Page Thirty-One

The Morning Intelligencer came up to the breakfast room in Brook Street at half past eight, ironed flat, and Wardlow found the paragraph before his coffee was poured.

It was on the second page, under the Court news.

We are able to satisfy the curious. The “Mrs. Nettle” whose Notebook has for two Seasons enlivened a weekly contemporary is a Miss H— L—, daughter of a late vicar in Hertfordshire, and companion to the Dowager Lady H—, at whose table she has gathered what she sold. The lady kept her Christmas snowbound in Derbyshire, under the roof of a noble Earl whom she had long abused. Those who admired her retraction of Saturday last may judge for themselves how a peer’s pardon is come by.

He read it once and passed it across the cloth. Cecily read it with her cup held in the air.

“He has put you behind a dash,” she said. “You asked him particularly not to.”

“I did.”

“And he has not his name to it, nor anybody’s. He has learned nothing.” She set the cup down. Her hand was quite steady. She had gone to St. George’s on Sunday in her best black and been looked at for an hour and a half, and had come home hungry. “It is a mean piece of writing. She would have done it in half the words.”

“She would not have done it.”

“No. I know that.”

He looked at the initials. H— L—. There were not many vicars’ daughters with those letters who handed shawls to a Dowager Lady H—. Every woman who had ever dined in Hill Street would have the name by ten o’clock.

It was all over town by noon. Wardlow did not need to leave the house to know it, because the town came to him. Pym brought up eleven cards before twelve and was told each time that nobody was at home. A note came from his club, from a man he hardly knew, asking with great delicacy whether he would care to contradict anything. Lord Tarrant sent round to ask if the Derbyshire roads were truly so bad at Christmas.

Brome arrived at a quarter past twelve with his hat still on.

“White’s has it, and Brooks’s, and the lobby. I have been stopped nine times between Palace Yard and your door.” He sat down heavily. “They are not talking about chimneys, Wardlow. They are talking about a desk. Lady Merrow has told four people already that she always knew the creature was listening. She is the eleven gowns, and her husband has a vote.”

“What do they say of Miss Ludlow?”

“What you would expect. That she sold her godmother’s guests, and then sold her retraction dearer.” Brome rubbed his head. “Some of them say it laughing. I liked those least.”

Wardlow got up and went to the window. Brook Street was wet and grey, and a hawker was going down it with papers under his arm.

He was quick at arranging things. He had told her so. Standing there, he arranged four in as many minutes. He could be at the office of the Intelligencer in half an hour, and the editor would give up his informant to an earl. He could find Halewood, who lodged in Duke Street, and say what he thought in a room with a shut door. He could drive to Islington with his own horses, and bring four people and a tea caddy back to Brook Street out of the way of the stares. He could send a line to every newspaper in London that Miss Ludlow was to be his wife, which was no longer true.

Each of them would have been a relief to him, and each would have been done to her. She would have heard of it afterward, as she had heard of the hundred guineas.

“What are you going to do?” Cecily said behind him.

“Ask her.”

“She may not answer.”

“Then I shall have her answer in that.”

Brome looked from one to the other of them and said nothing. He had kept the secrets of the Treasury bench for thirty years.

Pym came in with a twelfth card on the salver, and this one was not a caller’s. It was large and square, with a black edge for the Queen. The Dowager Viscountess Halewood, At Home, Thursday the 21st of January, nine o’clock. It was addressed to them both. Across the foot ran a line in a big, impatient hand. You may come or stay away. I shall think no worse of you for either. The town will.

“Thursday,” said Brome. “That is the night the session opens. Every peer in London will have dined and be looking for somewhere to be seen. She cannot mean to have it now.”

“The ink on that is this morning’s,” Cecily said. “She means it more than she did.”

Brome took the card and turned it over, and gave it back.

“I shall say it once, and then I am done. If you are seen in that drawing room, with that young woman standing in it, the paragraph is proved to every fool who wants it proved. It is my three votes. It is what I said in your library, only worse, because now they have it in print.”

“I hear you,” Wardlow said. He put the card on the mantelpiece. He did not say what he would do on Thursday, because he did not yet know what she would have him do about anything.

He went to his book-room and shut the door.

The green morocco book was in his breast pocket, where it had been since the sixth. He laid it on the table and opened it at the first page. It began in the March of last year with the depth of the sough. It had the price of larch in it, and the names of five men who had promised him their votes in April, with a line through each. It had coal. It had the three lines of the twenty-seventh of December, and the page after them, and a few pages more that he would have given a good deal to keep to himself.

He had thought in the night of sending her that one leaf. He had thought of marking it. Either would have been a way of telling her where to look and what to think when she got there. She had found a single page by accident, and had been left to wonder what stood on the others. She had better have all of them.

