The Sixteenth

Mr. Garrow had told her to come at nine, before the hawkers took the bundles, and at nine the press in the cellar was still running.

Hester stood in his office in her grey veil with a damp copy of the Weekly Lantern in her hands. She had not put on her spectacles. She knew what was in the second column of the third page. She had written it four times since Monday, and argued over it for two days.

“You have the corn-factor’s place as well as your own,” Mr. Garrow said. “I put him on the back page and told him it was a better one. That is the first time in eleven years I have moved a paid advertisement for a contributor. I should like it remembered.”

“I shall remember it.”

“You will remember that I cut you, I daresay.” He took snuff. It was on his neckcloth and on the proof beside him. “I cut a viscount’s name and I cut your own. I would do both again.”

They had fought on the Monday. He had heard her out with his finger on a pencil, and he had said no to all of it. A paper did not eat its own words. She had gone home across Smithfield with her face burning. On the Tuesday she had come back to begin again, and he had said yes before she had her veil up. He would give her the two paragraphs retracted, at whatever length she liked, with an earl and an earl’s sister named in full. She had supposed for a day that she had worn him down. She was less sure now, for it was unlike him to change his mind overnight.

But he would not print Viscount Halewood, and nothing she said had moved him an inch.

“Two unsigned notes and a rhyme about a frost,” he said now, as if she had spoken. “He is a peer, and he would have me in the King’s Bench by Easter. You have him in his own hand, I grant it. Shew it to a judge and I shall print what the judge says.”

“And my name?”

“A retraction signed Mrs. Nettle is the Lantern taking back what the Lantern said. A retraction signed by a Miss Somebody of Islington is a young woman writing to the newspapers. The town would read the second for the scandal and forget what was retracted.” He blew his nose. “Do one thing at a time. Clear them this week. Hang yourself the next, if you must.”

It was sense, and she had given way to it. She did not like having done so. Today was the sixteenth. She had told a man in a cold gallery that he should have his answer in print, and he had it. But she had told another man, at a desk, that she would stand up under her own name and be first. She had stood up in a veil.

“There will be a next week,” she said.

“I do not doubt it.” Mr. Garrow opened his drawer. He counted two pound notes and two shillings onto the desk, and took his finger off them at once. “For this one. It is the best copy you ever gave me, and there is not a joke in it. I do not know what the trade is coming to.”

She put the money into her reticule. They were the first two guineas she had earned in five weeks.

“Take three copies. And go home by Holborn.”

She went out past the clerk’s desk. Tibbs looked up and said, “Good morning, ma’am,” and she said, “Good morning.” He did not look after her. She noticed that, and did not know what to make of it.
***
Jonas was at school until one on Saturdays, and it was the reason she had hurried.

Her mother had the paper flat on the parlour table under the window. Naomi stood behind the chair. The fire was lit, though it was not yet eleven, because Mrs. Ludlow had said that this was not a thing to be read in the cold.

“You need not, Mama. I can tell you what it says.”

“You told me on Sunday what it would say. I should like to hear what it does.” Her mother put on her own spectacles, which had been the vicar’s. She read slowly, in the voice she had used for the lessons at family prayers.

“‘Mrs. Nettle’s Notebook. The writer of this Notebook has two things to unsay, and will say nothing else this week.

“‘On the 14th of June, 1817, it was printed here that Lady C— C— was seen leaving a gentleman’s street at an hour when no lady pays calls. The lady was Lady Cecily Calver, and she is named here by her own desire. The street was Half Moon Street. In the top back room of a lodging-house there, kept by her sister, Winifred Larkin lay dying. She had been nurse in Lady Cecily’s family for thirty years. Lady Cecily sat with her every evening from the first of June until she slept. Winifred Larkin died on the 19th of June, with Lady Cecily beside her. There was no gentleman in the case. There was an old servant and a young woman who would not leave her to die among strangers. Every other construction put on that paragraph was false, and the writer invited it.’”

Naomi made a small wet sound. Her mother read on.

“‘On the 9th of May, 1818, it was printed here that the Earl of Wardlow had bought the sweeping-machine which his Climbing Boys Bill would oblige householders to use. That was false. The Earl of Wardlow owns no share in any such patent and never has. He has given forty of these machines to forty parishes at his own cost, and has not had a penny by them. Three days after that paragraph, his bill was lost by five votes.

“‘Both statements came to the writer unsigned. Both were in one hand. She knows whose hand it is, and will say so when she may shew it. That is no excuse for her. The first she printed without asking one question. The second she asked about in two places, was told by nobody that it was true, and printed because the sentence pleased her. She ought to have asked. She was a fool to print them, and she begs the pardon of Lady Cecily Calver and of the Earl of Wardlow, who have suffered by a wit that was better than its information.’”

