Since the Snowdrift

Hester had kept one secret for a year and ten months. She found the new one a great deal harder, and she had only been keeping it since dusk.

It was in her face. She was sure of it. She came down the dug path to the chapel on Sunday morning with her godmother’s prayer book, and she kept her eyes on the snow in case anybody should look into them and see an earl.

“You are humming,” said Lady Halewood.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

“Do not beg my pardon. Tell me the tune, so that I may avoid it.”

There was still no curate. The road would bear a wheel now, but it was a sheet of ice from the park gate down, and Lady Cecily had said that she would not ask Mr. Dakin to break his neck for thirty people who could read. So Adrian stood at the desk in his black coat and opened the book.

Hester watched his left hand. It lay on the wood, and it lay easy.

He read the Sentences and the Exhortation. He stopped at every full stop and took his breath, and he looked up at the benches while he did it. Once she saw the trouble coming in the set of his shoulders, a line off. He stopped where the sentence ended. He looked at Mrs. Orme, and breathed, and went on. Mrs. Orme sat up straighter, like a woman who has been singled out.

He waited only once in the whole service, at brethren, and it was short.

“Seventeen minutes,” her godmother said on the path afterward. She had her watch in her glove. “It was twenty-four on Christmas Day. What have you done to him?”

“I have only moved his full stops, ma’am.”

“Have you? I should have said that you had moved something else.” The black eyes were on her. Hester looked hard at the chapel wall, and at the small stone a yard from the door, which somebody had cleared again.

It was the easiest day she had spent since she was a girl.

After the cold beef, Lady Cecily wanted to see the Eyre child for herself. They walked the mile to the Row, the three of them, with Ned drawing the hand-sledge behind under a sack of the new coal. The sky was soft and grey, and a little water was running under the crust of the snow. Lady Cecily walked in the middle and talked about red flannel.

Hannah Eyre opened her door wide this time. The boy was sitting up against the bolster with a wooden horse in his fist. His name was Sam. He looked at Hester for a long moment, and then he held out the horse.

“He knows you, miss,” Hannah said. “He’s not let anybody touch that sin‘ Will carved it.”

Hester sat on the bed and was shown the horse. When she looked up, there was a bucket of water standing full by the hearth that had not been there before, and Adrian was stooping under the lintel with snow on his boots.

“You were not asked for that, my lord,” she said.

“I have one talent in this cottage. I mean to practise it.”

On the way home Lady Cecily took her arm.

“I shall be sorry on Wednesday, Miss Ludlow. I did not think I should say that to anybody out of that coach. I have not had a friend in this house since Larkin.”

Hester said something, and did not know what. It lay cold under her ribs for half the hill. Tomorrow she would tell this small, straight woman who she was. But she had asked for one day, and she would not spoil it by being afraid in advance. She looked at the tall back walking ahead of them and let herself be glad.

They wrote the fifteenth page before the light went. In the evening her godmother pointed at the chess table with her cane, and Hester sat down opposite him and drew black.

On the fourth move she brought her queen out.

It was bad chess, and she knew it. She set the piece down in the open, in the middle of the board, where his bishop could have had it for nothing. She kept her finger on it a moment and looked at him.

He looked at the queen for a long time. Then he moved a pawn on the other side of the board.

“Are you blind, Lord Wardlow?” said Lady Halewood. “You might have taken her.”

“I gave my word that I would not, ma’am.”

“To whom?”

“To the lady.”

“Then you are a fool, and you will lose.” She was right. It took Hester twenty-six moves, and she laughed through most of them.
***
She heard the clock on the stairs strike eleven, and the half hour, and the three quarters.

Her room was warm. Somebody had put a brick in the bed again. She lay on her back with her plait over her shoulder and the key on its ribbon in the hollow of her throat, and she could not sleep for happiness. It kept her awake as fear had done. She would not have known the difference in the dark, except that this did not make her feel sick.

At a few minutes before twelve she got up. She put her wrapper on over her nightgown, and her shawl over that, and lit her candle at the fire.

She told herself that she wanted the fifteenth page. There was a clause in it that she had not liked. She had got as far as the top of the stairs before she owned that she had not come down for a clause.

The library door stood half open, and there was light behind it.

He was in the chair by the hearth, in a dark dressing gown over his shirt, with his feet stretched to the fire. There was no pen in his hand. A small green book lay open on his knee, and he was looking past it at the coals.

He turned his head. Then he shut the book and put it into his pocket, and stood up.

“Hester.”

“I could not sleep.”

“Nor I.”

“I came for the fifteenth page.” She set her candle down on the desk. “That is untrue. I came to see whether you were here.”

“I have been here since eleven, hoping that you would come. I had made up my mind not to go and knock.” He pushed the other chair nearer the fire. “Sit down. You are shivering.”

She sat on the hearthrug with her back against the chair, because it was nearer the warmth. After a moment he came down from his own chair and sat on the rug beside her, with his long legs drawn up. He looked much younger there.

“What kept you awake?” he asked.

