Fourteen Minutes

The House of Lords smelled of candle-wax and wet wool, and at a quarter past five Wardlow stood up in it with nineteen pages in his right hand.

His left hand was in his coat pocket. The brass was there, and it had warmed. He let go of it and brought the hand out empty, because there was no desk to hold and he had been taught that he did not need one.

There were more peers on the benches than he had seen on a Tuesday in seven years. He knew why they had come. Half of them wanted to hear the speech that a newspaper woman had written for the man who married her. They had been married fifteen days. At St. Mary’s in Islington the curate had asked who gave this woman, and Lady Halewood had said “I do” before Jonas could open his mouth. She had added that she had been two Seasons about it. Mrs. Ludlow had cried quietly and Naomi loudly. Cecily had signed the register with a firm hand, and Jonas had held the ring so tight that it left a mark in his palm.

There was an empty place on the viscounts’ bench. Nobody had sat in it since the opening of the session.

Brome stood below the bar with the other members of the Commons who had come up to listen. He had his watch open in his hand.

“My Lords,” Wardlow said, “I move that this bill be now read a second time.”

He stopped at the full stop and breathed. Somebody coughed on the bishops’ bench. He looked down at the large upright hand, with its small stroke after every sentence, and began.

“On the twenty-third of December, 1796, I heard a knocking in the wall of my father’s house. I was eleven years old. I did not know what it was, and I waited an hour to be certain.”

He breathed at every stroke. He did not hurry it. He had said these words to a marble bust and a deaf colonel, and to his wife in a hackney on the way from Islington. He said them now to four rows of men in black, and he looked at them while he did it.

“It was a child. He was eight years old, and his name was Tom Pickering.”

The name came whole. He had known that it would.

“When they broke the wall, he was dead.”

He stopped there on purpose. He looked along the benches and let them have it. He counted three breaths. In May a pause of that length had brought out the watches. Tonight nobody moved. The coughing on the bishops’ bench had stopped.

“I have been certain ever since. I do not ask your lordships to feel what I felt that day. I ask you only not to wait an hour.”

Lord Hatherleigh, who had been at Corunna, sat forward with his hands on his knees.

Wardlow turned the page. The sentences were short, and each one stood by itself, and he found that he could walk from one to the next as a man crosses a stream on stones.

“The law says eight. I have met a boy of four.” He breathed. “A child of six is sold.”

He stopped, and looked at Lord Penmoor.

Penmoor was a stout old man with a red face. His hand went to his waistcoat and closed over his watch-case, and stayed there.

“The price is three guineas. His father sells him because there are five more at home.”

He gave them the brine and the nine-inch flue. He gave them Ned. “In the year nine I bought a boy in Sheffield for eight guineas. He was ten years old. He is nineteen now, and he keeps my accounts. He asks me to tell your lordships that he has knees like a saddle, and that you will not believe the rest without.”

There was a sound along the benches that was nearly a laugh, and it was a kind one. He had never before made that House laugh on purpose.

On the tenth page he came to Lord Tarrant’s two sentences. He turned a little, so that he faced the man.

“I own no share in any patent, and I never have. I have given forty of these machines away, and I will give forty more to any of your lordships’ parishes that will ask for one.”

Tarrant went pink and nodded several times.

The wall rose on the twelfth page. He felt it a line and a half off. It was parishes, as it had been in the library, and he had said that word to an empty book-room two hundred times. He went on to the full stop before it. He stopped there, and raised his eyes from the paper, and looked at Lord Dunmere, who wanted to know what it cost.

He breathed. The word was not ready.

He breathed again. His left hand hung open at his side. Four hundred candles burned, and the Lord Chancellor sat on the Woolsack with his chin on his chest. Dunmere looked back at him attentively, as a man looks at somebody who is about to tell him a figure. Nobody on those benches knew that anything was the matter. They saw a speaker letting his last sentence settle.

The word came.

“What have the parishes found? The same sweep comes on the same day and asks the same charge; he brings a bundle of canes where he used to bring a child.”

Dunmere wrote something on his cuff.

He hardly needed the last seven pages. He knew them, and he knew how they were made, and he could hear her pen in every line. When he came to the nineteenth he lowered the paper altogether.

“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 sat down.

There was no sound for the space of a breath. Then Hatherleigh said “Hear, hear,” rather hoarsely, and it went along the bench behind him.

Below the bar, Brome shut his watch. He held up both hands with the fingers spread, and then four fingers more.

