In Full

Lady Halewood waited until the eggs had gone round, and then she laid her fork down like a judge laying down a pen.

There was a fire in the breakfast room again, for the first time in a fortnight, and all seven places were filled. Wardlow had the head of the table. Hester sat on the far side between Brome and his aunt, in the grey gown, with her hair very neat. He had woken her at four, as he had promised, and had watched her go down the passage with her candle. He had not slept afterward. He had lain and looked at the green book on the table by his bed.

“Lord Wardlow,” said Lady Halewood. “On Wednesday night you played my goddaughter at chess, and she beat you. Last night she put her queen in the middle of the board on the fourth move, and you would not take it. You said that you had given your word to the lady.”

“I had, ma’am.”

“I am sixty-one. I have no time left for riddles, and I go to London on Wednesday. Hester has hummed for two days. She hummed in the chapel. I ask you plainly, at your own table, whether you have anything to say to me.”

He looked down the cloth at Hester. It was her term that nobody should be told, and it was not his to break. She had gone pink to the hair. She looked at her godmother, and then at Cecily, and he saw her make up her mind. She gave him the smallest nod.

“I have, ma’am,” he said. “On Saturday I asked Miss Ludlow to marry me. She has done me the honour to say that she will.”

Brome put down his cup. Cecily’s hands flew to her mouth.

“At last,” said Lady Halewood.

“Ma’am?”

“I said at last. You met her on my stairs in May. She has handed you your tea in Hill Street through two Seasons, and you never looked higher than the cup. I should like to know why it wanted a week of snow and a nine-foot desk to shew you what was under your nose.”

“I am a slow man, ma’am. It has been remarked on in print.”

“It has.” She gave her bark. “Well, you have got there. She has no money. She has a mother in Islington whom you will like, and a brother who eats. She is the only woman I ever knew who could be trusted with my gloves. I shall miss her abominably, and I do not mean to say so twice.”

“WHAT IS IT, LETTICE? WHY IS EVERYBODY RED?”

“WARDLOW IS TO MARRY MISS LUDLOW, IVO.”

“Is he, by God!” The Colonel struck the table so that the spoons jumped. “The tall girl who writes quickly? Capital! I said it was a capital thing in a woman. Didn’t I say so, Lettice?”

Brome was on his feet with his hand out, beaming. Cecily had pushed back her chair. She came round the end of the table with her face alight, and her arms were already lifting.

Hester stood up before she could reach her.

“Lady Cecily, pray do not. Not yet.” Her voice was low, and it carried. “I had meant you to hear something else before you heard this, and my godmother has been too quick for me. May I speak to you alone? Now, before you say one kind word that you may wish to have back.”

Cecily stopped. Her eyes went to her brother’s face, and whatever she read there took the light out of her own.

“The still-room,” she said. “Nobody will come there.”
***
He followed them down the kitchen passage, and at the still-room door Hester turned on him.

“You are not to come in. And you are not to speak for me.”

“May I stand here?”

She thought about it. “Yes. I have nothing to say to her that I have not said to you. Leave the door as it is.”

It stood a hand’s breadth open. He put his back against the wall beside it, among the smell of cloves, and looked at the stones of the floor.

“Miss Ludlow,” Cecily said inside. “You are frightening me.”

“I am frightened myself. I shall be quick.” There was a pause. He knew what it was. She was choosing to stand. “On Wednesday the twenty-third you told me, in this room, about Half Moon Street, and your nurse, and the Lantern of the fourteenth of June. You asked whether I read Mrs. Nettle. I said that I had seen it.”

“I remember.”

“I had seen it because I wrote it. I am Mrs. Nettle. I have been since the spring of the year seventeen. That paragraph was mine, every word. The note came unsigned to my editor on the ninth of June. It gave the street and the hour and the eight evenings. I asked nobody anything. I sat at my table and tried ‘a bachelor’s street’, and crossed it through for ‘a gentleman’s’, because it was neater. I was paid two guineas.”

Wardlow heard nothing at all. He counted his own breaths, and had reached twenty before his sister spoke.

“You tied my string.”

“Yes.”

“You sat on that stool and let me tell you about Larkin, and you wrote ‘Eyre’ on a parcel.”

“Yes. I knew I should speak, and I was afraid to. I was afraid of the door of this house, with the pass full, and of my mother’s rent. I told myself it was for her. It was for me as well.”

“When did my brother learn it?”

