Terms

Cicero had heard the first page eleven times by ten o’clock, and Wardlow was beginning to dislike the shape of his nose.

“Again,” said Miss Ludlow.

She stood at the far end of the library with her back to the open door. She had made him leave the desk. He was on the hearthstone with the pages in his hand, facing the shelf, and she had turned every chair in the room to look at him.

“The House has no desk to lean on, my lord. You will hold your paper and stand on your feet. Colonel Marsden is Lord Penmoor. Mrs. Marsden is Lord Hatherleigh. Mr. Brome is Lord Dunmere, who wants to know what it costs.”

“And I?” said Lady Halewood from the best chair.

“You are Lord Tarrant, ma’am.”

“I will not be Tarrant. The man is a fool.”

“He has a vote, ma’am, and you have the right face for doubting.”

Lady Halewood gave her short bark and settled her cane across her knees. Wardlow looked down at the page. Miss Ludlow had gone over it that morning with a pencil, and after every full stop there now stood a small upright stroke.

“Before you begin,” she said. “How soon do you know that a word will not come?”

Nobody had asked him that in his life. He had to think.

“A line before it. Sometimes two.”

“Then you have a line’s warning. Most people who fall have none.” She came a few steps nearer. “You go on to the very edge of the word and stop there, and everybody sees a man standing at a fence. Stop sooner. Stop at the last full stop before it, and breathe, and look at a bench. Then the House sees a man who is letting them think about what he has just said.”

“And if the word is still not ready?”

“Then you breathe again. You have short sentences now. There is a full stop every eight words, and I have put a stroke at each one. Breathe at every stroke, whether you need it or not. When you do need it, nobody will be able to tell which was which.”

He turned that over. It was so simple that he was a little angry. He had been taught at eleven to hide the wall. He had not once been told that he might choose where to stand while he waited for it.

“Again,” she said. “And look at Lord Penmoor when you come to the age.”

He read it. He breathed at each stroke, and felt foolish for the first six. At the seventh he felt the old tightening, a line off, at chimney. He stopped at the full stop before it and let his eyes rest on his uncle’s red face. He took his breath and the word came through.

He had not gripped anything. He looked down at his left hand, and it was open.

“WHAT DID HE SAY, LETTICE?”

“THE SPEECH, IVO. THE ONE ABOUT THE BOY.”

“Didn’t catch a word,” the Colonel announced. “But he looks dashed sure of himself. Looked me straight in the eye. Never saw him do that on his legs before. I’d vote for him.”

Brome began to laugh, and wiped his eyes.

“There is your answer, Wardlow. A man who cannot hear you has just been persuaded.”

“He is your uncle,” said Lady Halewood. “Tarrant is still doubtful. Do the next.”

They did the next, and the one after. She was merciless. She stopped him when he hurried and stopped him when he dropped his eyes. Twice she made him say a line with the pages behind his back. Once she walked the length of the room and moved his chin up with one finger, in front of her godmother. Then she went back to her place by the door with her colour high. He lost the following sentence altogether, and it was no fault of the consonants.

Ned Varley came in with the logs at the fourth page. Wardlow was halfway down it.

“‘In the year nine I bought a boy in Sheffield for eight guineas. He was ten years old. He is nineteen now, and he keeps my accounts.’”

A log went down on the hearthstone with a bang.

“That’s me,” said Ned.

“It is.” Wardlow lowered the page. He ought to have asked a week ago, and it shamed him that he had not thought of it. “I should have had your leave before it was written, Ned. I am asking for it now. It is your life, and four hundred men will hear it. If you had sooner they did not, the page comes out.”

Ned picked up the log and held it against his chest. His ears had gone scarlet.

“Will it be in the newspapers, my lord?”

“Very likely.”

“Then say it loud,” said Ned. “And say I’ve knees like a saddle. They’ll not believe the rest without.”

“I told you that he needed no help with his sentences,” Miss Ludlow said. She was writing it into the margin already.
***
Lady Halewood went up at one to rest her eyes. Cecily was in the east room with Mrs. Orme and every window open, and had sent word that she would not sit down until the smell of hair-oil was out of the curtains. The Colonel slept. Mrs. Marsden counted stitches. Brome had his division lists.

Miss Ludlow sat on the left of the inkstand with the brass plate beside her blotting-book. She took a small case from her pocket and held it a moment.

“You have not seen these, my lord. I have kept them upstairs for a fortnight, and I have had the headache for most of it.”

They were steel spectacles, very plain. She hooked them on and looked at him through them with her chin up, as if she expected him to laugh.

“So that is how you look when you are doing it,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Taking a peer to pieces. I have often tried to picture it. I had the cap and the hatpin quite wrong.”

