Sixty Men

Lady Halewood gave her leave at breakfast, in front of six people, and made it sound like a sentence of transportation.

“The Edge,” she said. “That great black shelf behind the house. You wish to take my goddaughter up it, Lord Wardlow, to look at men digging.”

“They began at first light, ma’am. Miss Ludlow has been indoors four days over my speech. The path is trodden to the top, and the whole of it lies in view of the house.”

“In view of how many windows?”

“I have never counted. Thirty, perhaps.”

“Then I shall sit at one of them.” The black eyes went to Hester. “Thick boots. And if you come back with a cold, I shall not nurse it.”

“I admire energy in others,” Lord Halewood said to his coffee. “Do take care on the heights, Miss Ludlow. One sees so very far from up there.”

Hester did not answer him. She went for her cloak.

The day was blue from one side of the sky to the other. The snow had a crust on it that shone, and the path the shepherds had made went up the hill behind the stables in a line of deep blue shadow. Lord Wardlow walked on her left, on the side where the slope fell away.

“I have put myself next the ditches,” he said. “I know where they are.”

“I knew where that one was, my lord. I only wished to learn how deep.”

“And did you?”

“To the armpits. You have it in evidence.”

He laughed. It came easily this morning. Everything about him did. She had handed him the three lines of his ending yesterday, an hour late and with a white face, and he had read them and said only, “Yes. That is it.” He had asked her nothing. He had sent Jessop for tea, and had kept the Colonel talking about Rotherham until she could hold a pen.

She did not understand him today. He had held himself so still on Saturday that she had thought he meant never to come near her again. Now he shortened his stride to hers on the steep places and put out a hand at the stile, and looked at her as though she were a page he liked.

She had Lord Halewood’s voice in her head the whole way up. I should watch his face while he took it in.

“You are quiet,” said Lord Wardlow.

“It is steep.”

“It is. I shall give you the excuse.” He went ten paces. “Miss Ludlow. Is there anything that you would like to say to me?”

Her foot slipped on the crust, and he had her elbow before she knew it.

“Concerning what, my lord?”

“Concerning anything. I have had the impression, since Saturday, that you were carrying something heavier than a blotting-book. I am slow, as all London knows. But I am told that I listen well.”

It was the quill. He meant the quill, and her godmother’s cane on the threshold. He was a gentleman, and he was offering her the chance to say that she had been offended.

“Only that your hill is higher than it looked from the breakfast table,” she said.

“That is true of most things at Scarrow.” He let go of her elbow, and they climbed on.

The top came suddenly. The path went up between two black rocks as tall as a man, and beyond them the ground lay flat and scoured, with the wind coming over it clean and bitter from the west. She turned round to get her breath, and forgot to take it.

The Hall lay under her feet, grey and square, with smoke standing up from six of its fourteen stacks. She could see the chapel and the dug path, and the white park, and the roofs of Scarrow Row a mile off like a row of teeth. Beyond that the whole of the Peak went away in white folds to the edge of the sky.

“There,” he said, and pointed west.

A dark line was being drawn across the snow. It began where the road left the park wall and ran toward the dip of the Winnats. Along the far end of it, small and black and very many, were men. She saw the flash of the shovels before she made out the arms.

“Sixty,” he said. “Every man on the estate who can lift a spade, and both partnerships from the Row. Bagshaw said the level could wait. Ore that cannot go down the pass is only stone.”

“How far have they to go?”

“A mile of drift, to the second bend. The Castleton men are digging up from below. They should meet tomorrow, if the frost holds.” He had pulled off his gloves and put them in his pocket, and he took a brass glass from inside his coat and drew it out. “My father’s. It is stiff. Turn the second ring.”

She found the line and followed it. The dots became men. They stood in the cut to their shoulders and threw the snow up and over, and it hung in the air like smoke.

“The two at the head, working back to back and not speaking, are Bagshaw and Frith,” he said beside her. “They have each brought their six, to see that the other does his share. The man behind them who throws left-handed is Nathan Hallam. He broke the other arm at the level in the year twelve, and it set crooked. Then the three Barber brothers. They will be singing. They sing at everything, and badly.”

“I cannot hear them.”

“You are fortunate. The tall one, with no hat, is Will Eyre.”

She held the glass steady on him. He was a long young man, digging very hard.

