Two Guineas

The press was running in the cellar of the Weekly Lantern, and every thump of it came up through the floor into the soles of Hester Ludlow’s boots.

She liked the feeling. It meant the paper was going out, and when the paper went out she was paid.

“Two guineas,” said Mr. Garrow. He counted two pound notes and two shillings onto the desk between them, and kept one finger on the notes. “And six lines.”

“Six lines of what?”

“Six lines too many.” He pushed a long slip of damp paper at her with his other hand. “Next Saturday’s Notebook. Tibbs set it this morning and it runs over the foot of the column. I have a corn-factor’s advertisement to go under you, paid in advance, and I will not lose him for your eloquence.”

Mr. Phineas Garrow was fifty-two and as thin as a pen. There was snuff on his neckcloth, on his cuffs and on most of the papers in the room. He had edited the Lantern from this office in Crane Court for eleven years, and he had never yet handed over money without holding on to it a moment longer than he needed to.

Hester took her spectacles out of her reticule and put them on. They were plain steel, and they pinched her nose. She wore them here and at her own table at home, and nowhere else.

“Your pencil, please.”

He gave it to her. She read down the proof once, quickly, with the pencil moving beside the lines and not touching them. It was her own work, written on Wednesday night, and it already looked like a stranger’s. That was the use of print. It showed her what she had actually said.

One observes that the warehouses of Ludgate Hill have never mourned so sincerely; black bombazine stood at three shillings the yard in October and stands at five to-day.

That could stay. So could Lady M—, who was in such affliction for Her late Majesty that she had ordered eleven gowns to shew it.

“The Bishop’s dinner,” Hester said, and drew a line through a sentence. “Two lines. It was only there because I liked the word ‘gravy’.”

“I liked it too.”

“Then you may have it for nothing some other week.” She moved down. “Here. ‘Exceedingly and most remarkably prudent.’ He is only prudent. That brings ‘daughters’ up from the line below, where it was sitting all by itself, and saves you a third line.”

Garrow leaned over to look. He counted the words on his fingers, which were brown at the tips, and grunted.

“Three more.”

“I know how many.” She went on reading. Near the foot of the slip there was a paragraph about an actress at Covent Garden and a marquess’s carriage. It was three lines long. It was also the only thing in the column she had not seen or heard for herself. She had it from Lady Halewood’s maid, who had it from a footman.

She struck it out, top to bottom.

“That is six,” she said, and gave him back his pencil.

“That was the best thing in it.”

“It was the least certain thing in it. If I must lose three lines, I shall lose the three I could not swear to.”

Garrow looked at the slip, and then at her over the top of it. “You have left in the Earl.”

“The Earl always stays in.”

She did not need to look to know what the lines said. The Earl of Soot is gone north for Christmas. One hopes that his chimneys are in better order than his sentences; the former, at least, can be swept.

“He is worth two hundred copies a week to you in the Season,” she said. “You told me so yourself.”

“I did.” Garrow did not smile. He lifted his finger off the money at last, and she put the notes and the shillings into her reticule and drew the string tight. “Sit down a moment, Miss Ludlow.”

“I have two miles to walk and it will be dark by four.”

“Sit down.”

She sat. The only other chair in the room was heaped with old numbers of the paper, so she sat on the edge of it, on top of last August.

Garrow took snuff, which he did when he wanted time. Then he shut the door to the outer office. Through the glass panel she could see the back of the clerk’s head bent over a ledger.

“On Thursday,” he said, “a gentleman came up those stairs from Lincoln’s Inn. Very civil, very clean. He is solicitor to the Earl of Wardlow.”

Hester kept her hands still in her lap. “Does he mean to bring an action?”

“Against whom? A man cannot serve a writ on a pen-name. No. He came with an offer.” Garrow rubbed his nose. “One hundred guineas to any person employed at this paper who will put a name to Mrs. Nettle.”

She did the sum without meaning to. A hundred guineas was fifty Saturdays. It was very nearly a year of her.

“He made this offer to you?”

“He made it standing in the middle of the outer office, in a clear voice, with the door open. He made it to me, to Tibbs, to the boy who carries the formes and to the woman who washes the stairs.”

“I see.” Her mouth had gone dry. “And who at this paper is able to earn it?”

“I am. Nobody else. I pay you from my own drawer and the book says ‘N.’ and nothing more.” He glanced at the glass. “But Tibbs is no fool. He knows that a tall lady in a grey veil comes up on Saturdays at two. He has carried your proofs in and out of this room for a year and nine months. He has eighteen shillings a week, a wife, and a child coming in March.”

“He does not know my name.”