“On Thursday night. I told him at half past eleven, in the library, and gave him the two notes. He promised that you should hear it from me. That is why he would not name me to you on Friday.”

Wardlow shut his eyes. She believed it. She had said it to his sister as a plain fact, and his sister now believed it too. He stood against the wall with the truth in his breast pocket and did not go in. It was Hester’s quarter of an hour. He would not push into the middle of it with a confession of his own.

There was another silence. It was longer than the first. Somewhere beyond the wall Mrs. Orme was beating eggs.

“I burned that paper in the breakfast-room grate,” Cecily said at last. Her voice was thin and exact. “I did not cry, because Adrian was watching me, and he looked as if he would kill somebody. I have thought about the person who wrote it every day since. I gave her a face. She was forty, and she had a tight mouth, and she enjoyed herself. I find it very hard that she should turn out to be you.”

“I know.”

“I cannot forgive it today. I should be lying if I said that I did, and there has been lying enough. Do not ask me.”

“I shall not ask you. I did not come for that.”

“What did you come for?”

“To have it said to your face before you called me sister. And to ask you a thing. I mean to print the truth in the Notebook of the sixteenth, with my own name to it. The patent is written. There is an inch left blank for the fourteenth of June. Your name went out once without your leave. I will not print it again unless you tell me to.”

He heard his sister walk the length of the little room and back. It was four steps each way.

“I know who forged the knife,” she said. “I have his letter upstairs, with his name under a flourish. He stood in that street and counted me. I can see now who sharpened it. You did it well. It was the cleverest sentence anybody ever wrote about me.” She stopped walking. “He has cost me a husband I did not want and a year and a half of London. He set you on me because you were the best pen he could find, and you have been ill with it since the day you knew. I have watched you be ill and not understood it. I will not lose a sister over a liar’s note. He shall not have that from me as well.”

Hester made a small sound. It was not quite a word.

“Do not cry, or I shall, and I have the east room still to see to. Listen to me. You will fill your inch. And you will not write Lady C, dash, C. The lie hid behind a dash, and everybody knew whom it meant. You will write Lady Cecily Calver, in full. You will write Half Moon Street, and you will write that Winifred Larkin, who was nurse in my family for thirty years, lay dying in the top back room of that house, and that she died on the nineteenth of June. I want her name printed too. She would have liked to be in a newspaper.”

“In full,” Hester said unsteadily. “Every word as you have given it.”

“And I shall read it before it goes. That is my term.”

“It is a fair one.”

The door was pulled wide. Cecily stood in it, white, with two bright spots on her cheeks.

“You may come in, Adrian. You breathe very loudly for a man who is not listening.” She looked up at him. “I wish you joy. I mean it with all my heart. I shall wish her joy when I am able. It may be Thursday.”

She went away up the passage with her chin level. Hester was standing by the long table with one hand flat on it. He went to her and did not touch her until she turned, and then he held her for a minute among the jars.

“She was kinder than I had any right to,” Hester said into his coat.

“She was just. It is the same thing with her. It only takes longer.”
***
By three o’clock there were nineteen pages.

She had written the whole of the fair copy that day, in the large upright hand that she had made for her father’s eyes. Every full stop had its small stroke after it. He stood on the hearthstone and read the last page to Cicero, and to the Colonel, who was Lord Penmoor again.

“‘I do not ask your lordships to pity anybody. I ask you to read this bill a second time. His name was Tom Pickering, and he was eight years old.’”

He stopped there. There was nothing after it.

“That is the door shutting,” he said.

“I thought you would hear it.” She wiped her pen and laid it in the tray. Then she took off her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Nineteen. You may speak it in fourteen minutes if you breathe, and twelve if you do not. I should breathe.”

“Your father allowed twenty.”

“My father would have said that you had six to spare, and that you should on no account use them.”

Lady Halewood wanted her upstairs to begin on the boxes. He watched her go, and squared the pages on the common ground. Brome got up from the sofa.

“A word, Wardlow. In the window, where your aunt cannot lip-read it.”

They stood in the bay, with the park grey and dripping beyond the glass.

“I wished you joy this morning, and I meant it. She is worth ten of anybody I have met in thirty years of dinners. Now I am going to talk to you as the member in charge of your bill.” Brome clasped his hands behind him. “I have been counting since the billiard room. Corsley I can feed. Penmoor you will have at the word ‘six’. Hatherleigh and Dunmere she has given you a line apiece. Tarrant has his two sentences. That is five, and it would carry us, on the old numbers.”

