Ninety-Four Columns

The water coming out of Scarrow Sough was two inches deep. It should have been nine.

Wardlow crouched at the stone mouth of the drain with a lantern and looked at the mark he had had cut in the wall of the channel in the spring of 1812. The mark was dry. So was a good hand’s breadth of stone below it. The stream that ran out past his boots was thin and brown, and there was a skin of ice along its edges.

It was half past seven on a Thursday morning, a week before Christmas Eve, and it was not yet properly light. The frost had been hard for five nights. Behind him on the bank, two men stood as far from each other as the path allowed.

“How long has it run like this?” he said.

“Nine days, my lord,” said Sampson Bagshaw. He was a broad, slow man who led the partnership that worked the deep end of the vein. “Nine days today. And every one of them, my bottom level’s filled a bit more. I’ve fourteen men sat at home on Scarrow Row with nowt to do but look at their wives.”

“That’s no fault of mine,” said Abel Frith. He had the upper workings, and he was thin and quick and already angry. “The fall’s in the old length. Nobody’s been in the old length since my father’s time.”

“The old length’s under thy ground, Abel.”

“Aye, and whose men have been coming up through it since Michaelmas to save theirsens the walk? Not mine.”

“If tha means to call my lads thieves—”

“I mean there was good oak standing in that length in September, and I’d like to know where it stands now.”

Wardlow let them go on while he put two fingers into the water. He rubbed what came up between finger and thumb. It was clay, yellow and fine, and it had not yet settled out of the stream. A fall that was nine days old and finished would be running clear by now. This one was still coming down.

He stood up. Both men stopped talking.

He was used to that. He was six feet tall and he owned the hill they were standing on, and either would have done it. But the men of Scarrow also knew that when his lordship meant to speak he took his time over it, and that it was a waste of breath to fill the gap for him. He had been grateful for that all his life.

“The roof is still falling,” he said. “You can see it in the water. So I shall not wait for the barmaster. Every day it stands, there is more to dig.”

“I never said wait,” said Frith.

“No. You said it was not your fault. Bagshaw says it is not his. I was not in the old length in September, and I cannot tell which of you is right.” He paused, and found the next words, and brought them out whole. “Nor can anybody, until the fall is cleared and a man can look at the stumps of the timber.”

Bagshaw frowned. “The stumps?”

“Oak that rots and gives way breaks ragged. It leaves a stump like a chewed bone. Oak that is drawn out to be used again is sawn or knocked clean. You both know that better than I do.”

Neither man answered. Frith looked at the water. Bagshaw looked at Frith.

“So. Here is what I propose. You will each send six men, starting at noon today. They work together, turn about, until the water is running at my mark. I shall give the timber to make the length good. There is larch felled in the Hall wood, and it will be at the shaft top by ten.” He waited a moment. “When the fall is out, the barmaster goes in with a lantern. If the old timber rotted, it is nobody’s theft. Then custom holds. Frith bears the cost of his own length, and Bagshaw bears his lost days, as he would for any flood.”

“And if it’s sawn?” said Bagshaw.

“Then the oak is in somebody’s shed, and it will not be hard to find. Whoever has it pays for the whole. The digging, the other man’s lost days and my larch.”

There was a silence. It was the kind Wardlow liked best. Each man was working out whether he had been cheated, and neither could find the place.

“That’s fair,” Frith said at last, as if it hurt him.

“It’s quick, any road,” said Bagshaw. “I’ll say that.”

“One thing more. Bagshaw, your fourteen men have had no wages since the eighth. A sack of flour goes to each of their houses this afternoon from the Hall. It is not a loan and it is not to be set against anything.” He picked up the lantern. “Noon, then. Six men each. I shall come down tomorrow and look at the water.”

He left them on the bank. When he glanced back from the top of the gully they were standing a yard closer together, arguing about which six.

It was a mile from Scarrow Row up to the Hall, and he walked it fast, because he was cold and because he was pleased. The whole business had taken twenty minutes. Men would be digging by noon who might have gone to law until Easter. That was work he understood. Put two angry men and a fact in front of him and he could generally find the way through.

He wished he could do as much with a sheet of paper.

The Hall came up out of the half-dark as he climbed, long and grey and square, built of the same gritstone as the Edge behind it. There were lights in the kitchen wing and one in the breakfast room. His uncle and aunt Marsden had come on Tuesday. They were both deaf and both early risers, and he could hear the Colonel from the foot of the steps, telling his wife at the top of his voice that the eggs were excellent.

Wardlow went in by the side door. He did not go through the great hall. He seldom did in December if another way would serve.

Jessop had coffee waiting for him in the library, which was the reason Jessop had been butler for twenty years. There was a good fire. There was the long desk under the window, and the bust of Cicero on its shelf, looking down his marble nose. And there, squared up in the middle of the blotter where he had left them at midnight, were eleven pages of the speech.

He sat down, drank half the coffee, and read the top page.