The ribbon still lay at the twenty-seventh. He drew it out and folded it flat inside the back cover, so that it marked nothing.

Cecily had forbidden him a letter with twelve reasons in it. He took one of his own cards and turned it over, and wrote a single line on the back.

What would you have me do? I will do that and nothing else.

He looked at it for some time. It asked her for something after all. But it asked for an order, and she was free not to give one.

He wrapped the book and the card together in a sheet of plain paper and tied it with tape.
***
He took a hackney as far as the Angel and walked the rest. He would not have a carriage with his arms on it standing in her street.

Colebrooke Row was a long terrace with a strip of wet garden before it. He had the number from her own account of herself, on New Year’s Eve, standing behind a chair. He would have known the house without it. It was the narrowest in the row, two windows wide, and the knocker had been polished that morning by somebody who did not mean to be pitied.

A curtain moved in the house opposite. He knocked once.

There was a step, and a pause, and then the door was dragged open with an effort, for it stuck. A girl of nineteen stood in the gap. She was fair where her sister was brown, and a good deal prettier, and her eyes were red. She looked up at him, and up, and he saw her understand who he was.

“Miss Naomi Ludlow, I think. My name is Wardlow.”

“I know what your name is.” She had hold of the edge of the door with both hands. “My sister is not at home.”

“I see.”

“She is at home. She is in the kitchen. But she is not at home to you, my lord. She told me to say the first thing and stop, and I am no good at it.” Her chin shook and steadied. “There has been a man here from a newspaper already. Mrs. Abney over the way has stood at her window since ten. My brother came in at one with his lip split open, and would not say why until Hester made him. So you cannot come in. I am sorry if it is rude.”

“It is not rude. I did not come to be let in.” He held out the parcel. “Will you give her this? It is not a letter. She told me that she kept everything, and this is the whole of something she saw one page of. It is hers to read or to burn. There is a card with it, and the card has one line.”

Miss Naomi looked at the parcel as if it might be a writ.

“Is there to be an answer?”

“Only if she chooses. I shall not send to ask.”

She took it. She held it against her apron, and went on looking at him, and it was plain that there was something else she could not keep in.

“I used to read you aloud to my mother,” she said. “On Saturdays. The Earl of Soot. I did a voice.”

“Was it slow?”

“Very slow.” She went scarlet. “You do not look as I made you. You are not fat.”

“I am obliged to you. Good afternoon, Miss Naomi.”

He put on his hat and went down the two steps. Behind him the door was pushed, and stuck, and pushed again until it shut. He walked back to the Angel without once turning to look at the windows, and it was the longest half mile he had gone since the drive at Scarrow.
***
The afternoon went as the morning had. He read page twelve aloud to an empty book-room, with a breath at every stroke, because the boys had not ceased to climb for anything the Intelligencer had printed. Cecily wrote to their aunt at Scarrow, in large plain words, so that the news might come to the Marsdens from her before it came from a Sheffield paper. Brome went away to feed Lord Corsley.

By seven it was dark and raining. Wardlow was at his table with the brass plate under his left hand when Pym came to the door.

“There is a young person below, my lord. A boy. He will not give his message to me. He says that he was told to put it into your hand, and that he has walked from Islington to do it.”

“Bring him up.”

The boy who came in was fourteen and all legs. His jacket was short in the sleeves, and the cuffs had been let down. He had brown hair plastered flat with rain. His lower lip was split at the left corner and swollen to twice its size. He had his sister’s grey eyes, and he looked about the book-room with them, very frankly, and then at Wardlow.

“Are you the Earl?”

“I am. You are Jonas Ludlow.”

“Yes, sir. My lord.” He did not bow. “I have a thing for you from Hester. She said I was to give it to you myself and take nothing for it.”

“Sit down first. You are wet through. That lip wants looking at.”

“It has been looked at. Naomi put vinegar on it. I would sooner have been hit again.” He sat on the edge of a chair, with his knees a long way out. “A fellow called Padgett did it. His father takes the Intelligencer. He read the piece out in the yard at dinner-hour, and said he knew who Miss H. L. was, because his aunt dines in Hill Street. Then he said something about my sister and an earl.”

“And you hit him.”

“Twice. He only got me once. He is bigger, but he is slow.” Jonas touched the lip and winced. “Then I went home to tell them it was a lie. Hess sat me down and said that the first half was true. She is Mrs. Nettle. She has been for two years, and I thought she copied bills of lading.” His voice cracked upward, and he scowled at it. “I asked her about the second half. She said that was her affair, and that Padgett had none of it right.”

“He had not.”

“Then what is right?”

It was asked straight, by the nearest thing to a man that her family had. Wardlow gave it a straight answer, at his own pace.