Fourteen minutes. Her father would have said that he had six to spare.
***
Lord Merrow rose at seven. He spoke on the liberty of the English householder, and on the danger of fire in flues that no machine could reach. He spoke on a certain class of writer who was now, it seemed, to be heard in that House at second hand. He was a thin man with a high voice, and he did not look at Wardlow once.

Wardlow sat with his arms folded and listened to every word. He had been angry for smaller things. He found tonight that he was chiefly counting.

Merrow sat down at ten minutes to eight. Brome had his watch out again.

The House divided at half past eleven. Wardlow went out with the Contents and stood in the press, among men who clapped him on the arm. He could not tell how many they were. He had been wrong about that once before.

The tellers came to the table. The Lord Chancellor heard them and lifted his head.

“Contents, thirty-seven. Not-Contents, thirty-three. The Contents have it.”

Wardlow put his hand into his pocket and closed it on the brass. He stood so for a moment, with the House breaking up round him. He did not trust himself to speak to anybody just then.

Brome reached him in the lobby. The plain face was shining, and the eyes were wet, and he had lost his hat.

“Four,” Brome said. “Four, Wardlow. I have done the sum three times, and it is four whichever way I do it. Merrow took his two with him, as I said he would. There are your three. Then three came over to us from his own side of the House. I saw them walk, and I thought that I should fall down. So they stand at thirty-three, exactly where they stood in May.”

“And ours?”

“The five she gave you a line apiece. Every one. Corsley had my saddle of mutton last night, and voted like a lamb. And four more who never gave a vote on a chimney in their lives. I wrote to three of them from your library. The fourth I cannot account for at all.” He blew his nose. “Twelve new, and three gone. Twenty-eight is thirty-seven. I shall carry it to my own House on Thursday, and I do not expect to sit down for cheering.”

“It was her speech.”

“It was her speech and your breath. I timed Merrow at fifty minutes. I hope that somebody will mention it.”

“I think that somebody may.”

Lord Tarrant came up to them, blinking, with his hat in both hands.

“Wardlow. A very proper speech. Short. I followed all of it.” He lowered his voice, though there was nobody near. “You will have heard about that fellow. Halewood. He crossed to Calais on Wednesday the third. My man had it from his man. The tailor was at his door the morning after Hill Street, and the rest of them by the Monday. Fourteen thousand, they say. Nobody will lend to a man whose own stepmother has shewn him the stairs before sixty people.”

“I had heard that he was gone.”

“He will not come back. They never do, from Calais.” Tarrant shook his head. “I voted on his note in May. I shall not forget that. My compliments to Lady Wardlow. I take the Lantern now. One likes to know what one has said.”

He went away. Brome looked after him and began to laugh, and had to lean on the wall.
***
It rained all the way up Whitehall. Wardlow let the carriage go at the corner of Brook Street and walked the last hundred yards, because he wanted the air on his face.

Pym opened to him as the clocks struck twelve.

“Her ladyship is in the book-room, my lord. Lady Cecily went up at eleven. She desired to be woken, whatever the hour.”

There was a light under the book-room door. He opened it quietly.

She was at his table, on the left of the inkstand. She had brought very little to Brook Street besides her father’s oak box, and it stood open at her elbow. She wore the grey gown and the steel spectacles, and she held the page close to her face, like a schoolboy. Her pen was going fast. There was ink beside her mouth.

She was humming.

He stood and looked at her. He had thirty-seven votes in his pocket, and he thought that this was the better thing to come home to.

The pen stopped. She did not turn round.

“I have heard you breathing for a full minute. You do it very loudly for a man with news. If we have lost, say it quickly, and I shall be unkind to somebody.”

“Carried,” he said. “Thirty-seven to thirty-three.”

She put the pen down in the tray. Then she got up and came to him, and took his face in both hands. Her fingers were cold and inky. She kissed him hard, with the spectacles knocking against his cheekbone.

“Say it again.”

“Thirty-seven to thirty-three. By four.”

“Did you breathe?”

“At every stroke. Brome had fourteen minutes by his watch.”

“And the twelfth page?”

“It came. I waited for it at the full stop and looked at Dunmere. He wrote the charge on his cuff.”

She made him tell all of it. She wanted Penmoor’s watch-case, and Hatherleigh’s hands on his knees, and who had laughed at Ned. She did the sum of the twelve and the three faster than Brome had. When he came to Merrow she went back to her chair and took up the pen.

“Fifty minutes? You are sure? By whose watch?”

“Brome’s.”

“Then I have my first line.” She laid her left arm across the page. “You are on your own side of the frontier, Adrian. Keep your eyes there.”

