Mistress of Ironwood

They came up from the city in October, and the first thing she did was walk the orchard with the man Roman had sent, a slow-speaking Vermonter named Aubrey Kitt who put his hand on a trunk the way a doctor puts a hand on a chest and said, "Twenty acres, and eleven of them are worth saving, and the Spy is the best fruit on this hill and it has been pruned by a man who was looking at the ground."

He came with three men and a truck and worked the Spy block for six weeks for a share of the crop, and Gil stood in the rows with his hands in his pockets and watched and did not interfere, and in the second spring the block produced more than it had produced in eleven years.

Hollis learned the house at Ironwood the way she had learned the orchard, by walking it. There were two hundred and six tenants and she learned their names in a year and a half. There was a conservatory with citrus in it and she learned to prune the citrus. There was a lake and she learned to row it badly. There was a long gallery with eleven Ashcrofts in it and she decided, in the second month, that she did not like any of them except the one over the drawing room mantel, which was painted when he was twenty-two and which she would stand in front of for a minute at a time, in the morning, on her way to the kitchen.

Imogen came to stay in November for three weeks. She was nineteen and she played the harp in the conservatory every morning, and she and Hollis sat in the kitchen on the terrible evenings and did not talk about Dex Cray, and then, on the last evening, did.

"He wrote to me," Imogen said. "In September. He said he had heard I was well."

"What did you do with it?"

"I gave it to Roman." She had her hands around a mug. "I gave it to him because I knew he would do something and I did not want to know what. He did something. He always does something. That is the thing about him. He does something and then he does not tell you, and then you find out three years later from a lawyer, and you love him and you want to hit him."

"I know," said Hollis. "I know exactly."

Constance Wray did not write for eight months, and then wrote to say that the conservatory at Litchfield had lost a camellia and that Odette was at the coast. Roman went down twice and was received once. In the second year Odette Wray married a man from Baltimore who was not a cousin, and Constance Wray wrote a letter of six pages which Roman read and put in the drawer with the other one, and in the third year, at Christmas, she came to Ironwood and sat in the drawing room with her hands folded and said to Hollis, in front of eleven people, "The citrus is very well kept," which everyone understood to be an apology and which Hollis accepted as one.

The Spy block paid. In the third year they planted nine acres of it and put in a press with a jacket that held temperature, and Gil Arden, who was sixty-one, came up to the Berkshires in October and stood in the new barn and drank a glass of his own cider and said, "Your mother will want a case for the woman at the egg stall," and then, after a while: "I was wrong about the inventory. I wrote to White Plains in August."

"You wrote?"

"I wrote. It cost eleven thousand dollars and I have never spent money with more pleasure. The land is out of trust. It goes to your mother and then to all five of you, equally, and Pell gets a photograph of himself on a beach every December and nothing else."

Hollis said, "Eleven thousand."

"It was not my eleven thousand," said Gil. "I have been trying to tell you for two years. He bought the reversion on the trust from Pell in the spring of the year you were married, and he had Marcus paper it so that I would never find out, and I found out from Marcus's clerk, who is engaged to the woman at the egg stall."

There were eleven of them that first winter and she wrote all eleven down; there was a tenant on the estate named Delia Bragg who had a dairy at the top of the north road and whose lease had been renewed four times without an increase, and who came to the kitchen door in the second winter with a jar of cream and a grievance about a culvert. Hollis listened to the grievance, and then she went up to the north road with Aubrey Kitt's brother and looked at the culvert, and it took six hundred dollars and two days, and Mrs. Bragg said, "We have never had that done in thirty year," in the flat voice of a person who has learned not to be surprised by landlords. In March the culvert went into the estate budget, and there were nine more like it, and she had all of them done by June.

Afterwards, in the kitchen, Mrs. Quist said, "He does it and he does not say. The last one did not do it and said a great deal."

"Who was the last one?"

"His father." Mrs. Quist folded a sheet. "The old man was a good landlord and a bad father and there is no way to say both of those things about a person in a sentence that anybody will believe. He left everything to Roman, including the sister and the aunt and two hundred and six tenants, in the same week he turned eight-and-twenty, and Roman has never once said a word about it, and I have watched him write four hundred letters a year to people he will never meet and I have decided that is what grief looks like in him."

In the second week she was writing the estate accounts in the little room off the hall and wrote the word culvert and then sat with the pen down for a long time until the ink dried on the nib. Three weeks after that she carried the sentence up the north road and into the conservatory and into the drawing room, and one morning she went and stood in front of the portrait of a serious boy in a black coat with his hand on a chair, and she said, out loud, to nobody, "You did not tell me," and then heard what she had said and did not take it back.

She went out into the orchard and stood in the rows in the rain with the trees going down to the creek, and after a while he came out and stood beside her.

"I told you once," he said, "that I would lie to you about money for the rest of my life."

"You told me."

"I am telling you now because your father found out and not because I wanted you to know."

"I know."

They stood in the rain and looked at nine acres of Spy, and she said, "You cannot keep doing this."

"No," he said. "I am told that constantly."