The Third Specimen

Wardlow found his sister in the housekeeper’s room at half past eight, with the store-book open and a pen behind her ear.

“Three sacks from Castleton,” Cecily said. “Mrs. Orme wept over them. You may have a fire in the breakfast room again, and my aunt may stop wearing two caps.” She looked up, and her face changed. “What is it? You have not slept.”

“Not much.” He shut the door. “Cecy, I must ask you for something that you will not like to give. The letter Halewood wrote to you on the twenty-second of April, in the year seventeen. You told me once that you had kept it.”

She took the pen from behind her ear and laid it down.

“Why?”

“Because I believe that he wrote two unsigned notes to the Weekly Lantern. One in May, concerning me. One in the June of the year seventeen, concerning you. I have them in my pocket. I want a piece of his writing that he cannot disown, with his name at the foot.”

She sat perfectly still. He had seen her sit so once before, in this house, with a portfolio on the desk between them.

“You have them,” she said. “The notes themselves.”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Since midnight.”

“From whom?”

He had known that she would ask it, and he had settled at four in the morning what he would say. It sounded worse aloud.

“I cannot tell you. I gave my word that the person should tell you with their own mouth, and I mean to keep it. You shall know. It will not be long.”

“Adrian.” Her hazel eyes were very bright. “You are doing it again. You are finishing the sum before you trouble me with it.”

“I am. This time I am telling you that I am doing it, and why. It is all the improvement I can manage this morning.”

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she got up without a word and went out. He heard her go up the back stair. She was gone four minutes. When she came back she had two sides of letter-paper in her hand, folded small and worn at the creases.

“Shew me,” she said. “I will not hand it over to be looked at behind my back. I shall look too.”

He laid the two notes on the store-book. She set the letter beside them.

Madam, it began, I shall not weary Lady Cecily Calver with protestations. The capital M was thrown back in a long loop. The d of Madam curled over the letter before it like a whip. He put his finger under it, and then under Lady in the note of June, and said nothing. She did not need telling.

She read the note through. He watched her come to the eight evenings.

“He counted them,” she said. Her voice was thin and quite steady. “He stood in that street, or he paid a man to stand there. He watched me go in to Larkin and come out. And then he wrote it down, very neatly, with every word of it true.” She touched the foot of her own letter, where the name stood with a flourish under it. “It is the same. A child could see it. Even the dash.”

“Yes.”

“Seven weeks after I refused him.” She straightened. She was white, but it was not Saturday’s whiteness on the gravel. “I have thought for a year and a half that some stranger saw me and found it amusing. I do not know why this should be easier. It is. I had sooner be hated than be a joke.” She looked at the note again. “And Mrs. Nettle printed it, of course. She was sent a thing like that, by a hand like that, and she never asked one question.”

“She was sent it by a man who knew exactly how to make it look. He chose her because she was the best pen in London.”

“You are making her excuses. That is new.” Her eyebrows had gone up. “A fortnight ago you meant to make her answer for the fourteenth of June.”

“I mean to make somebody answer for it. I have changed my mind as to who comes first.”

She studied him. He bore it. He was keeping more from her than a name, and he liked it no better for knowing that she could very nearly see it.

“What will you do?”

“Speak to him, this morning. With Brome in the room, so that there is a witness.”

“You gave me your word.”

“I shall keep it. I shall not raise my voice.”

“I asked that there should be no scene in my drawing room.” For the first time, something that was almost a smile touched her mouth. “He is in the billiard room. He has had a fire lit there with my new coal. I find that I do not care what happens in the billiard room. Bring me back my letter, Adrian. I still want it to remind me.”
***
Brome was on the sofa in the library with last week’s division lists. He came without a question when he saw Wardlow’s face.

The billiard room smelled of chalk and new smoke. Halewood was alone at the table in his shirt-sleeves, knocking the red about. He looked up as they came in, and then he looked at the door, which Wardlow left open.

“Two of you. Am I to be asked for a game, or for my bill?”

Wardlow went to the end of the table. He laid three sheets on the green cloth, side by side, and kept his hand upon them. He put down the verse, the note of May and the letter with the name at its foot. The note of June he kept in his pocket. It had Cecily’s initials in it, and he would not set that before this man again.

“These are in your hand,” he said. “Brome, I want you to look at them. Halewood wrote this one on Christmas Eve, in front of us all. He signed this one to my sister. The third came unsigned to the Weekly Lantern on the second of May. It says that I had bought a share in a patent. A second, in the same hand, went there on the ninth of June in the year seventeen. You will know what that one concerned.”

Brome bent over the cloth with his spectacles in his fingers. He was a long minute. When he stood up his kind face had gone heavy.

“It is one hand,” he said. “I would say so anywhere.”

Halewood chalked his cue.

“So she ran to you,” he said pleasantly. “I told her that I should know of it.”

“She walked. At half past eleven last night, with those in her pocket, expecting to be turned out of the house.”

“And was not. No. I did not think that she would be, after Tuesday.” He leaned over and played his stroke, and the balls clicked. “Well, Wardlow? You are waiting for me to say that I never saw them before. I shall spare us both. I wrote them. They were very good notes. I flatter myself that the second was the better.”