“But?”

“But the numbers are not old. She prints her name on the sixteenth. Halewood will be in every club by the seventeenth with the rest. By the time you stand up, the House will know that Mrs. Nettle abused the bill for two years, and that she is to be Lady Wardlow, and that she spent Christmas at your elbow. There are men on those benches whom she has made ridiculous. One of them has eleven gowns in the story. They will say that the speech is a hack’s work, bought in a way that they will not say before ladies. I put it at three votes. It may be more. Five gained and three thrown away, and I am not sure that I win.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Wait. Let her print, since she will. But keep your name off hers until after the division. Marry her in April. Nobody need know before that there is anything between you but a retraction.”

Wardlow looked out at the path to the chapel. He took his time, and Brome let him.

“She is going to stand up alone in that newspaper and say what she did. You ask me to let her do it and to be somewhere else. Then, when the vote is safe, I am to fetch her out and say that she was mine all along.” He shook his head. “I offered a hundred guineas for her name when I thought it worth nothing. I will not turn round now and behave as though it were too costly to stand beside. I shall get the licence the day I reach London.”

“And the three votes?”

“I shall pay them.”

“The boys will pay them, Wardlow, if we lose.”

That went in, as Brome had meant it to. Wardlow waited until he could answer it honestly.

“Then we must not lose. Find me three more. Ask her who they are. She will know which of them carries a picture in his watch.”

Brome looked at him for some time. Then he sighed, and something in the plain face eased.

“I had to say it. I should have thought the less of you if you had listened.” He patted Wardlow’s arm. “Three more. Good God. I had better go and write some letters.”
***
It was past ten when he came back to the library alone.

The fire was low. The house had gone up to bed early, with a journey on Wednesday to be packed for. He lit the lamp and took page twelve out of the nineteen. It was the page of the forty parishes, and it had parishes in it three times. He stood on the hearthstone and said it over until the word came at every stroke without his looking for it. Then he laid the page on his blotter and sat down.

He took the green morocco book from his breast pocket.

He had said that it should wait for the speech, and the speech was done. It lay on the common ground in her hand, with the brass plate beside it on her side of the inkstand. The cold voice that had counted his days for him since the twenty-seventh had nothing more to say. He had run out of reasons, and found that he was glad of it.

He opened the book. He turned back from the thirty-first page to the one he wanted, and drew the ribbon down between the leaves to mark it.

27 Dec. It is Miss Ludlow. I shall not say so. I want her to tell me.

It looked very bare. He had written it at half past two in the morning, pleased with his own fairness. He read it now as she would read it. He thought of her on the Edge, getting two words out. He thought of her behind that chair with a pin in her fingers, asking leave to be gone by eight.

She would be angry. He hoped that she would be only angry. He meant to put the book into her hand and stand while she read it, and say nothing in his own defence until she asked.

She would be in the blue room still, or on her way from it. He got up with the book open in his hand and went to the door.

Somebody was laughing on the stairs.

There were two voices. One was Hester’s, low and helpless, trying to stop. The other he had not heard on those stairs since the spring of the year seventeen.

“He said ‘Four’?” said his sister. “Aloud? At what?”

“I shall never tell you. I ought not to have told you so much.”

“Then I shall ask him at breakfast, before my uncle.” Cecily’s laugh broke out again, clear and quick. It was a girl’s laugh. “Oh, do not look so. I said Thursday, and it is only Monday. I find that I cannot keep it up. You had better call me Cecily before I change my mind.”

“Cecily.”

“There. Good night, Hester. Mind the third stair. It creaks, and Lady Halewood has ears.”

He stood in the library doorway with the book in his hand. Their steps went up together, and the light of their candles moved along the rail and was gone. A door closed, and then another.

His sister had laughed. She had come out of the still-room that morning as white as paper, and by ten at night she was laughing on the stairs with the woman who had written the paragraph. Hester had earned that with the hardest quarter of an hour of her life. It was not twelve hours old.

He could not go up after it and knock, and put this into her hand.

He went back to the desk. He closed the book on its ribbon and laid it down on page twelve to keep the sheet flat. He would give it to her in the morning, he told himself, before the boxes came down. He turned out the lamp.

The book stayed where he had put it, on his side of the inkstand, with the ribbon at the place.
***