It was dreadful. He had known at midnight that it was dreadful, and it had not improved while he slept.

He read one sentence over, under his breath. “‘That the employment of children of tender years in the ascent of flues is attended with circumstances of peculiar hardship, your lordships, upon a consideration of the evidence, cannot, it is submitted, doubt.’”

Every word of it was true. A man could have slept through it standing up.

The Climbing Boys Bill was a short thing, and a plain one. No master sweep was to send a child under fourteen up a chimney. Flues were to be swept with the jointed brush, which had been invented in 1803 and did the work as well. He had brought it into the House of Lords in the spring. On Tuesday the twelfth of May it had been lost, twenty-eight votes to thirty-three. Five votes. He could have named the five. He could have named the dinner tables where they had been turned.

He would bring it back when the new Parliament met. Brome would carry it through the Commons again without trouble. The Lords were the difficulty, and what the Lords needed was a speech. It could not be an argument, for he had given them argument, forty minutes of it, with tables. They had coughed and looked at the clock, and afterwards a newspaper had said—

He did not finish the thought. He dipped his pen and tried the sentence another way, and it came out longer.

The trouble was that he knew perfectly well what he wanted to say, and it could be said in a dozen words. Children die in chimneys, and we can stop it, and we should. But when he sat down to write for the House, something stiffened in him, and the words came out in their court dress. He had spent his boyhood learning to get a sentence from one end to the other without stopping in the middle. He had learned it by building each one beforehand, heavy and safe, like a wall. He no longer knew how to build any other kind.

His left hand had gone, as it did when he was thinking, to the thing that sat at the corner of the blotter.

It was a round plate of brass, three inches across, with two holes where it had once been sewn to a cap. It was worn smooth at the edges. Stamped in the middle, in letters a child could have read if anybody had taught him, were the words O. HOBB, MASTER SWEEP, SHEFFIELD.

He had had it since he was eleven years old. He did not use it for a paperweight. It lay on the desk so that he would see it.

Wednesday next would be the twenty-third. He would be out all that day, as he was every year, and the house knew not to ask.

There was a knock at the open door, and Ned Varley came in sideways with a basket of logs on his hip.

“Morning, my lord. Mr. Jessop says you’re to have the ash, it burns longer.” Ned was nineteen and wiry, with hair the colour of a new penny, and he had never in ten years come into a room quietly. He knelt at the hearth and began to stack. “Is it right about the sough? They’re saying in the kitchen you’ve set Frith and Bagshaw to dig it out together.”

“Six men each.”

Ned laughed out loud. “I’d give a shilling to hear that. They’ll have it clear in three days just to be shut of each other.” He set the last log and sat back on his heels. His eye went to the brass plate under Wardlow’s hand, as it always did, and then away again. “Shall you want owt else, my lord?”

“No. Thank you, Ned.”

When he had gone, Wardlow moved his hand off the plate. He took a clean sheet and wrote My Lords at the top of it, and then sat looking at those two words until the coffee was cold.

“You are scowling at that paper as if it owed you rent.”

His sister had come in without his hearing her. Lady Cecily Calver was a small woman, fair-haired, with hazel eyes that looked straight at whatever was in front of them. She was in black for the Queen, like everybody else in England, and she had a list in her hand. She was twenty-four. For the last year and a half she had lived at Scarrow as quietly as a woman of sixty, and he had not yet learned to see it without anger.

“It is the speech,” he said.

“I guessed it was the speech. Is it any better?”

“No.”

“Then leave it and help me. I have rooms to settle.” She sat on the arm of the chair across the desk and consulted her list. “Mr. Brome comes on Saturday and has the oak room, as he always does. My uncle and aunt are where they are and happy. Lady Halewood is to have the blue room, because it has the best fire and she will complain least. Her companion goes in the small room at the end of that passage. A Miss Ludlow.”

“Whatever you think best.”

“I think it best to know why they are coming at all.” She lowered the list. “Adrian, you do not like Lady Halewood. You have told me so. You said she kept a table like a bear-pit and sat at the head of it with a stick. Yet three weeks ago you asked me to write and invite her for Christmas, and I did it, because you asked. I have waited ever since for you to tell me the reason. I am not going to wait any longer.”

It was fair. He had put it off because he had wanted to be certain first, and he was as certain now as paper could make him.

He got up and went to the cabinet beside the fireplace. He took out a portfolio of brown card, tied with tape, and brought it to the desk. It was three inches thick.

Cecily looked at it. She did not touch it. “What is that?”

“Mrs. Nettle’s Notebook. Every one, from the first of March last year. The newest came by yesterday’s post.” He untied the tape. “There are ninety-four.”

Her face did not change, but she went very still.

“You have kept them,” she said. “All of them. In this house.”

“Yes.”

“I burned the only one I ever saw.”

“I know you did.” He paused, and chose the words with care. “Cecy, I will not ask you to read one. I want to shew you a sum, and nothing else.”

