Thirty-One Moves

At noon on Wednesday a sledge came through the Winnats, and half the household of Scarrow stood on the steps to see it.

Wardlow heard it before he saw it. There was a jingle of harness at the park gate and a great deal of shouting, most of it Ned’s. Then a brown horse came up the drive between the white banks, blowing hard. It drew a flat farm sledge with a carrier walking at its head and a boy perched behind on three sacks of coal. The boy had a leather bag in his arms. It was so full that the flap would not close.

“Micah Platts, my lord,” the carrier said, and pulled off his hat. “From the Castle Inn. Your lot met ours at the second bend at half past ten. Mr. Frith said I were to tell you he got there before Mr. Bagshaw.”

“By how much?”

“About a yard, my lord.”

“What is the road?”

“It’s a trench. One horse wide, and ice at the bottom. I’d not put a wheel on it this side of Saturday. A sledge’ll go, if the man walks.” Platts jerked his thumb at the boy. “He’s brought the post. Nine days of it. The postmaster said he were sick of the sight.”

“Take the horse round. You will both eat before you go down. I shall have letters for the bag at two.”

Jessop received the Castleton bag as if it had been a christening. From the table inside the door he brought out the Scarrow bag, flat and locked, and gave it to the boy.

Miss Ludlow was standing on the top step beside her godmother. Wardlow saw her eyes follow that locked bag across the gravel. She watched it out of sight, and her face was quite empty. She had not looked so yesterday on the Edge.

He had kissed her knowing who she was. He had lain awake over that, and had not managed to be sorry. She had come within two words of telling him, and had given him the truth about her thoughts in place of the truth about her pen. It was a piece of the debt, honestly paid. He had told himself that the rest would follow.

“Your packet goes at last,” he said to her quietly.

“Yes, my lord.”

She was not looking at him. She was looking past him, at Halewood, who had come out without a hat to see the fun. Halewood smiled at her and smoothed the front of his coat. Wardlow had seen him do that on the terrace yesterday. He did not know what it meant, and he disliked it.

“Well,” said Lady Halewood. She struck the step with her cane. “I see that I am no longer a prisoner. I had better say at once, Lord Wardlow, that it makes no difference. I was asked until Twelfth Day, and I shall stay until Twelfth Day. I did not come a hundred and sixty-five miles to turn round the first hour somebody dug a hole in the snow.”

“Ma’am, I should be sorry if you thought of it.”

“I have not thought of it. I am telling you so that Lady Cecily need not wonder about the mutton.” She turned her head. “Everard, you have no such engagement.”

“None, ma’am.” Halewood’s pleasant voice did not alter. “Though I hear the road will not bear a wheel.”

“My horses and a sledge are at your service the moment you want them,” Wardlow said. “Today, if you choose. Platts will shew the way down.”

“You are too good. A viscount on a coal sledge! I think that I must wait for the wheel.” Halewood bowed to Cecily, who stood very straight on Brome’s arm. “It can only be until Saturday.”

Cecily said nothing at all. Her fingers had whitened on Brome’s sleeve. Wardlow had given her his word, and he kept it. It was hard to keep.
***
Jessop sorted the post on the library desk. It made eight heaps.

There were forty letters for Wardlow, most of them from parishes. There was a week’s Parliamentary gossip for Brome, who carried it to the sofa like a dog with a bone. There was a great square pile for Lady Halewood, and the Colonel’s Sheffield newspapers. Two letters lay on the left of the inkstand, for Miss Ludlow.

She took the first with a small glad sound. It was fat and crossed, in a soft faded hand.

“My mother,” she said. “And Naomi has written round the edges, and Jonas has drawn a goose.” She read it standing. Halfway down the page her face eased for the first time since the steps. “They ate the whole bird in two days. My brother has construed forty lines without help, and wishes it known.”

“Then Caesar has done something useful at last.”

“He built a bridge, I believe. He is always building a bridge.”

She sat down, still smiling, and took up the second.

Wardlow had seen it when Jessop put it there. He had not meant to look, and he had looked. It was a single sheet on poor paper, closed with a wafer. The direction was in a cramped, quick, upright hand, the hand of a man who writes all day against a clock. At one corner was the print of a thumb in black. A clerk’s ink was brown. This was the thick black that comes off type.

She saw the hand, and the smile went. She broke the wafer under the edge of the desk.

He turned over a letter from the overseers of Bakewell and watched her read. It was short. She read it once, and the colour left her face from the forehead down. Then she read it again. Her left hand had gone to the neck of her gown and closed on something under the cloth.

“Hester,” said Lady Halewood from the best chair, without lifting her eyes from her own letters. “Who writes to you from London on butcher’s paper?”

“A tradesman, ma’am. It is eight days old. He writes that an account is still open, and that one of his people is growing impatient over it.”

“Then pay him.”

“I mean to settle it, ma’am.” She folded the sheet small, and then smaller, and put it into her blotting-book. “This week.”

Wardlow looked at the overseers of Bakewell and did not see a word.