“I am happy, and I have got out of the way of it. I kept waiting for somebody to come and take the inventory.”

“What inventory?”

She had not meant to tell it. It came out because he had asked quietly and then waited.

“My father died on the eleventh of February, three years ago. He was fifty-eight. He took a chill at a burying and it went to his chest, and he was gone in nine days. We put him in his own churchyard on the Friday.” She watched the fire. “On the Tuesday there was a letter from the patron’s agent. It was a very civil letter. The living was given, and the new incumbent wished to be in by Lady Day. That was six weeks.”

“Six weeks, after ten years of your work.”

“After twenty-six of my mother’s. The work was not what hurt. The new vicar’s wife came to look at the house while we were still in it. She walked through every room with a yard measure. She measured the parlour windows for curtains, with my mother sitting there in her black, and she was perfectly pleasant, and she asked whether the chimney smoked.”

His hand had found hers on the rug.

“I had gone round that parish since I was fourteen. Everybody in it knew me. I thought that it counted for something to be known. It did not. People were kind for a fortnight, and they brought us eggs. Then they began to say ‘the late vicar’s family’, and to look at us as you look at a thing that has been left on a doorstep.” She drew a breath. “So I learned it. If people can see you, they can pity you, and measure you, and move you on. If nobody sees you, nobody can turn you out. My godmother’s companion was a kind of furniture, and Mrs. Nettle was a name. Between the two of them there was no Hester Ludlow anywhere to be given notice. I was safe so for nearly three years.”

“And then you came here.”

“And you told my godmother on your own steps that we had met. You had turned round far enough in May to see my face.” She laughed a little. “I was never so frightened. You have looked at me every day since. I have been waiting a fortnight for the yard measure.”

He was silent. He lifted her hand and held it against his chest, inside the dressing gown, where she could feel the beat.

“I see you,” he said. “I have seen the spectacles and the ink, and the worst thing you ever did, in your own words. I am not going to give you six weeks. I am not going to give you sixty years, if I can get more.”

She turned her face against his shoulder and stayed there. The log settled. The clock struck twelve, slowly, out in the hall.

When she lifted her head she knew what she was going to say, and she was not afraid of it.

“Adrian, I do not want to go back upstairs. I should like to stay with you tonight, if you will have me.”

She felt him stop breathing.

“If I will have you,” he said. His voice was rough. “Hester, I shall get a licence the day I reach London. It need be only a few weeks. I can wait for you. I would wait a good deal longer than that, and think myself lucky.”

“I know that you would. I am seven-and-twenty, and I have waited for everything.” She put her hand flat against his face. “You gave me your word yesterday. I do not need a clergyman to tell me that you will keep it. I want this tonight because I choose it, and not on a day when it has become my duty.”

He looked at her for a long moment, very gravely.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I am sure. I have been sure since the snowdrift.” It was easy after all. “I love you. I should have said so in the gallery. I had spent all my breath on terms.”

He shut his eyes. When he opened them they were wet, and he was smiling.

“Then I will have you,” he said, “with all my heart. And you will tell me if there is anything you do not like. You have never been slow to do it.”

She got up from the rug. She crossed the room and shut the library door, and the latch clicked.

“It stays open by day,” she said. “It is five minutes past midnight.”

He was laughing when she came back to him, and he was still laughing when she kissed him. It was nothing like the hill. They had been cold there, and in thick coats. Here the fire was hot on one side of her, and there was only linen between her hands and his skin. His mouth was slow and warm and in no hurry. He kissed the corner of her jaw and the place under her ear. She heard herself make a sound that she had not known was in her.

His fingers were at her plait. He drew the ribbon off and combed the hair loose over her shoulders, and looked at it.

“I have wanted to do that since it came down on one side, by the sunk fence.”

“It was full of snow.”

“I remember exactly what it was full of.”

The shawl had gone. He pushed the wrapper back from her shoulders and put his mouth to her throat, at the edge of the nightgown. She slid her hands inside his shirt and up over his ribs. He was lean and hard and very warm, and he shivered under her palms as if they had been cold.

“Not here,” she said into his hair. “Not on a hearthrug, under that bust.”

“He cannot see.”

“He can judge. Take me upstairs.”

They went by the back stair with one candle and her shawl bundled under his arm. She had never held a man’s hand in the dark before. On the top step he stopped to kiss her again, and she nearly dropped the light.

His room was large and plain. There was a fire, and a great bed with dark curtains, and a table beside it. He emptied the pocket of his dressing gown onto the table without looking, his watch and the little green book, and turned to her.

She was suddenly shy. She stood in the middle of his carpet in her bare feet and did not know what to do with her hands.

“There are a great many buttons,” she said.

“I shall count them.”

There were eleven, small and flat, from her collar to her waist. He did them one at a time. His hands were not quite steady, and at the fourth he said “Four” under his breath. She began to laugh and could not stop.

“You are doing a sum.”

“It is how I keep my head. Six.”

“I do not want you to keep your head.”

“Then you had better help me lose it. Seven.”

