Twelfth Day

Lady Halewood’s coach was at the steps by a quarter to eight, with four horses to it and ashes strewn under the wheels as far as the gate.

Wardlow stood in the staircase hall and watched the boxes go out. The thaw had turned the morning grey and wet. The whole house smelled of the Twelfth cake that Mrs. Orme had baked on Monday, when there had still been something to keep.

Ned carried the last box down. It was a small one, corded, and Wardlow knew whose it was. Ned set it on the roof himself and stood looking at it with his cap in his hand.

“GOOD-BYE, MA’AM!” the Colonel shouted from the breakfast-room door. “CAPITAL CHRISTMAS! NEVER ATE SO MUCH MUTTON IN MY LIFE!”

“I believe you, Colonel,” said Lady Halewood. She came down the last stair on her cane, in her fur tippet, with Pruett behind her. She gave Cecily two fingers and Brome a nod. Then she stopped in front of Wardlow and looked up at him.

“I was promised at your breakfast table on Monday that I should have no more riddles. I have had one since Tuesday noon, and I am to be shut in a coach with it for four days.”

“I am sorry for it, ma’am.”

“I do not ask you what you did. She will not say, and that tells me it was you.” The black eyes went over his face. “I took a girl into Derbyshire who could be trusted with my gloves. I am taking home one who put them both in the wrong box. Good morning, Lord Wardlow. You keep a good fire.”

She went out. Jessop gave her his arm down the steps.

Hester had come down behind her.

She wore the brown cloak and the thick boots, and she carried her father’s writing-box against her side with both hands. She had not let a servant touch it. Her face was pale and quite composed. She went first to Cecily, who kissed her cheek and held her hand a moment and said something too low for him to hear. She shook hands with Brome. She said good-bye to Mrs. Marsden, who patted her and looked bewildered.

Then there was nobody left but him.

He had not slept. He had spent a good part of the night on what he might say in this half minute. There had been a great many sentences. Every one of them had asked her for something.

She curtseyed. It was the curtsey she had made him on the gravel on the nineteenth of December, with a rug over her arm and her eyes on his waistcoat.

“I thank you for your hospitality, my lord.”

“Miss Ludlow. I wish you a safe road.”

She did not look up. She turned and went out through the great door, and down the steps.

He had meant to hand her into the coach. It was his place as her host. He took one step after her and stopped on the threshold. He knew what he would do if he had her hand in his. He would hold it a moment too long, and say her name, and oblige her to answer him before his butler and her godmother’s coachman. She had told him what she wanted, and she had measured it in miles. If he held her back now, he would be deciding for her again.

Jessop handed her in, and the door was shut. Pruett climbed up behind.

The coach went down the drive at a walk, grinding on the ashes. He watched it as far as the gate. Nobody put the glass down, and nobody looked back. It turned west toward the Winnats and the park wall hid it.

“Well,” said Brome heavily, at his elbow. “I have eleven pages of a speech and a man of my own who writes like a hen. I shall copy the other eight myself.” He hesitated. “I am sorry, Wardlow. I do not know for what. I am sorry in general.”

“Thank you.”

Brome went away. The Marsdens had gone back to their eggs. Cecily stood at the foot of the stairs with her hands folded.

“The library,” she said. “Now. I gave you last night, because she asked me to. I am not giving you this morning.”
***
She would not sit. She stood on the hearthstone, where he had stood to read to Cicero, and he stood at the desk.

“She came to my room yesterday at noon,” Cecily said. “She told me that it was ended, and that the fault was not hers, and that the reason was yours to tell. Then she asked whether I still wished to read my inch before it was printed, and where she should send it. She was perfectly steady. I have seen people perfectly steady before. I was one, in the July of the year seventeen. So tell me.”

He took the green book out of his pocket. He opened it at the ribbon and held it out to her.

She read the three lines. She looked at the date above them, and at the coal, and read them again.

“The twenty-seventh,” she said. “That was the Sunday. You walked me to the chapel that morning, and I told you that I liked her.”

“Yes.”

“And she told you on the Thursday night.”

“She told me what I had known for four days. I let her tell it as if it were news. She found that page yesterday, looking for a sheet of the speech.”

Cecily shut the book and laid it on the mantelpiece, as if she did not care to hold it.

“On Monday I stood in my still-room, and she said to me, ‘He learned it on Thursday night.’ You were on the other side of the door, and you heard her say it. You let her tell me a thing that you knew was not so, and you let me believe it.”

“I did.”

“Why did you not tell her on the Sunday?”

He gave her what he had given Hester. He told her what he had told himself, about a confession freely made, and then what had been true underneath it. He left nothing out. He told her about the hill and the stairs and the chessboard, and that he had written to Harbin on the Wednesday and kept that back too. It took some time, and she did not help him.

When he had done she was silent a moment.