Mrs. Ludlow laid her hand on the page.

Hester had not expected it to sound as it did in her mother’s voice. In Crane Court it had been copy. Here, between the tea caddy and Jonas’s Caesar, she heard what she had done to two people.

“It went to Brook Street on Tuesday,” she said. “The part about Lady Cecily. She was to read it first. It came back the same afternoon by her footman, with a line at the foot. ‘Print it. You have spelled Larkin right. C.’”

“Then she is a just young woman,” said her mother.

Naomi was crying in earnest now, with her apron to her face.

“I cannot help it. It is the old nurse. And it is you, Hess, calling yourself a fool in a newspaper, where the butcher can read it.”

“The butcher does not know who Mrs. Nettle is.”

“I know. I know who she is, and I was proud of her.” Naomi wiped her eyes angrily. “I used to read the Earl of Soot aloud to Mama and laugh. He never bought any machine at all, and he gave forty away, and now you will not even say his name in the house.”

“Naomi,” said Mrs. Ludlow.

“Well, she will not. She came home a week ago looking like the day we left Wickenden, and she has told us that he asked her and that it is ended, and nothing else.”

Hester took off her bonnet. Her hands needed something to do.

“There is nothing else that is mine to tell.”

Her mother looked at her over the steel rims. She had a mild face and people took it for a weak one.

“Your father had a rule about the pulpit,” she said. “If he had said a wrong thing from it, he unsaid it from the same place, on the next Sunday, as loudly. He did it twice in thirty years. He was ill for a week beforehand each time.” She folded the paper along its crease. “He would have read this, my dear, and he would have gone out to the garden for a quarter of an hour. Then he would have come in and kissed you.”

That nearly undid her. She bent and kissed her mother’s cap instead, and laid the two notes and the two shillings on the table.

“That is for the caddy. I must go to Hill Street. She will have had her copy with her chocolate, and I have not told her. I meant to tell her on the road. I had four days in a coach, and I told her nothing at all.”

“Then go now,” her mother said. “And Hester. Jonas is fourteen, and he is not a fool. He will have to know.”

“Next week. Mr. Garrow says that I may hang myself next week.”
***
The tall footman let her in. Lady Halewood was in the back drawing room, by a fire of sea-coal, with her cane across her knees and the Weekly Lantern open on the table at her elbow.

It was folded at the third page.

“You are early,” she said. “It is not your day. Sit down. No. I see that you mean to stand. You have your father’s look, when he was about to tell the squire something.”

“I do mean to stand, ma’am.” Hester put back her veil. She had made this sentence once already, at a desk in Derbyshire, and it came no more easily. “You have read that column.”

“I read it every Saturday.”

“I wrote it. I have written every one since the first. I am Mrs. Nettle. For nearly two years I have sat at your table three nights a week and gone home and written down what your guests said across my head. I was paid two guineas for each. I never asked your leave, and I never told you. I ought to have told you in the coach.”

Her godmother regarded her without a blink.

“Is that all?”

“Is it not enough?”

“It is a good deal less than I expected. I thought from your face that you had at least taken the spoons.” Lady Halewood moved the paper an inch with one finger. “Hester, I have known it since the spring of the year seventeen.”

Hester sat down after all. Her knees had settled it for her.

“The third Notebook,” said her godmother. “Or it may have been the fourth. There was a line in it about the Bishop of — and his gravy. I had said that thing myself, on the Tuesday, to nobody but old Lady Jane and the mustard. You were standing behind my chair with a shawl. On the Saturday there it was, a good deal better than I had made it. I looked at your right hand when you gave me my tea. You had scrubbed it raw with lemon.”

“You never said a word.”

“Why should I? I was vastly entertained.” The short bark came. “I had kept that table for thirty years, and nobody had ever written it down. Half of what is said there deserves to be lost, and the other half deserves the pillory. You could tell which was which. I thought it was high time.”

“Ma’am, I used your house.”

“You did. I helped you to.” She tapped the cane on the carpet. “Did you never wonder why a companion sat between an Admiral and a Dean? A companion belongs at the bottom of the table, next the curate, and you have not sat next a curate since that April. When Corsley is in drink he will say anything, and I put you at his left hand eleven times. I would send you across the room for a shawl, and the shawl was always behind whoever was talking best. I have been two Seasons arranging my dinners for a newspaper, and I have never been so well amused.”

Hester stared at her. Eleven of the last twenty columns had come from that table. He had told her so himself, at the desk. He had done the sum and thought it was chance.

“But why?”

“Because I do not pay you. One does not pay a goddaughter. It is not done, and your mother would have sent it back.” The black eyes were steady. “Barnabas Ludlow left four people fifty pounds a year. I could not put a salary into your hand. I could put you in the way of two guineas a week that you had earned with your own wits, and that nobody need thank me for. I thought it was a neater charity than most. You never guessed, and you are supposed to be clever.”

