In Print

“I have found my spectacles,” said Lady Halewood.

She was sitting up against four pillows with her chocolate, and the red case lay on the counterpane beside her. Hester stopped with the shawls over her arm.

“I am glad, ma’am. Where were they?”

“On the table by my bed. In the red case.” The black eyes met hers without a blink. “Do not stand there looking like a magistrate. I am sixty-one. I may lose what I please, and find it when I please.”

“You had Pruett on her knees under the bed.”

“Pruett is the better for exercise.” Her godmother drank, and set the cup down. “It was a quarter past five on Saturday, and it was growing dark. That old man was asleep in his chair, and you had been at that desk since nine. I thought it was time somebody wanted you elsewhere. I do not ask what I interrupted, Hester. I only tell you that I walked the length of that passage in the cold to do it, and I do not walk for nothing.”

Hester felt her face go hot. “There was nothing, ma’am. We were mending a pen.”

“Then it was a very interesting pen.” Lady Halewood turned her cane where it leaned against the bed. “He is thirty-three years old and he has forty thousand acres. You have one black gown and one grey. I say no more. I have seen girls cleverer than you made fools of by a great deal less than an earl.”

“He has not tried to make a fool of me.”

“No. I do not think he would know how. That is what troubles me. A rake I could have dealt with from this bed.” She waved a hand. “Go down. You have a face on you like a wet week, and you will get no better for sitting with me. He will have been at it since breakfast, and I daresay he has put something at the wrong end again. But the door stays open, child.”

“It is always open, ma’am. It is the rule of the house.”

“It is a good rule, so see that you keep to it.”

Hester laid the shawls where they could be reached and went out with her blotting-book under her arm.

She had the ending of his speech in it. She had written it on Sunday night, three lines, as she had told him it should be. That was easy. Everything else she carried this morning was heavy. She had three sheets of paper in a locked box, and she did not know how to use them without ruining her mother. And for two nights she had been thinking of a quill in the common ground, and a man’s face a hand’s width from her own, and how still he had held.

He had smiled at her in the chapel yesterday. He had read out a verse about lying lips, and she had wanted to sink through the flags, and then he had smiled. She did not know what to make of that. She only knew that she had gone about all Sunday feeling warmer than the weather allowed. She had no right to that, and she knew it.

The shortest way to the library was by the long gallery and the back stair. There had been no fire in the gallery for a week, and nobody went there who could help it. Her breath smoked. The windows down the left side were furred with frost at the corners, and down the right side the dark-haired Calvers looked out of their frames at the snow.

Lord Halewood was standing under the fourth of them.

He had a greatcoat on over his morning dress, and gloves. So he had come there on purpose, and had meant to stay as long as he must. He was not looking at the pictures. He was looking down the gallery at her, and he was smiling.

Her godmother had told her on the first morning what to do if she met him in a passage. There was only one way out of the gallery behind her, and it led back to the blue room. She walked on.

“Miss Ludlow. Good morning. I hoped that I might find you between one duty and the next.” He stepped out a pace, so that she must stop or go round him. “I have something of yours.”

He took his right hand from his pocket. In it was a folded packet closed with a wafer, a little rubbed at the corners from lying a week in a leather bag. He held it up between two fingers, with the direction toward her.

She could read it from where she stood. She had written it herself, at five in the morning, by one candle. Mr. P. Garrow, Crane Court, Fleet Street, London.

The cold of the gallery seemed to go straight through her gown. She did not let her face change. She had had practice at that across four hundred dinners.

“That was given to Lord Wardlow’s butler, my lord, for the post. It was locked in the bag.”

“So it was. It is a lock made to keep out honest people, and I had it open with the small blade of a penknife in less time than I take to tell you.” He turned the packet to look at it fondly. “You must not think that I make a habit of it. But consider my position. I have been shut in this house nine days, with a deaf colonel and a great deal of mutton. A man must have some occupation. I have had the pleasure of watching you.”

“I am sorry your lordship found nothing better to look at.”

“Oh, I found it most rewarding. I watched Lady Halewood’s companion write for six hours at a stretch without stopping to mend her pen. I watched her take a peer’s sentence to pieces as a cook draws a fowl. And on Christmas Eve I heard her make four lines of verse in three minutes.” He tilted his head. “Send home for supper, and then make your will. It is a strange thing, Miss Ludlow. I had the feeling that I had heard that tune before, though I knew I had never heard it at my stepmother’s table. You are so very quiet there.”

She said nothing. Her hands were tight on the blotting-book.