He could do that sum without paper. The letter was eight days old, so it had been written on the twenty-second. It came from a man with printer’s ink on his thumb. There was one account open between Crane Court and Scarrow Hall, and he had opened it himself. His solicitor had made the offer in a clear voice with the door wide, to a roomful of people on eighteen shillings a week. One of his people is growing impatient. Somebody in that office had been looking at a hundred guineas for three weeks, and her editor had thought it worth a letter to warn her.

He had done that. She was sitting a yard from him with a white face, because he had put a price on her on the tenth of December, when she was only a wasp to him.

“You have had bad news,” he said, low enough that the sofa should not hear. “Can I be of any use?”

It was a fair opening, and he made it as plain as he dared.

She looked up. Her grey eyes were very wide. For a moment he thought that she would do it there and then, with her godmother six feet away and the Colonel reading out the price of bar-iron.

“You are kind, my lord. It is a small matter of business. It will keep a day.”

“You are sure?”

“Quite sure.” She drew a clean sheet toward her. “What comes after the forty parishes? I have lost our place.”

That was the first door. He let it close.

There was a thing he could do without her leave, and he ought to have done it on Sunday at half past two in the morning. He took a sheet of his own paper and dipped his pen.

Scarrow Hall, 30 December 1818.

Sir, You will, on receipt of this, withdraw entirely the offer made by you on my behalf on the 10th instant at the office of the Weekly Lantern. I desire that you go there yourself, and say in the hearing of every person who heard it made that it is at an end. No sum will be paid by me, now or hereafter, to anybody whatever for the name of the writer who signs herself Mrs. Nettle. I shall take no proceedings. You need not write to ask my reasons. Wardlow.

It was the plainest letter he had written in his life. There was not a clause in it that she could have cut. He would have liked to tell her so.

She was writing on her own side with her head bent. The treaty held. She did not once look across.

He folded the sheet, directed it to Mr. Harbin, New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, and lit the taper. The wax ran red. He pressed his ring into it.

She did look up at that. People always look at a seal.

“To my man of business,” Wardlow said. “A thing I ought to have done some days ago.”

“Is it the larch, my lord?”

“Something of the kind. A piece of timber I had put where it should not be.”

He rang, and gave it to Jessop for the boy. When the door had closed behind it, he felt lighter by a good deal more than a hundred guineas.

Among the heap on his blotter lay two numbers of the Lantern, folded as they had come. Cecily had gone to the still-room. He opened the one for the nineteenth and found the column.

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.

It had the semicolon, with the weight after it. He waited for the old sting and found that it was mostly gone. She had written that before she ever saw a chimney of his. He thought of her face on Christmas night, over the brass.

He opened the twenty-sixth. Where the Notebook should have stood there was a corn-factor’s advertisement, twice the usual size, and a line in italic. Mrs. Nettle is from home.

“It is the first Saturday she has missed in ninety-five,” he said aloud.

Her pen made a small blot.

“My lord?”

“The lady with the hatpin. She is not in her place this week.” He laid the paper down between them, on the common ground. “I wonder what can have kept her.”

“Perhaps she had nothing to say.”

“That would be the first time.”

“Then perhaps she had too much.” Miss Ludlow did not touch the paper. “A person may find, all at once, that she does not like the sound of her own sentences. I am told that it happens even to earls.”

“It does. It is very uncomfortable. I have found that it mends, if one has help.”

She gave him a quick, startled look, and went back to the forty parishes. He put the Lantern into the drawer.
***
He met her on the stairs at five.

It was not contrived, or not much. He was coming down from his room with the green morocco book in his pocket, and she was going up with her godmother’s letters to be answered. The staircase hall was nearly dark. Jessop had not yet brought the lamps. They stopped on the half-landing, with the oak rail on one side and the tall clock ticking below.

“Miss Ludlow.”

“My lord.”

He had been exceedingly correct for a day and a half. He stood two steps below her now, so that their eyes were level, and kept his hands behind him. He could still feel the back of her neck in his fingers.

“I said yesterday that I had more to say to you. I have not forgotten it.”

“Nor have I.” It was hardly more than a breath.

“I said also that there were things not finished. I did not mean only the speech.” He paused. The word that was in the way was trust. He waited for it. “I should like you to know that whatever you chose to tell me, at any hour, I should hear it as your friend. You trusted me with nothing on that hill but your bad opinion, and I took it very well. I should take a great deal more.”

She stood with the letters held against her. In the half-dark he could see her throat move.

“You do not know what you are offering to hear.”

“Then tell me, and I shall know.”

A door opened above them. Pruett came to the rail of the passage with a candle and said, “Miss, her ladyship is asking for the red case,” and went back.

Miss Ludlow shut her eyes for a moment.

“Not on a staircase,” she said. “Not with my arms full of other people’s letters. My lord, I—there will be a better time. I promise you that there will.”

She went up past him quickly. Her skirt brushed his sleeve.

That was the second door. He stood on the landing until the clock struck the quarter.

Brome found him there.

“I have been looking for you. Come down here.” The older man drew him into the corner under the stairs, where the post table stood. His kind, plain face was troubled. “That fellow Halewood. At eleven this morning I passed his door, and his box was out in the passage with the cord laid ready across it. The pass was to open, and he was off. I thanked God.”