Brome made a sound in his throat. Wardlow’s left hand had closed on the cushion of the table. He waited until he could trust the words.

“You own it.”

“In this room, to you, with the door open on an empty passage. Why not? Carry it to London and see what it weighs.” Halewood stood his cue on its end. “Consider what you have. Two scraps of paper that begin Mrs. Nettle may care to know. Who received them? Who can swear to the day they came? There is only one person in England, and to swear it she must first say who she is. Then you have a libeller with a box of old letters, telling the world that the lies she printed were somebody else’s fault. Nobody will take a scribbler’s word, Wardlow. They will take it still less when the scribbler has spent her Christmas at your desk.”

“Mrs. Nettle?” said Brome. He looked from one to the other. “What scribbler?”

“Has he not told you? How discreet.” Halewood smiled at him. “Your family secretary, Brome. The tall one with the inky finger, who made you blow your nose on Saturday. She has been abusing your bill at two guineas a week since it was first brought in. I found her out on Monday. Our host, I gather, was told last night.”

Brome sat down on the bench under the cue-rack. He did it slowly, like a man lowering a sack.

“So you see how it stands,” Halewood went on. “My terms to Miss Ludlow are just what they were. The Lantern of the sixteenth says that your bill is a job, in her best manner, or I walk into White’s on the seventeenth and say her name. She may tell you a dozen times that she will not. She has a mother in Islington. We shall see what she says on the fifteenth.”

“You threatened a guest in my house,” Wardlow said. “You opened my post-bag with a knife.”

“I did. It is a shocking lock.” Halewood reached for his coat, which hung on a chair, and took a folded packet from the breast of it. He tossed it down the table. It slid across the cloth and stopped against Wardlow’s hand, with Mr. P. Garrow, Crane Court uppermost. “There. I have no more use for it. Brome has now read the direction, and that is as good as an affidavit. And I have something a great deal better.”

“What is that?”

“A view.” The pale eyes were shining. “I had my elbows on your balustrade for half an hour on Tuesday morning. I have excellent sight. One sees so very far from up there, as I told the lady. The Earl of S— , who has sought Mrs. N— these nine months at a hundred guineas, was observed on a hilltop in Derbyshire to have found her; one hears that he paid in another coin. It wants polish. I have not her gift. But I think it will be the best paragraph of the year, and I shall not need her to write it. Any editor in London will be glad of it. What becomes of your first page then, I wonder, when their lordships learn who made it, and how the author was paid?”

Wardlow heard Brome get to his feet. He put out a hand without turning, and the older man stopped.

The wall had risen in front of him, higher than it had been in the chapel. He stood and let it stand. He would not shout through it. He had given his word, and Halewood would dearly have liked a shout.

“You will leave this house within the hour,” he said at last, quite low. “Shaw will saddle the bay for you. The road will bear a horse. Your box goes down to the Castle Inn on the carrier’s sledge this afternoon, and you may take the Sheffield coach from there. You will not take leave of my sister. You will not speak to Miss Ludlow. If you pass either of them on the stairs, you will look at the wall.”

“With all my heart. I was growing tired of the mutton.”

“One thing more. Print what you saw on Tuesday, if you choose. I ask only that you spell my name out in full. I am not ashamed of it, and I should not like any other man to get the credit.”

Halewood’s smile slipped a little. He put on his coat, and settled the cuffs, and bowed to them both from the door.

“Until the sixteenth, then. My compliments to Mrs. Nettle. Tell her that I shall send out for a copy before breakfast.”

His step went away down the passage. Wardlow gathered the three sheets and the packet. His hands were cold.

“Wardlow,” said Brome heavily. “Is it true? The hill?”

“Yes.”

“And she is truly the woman who cost us five votes in May?”

“She is the woman who was handed a lie by that man, and sharpened it. She told me so last night, standing, with nothing asked. She wrote the two sentences to Tarrant herself. You saw her do it.”

“I did.” Brome rubbed his bald head with both hands. “Good God. I thought that I might lose by three. If he prints that, with her name, I shall be lucky to lose by ten. What do you mean to do?”

“I do not know. I am going to ask her.”

“Ask her?”

“It is her name. I have decided a good many things about it in the last three weeks, and not one of them with her leave.” He stopped at the door. “Brome. My sister knows what he wrote. She does not know who received it. Miss Ludlow is to tell her that herself. It is not to come from you or from me.”

“I have kept the secrets of the Treasury bench for thirty years. I can keep a young woman’s for a week.” Brome sighed. “And you had better make that hilltop respectable, my boy, and soon.”

“I intend to. I should like her to have one day first in which nothing is being done to her.”
***
They watched him go from the window on the stairs, the three of them. The bay went down between the white banks at a walk, and the rider sat it well and did not look back. Cecily stood with her letter folded in her hand until the park gate hid him. Then she let out her breath, and said that she would see about the east room being aired.

From the passage above came the tap of a cane.

“Is that my stepson gone? On a horse, in January?” Lady Halewood looked down over the rail in her shawls. “Then he has heard something that he did not like. I congratulate you, Lord Wardlow. Jessop had better count the spoons.”