“I read your nineteen pages on Monday night,” she said. “All of them. Did you think that I would not? I got as far as the fourth line of the first. ‘I waited an hour to be certain.’ I have been your sister for twenty-four years, Adrian. Larkin told me that there was a boy and a chimney. I had to learn the rest out of a fair copy, in her handwriting.”

“I could never get it out to you.”

“No. You were waiting until you could say it properly.” Her voice was thin and level. He would sooner she had shouted. “I shall say this once, and you will let me finish. You waited an hour in the year ninety-six, to be sure. You were eleven, and you were frightened of being laughed at, and I do not blame that child for anything. But you have waited ever since. You waited three weeks to tell me why Lady Halewood was asked to my table. You wanted the sum finished first. On Friday you would not tell me who had the notes. You stood at my door on Monday and waited again. You have had her on trial since Christmas, and you waited for a verdict.”

“Cecy—”

“Each time you have a kind name for it. You were sparing me, or being fair to her. You did not wish to trouble anybody until you were certain.” She came off the hearthstone. “It has never once been kindness. It is what you do when you are afraid of being wrong aloud. You keep the thing to yourself until it is safe, and the rest of us stand about not knowing that anything is being decided. I have forgiven it a dozen times, because it was only me. I do not see why she should.”

He had nothing to answer with. Every clause of it was exact.

“She did not say that to me,” he said at last. “About the hour. She told me that she had thought of it, and would not.”

“Then she is more generous than I am. I knew that already.” Cecily’s eyes were bright and angry. “She came into my still-room and told me the worst thing she had ever done, standing up, when I was about to kiss her. It took her a quarter of an hour, and she had not been asked. You had four days, Adrian, and a desk nine feet long, and you sat at it.”

“What would you have me do?”

“I do not know. I am not going to arrange it for you.” She picked the green book off the mantelpiece and put it into his hand. “I shall tell you what you will not do. You will not write her a letter with twelve reasons in it. You have had four nights to compose your case, and I am sure that it is very fine. She has heard it.”

She went to the door. There she stopped, as she always did.

“I am too angry to be in a room with you until dinner. I shall be in the east room. It still smells of hair-oil.”

He heard her go up the back stair. He sat down on his own side of the inkstand.

The left of the desk was bare. She had taken her blotting-book and her pens. The nineteen pages lay where she had set them, square, with My Lords uppermost, and the brass plate lay at the corner of his blotter.

He did not touch either. He sat and looked at the place where her chair was pushed in.
***
“Shall I do the hearth, my lord, or shall I come back?”

Ned was in the doorway with a pan and a brush and a bucket. He had never before asked whether he should come in.

“Do it.”

Ned knelt and began to draw the ash forward from under the last of the yule log. He worked without whistling. The brush scraped on the stone. After a minute it slowed, and Wardlow knew without turning that the boy was looking at the desk.

“She’s left the boy’s plate,” said Ned.

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d given it her. It were on her side from New Year’s Day, by her book. I said to Mr. Jessop, that’s right, that is. She’ll look after it.” He sat back on his heels. “I carried her box down this morning, and I thought it’d be in it. Why’s she left it behind?”

Wardlow could have said that it was no affair of an under-servant’s. Ned had been in the fourth page of the speech since Saturday, by his own leave, with his knees. He was owed a true answer.

“Because I did her a wrong, Ned. A bad one. She would not keep anything of mine after it.”

Ned took that in. He did not ask what the wrong was.

“Did you tell her you were sorry?”

“I told her that I was wrong. She knew it already.”

“And she went, any road.”

“She went.”

Ned turned the brush over in his hands and picked a cinder out of the bristles.

“Hobb were sorry,” he said. “My master, in Sheffield. He were chapel. He’d be sorry every Sunday, regular. He’d cry over us, some weeks, and say he were a sinner, and give us a bit of bacon. Monday morning I were up a nine-inch flue with a pin in my foot to keep me climbing.” He shrugged. “I got so I’d sooner he didn’t say it. It only meant bacon.”

Wardlow had turned in his chair.

“You came into that yard and never opened your mouth. You counted eight guineas onto the copper lid and put your hand out for the paper. I thought you were a worse one, I told Miss Ludlow so. I didn’t know what you were till I’d been here a month, and nobody’d sent me up owt.” Ned’s ears were going red. “I’m not saying it’s the same, my lord. I don’t know what you did. I only think she’s had a lot of folk talk at her. She were a parson’s daughter.”

He bent to the hearth again and swept the ash into the pan, quickly, as if he had said too much. When the stone was clean he laid two fresh logs and took up his bucket.

“Ned.”

“My lord?”

“Thank you. That was better put than anything I have managed this week.”

“It weren’t put at all,” said Ned, astonished, and went out sideways.

Wardlow sat still.