He turned the pile over and lifted off the newest part of it. Each cutting was pasted to a sheet of foolscap, with the date at the top in his own hand. On some of the sheets there were lines marked in red ink down the margin.

“These are the last twenty. July to this month. I have gone through each of them, paragraph by paragraph, and asked one question. Where was this first said?” He laid a sheet in front of her and put his finger beside the red line, so that she need read no more than he wished. “This, about the Admiral and his wig. I heard that told myself, on a Tuesday, at a dinner of fourteen. It was in the Lantern on the Saturday. This one, Brome heard. He wrote down for me who else was in the room. This one, the same.”

“And where was it? The dinner?”

“Hill Street. Lady Halewood’s table.” He squared the sheets. “Eleven. Eleven of the last twenty columns carry something that was first said in that house. I can prove no such thing of any other house in London. The next nearest is three.”

Cecily was quick. She had always been quicker than he was. “Then Mrs. Nettle dines there. She is one of the guests.”

“I thought so. I had the lists from Brome and from two others. No single guest was present at more than three of the eleven evenings.” He waited a moment. “The household was present at all of them.”

“A servant?”

“A servant who could write like that would not stay a servant for long.”

He heard what he had said, and so did she. Her eyebrows went up.

“You admire her.”

“I admire nothing about her.” It came out too fast, and he slowed it. “She can put a sentence together. So can a great many people who ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

He did not add that he had read some of those ninety-four columns a great many times, or why. There was one from the Saturday after the vote. Lord W— rose on Tuesday to speak for the climbing boys; one hears that he has hopes of sitting down by Michaelmas. He had written forty minutes of argument for that debate, and the House had gone away repeating her nineteen words. He hated her for it. He would also have given a good deal to know how it was done.

“So it is Lady Halewood herself,” Cecily said slowly. “Or it is someone who lives under her roof.”

“Yes.”

A new thought had struck her. He saw it come, and saw her hand close on the list. “Her stepson.”

“Is not of her household. Halewood keeps his own rooms. She receives him as little as she decently can, I am told. And he is not asked here. I would not do that to you.”

She let out her breath. “No. I did not truly think it.” She looked at the portfolio again. “Does your man in Lincoln’s Inn know of this? I thought he was to buy the name for you at the newspaper.”

“He offered a hundred guineas there a week ago. Nobody has come forward yet. I do not mean to depend on it.”

“And so you have asked the woman here instead. For three weeks, to eat her Christmas dinner at my table.” Her voice was quite level. “I wrote the letter and put my own name to it. I may have invited the person who wrote that I was seen leaving a gentleman’s street at night, and you did not tell me so.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was not sure.” He made himself hold her eye. “I wanted the sum finished before I troubled you with it.”

“That is very like you,” said Cecily. It was not praise. She stood up and walked to the window, and looked out at the frost on the park for some time. He did not hurry her.

“What will you do,” she said, with her back to him, “when you have the name?”

“Make her answer for the fourteenth of June.”

“How? You cannot call out a woman. If you take her to law, every word of it is read out in court and printed again.” She turned round. “I shall tell you what I want, since nobody has asked me. I do not want Mr. Denham back. A man who will believe a newspaper before he believes me may keep his ring. I do not much want her punished. I want to be able to walk into a room in London without its going quiet. Can your sum do that?”

He thought about it honestly, because she deserved it.

“It can do this,” he said. “A lie with no author is believed for ever. Give it an author, and people can ask what she had to gain by it. I mean her to say, with her name to it, that what she printed was false. I cannot make her do that until I know who she is.”

Cecily considered him. Then she came back and picked up her list.

“If you wish, I shall write to put them off,” he said. “It is your house to keep. Say so.”

“You know very well it is too late. They left London yesterday. They will be at Derby tomorrow night.” She gave a short sigh. “Very well. I shall be civil. Lady Halewood shall have her good fire, and the companion shall have a hot brick like anybody else. But I will have no scene in my drawing room at Christmas, Adrian. Whatever you find, you will be a gentleman about it under this roof.”

“You have my word.”

“I shall hold you to it.” At the door she stopped. “They are asked until Twelfth Day. That is not very long to find out what all London has failed to learn in two Seasons.”

“It is nearly three weeks, and all London was not looking in one house.”

She shook her head at him, and went away to see about the blue room.

Wardlow stood for a while with his hand flat on the portfolio. Then he tied the tape again and put it back in the cabinet, and turned the key.

Lady Halewood was sharp enough to have written them, God knew. If the old woman had not, then she knew who had. A lady’s maid, a secretary, some poor relation with a pen. They would all be here on Saturday, under his eye, with nowhere to go but his own rooms and nothing to do but talk. Sooner or later Mrs. Nettle would say aloud something he had already read.

He sat down at the desk. The brass plate lay at the corner of the blotter, and My Lords lay in front of him, with nothing under it.

The speech could wait three weeks. This could not.

Before Twelfth Day, he promised himself, he would put a name to her.
***