“And?”

“At four I passed again. The box is gone back in. One of your footmen was hanging his shirts in the press. He has stopped packing, Wardlow. He says he waits for a wheel. He does not like this house. He does not like his stepmother, and he is frightened to death of your sister’s eye. Yet he could not be got onto that sledge.” Brome shook his head. “In my trade, when a man who hates a place will not leave it, I ask what he expects to collect there.”

“Cecily.”

“I do not think so. He never looks at her. I have watched.” Brome hesitated. “He looks at your desk. At the left side of it.”

Wardlow felt the cold of the hall on the back of his neck.

“He has been insolent to Miss Ludlow since the first day.”

“He was insolent last week. This week he is pleased. I like that less.” Brome patted his arm. “I say only that I should be easier if he were gone, and if that speech were under lock at night. There. I am an old woman. Let us go and eat mutton.”
***
After dinner Cecily took her uncle and aunt and Brome to a round game at the far end of the drawing room. Halewood stood at the fire with his coffee. Lady Halewood looked at the chess table by her elbow, and then at her goddaughter.

“Play him, Hester. He has had the use of you all week. Let us see whether he can do anything by himself.”

So they sat down with the board between them, under her godmother’s eye, and he drew white.

He was a fair player. He had beaten Brome every Christmas for ten years. He opened as he had been taught, and built his pawns across the middle like a wall, and brought his pieces out behind it in good order.

She let him build. She put a knight on the edge of the board, where his tutor had told him a knight was wasted, and a bishop on a long empty line, and then she appeared to lose interest. She took a pawn that did not matter. She lost one that did. He began to think that she played like a lady.

“You are very patient,” he said, at the fifteenth move.

“I am waiting for your wall to be finished, my lord. One cannot go round a thing until one knows where it ends.”

At the nineteenth move her queen came out. He had forgotten that she had one. It crossed the whole board in a stroke and sat down behind his pawns. The bishop on the long line was looking straight at his king, and the knight on the edge was no longer wasted.

He put his chin on his fist and thought for four minutes. Her godmother gave a bark.

“You keep the best of your game back,” he said. He kept his voice for her alone. “I have noticed it before. You let a man think that he has seen the whole of you. All the while, the piece that matters is still at home on its own square.”

Her hand stopped above the board.

“Is that a fault, my lord?”

“It wins. I only think that it must be lonely for the queen.” He moved a rook, knowing that it would not save him. “If she were to come out early, for once, and in the open, I do not believe that she would be taken. I should not take her.”

She looked at him across the pieces. The candles were between them, and her eyes were bright and wet and very steady. She understood that he was not speaking of chess. He was almost sure of it. He saw her draw breath.

Behind her, Halewood set his cup down on the mantelpiece. It made a small clear sound. She heard it, and her shoulders stiffened under the black gown.

“She comes out when she is ready,” Miss Ludlow said. Her voice was low. “It will not be long now, my lord. I think you will find that she has only one more move to wait.”

She moved the knight. “Check.”

It took her twelve moves more. He fought every one. At the last his king stood in the corner with his own pawns crowded round it, and nowhere to go.

“Mate,” she said. “I am sorry. That is thirty-one.”

“You are not sorry in the least.”

“No. I am not.” She almost smiled.

“Thirty-one,” said Lady Halewood. “My husband lasted forty against her, and he was a fool. Come along, child. I want my drops.”

That was the third door. She had not come through it, but she had put her hand on the latch, and he had heard her do it.
***
The house was quiet by midnight. Wardlow sat alone at the long desk with one candle and the fire burned low.

He took out the green morocco book. The next clean page was the thirty-first. He noted the number, and thought of the chessboard, and was amused in spite of himself.

30 Dec. Road open to sledges; wheels by Saturday. Wrote to Harbin. The hundred guineas are withdrawn, wholly, and he is to say so at the newspaper in person. I have not told her. I will not have her think her safety was a bargain.

He sanded it and sat looking at the words.

He could tell her tomorrow at nine. I have known since Sunday. You have nothing to fear from me. It would take the white out of her face. He thought of that face over the printer’s letter, and for a moment his hand was on the arm of the chair to rise, as though she were in the room.

But she had promised him a better time. She had said this week to her godmother and one more move to him. She was coming to it by her own road, and she was nearly there. If he spoke first, he would take it from her. She would never know afterward whether she would have found the courage, and nor would he. He wanted very much, for her sake, that she should know.

He weighed Brome’s warning too. Halewood was watching the left side of the desk. Halewood had stopped packing. It was ugly, and he did not understand it. But the man could do nothing in a day. The speech would go into the cabinet with the portfolio, and the key into his own pocket.

The small cold voice spoke again, the one that had spoken on Sunday. It reminded him that it was now four days and not three.

He answered it as he had before. The offer was withdrawn, and she was safe from Crane Court whether she knew it or not. Nobody was knocking in any wall. She had as good as told him that she would speak tomorrow.

He shut the book and locked the speech away, and took up his candle.

One more day could not matter.
***