Wardlow went on to the library.

His uncle and aunt were in their chairs by the fire. The Colonel was reading out the price of bar-iron. Miss Ludlow sat on the left of the inkstand in the grey gown, with a clean sheet before her and nothing written on it. Her eyes were swollen. She stood up when she saw him.

“He is gone,” Wardlow said. “Half an hour since. Sit down. I have a good deal to tell you, and none of it need be whispered. My uncle would not hear a field-gun.”

She sat. He took his own chair and told her all of it in order. He gave her Halewood’s admission, and what he had said of a scribbler’s word, and the terms that stood. He did not soften the paragraph about the hilltop. He gave it to her as nearly as he could recall it.

The colour came up her face and went again.

“He has not my gift,” she said, after a moment. “But it would serve. It would serve very well.” She pressed her hands together. “I have done that to you too, then. I am sorry for it.”

“I kissed you on my own hill, of my own will, and I asked your leave. I will not have you sorry for my share.” He laid the packet on the common ground. “This is yours. The wafer is whole.”

She looked at her own direction for a moment. Then she got up, walked to the hearth and put the packet on the ash log. The Colonel broke off to watch it burn.

“WHAT HAS SHE BURNED, LETTICE?”

“A LETTER, IVO.”

“Ah! Quite right. Never keep ’em,” said the Colonel, and went back to Rotherham.

“It had the night-caps in it,” Miss Ludlow said, sitting down again. “I wrote that line eleven days ago, and I had as soon it were ash. That is the last of the Earl of Soot, my lord. I shall not write him again.”

“I shall miss him a little. He sold two hundred copies.”

She almost laughed. It caught in her throat.

Wardlow took the two notes from his pocket and laid them on her blotting-book.

“These go back in your box, under your key. They are your proof, and I had no business to carry them further than this morning. My sister has her own letter. I have the verse.”

“You are giving them back to me?”

“They were sent to you.” He folded his hands on the desk. He had been turning the next words over since the billiard room. “Miss Ludlow, I have come to ask you a question. I could do four things before dinner. I could write to my solicitor. I could write to your editor. I could lay those before Tarrant, or go to London and say in every club that Halewood is a liar. I have been arranging matters for other people since I was six-and-twenty, and I am quick at it. I arranged a price on your name, and you had a letter about that on Wednesday which turned you white.”

“My lord—”

“So I shall arrange nothing. This concerns you first. It is your name, and your mother’s rent, and your pen. What do you want done?”

She stared at him. He thought, with a pang, that nobody had asked her that in a long while.

She did not answer quickly. She looked at the two notes, and at the window, and he let her take the time.

“I told him that he should have his answer in print,” she said slowly. “I did not know what I meant by it when I said it. I think I know now. He believes that he owns the secret. He means to tell it, or to make me pay to keep it. The only way to take it from him is to tell it first.”

“Yourself.”

“Myself. In the Notebook, in the same column that carried the lies, and where the same people will read it. I shall say that the patent paragraph was false and the Half Moon Street paragraph was false, and how each came to me, and in what hand.” Her chin had come up. “A thing said in a club may be denied the next day. A thing in print, with the proofs behind it, cannot. I learned that at your expense.”

“It will cost you your table.”

“It has cost me that already. He will see to it, whichever way I turn.” She drew a breath. “I do not know yet how it is to be done. I must see Mr. Garrow, and I must tell my mother, and my godmother, before they read it. And Lady Cecily, before any of them. I have fifteen days. But that is what I want, my lord. I want to print the truth myself, and I want to be first.”

He looked at her. She was pale and red-eyed, and her hair was not as neat as usual. He thought that he had never in his life seen anybody he admired so much.

“Then that is what will be done,” he said. “I shall stand wherever you tell me to stand. If you want my name beside yours, you shall have it. If you want me a hundred and sixty-five miles off, I shall try to bear that too.”

“I do not think I want that.”

“I am glad of it.”

He ought to have told her then. It came up in him as it had at midnight, with her tears on his handkerchief. I have known since Sunday. She had stood behind that chair and paid her whole debt, and he had said that they began the year honest. He had lain awake over that word until four.

But she had fifteen days and three confessions before her, and Halewood on the road to London. He told himself that it would keep until she had less to carry.

He reached to the corner of his blotter and picked up the brass plate. It was cold, as it always was at first. He leaned across the inkstand and put it into her right hand, and closed her stained fingers over it with his own.

“My lord. I cannot take this.”

“You can hold it while you work. I have had it at my elbow for twenty-two years, and it never made me a sentence. You had it under your eyes for one night and made me a page.” He kept his hand over hers. “The speech is half done. I want you to finish it. All of it, to the last line, as you would have it if it were yours. Whatever Halewood prints, that page must be the best thing those peers hear this year. And you will write it a great deal better than I shall ever speak it.”

She opened her fingers and looked down at the worn brass, and the letters in the middle of it. Her thumb moved once along the rim. When she raised her eyes they were wet again, and there was a light in them that he knew. He had seen it on the drive on a Sunday, just before Dean Swift.

“Then we shall have to work on how you speak it,” said Miss Ludlow.
***