“He does not. He knows which way you turn at the end of the court. A man might follow a lady home for a hundred guineas. I do not say he will. I say that I have seen him thinking, and he does not usually think.”

Hester looked at the back of Tibbs’s head. It was an ordinary head, with a bald place beginning at the crown. She had never once wondered what was in it.

“What does his lordship want with my name, if he cannot go to law?”

“He can go to law once he has it. Or he can simply say it aloud in a drawing room and go home to his dinner.” Garrow spread his hands. “You know better than I do what happens then.”

She knew exactly. Lady Halewood’s companion sat at Lady Halewood’s table three nights a week, handed tea, found shawls, and listened. Nobody lowered their voice for a companion. If it were known that the companion went home and wrote it all down, there would be no more table. There would be no more talk, no more Notebook, and no more two guineas. Her godmother’s door in Hill Street would shut, and Hester did not think it would shut quietly.

“Why now?” she said. “I have been calling him the Earl of Soot since his bill was first brought in.”

“I asked the solicitor that. He was too clean to answer. I have my own idea.” Garrow picked up the pencil and turned it over. “A man will bear being laughed at. I do not think he bears the paragraph about his sister. Or the one about the patent. That one cost him, in May.”

“He lost by five votes. I do not suppose I had five peers in my pocket.”

“You had every peer who wanted a reason. You gave them one that would go on a calling card.”

She remembered the line very well. It had been quoted back to her at Lady Halewood’s table by people who had no idea who had written it, and she had passed the muffins and been proud.

“Both those paragraphs were true,” she said.

“Both of them came to you unsigned.”

“They came from somebody who knew the houses. The street was right. The hours were right. I asked in two places about the patent and nobody would say it was false.” She heard her voice rise and brought it down. “I keep every note anybody sends me, Mr. Garrow. I always have. If it ever comes to a court, I can shew where I had each word.”

“Good. Keep them somewhere with a lock.” He stood, which meant she might go. “I am not telling you to stop. God forbid, with the Season coming. I am telling you to take a different way home each week, and to let me have your copy by post when you can. And if you must cross this office, keep your veil down.”

“I always do.”

“Then keep it lower.” He opened the door for her. “Send me the Christmas column as early as you are able. The men want their holiday.”

She folded her spectacles away and pulled her veil down. As she passed the clerk’s desk, Tibbs looked up and said, “Good afternoon, ma’am,” as he always did. She said, “Good afternoon,” as she always did. Then she went down the stairs a little faster than usual.

At the mouth of Crane Court she turned left, toward Temple Bar. She did it because she always turned right. She walked as far as Fetter Lane, went up it to Holborn, and came round by Smithfield, and she was cross with herself the whole way. It added a quarter of an hour, and her boots were thin.

Nobody followed her. She looked back twice at Smithfield, where the pens were empty and the stones were slick, and saw only a drover’s dog and a boy with a tray of pies.

It was two miles from the Lantern to the house in Colebrooke Row, and she usually did her accounts as she walked. She did them now, going up St. John Street with her hands in her muff and the wind in her face.

The rent was forty pounds a year. Ten of it fell due on Christmas Day, which was thirteen days off. Her mother’s annuity was fifty pounds a year, and it was all that her father had been able to leave. A country vicar with three children and an open hand does not die rich. That made fifty pounds coming in and forty going straight out again to the landlord. The ten that remained would have to feed and warm four people and keep a boy of fourteen at his day school.

It could not be done. Mrs. Nettle did it. Two guineas every Saturday came to rather more than a hundred pounds a year, and it paid for the coal, the butcher, Jonas’s Latin and Naomi’s shoes. Lady Halewood gave Hester her dinners and a new gown each spring and no wages at all, because one does not pay a goddaughter. Hester had never asked her to. She would much sooner pick her godmother’s guests clean and be paid by Mr. Garrow.

It was a thought to be ashamed of, and she kept it for the quiet part of St. John Street, where there was nobody to see her face.

There would be no table at all if a clean gentleman from Lincoln’s Inn had his way.

She tried to be fair about the Earl of Wardlow. Being fair was a habit her father had given her, and it was often inconvenient. She had seen the man perhaps a dozen times, across rooms. He was tall and dark, and he was said to speak in the House of Lords as if every word had to be fetched up from a well. She had exchanged exactly one remark with him in her life, and had had the better of it. He was rich and he was an earl, and he wanted to make a law telling poor men how to clean chimneys with a machine he had bought into. He had a sister who went about at night where she should not. People like that could bear a paragraph, and if they could not, they had no business in public life.

A hundred guineas, though, to the woman who washed the stairs. She had not thought he cared so much. It made him seem less like a figure in a print and more like a person, and she did not want him to be a person. People were harder to be witty about.