He had written a letter to her in his head. Cecily had guessed it. It had begun at two in the morning and it was a good letter, as plain as he could make it. It said that he had been wrong and why, and what he had learned, and that he asked nothing. But a letter that asked nothing was still a letter. She would have to open it and read his reasons through in his hand. She would be made to hear him once more, when she had curtseyed and gone away so that she need not. He had held the trial without telling her, and now he meant to send her the judge’s remarks.

It only meant bacon.

He would write her nothing at all. That was hard to accept, and he made himself accept it before he looked for anything else.

Was there anything that he could do? She had told him what was hers. She would see her editor and print the truth, with every name in full. It was never his to give or take away. He could not help her with a line of it, and he had no right to try.

But he could clear out of her road what he had put there himself.

Harbin had been told on the thirtieth to go to Crane Court. Harbin was a careful man, and he would have gone. But he would have said it as solicitors say things, and an editor who had been threatened by an earl’s lawyer in December would not readily believe the same lawyer in January. If Hester laid a retraction on that man’s desk, he would ask himself whether it was a trap. He might well refuse it for fear of an action.

Wardlow drew a sheet toward him and dipped his pen.

Scarrow Hall, Derbyshire, 6 January 1819.

Sir, I write to you in my own name, and not through my solicitor, so that you may hold me to what follows.

On the 10th of December an offer of one hundred guineas was made at your office on my behalf for the name of the writer who signs herself Mrs. Nettle. I instructed Mr. Harbin on the 30th of December to withdraw it. It is withdrawn for good. It will not be renewed by me, or by any person acting for me.

If Mrs. Nettle should send you a retraction of anything your paper has printed concerning me or my family, you may print it exactly as she sends it. I shall bring no action against you, against The Weekly Lantern or against her, on account of the retraction or of the paragraphs it concerns. This letter is your warrant for that.

I ask nothing in return, and I require no answer.

Wardlow.

He read it through once. He had not stopped for a word, and there was no clause in it that asked the man to tell her or to keep it from her. Garrow could do as he judged best. It was not a message to her. It only undid a thing that Wardlow had done.

He directed it to Mr. P. Garrow, The Weekly Lantern, Crane Court, Fleet Street, and sealed it with his ring, and rang for Jessop.

“For the bag. It goes down at five.”

“Yes, my lord.” Jessop glanced at the direction. His face told Wardlow nothing, as it had told her nothing on a Monday in December.
***
Cecily came back at four, when the lamps were lit. She had a list in her hand.

“I have been counting linen,” she said. “It is a good thing to do when one is angry, because it comes out the same whatever one feels. I am less angry than I was. That is not the same as pleased.”

“I know it.”

“What have you written to her?”

“Nothing. I shall not write.”

She looked at him sharply, and then at the desk, where there was only the speech.

“Good,” she said. She sat down on the arm of the chair across from him, where she had sat on the seventeenth of December with her list of rooms. “You go to London on Friday. Parliament meets next week, and Mr. Brome wants you in Brook Street before it does. I am coming with you.”

He had not expected it. She had not been south of Derby in a year and a half.

“Cecy. You need not. The paragraph is not out until the sixteenth, and nobody yet knows—”

“That is why. On the sixteenth my name will be printed in a newspaper, in full, by my own order. I told her to write Lady Cecily Calver, and Half Moon Street, and Larkin. I am not going to have that read in every house in Mayfair while I sit here counting sheets.” Her chin was level. “I shall be in Brook Street. On the seventeenth I shall go to church at St. George’s and be looked at. I have wanted to walk into a room in London for eighteen months. I think that this is the week.”

“Then I am glad of your company.”

“There is my inch as well. She is to send it to me, and I am to read it before it goes. I had sooner do that across two miles than across a hundred and sixty-five.” She folded the list. “I am not coming to plead for you, Adrian. If I see her, I shall not say your name unless she says it first.”

“I should not ask it of you.”

“No. I see that you would not. That is something.” She got up. For a moment her hand rested on his shoulder, lightly, and was gone. “Friday at eight. Jessop is having ashes put down again. My uncle and aunt will keep the house, and they are delighted. They mean to finish the mutton.”

When she had gone he put the nineteen pages into their portfolio and tied the tape. They would travel in his own case.

That left the brass.

It lay by the corner of the blotter, where it had lain for twenty-two years, and where she had put it back with her own hand. It is Tom’s, and he belongs here. She was right about that. But he was going to stand up in the House of Lords and say that name, with a breath at every stroke, and he did not think he could do it with the plate two counties off.

It had been hers for four days. If she ever wished to have it again, she would not need to write to Derbyshire for it. If she never did, he would carry it himself.

He picked it up. It was cold at first, as it always was. He ran his thumb along the rim where hers had gone, and put it into the pocket of his coat.
***