, half the stone delivered, the rest in his pocket. Wages paid on the page, men paid in part, difference his. The mill wheel cracking for three winters before he told the master about it—and the timber for that mill wheel, do not ask me where it went. Always a smile. Always a story. Always a reason the figure looked as it did.”