“On the second of this month I asked your sister to marry me, and she said that she would. Three days after, she learned that I had done her a wrong. I had kept a thing from her that she had a right to be told. She ended it, and she was right to. That is all there is. If Padgett asks again, you may give him that from me, with my name to it.”

Jonas considered this for some time.

“Was the wrong in the green book?”

“It was.”

“She read it at the kitchen table. Every page. She had her spectacles on, and she would not let Naomi look over her shoulder. She laughed once, near the front. I think it was about some men called Frith and Bagshaw. After that she did not laugh.” He frowned. “She got to one place and went back, and read it over, and took her spectacles off. She sat a good while. Mama asked if she was ill, and she said no, she was being fair, and it was inconvenient.”

Wardlow had not asked for any of it. He kept his hand flat on the table and did not ask for more.

“Then she wrote this.” Jonas unbuttoned his jacket and brought out a packet done up in the same plain paper, tied with the same tape. It was dry. He had carried it three miles inside his shirt. “I was to say nothing with it. I have said a good deal, I suppose.”

“You have said nothing that she would mind. Thank you.”

The tape was knotted twice, in the grocer’s knot that he had seen her tie on Christmas parcels. Inside was the green book. A folded half-sheet lay on top of it.

It was in the quick upright hand, without a correction.

Nothing for me. Speak for the boys. I shall speak for myself. Read page 31 of your own book; you withdrew the hundred guineas before I told you anything. H.L.

He read it through. Then he opened the book.

She had drawn the ribbon out from the back cover and laid it down between two leaves. He did not need to see the number. It was the page he had written at midnight on the thirtieth of December, alone at the long desk, pleased to find that it was the thirty-first.

Wrote to Harbin. The hundred guineas are withdrawn, wholly, and he is to say so at the newspaper in person. I have not told her. I will not have her think her safety was a bargain.

He had not sent her to that page. He had forgotten, in the wrapping of the parcel, that it was there to be found. He had been thinking only of the twenty-seventh.

She had read the twenty-seventh again, and all that followed it. And she had gone on four leaves and found a thing that told in his favour, and she had set it down for him with the date. He had told her on the Edge that he would rather have her justice than anyone’s good opinion. She had left him on the fifth of January, and here was her justice, sent across London inside her brother’s shirt. She would not keep back a fact because it was on his side.

It was not forgiveness, and he did not mistake it for that. Nothing for me was plain enough. She would speak for herself, and she did not say how or where.

“Is it bad?” said Jonas.

“No. It is exact.” He had to wait for the next. “Your sister is the most just person I have ever met.”

“She is, rather. It is a great nuisance at home.” The boy’s eyes had gone to the plate of seed-cake that Pym had left on the side table at five, and stayed there. “She said I was to take nothing for the errand.”

“Did she say anything about cake?”

Jonas thought. “No. She did not mention cake.”

“Then I do not see that either of us breaks her terms.”

The boy ate three slices in the time it took Wardlow to read the note a second time. He ate on the sound side of his mouth, with great attention.

“Is it true that you bought a boy for eight guineas?” he asked through the last of it. “It was in the Lantern on Saturday, nearly. And Hess told Mama.”

“It is true. He is nineteen now, and he keeps my accounts. He has knees like a saddle, and he will shew them to you if he ever has the chance.”

“I should like that.” Jonas stood up and brushed the crumbs from his jacket onto the carpet. “I must go. She gave me a shilling for a hackney, and I mean to walk and keep it.”

“It is raining.”

“I am wet already.”

Wardlow could have sent him home in the carriage. He looked at the split lip and the let-down cuffs, and remembered a fifth term, agreed to in a cold gallery. The shilling was hers, and the boy’s road was his own.

“Then go by Oxford Street, where the lamps are. Tell your sister that her message was put into my hand, and that I have read the page.”

“Is that all?”

“That is all.”

Jonas nodded. At the door he turned round, as his sister did, and as Cecily did.

“I hit Padgett for the second half,” he said. “I am glad it was not all a lie. You do not seem a bad sort. You wait a long time before you say things, but then you say them.”

He was gone down the stairs two at a time. Wardlow heard Pym let him out into the rain.

He sat down again. The book lay open at the ribbon, and the half-sheet lay beside it, and the brass plate was at his left hand.

There were twenty-nine words in her note. He had counted them without meaning to. She had not written my lord at the head of it. She had not signed it Mrs. Nettle, who owed him nothing now, nor Miss Ludlow, who had curtseyed to his waistcoat. There were two capitals and two full stops, set down firmly, by a woman who had hidden behind a pen-name for two years and had no more use for it.

H.L.

The fire burned down. Cecily came to the door once and went away again. He read the two letters over a great many times.
***