“His boy ate porridge yesterday,” Lord Wardlow said. “Sitting up. Ned told me at seven this morning, and then told Mrs. Orme, and then told the horses.”

“You know them all from here. You cannot see one face.”

“I have watched them work since I was a boy. A man digs as he walks.” He took the glass from her and looked for a moment himself. “The one who has stopped to give advice is Ned. He is there to carry the tally of the yards. I see that he has found time for other duties.”

She laughed, and it hurt her. Ten days ago she would have had a sentence ready for an earl who stood on a rock to watch his tenants shovel. The Earl of Soot surveys his snow. It would have taken her a quarter of a minute. And he had been up since before light to set each of the sixty in his place, and he knew which of them had a crooked arm.

He shut the glass and put it away. The wind dropped, and it was very quiet.

“I shall ask once more,” he said. He spoke slowly, and he was looking at the road. “After that I shall let it alone. Is there anything you would like to say to me? I do not think that I should take it as hardly as you fear.”

He could not know what he was offering. She knew that. But the words were there to be said, and he had made a place for them twice.

She turned to face him. Her heart was going so hard that she felt it in her throat.

“My lord. There is a thing.”

“Yes.”

“I am—”

He waited. He did it as he did in the chapel, perfectly still, with his whole attention on her. His dark eyes were kind. She thought of them changing, and of the ink on her finger, and of a narrow door in Colebrooke Row that stuck in wet weather.

Her courage went out of her like water out of a cracked jug.

“I have been unjust to you,” she said. “In my thoughts. For the better part of two years.”

It was true. It was perhaps a tenth of what was true.

“Have you?”

“I thought you pompous. I thought that you liked the sound of your own voice, and made the House listen to it for forty minutes because nobody dared stop an earl.” Her voice shook, and she let it. “I thought the bill was a rich man’s hobby. I thought that you had never been cold or frightened in your life, and that it would do you good to be laughed at. I thought all of it across rooms, without once being near enough to know. My father would have been ashamed of me.”

He said nothing for a moment. Something had passed over his face that she could not read. It was not disappointment, quite. It was more like a man who has knocked at a door and heard somebody come halfway down the stairs.

“And now?” he said.

“Now I have been near enough.”

“Then I shall tell you what I think of it.” He paused, and brought the words out one by one. “A great many people have a good opinion of me. Most of them have it because I am Wardlow, and it costs them nothing. I do not value it much. I would rather have your justice, Miss Ludlow, than anyone’s good opinion. It is harder to get, and I think that it will be worth more when I have it.”

“You have not all of it yet.”

“No. I know that I have not.”

She did not know what he meant, and she had no time to ask. He had lifted his bare right hand, and stopped it in the air a few inches from her cheek.

“I held still on Saturday,” he said. “I am not sure that I was right. I find that I cannot do it twice. May I?”

She had expected to be frightened, if this ever came. She had lain awake two nights expecting it. What she felt was a great rush of gladness, and under it a kind of fury at every hour of the last fortnight that had not been this.

“Yes,” said Hester. “And be quick about it.”

His mouth moved at one corner. Then his hand was against her face. It was cold, and so was her cheek, and the palm warmed while she stood there. He bent his head and kissed her.

He began it carefully, as he began a sentence. His lips were cool and slow, and they asked a question. She had been kissed once before in her life, at nineteen, by a curate behind the vestry, and had thought very little of it. She had not known that it could be like having a hand laid on the exact place that ached.

She answered him. She put both her hands on the front of his coat and held on, and kissed him back with all the breath she had. She felt him take it in. He made a low sound, and his other arm came round her and brought her against him, and he stopped being careful.

His mouth was warm now. His bare fingers had gone under the edge of her bonnet to the back of her neck, and where they touched her she felt it all the way down her spine. She could feel his heart through his coat, and it was going as hard as her own. She thought, with the small part of her that was still thinking, that he kissed as he had argued on the drive, quickly and well and with no walls built beforehand.

The wind came back and pulled at her cloak. Neither of them minded it.

When he lifted his head she kept her eyes shut a moment longer. Then she opened them. He was looking down at her, and there was no guard on his face at all.

“I ought to beg your pardon,” he said. He was out of breath. “I find that I am not going to.”