“So I asked myself to whom such a quiet person writes, at such length, in a snowstorm. And I went to see.” He tapped the direction with one gloved finger. “Every man in London who has ever wished to see his neighbour in print knows where Mr. Garrow lives. I can read a direction as well as anybody. You will observe that I have not broken the wafer. I did not need to, and I am not a thief.”

“You have my letter in your hand, my lord. You took it out of a locked bag.”

“I shall certainly put it back. In time.” He slid the packet into the breast of his greatcoat and patted the place. “Good morning, Mrs. Nettle. I have admired you for nearly two years. I had not the least idea that you had been handing me my tea.”

She had been afraid of this since a Saturday in Crane Court, when Mr. Garrow had kept his finger on the money. She had supposed it would come from a compositor with a child due in March. She had never thought of a viscount with a penknife.

It would do no good to deny it. He had only to carry that packet down one flight of stairs.

“What do you want?” said Hester.

“There! I knew that you would be quick. My stepmother would have talked for ten minutes about my character.” He drew off one glove and looked at his nails. “I want a paragraph. One only, and I shall not even ask to see it beforehand. I leave the wording to you. Nobody in England does it better.”

“A paragraph concerning what?”

“The new Parliament meets in the middle of January. Wardlow will have his bill down again within the month. Your column of Saturday the sixteenth will say that the thing is a job. It has been got up for the men who make sweeping machines, and your noble friend is their hired voice. They have forty engines sold already, and every chimney in England to follow.” He smiled. “You will find a neater way of putting it. You did before.”

Her stomach turned over. He was speaking of the patent paragraph. He was not owning to the note. He was only speaking of what all London had read. He did not know that she had his looped d’s in a box under a grey gown.

“It is false,” she said. “He gives the machines away. He has never taken a penny by them. I had that from the servant who packs the crates.”

“I daresay. What has that to do with it? It was false in May, and it answered very well.” He put the glove on again, finger by finger. “They lost by five. Brome is afraid of three this time, I hear, and three is a number that one good sentence will turn. I was a little concerned on Saturday, I admit. That first page of yours is a dangerous piece of work. It is fortunate that the same hand may undo it.”

“And if I will not?”

“Then I shall be obliged to tell what I know. I shall begin here, with our host. I should enjoy that. He has been looking for you since the spring, you know, at a hundred guineas. I wonder how he will like to learn that the Earl of Soot was christened at his own desk, by the lady who has been mending his verbs.” The pale eyes rested on her face. “I should watch his face while he took it in. I think he has grown fond of his secretary.”

She had thought that she was frightened before. This was worse, and it was a different fear. She saw the dark, slow, careful face that had smiled at her across a chapel, and she saw it change.

“After that there is Lady Cecily, who will remember a certain Saturday in June. Then my stepmother. She has fed a spy at her own table for two years, and she does not like to be made ridiculous. I do not think you would see Hill Street again. And then there is London.” He spread his hands. “I belong to four clubs. It would be all over town in a week. You would not sit at another table in that city, Miss Ludlow, and a Mrs. Nettle with no table is only a spinster with a pen.”

“You have thought of everything.”

“I have had nine days. I thought of Islington too.” He said it lightly. “A clergyman’s widow, I believe, and a girl of an age to be married, and a schoolboy. It is a narrow house, held by the quarter. Landlords are timid creatures. They do not care to let to the mother of a libeller whom an earl means to prosecute. Nor do schoolmasters keep such a boy, when the fees stop coming.”

She thought of the tea caddy with nothing in it. She thought of Jonas with his long legs under the table, eating bread over Caesar, and her mother letting down his cuffs by one candle.

It made her angry, and she found that the anger steadied her as nothing else had.

“May I ask a question, my lord?”

“As many as you like. I have not been so well entertained since Derby.”

“Why? It is a short bill about chimneys. It will not cost you a shilling whether it is carried or lost. What is it to you?”

He laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, and it rang a little in the empty gallery.

“It is nothing to me. I do not care if every sweep’s brat in England is boiled or roasted. I care that Wardlow wants it.” He leaned his shoulder against the panelling, under a Calver in a ruff. “I shall be candid with you. We are in the same trade now, and it is a relief to talk to somebody of sense. I owe fourteen thousand pounds, Miss Ludlow. It is owed to the kind of people who do not wait. There was a young lady with twenty thousand who would have set me quite straight. I asked for her very civilly. Her brother stood up in his book-room and told me that I was a fortune-hunter, and that I should never have her if I asked every year until the money was gone. He said it quite fast, for him.”

“That was on your own offer,” said Hester. “It was your own letter. He did not cost you the heiress. She had refused you already, by the same day’s post.”