Hester found that she was laughing, and that her eyes were wet. She thought of the walk up St. John Street, five weeks ago, and of the hard little thought that she had kept for the quiet part of it. She had prided herself on picking her godmother’s guests clean. They had been set out for her every night.

“Then you knew in Derbyshire. All the while.”

“Naturally. I knew what that man was hunting before I was out of my travelling cloak. He stood at the foot of his own stairs and asked me who wrote my letters. I very nearly told him, to see his face.” She sniffed. “I thought that he had better find you for himself. He seemed to me a person who would value a thing more for having worked it out.”

Hester’s laughter stopped.

“I did not know about the two notes,” Lady Halewood went on, more slowly. She laid her hand on the paper. “I shall say that. Had I known that somebody was feeding you poison through Crane Court, I should have spoken in the first week. This is well done, child. It is handsomer than they will expect, and it is plainer than I should have had the courage for. A wit that was better than its information. Yes.”

“I could not print whose hand it was. Mr. Garrow will not have it until I can shew it before a court.”

“Do not tell me whose. I shall hear it when all London does, and I do not expect to be astonished.” Her mouth had thinned. “A man does not ride down the Winnats in January for his health. I have been counting spoons for eighteen years. I can count this.”

She rang, and told the footman to bring tea, and waited until the door had closed.

“Now. I have had four days in a coach with a riddle, and a week since. You told me on the road that it was ended and that the fault was his. I let it be, because you looked as if you would break. You do not look so today. What did he do?”

Hester had not meant to tell it. But she had just been told a secret that had been kept two years for her good, and she had nothing left to hide behind.

“He knew, ma’am. He worked it out on the twenty-seventh of December, from my sentences. He wrote it down in a pocket-book. And he did not say so. He asked me on the hill whether I had anything to tell him. He asked me on the stairs, and he asked again over that chessboard. He waited to see whether I would confess. I did, on the Thursday night, standing up, and he let me think that he heard it for the first time. I found the book on the Tuesday morning.”

“Four days,” said her godmother.

“Four days.”

“I waited two Seasons.”

“I know that you did. I have been thinking so for the last five minutes.” Hester pressed her hands together. “It is not the same. I cannot make it the same, though I see that it ought to be. You were not waiting to learn what I was. You had decided that already, and you put me next the Dean. He was waiting for a verdict. He liked me, and he watched me to see whether he might safely go on. Every kind thing he said to me in those four days had a question folded inside it.”

“And if you had failed?”

“I do not know. He does not know. That is what I cannot get past.” Her voice shook, and she let it. “I miss him, ma’am. I had better say it to somebody. I miss him at nine in the morning, when I sit down to write and there is nobody on the right of the inkstand to argue with. I wrote that column four times, and each time I turned to ask him whether a clause would do. I see a tall man in a black coat at the Angel and my heart behaves like a girl’s. I am not cured of anything.”

“Then why are you in Hill Street, and he in Brook Street?”

“Because I go back over it, and I always stop at the twenty-seventh. I get as far as the chapel, and he is reading about lying lips, and he looks up and smiles at me, knowing. I thought that smile was the kindest thing I had ever been given. I cannot find out now what it was. And I told him things afterward, ma’am. I told him a great deal that I had told nobody, while that page was lying in his pocket.” She shook her head. “He said that he was wrong. He did not excuse it. He stood there and agreed with every word I said. I believe that he is sorry. I do not see what he could ever do that would let me sit easy across a desk from him again.”

“Has he written?”

“Not a line.”

“Hm,” said Lady Halewood. She looked at the fire for a while. “I said in his house that he would not know how to make a fool of you. I was right as to that. He has made one of himself, which is commoner, and takes longer to mend. I shall not tell you what to do. I arranged your dinners. I do not arrange your marriages.” She put out her hand, and Hester gave her the shawl from the chair-back without thinking. “You dine here on Tuesday, as usual, between Corsley and the Dean. When your name is out, I shall see who leaves the table, and know whom not to ask again.”

The door opened. It was the tall footman, with no tea. He had a small silver salver.

“For Miss Ludlow, my lady. A gentleman left it at the door. He would not come up, and he said there was no answer.”

“What gentleman?” said Lady Halewood.

The footman hesitated. “His lordship, my lady.”

Hester took the card. It was thick, and good, and the name was engraved across the middle of it. Viscount Halewood. Her godmother had leaned forward on her cane, and had read it upside down, and had gone very still.

Hester turned the card over.

There was no date and no initial. There was a single line of writing, in an easy hand full of long loops, with the capital thrown back over itself like the lash of a whip.

You have chosen.
***