She pulled his shirt up out of his waistband. He had to stop and let her drag it off over his head, and she stood holding it, astonished at herself. She had not known that she would be the kind of woman who did that. He looked as surprised as she was, and a good deal more pleased.

At the eleventh button the black ribbon was in his way. He touched the key where it lay between her breasts.

“What is this?”

“My father’s box. I have not had it off since Hill Street.” She lifted the ribbon over her head herself and laid the key on the table, beside his watch. “I do not think I need to wear it tonight.”

He said her name. Then he slipped the nightgown from her shoulders, and it fell, and she stood in the firelight with nothing on at all.

She had expected to want to cover herself. He looked at her as he had looked at the first page of the speech, as though it were the best thing he had ever had under his name. She found that she wanted to be looked at.

“You are beautiful,” he said slowly. “I ought to have a better word. I have not.”

“It will do. It has the verb in the right place.”

The sheets were cold, and he was warm. He lay down beside her and drew the covers over them both. For a while he only held her, skin against skin, until she had stopped trembling. Then his hand moved. It went over her shoulder and down her side to her hip, and back. He cupped her breast and bent his head to it. The heat of his mouth there went through her like a struck bell. She arched against him and caught at his hair.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Yes. That. Do not stop to ask me about that.”

He laughed against her skin. She learned him in turn. She ran her hands down the long muscles of his back and over his hips, and felt him catch his breath. She kissed the hollow of his throat. When she set her mouth to his chest and tasted him, he said something that was not a sentence at all, and she was absurdly proud.

His hand slid along her thigh and between, and stayed. He watched her face while he touched her. She had not known that her body could gather itself like that, tighter and sweeter, toward something that she could not see. She said his name twice. The second time her voice was not her own.

When he moved over her, he held himself on his arms and waited.

“It may hurt you. I shall be as slow as I know how.”

“You are the slowest man in England. I rely on it.”

It did hurt, a little, for a moment. She drew a sharp breath and he went quite still. She felt his arms shaking with the effort of it. She put her hands on his back.

“Wait. There. Now go on.”

He went on. The hurt eased and something else came in its place, deep and slow, and she moved to meet it. He kissed her mouth and her wet eyelids. He said that he loved her, and it was broken up by his breathing. She wrapped her legs about him and held him as near as she could. The thing that had been gathering in her broke all at once, and she cried out against his shoulder. A little after, she felt him shudder and go heavy in her arms, with his face in her hair.

They lay without moving. The fire ticked. His heart was going against her breast like a man running.

“Did I hurt you much?” he said at last.

“Hardly at all. I am trying to find something to criticise, and I cannot. It is very unlike me.”

He rolled to his side and gathered her in, with her head on his arm. She lay and looked at him in the light of the one candle. There was grey in the hair at his temple, and she touched it.

After a while she put the middle finger of her right hand on his shoulder and began to move it.

“What are you doing?”

“Writing. Guess.”

He lay still and attended. She made the letters large.

“A child,” he said. “A child of six is sold.”

“There are six words. You see how quickly you take it in when it is put at the right end.”

“Write the next.”

She wrote the price, and his father, and the five more at home. He had every one. Then he caught her hand and kissed the stain.

“Now read me something of hers. Mrs. Nettle’s. I want the worst thing she ever said of me.”

“Adrian, no.”

“The worst. You know them all by heart. You told Garrow that you keep everything.”

She hid her face in his neck. There was one that she had been rather vain of, in the June of last year, and it had nothing in it that was false.

“‘The Earl of Soot was seen to smile on Thursday, at Lady J—’s rout,’” she said, muffled. “‘The matter has been referred to a committee; it is expected to report next Session.’”

There was a silence of perhaps two breaths. Then the bed began to shake.

He laughed as he had laughed in the snow, with his head thrown back on the pillow and no guard on it at all. He laughed until he had to wipe his eyes on the sheet.

“I have that one pasted on foolscap, and I never once laughed at it.”

“You are not offended?”

“I did smile at that rout, and it was the only time that Season. Somebody had told me that the Admiral’s wig was on back to front.” He drew her closer. “You may tell your readers that the committee has reported. It finds the smile to be in order, and recommends that there be more.”

She was laughing too, and very sleepy. Her limbs felt heavy and loose, and there was a small ache in her that she did not mind.

“I must be in my own bed before the maids are up,” she said.

“I shall wake you at four. I do not sleep much.”

“You will tonight.”

“Perhaps.” He kissed her forehead. “Go to sleep, my love. I have you.”

She believed him. Nobody had said that to her since the vicarage, and she had not let anybody try. She turned her cheek into the warm hollow of his shoulder and let her eyes close.

They opened once more, a little later, at the very edge of sleep. The candle had burned low. He was awake. He lay quite still so as not to disturb her, with his arm round her and his face turned toward the table by the bed. The light fell there on his watch and her key, and on the small green book lying between them.

She thought drowsily that he looked troubled, and that she would ask him about it in the morning. Then she slept.
***