His eyebrows rose. “They have been confiding in you. How charming. Yes, she refused me. Girls refuse, and they are brought round. But they are not brought round when the head of the family has said a thing like that and means to say it to other heads of families. I found two doors shut to me that summer which had been open in the spring. The Calvers cost me an heiress, and very likely a second.” He was still smiling. “I am a man who pays his debts of that sort, even if I pay no others. I have had a part of what I am owed. I mean to have the rest.”

A part of it. He had had Lady Cecily’s name, and Mr. Denham’s letter, and five votes in May. He stood there under her family’s portraits and counted it over like winnings.

And he would not stop at the sixteenth of January. She saw that quite clearly. If she wrote this paragraph, there would be another in March, and another after that. She would write for him as long as he had breath to ask.

She stood up as straight as she could. She was a tall woman, and it brought her eyes level with his.

“You shall have my answer in print, my lord.”

For a moment he studied her. Then he took it as she had known he would, because he could not imagine any other meaning.

“On the sixteenth. Excellent. I shall send out for a copy before breakfast.” He stood away from the wall and made her a bow, as graceful as the one he had made on the gravel. “I knew that we should understand each other. You have a mother. I never yet met a principle that weighed as much as a quarter’s rent.”

“Is that all?”

“Quite all. I shall keep your little packet by me until the day, in case your memory should need help. And I need hardly say that our host is to know nothing of this talk. If he hears of it, I shall know from whom, and I shall speak first.” He touched his hat-brim, though he wore no hat. “Your servant, Mrs. Nettle. Do go down to him. He frets when you are late.”

He walked away up the gallery toward the main stair, without hurry. She heard his boots on the boards the whole length of it, and then on the landing, and then not at all.

Only then did her knees give. She got to the nearest window and sat down on the cold stone of the sill, with the blotting-book on her lap. She was shaking as she had not shaken in the sunk fence.

Outside, the park lay white and blinding under the sun. She could see the chapel, and the single dug path that led to it.

She tried to think it through in order, as she did her accounts.

She would not write it. That was the first thing, and it was settled. She had printed two lies without knowing them for lies. She would not print a third when she did know. Her father would have turned his face from her.

Then Lord Halewood would speak, and everything he had promised would follow. He could do every part of it.

Unless she spoke first. She had the three sheets. He thought he held all the cards, and he did not know there was a box. She could lay his own hand in front of Lord Wardlow tonight. She could prove who had lied about Lady Cecily and why.

But to do that, she must say what she was. She came back to it every time. She must say that she was Mrs. Nettle and had made the Earl of Soot. She had sat up until two in the morning writing his dead boy’s name for him, with that upon her. She thought of the open door on Christmas night, and his cold hand going still under hers.

He would never look at her like that again. She had not known, until Lord Halewood threatened to take it away, how much she had come to depend on being looked at so.

In print, she had said. She did not yet know what she meant by it. She knew only what she did not mean. It had come to her tongue as her best sentences did, before she had worked out the sense. There was something in it, though. A thing said in a gallery might be denied afterward. A thing in print, with a name to it, could not be.

She was too cold to think more. She stood up and found that her legs would hold her.

There was still a speech to finish. Whatever else she was, she had promised him an ending.

She went down the back stair with her hand on the wall. The passage below was dim and smelled of woodsmoke. Light and warmth came out of the library door, which stood open as it always did, and voices came with them.

“WHAT IS IT, LETTICE? WHAT IS THE JOKE?”

“WARDLOW HAS WRITTEN A SENTENCE, IVO.”

“I have written six,” said Lord Wardlow. “By myself. Brome, you are my witness. The law says eight. There is not a word in it over one syllable.”

“I am astonished,” said Mr. Brome. “Read us the next.”

“I dare not. Miss Ludlow will be down directly, and she will tell me that it has the verb at the wrong end. She will be right. She is always right, and I am beginning to bear it very well.”

And he laughed.

She had heard him laugh like that once before, sitting in the snow on Christmas Eve with his hat off. It was not a sound he made often. There was no guard on it at all. It was the laugh of a man who had slept, and had a speech at last, and was waiting for somebody he trusted to come through the door.

Lady Cecily was in there too. Hester could hear her saying something dry about the six sentences. She had come into the library because Lord Halewood was not in it.

Hester stood in the passage, a yard short of the light. She had the three lines of his ending in the blotting-book against her chest. She could hear the fire, and his pen being set down in the tray on the common ground.

She had only to walk six steps and sit down on the left of the inkstand. He would look up. He would be glad.

She could not make her feet do it.
***