At the Angel she bought a pennyworth of hot chestnuts for Jonas and carried them inside her muff to keep both warm. The lamps were being lit along the High Street. By the time she turned into Colebrooke Row the sky was dark over the roofs.

Their house was the narrowest in the row. It had two rooms on each floor and a kitchen below, and a front door that stuck in wet weather. Naomi opened it before Hester could knock.

“You are late. Mama thought you had been run over.”

“I came round by Holborn.”

“Whatever for?”

“For the exercise.” Hester came in and shut the door with her shoulder. “Is Jonas home?”

“He is in the parlour, pretending to do Caesar and eating bread.”

That settled what could be said and what could not. Jonas knew that his eldest sister did fair-copying for a printer in Fleet Street on Saturdays, and was paid for it. He was fourteen and he could not keep a thing to himself, so that was all he had been told.

The parlour was warm, because it was the only room where they lit a fire before bedtime. Her mother sat close to the candle with a shirt of Jonas’s across her knee, letting down the cuffs. Mrs. Ludlow was fifty-three and looked more, and she had the mild, tired face of a woman who had been a vicar’s wife for twenty-six years and a widow for nearly three.

“There you are, my dear. Did the printer pay?”

“He paid.” Hester took out the two notes and the two shillings and laid them on the table. Her mother looked at them the way she did every week, with relief and a little sorrow mixed, and then lifted the lid of the tea caddy and put the notes inside. There were four more notes in there already. With the annuity money due at Christmas, the quarter’s rent was safe.

“That is the rent,” Mrs. Ludlow said softly. “Thank God.”

“Thank Hester’s handwriting,” said Jonas, with his mouth full. He had his father’s long legs already, and they stuck out from under the table. “What do you copy for him, Hess? Is it sermons?”

“Bills of lading. Very dull.” She dropped the paper of chestnuts onto his open book. “Those are for whoever can tell me what Caesar did next.”

“He built a bridge. He is always building a bridge.” Jonas was into the chestnuts before he had finished speaking.

Hester took off her bonnet and her gloves. The middle finger of her right hand was stained black down one side, as it always was. No amount of lemon juice moved it. She put the hand behind her to warm it at the fire.

Naomi had followed her in and was standing by the door with something held against her skirt. She was nineteen, the pretty one of the family, and she had no gift at all for hiding things.

“What have you there?” Hester said.

“It came at two o’clock, just after you had gone. Lady Halewood’s footman brought it. The tall one, with the calves. He would not wait for an answer. He said her ladyship said there was not going to be one.”

“That sounds like her.”

“I have not opened it,” said Naomi, with a great deal of virtue. She held out a folded sheet sealed with black wax. “I held it up to the candle, but she writes on such thick paper.”

Hester broke the seal. Her godmother wrote a large, square, impatient hand that needed no spectacles, and she never used two words where one would do.

“Read it out,” said her mother. “I hope she is not ill.”

“She is never ill. She would not allow it.” Hester tilted the page to the light. “‘Hester. I go into Derbyshire on Wednesday for Christmas, and you go with me. We stay until Twelfth Day.’”

“Wednesday!” said Naomi. “That is four days.”

“Christmas,” said her mother, more quietly. She had never yet kept one without all three children at her table.

Hester felt it too, a small hard pull under the ribs. But a companion who was not paid could still be dismissed. And where Lady Halewood went, there was talk. A country house full of people shut up together for three weeks would fill a good many Notebooks. She could post her copy to Mr. Garrow, which was what he had just asked her to do. She would be a hundred miles and more from Tibbs and his thoughts.

“I shall leave you the caddy,” she said. “And I shall be back before the next quarter is thought of. Mama, you will hardly miss me. You will have a whole goose between three.”

“Is there to be a goose?” said Jonas.

“There is. Listen. ‘Tell your mother I shall send the goose to Islington as usual and she is not to thank me. Be in Hill Street by seven with your box; I do not wait breakfast for anybody. Bring the grey and the black. There is to be no ball, for which we may thank the poor Queen. Bring your thickest boots as well, for I am told the place is all rock and wind and nothing else.’”

“It sounds horrid,” said Naomi happily. “Whose is it? Do go on. Is it a duke?”

“She does not know any dukes she can tolerate.” Hester turned the sheet over. There were two lines more on the back, and the initials.

She read them to herself first, and felt the warmth of the fire leave her hands.

“Hester?” said her mother.

“It is nothing. It is the direction, that is all.” She was surprised at how level her voice came out. She read the lines aloud, exactly as they stood. “‘We are asked for the whole three weeks, and I have accepted for us both. The house is Scarrow Hall, seat of the Earl of Wardlow.’”
***