“I shall thank you to remember that the frontier stands.” But she was smiling as she bent to the page.

She wrote for a quarter of an hour. He listened to the pen and wrote nothing himself. Then she turned the sheet and pushed it across the common ground.

“I was unkind to yours, so you had better be unkind to mine.”

He read it. There was no wit in it at all, and she had plainly meant that.

On the 9th of May last this Notebook said that the Earl of Wardlow had bought a share in the sweeping-machine his bill would require. That was false. He owns no share and never has; he has given forty machines away. The writer had it from an unsigned note. She asked in two places whether it was true, was told by nobody that it was, and printed it because the sentence pleased her.

Below that was a space, and then more.

“You have put my name in full,” he said.

“The lie went out behind a dash. I will not take it back behind one. People must not be able to say afterward that they did not know whom I meant.”

“Very well. But this.” He put his finger under the last line. “‘Because the sentence pleased her.’ You were imposed upon, Miss Ludlow. A man set out to deceive you, and he was skilful. You might say so. ‘The writer was deceived.’ It is three words, and it is true.”

“I was deceived on the Saturday, when the note came. On the Wednesday I sat down and chose.” She took off the spectacles to look at him. “People say ‘deceived’ when they would like to be forgiven before they reach the full stop. I am not asking the reader to forgive me. I am telling him what I did.”

“You are harder on yourself than I should be on a sheep-stealer.”

“The sheep-stealer did not lose you five votes.”

He tried twice more. He offered her too hastily, and she said that haste was an excuse too. He offered to have pleased her struck out and nothing put in its place. She said that he would have the whole reason or no retraction, and that he was a worse editor than Mr. Garrow, who at least only cut for length.

“And the space?” he asked at last.

“That is the fourteenth of June.” Her voice had dropped, though there was nobody to hear. “I cannot write it until I have spoken to Lady Cecily. Her name has been printed once without her leave. It shall not be printed a second time unless she tells me herself that she wishes it.”

He looked at the blank inch of paper. He had not thought of that either. He had been ready to mend his sister’s name over her head for a year and a half.

“There is one thing,” he said. “It does not soften anything.”

“Well?”

“The second sentence from the end. ‘That she ought, before a word of it was set in type, and having every means of asking, to have asked, the writer knows.’” He kept his face grave. “It has the verb at the wrong end.”

She snatched the sheet back and put her spectacles on. She read it. Then she laid her forehead down on her blotting-book, and her shoulders shook.

“It has,” she said, muffled. “Oh, it has. Thirty words late. My father would disown me.”

“‘She ought to have asked.’ Stop there.”

“Five words.” She sat up, pink and wet-eyed with laughing, and struck the line through. “You are insufferable, my lord. Mr. Brome, you are my witness that he is insufferable.”

“I have known it for twenty years,” said Brome behind his lists.
***
The light began to go at four. She had been at the desk since nine, and he saw her press her fingers to the bridge of her nose where the steel had marked it.

“Will you walk in the gallery with me?” he said. “It is cold. You will want your cloak.”

She looked at him quickly. “The gallery?”

“You told me on Thursday night what was said to you there. I should like you to have something else to remember in that room.”

She fetched the cloak.

There had been no fire in the gallery for twelve days, and their steps rang on the boards. The windows down the left side were blue with dusk. Beyond them the snow held the last of the light, and the dug path to the chapel showed as a dark thread. On the other wall his family looked down out of their frames. A housemaid went through with a can of water, curtseyed, and left the far door standing wide.

They walked the length of it once without speaking. Under the fourth portrait she slowed, and he knew that it was the place.

He stopped there. He had not built this beforehand. He had tried to in the night, and each sentence had come out with its court dress on, so he had thrown them all away.

“Miss Ludlow. I have a house and a name.”

She went very still.

“A week ago I should have offered them to you as a man throws a rope. There is every reason for it. Halewood is on the road with a paragraph in his head. Brome told me yesterday to make that hilltop respectable. You have a mother, and a rent, and a table that you are about to lose.” He paused at a full stop, as she had taught him, and breathed. “They are all good reasons, and I do not want you to say yes for any of them. You decided yesterday to print your own name and stand what came of it. You decided it before I had opened my mouth. You do not need rescuing, and I am not offering to rescue you.”

“Then what are you offering, my lord?”

“Myself. I have nothing else that you could not do without.” He did not look at a bench. He looked at her. “I love you.”

It came out whole. He had expected to wait for it, and there had been nothing to wait for.

“I have loved you since some time before I knew it. I think it was the armpits. I should like you to marry me. Will you?”

She had both hands inside her cloak. In the blue light her eyes were very wide.