“I have not looked.”

“I know that you have not. It is one of the reasons I married you.”

She ran up to Cecily’s door, and he heard a cry through two floors, and bare feet on the boards. When she came down again she was out of breath and laughing.

“She says that she will go to three parties this week, and wear yellow at all of them when the mourning is out. She says that Larkin would have liked the knees.”

He took the brass plate from his pocket. He set it down beside the inkstand, on the common ground.

She looked at it. She touched the rim once with her stained finger.

“You had it with you.”

“In my left pocket. I held it during the division. I did not hold it while I spoke.”

“No. You did not need it then.” She took off her spectacles and folded them into the box, and turned the key from habit. Then she laughed at herself and left the key in the lock. “The column will keep till morning. Come to bed. I am asking you.”

“Yes,” he said. “With all my heart.”
***
There was a good fire in their room, and she would not let him put out the candle.

“I want to see you. I have been looking at a page since nine o’clock.”

“Then look.”

She undid his neckcloth herself. She had got quick at it in a fortnight. She drew it off and put her mouth to his throat, where the linen had been, and he shut his eyes.

“Tell me what you want,” she said against his skin.

A year ago he would have had no words for that. He found that he had them now, and that they were short.

“Your hair down. Your hands on me. I want you to take your time.”

“I have all night. I rely on you to have it too.”

He took the pins out one by one and laid them on the table by the bed. The brown hair came down over his wrists. The steel had left a small red mark on the bridge of her nose, and he kissed that first. She laughed, and then she did not laugh, because he had found the hooks of the grey gown.

It was nothing like the first time. He had been half afraid then, and so careful that his arms had shaken. He knew her now. He knew that she caught her breath when he kissed the inside of her wrist, and that she liked the weight of his hand on her hip. He slid the gown from her shoulders and the shift after it. She stood against him in the firelight, warm and tall, and unfastened his shirt without any shyness at all.

“You are thinner than at Christmas,” she said. She ran her palms down his ribs. “You have not eaten since the Intelligencer.”

“I shall eat tomorrow. I shall eat like Corsley.”

“See that you do. I am not married to a division list.”

The bed was wide and the sheets were cool. He lay down with her and drew her against him, and for a time they only kissed, slowly, like people with nowhere to be in the morning. Her mouth tasted of the tea she had let go cold at the desk. He put his lips to her breast and felt her hand close in his hair.

“Is there anything you know of me,” she said, rather breathlessly, “that you have not said?”

“You hum when the column is going well. You were humming when I came in.”

“I was not.”

“You were. It is the tune from the chapel path. I have known since the snow that it meant you were happy, and I had never told you.”

“Then that is within the hour.” She pulled him up to her and kissed him. “Now I shall tell you one. I ate nothing at dinner. I sat at that table from nine and wrote the same sentence four times. I was more frightened tonight than I was in Hill Street, and it was not for the bill. I could not bear that you should stand up there with my words and have them fail you.”

“They held me up. Every one.”

“I know it now. I did not know it at nine.” Her eyes were wet and bright. “Touch me, Adrian. There. Yes.”

He did as she asked. He watched her face while he did it, and she let him watch. She said what she liked and what she liked better, in plain words. He answered her in the same, and neither of them looked away. Her thigh slid over his. She moved with his hand until her breath broke and she said his name into his shoulder.

“Now you,” she said, when she could. “Tell me.”

“I want you over me. I want to see you.”

She rose above him with her hair falling forward round them both. She took him into her slowly, with her hands braced on his chest and her lip caught in her teeth. He held her hips and did not hurry her. There was no pain in it this time and no fear, only heat and her eyes on his. He told her that he loved her. He told her that she was the best thing that had ever come up the Winnats. She laughed aloud at that, and then her head went back and she could not laugh. He felt her tighten and shake, and he followed her with her name in his mouth.

She came down on his chest and lay there. He could feel her heart going, and his own under it.

After a while she turned her cheek on his shoulder.

“Thirty-seven to thirty-three,” she said drowsily. “It scans, very nearly.”

“Do not put it into verse.”

“I shall put it into prose. I have fifty minutes of Lord Merrow to begin with, and I have thirty-two names to follow him.” She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him. Her hair was in her eyes, and the ink was still beside her mouth, and she was smiling in a way that he would not have cared to see if he had voted the other way. “They are to be boys under fourteen for two readings more, Adrian, because of those men. I was sorry for most of what I wrote last year. I shall not be sorry for this. You may tell Mr. Brome that Mrs. Nettle intends to be very hard on the thirty-three.”
***