“If you do, my lord, I shall push you into a ditch. I know where one is.”

He laughed against her forehead. She could feel him shaking with it. His thumb moved along her cheekbone, back and forth, as if he were learning it.

“Your nose is very cold,” he said.

“So is yours. I did not like to mention it.”

“You mention everything. It is the best thing about you.” He kissed her once more, briefly, at the corner of her mouth. Then he stepped back and took his hands away, and she saw what it cost him. “I have more to say to you than that. A great deal more. I mean to say it in its proper order, and under a roof, and soon. I shall not say it today.”

“Why not today?”

“Because there are things between us that are not finished.” He took his gloves out of his pocket and looked at them, and did not put them on. “The speech, for one.”

It was an odd answer. She was too happy to turn it over.

“Then we had better go down and finish it,” she said.

He set her bonnet straight with both hands, gravely, and gave her his arm between the rocks.
***
The path down was easier than the path up. Hester did not feel it under her boots.

She was happy. She had not been so happy since she was a girl at Wickenden, on a morning when her father had read out her first whole sermon and a farmer had wept at it. Her mouth still felt his. She kept wanting to put her fingers to it. The Hall lay below them in the sun with all its windows shining, and she thought that it was the handsomest house she had ever seen.

Under the happiness she was wretched, and she knew she had earned it.

He had kissed Miss Ludlow. He had kissed a vicar’s daughter who mended verbs and knew what to do for croup. He had asked for her justice and told her that he prized it. She had let him do it. She had stood on his own hill, above his own chimneys, and taken that kiss as Mrs. Nettle, who had cost him five votes and his sister a husband.

She had had the chance. He had asked her twice. She had got as far as two words and then given him a tenth part of the truth, dressed up to look like the whole.

“You have gone quiet again,” he said.

“I am thinking that I am a coward, my lord.”

“You went into Hannah Eyre’s cottage past me. You told an earl in his own house that he could not count. I have not observed it.”

“You have not seen me try anything difficult.”

He glanced down at her. He looked as though he would speak, and then he only tucked her hand more firmly into his arm.

She did her accounts, since she could trust those. This was Tuesday. The road would be open tomorrow or the day after. When it was, Lord Halewood could send a letter to any of his four clubs, and he could walk into the library whenever he pleased. He had her packet in the breast of his coat. He believed that she would write for him. That belief would keep him quiet only until he began to doubt it.

So she could not wait for the sixteenth of January, or the sixth, or the road. She must tell this man herself, in her own words, with the three sheets in her hand. She must do it before anybody else did it for her, and she must do it soon.

She would lose him by it. She made herself look at that squarely. A man might forgive the Earl of Soot. He would not forgive Half Moon Street, and she would not ask him to. But he would have the truth from her and not from a blackmailer in a greatcoat. Lady Cecily would have the notes. It was the only decent thing left for her to do, and she had been ten days finding it.

The year had three days left in it. It had been a year of two lies, and she would not carry them into another. Before midnight on Thursday she would tell him. She gave herself that long because she did not believe she could do it sooner, and she did not hide the reason from herself.

That gave her today. She would not think it stolen. She would think of it as the one thing she had that was not Mrs. Nettle’s.

“There is Lady Halewood,” he said. “Third window from the east, on the first floor. She has a shawl over her head.”

“She will have counted every step.”

“Then I am glad of the rocks.”

“My lord!”

“I am thirty-three, Miss Ludlow, and I have been respectable for all of them. You must allow me one remark.” He was smiling straight ahead of him, like a boy. “I shall be exceedingly correct from the stile onward.”

He was. He handed her over it as he might have handed the Dowager herself, and walked a full yard from her across the last field. The path came down behind the stables and round the east end of the house, past the chapel, to the foot of the terrace steps.

She looked up, because something there had moved.

A man was standing at the end of the terrace, where the balustrade turned the corner and the whole of the Edge could be seen. He had a greatcoat on, and gloves, and a hat this time. He was leaning on the stone with both elbows, quite at his ease. He might have been there for an hour.

Lord Wardlow had seen him too. She felt the change in the man beside her without looking round.

Lord Halewood straightened without hurry. He raised his hat to them both. Then he laid his gloved hand for a moment flat on the breast of his coat, and smiled down at her, and waited for them to come up.
***