“You are asking Mrs. Nettle,” she said. It was hardly steady.

“I am asking Hester Ludlow. She is Mrs. Nettle, and she is also wrong about where a knight should stand. I know whom I am asking.”

She laughed, and it broke in the middle. She turned away to the window and stood with her back to him for the time it took the housemaid’s steps to die away on the stairs. He let her take it.

When she turned round she had brought her right hand out of the cloak, and she was holding up the inky finger.

“I have terms.”

“I hoped that you would.”

“You will not like them.”

“Name them.”

“First. Mrs. Nettle goes on writing. Every week, for Mr. Garrow, for two guineas. I will not put her away in a drawer because I have changed my name. There has never been a countess with a column, and you will be laughed at for it.”

“I have been laughed at by the best. Agreed.”

“Second. She writes under your roof. At that desk, on the left of the inkstand. The frontier stands. You do not read a line of her copy before it goes to the post, and you do not ask.”

“Cicero shall judge it. Agreed.”

“Third. She writes about whomever she pleases. That will be your friends, and the men who dine at your table and vote with you. If Lord Corsley sells his vote for a dinner, I shall say that he did, and what he ate.”

“He will have earned it. Agreed.”

“Fourth.” Her chin came up. “Yourself included. If you ever again speak for forty minutes, my lord, the Lantern will mention it on the Saturday. I shall not spare you because I sit at the foot of your table.”

“I should think the less of you if you did. Agreed.”

“Fifth. The two guineas are mine, and they go to Islington as they always have. My mother is not to be pensioned off by an earl like an old horse. Whatever you may wish to do for my family, you will ask me first, and I may say no.”

That one went home. He thought of a sack of flour sent to fourteen houses without a word, and of a hundred guineas offered in a clear voice.

“I am learning to ask,” he said. “You have seen that I am slow at it. Agreed. Is there a sixth?”

“I cannot think of one. I had not expected to get past the first.”

“Then I have a single term of my own.”

Her face changed. She braced herself, and he was sorry to see it.

“I ask only that you spell my name right.”

She stared at him.

“Mrs. Nettle has had it as a W and a dash for nearly two years, and as Soot the rest of the time. If I am to be abused in print by my wife, I want it done in full. Wardlow. It has two syllables, and none of them is a chimney.”

Her mouth trembled. Then she was laughing in earnest, with her hand over her lips and her eyes shining above it.

“I can spell Wardlow. I learned it this afternoon. It is the other one that I have never had the use of.” She took her hand down. She said it carefully, as she tried a new word on a page. “Adrian.”

Nobody but his sister had called him that in seven years. He had not known how it would sound in her voice. He found that he could not answer.

“Yes, Adrian,” said Hester. “On those terms, and on that one. I will.”

He took the stained hand and kissed it. Then he kissed her mouth, there under the fourth of his ancestors, with both doors of the gallery standing open and nobody in the world to see. It was a short kiss. Her lips were cold and they were smiling against his. She held on to his coat as she had on the Edge.

“There is one thing more,” she said, when he let her go. “It should be the sixth term. Nobody is to be told yet.”

“Not your godmother?”

“Not anybody, until I have spoken to Lady Cecily. She likes me, and she does not know what I am. I will not be handed to her as a sister while I still have that in my pocket. If she cannot bear me afterward, then you must think again, and I shall not hold you to this.”

“I shall not think again. But she shall hear the one thing before the other. I promised you that already.”

“Tomorrow is Sunday. I shall tell her on Monday.” She drew the cloak round her. “Let me have one day first, Adrian. I should like to remember being happy in this house, with nothing owing, before I go and pay the next.”

With nothing owing. He gave her his arm and they walked back down the gallery toward the lamps.

The green morocco book was in the breast of his coat. He could feel the corner of it against his ribs. He knew the page without opening it. 27 Dec. It is Miss Ludlow. I shall not say so. I want her to tell me.

She had told him. She had done it standing, with the door open, expecting to be turned out, and he had let her think he heard it for the first time. He had kissed her ink and said that they began the year honest. Now she had given him her terms like a woman emptying her pockets on a table, and he had agreed to all of them with that entry lying over his heart.

He would tell her. He had no doubt of that. It would hurt her a little, and then she would see why he had waited. He had done it for her sake, after all.

But she had asked for one clear day. On Monday she must face his sister. There were five pages of the speech still to write, and on Wednesday a coach would carry her south. It would be a poor kindness to lay one thing more on her before the work was done.

When the last line was written, he would open the book at that page and put it into her hand. He settled it so on the back stair, with her fingers warm in the crook of his arm. It would wait for the speech.
***