Aged Eight

There was no snow in the sunk fence this year, and Hester stopped on the track to look down into it.

It was five feet deep and faced with stone. Frost stood white on the grass at the bottom. She was a little surprised that she had ever come out of it alive.

“To the armpits,” Adrian said beside her. “You have it in evidence.”

“I was a good deal shorter then. I had not been made a countess.”

Dick Heathcote had gone on ahead with the empty handcart. It was Christmas Eve, and the twenty-two parcels were delivered. Hester had tied them on Wednesday with Cecily and her own mother, in the still-room, with the cloves. Bagshaw’s had wanted five sixpences this year.

She had her hand flat against the front of her cloak. She had kept it there for the better part of the mile.

At Hannah Eyre’s she had sat on the bed, as she always did, while Sam shewed her the wooden horse. He was four now, and loud, and he had not barked since the spring. Adrian had been out at the pump with the bucket. She had bent to look at the horse’s new tail, and something under her ribs had turned over, quick and light, like a fish in a pool.

She had done her accounts on the way home. She was good at accounts, and they came out the same three times.

“Adrian. I told you at Martinmas that I wondered.”

“You did.”

“I am not wondering now. It moved, half an hour ago, in Hannah’s cottage. I have counted. It will be May.”

She had braced herself to wait. She knew his pauses as she knew her own handwriting, and she had long ago stopped minding them.

There was none.

“Then I shall be five-and-thirty, and the happiest man in Derbyshire,” he said. “Are you well? Are you cold? You have walked two miles on a frozen track, and I let you.”

“You did not let me. I walked.”

“So you did.” He had taken both her hands. His own were not steady. “Hester. I am glad. I am so glad that I cannot stand still. And I am frightened. I had better say so within the minute. I shall be frightened until May, and you will have to bear with it.”

“I am frightened too. I thought that I had better say so on a hill, since you argue best there.”

He laughed, and it shook. Then he kissed her, on the open track, in sight of every window of the Hall. His nose was very cold.

“May I tell Cecily?”

“You may. I shall tell my mother. And I shall tell my godmother myself, because she will say that she arranged it, and I should like to see her face.”

They went on. He walked on the side of the ditch.

The dower house stood in the low fields, with smoke going up from two of its chimneys. Her mother and Naomi had been in it since April. He had asked her about that in March, standing up, in the book-room in Brook Street. She had said no. He had asked again in a week. The house had stood empty for eleven years, he said, and a roof wanted living under. Scarrow Row had no vicar’s wife nearer than Castleton, and he knew of a lady who had done that work for twenty-six years. She might have it rent-free for her life, or she might pay him a shilling a year, if Hester thought it more fitting. He would not mention it to Mrs. Ludlow at all unless Hester said that he might.

She had said that he might. Her mother had the Row now, and went round it on Tuesdays with a basket.

Mrs. Nettle’s guineas went to Derby, where Jonas was at school. There were three of them a week since Michaelmas. Mr. Garrow had written that a countess sold four hundred copies more than a spinster, and that he was not a man to be ungrateful. He had added that last Saturday’s Notebook ran six lines over, as usual.

It had not missed a Saturday. All London knew whose it was. She had supposed that the tables would go quiet when she sat down at them. They had grown more careful, and no less talkative. Lord Corsley looked at his plate before he ate from it. Lady Merrow had not ordered a gown in ten months.

And since June it had been the law of England. No child under fourteen went up a flue. The bill had passed its third reading on a warm night, with the windows open, and she had not been hard on anybody that week at all.
***
By six o’clock the great hall was full.

Hester had never seen it so. She had crossed it a hundred times in the year, and it had always been cold stone and a swept hearth. Tonight there were candles in every sconce. The twenty-two families had come up from the Row in their Sunday clothes, and the whole household stood along the wall. Sampson Bagshaw and Abel Frith were side by side, not speaking, in great comfort.

Cecily stood in the middle of the floor with a list in her hand. She was in dark blue, and she was telling Jessop where the ale was to go.

“I ought to be doing that,” Hester had said to her on Monday.

“You ought not. I have kept this Christmas since I was twelve. You may have it when I am tired of it, which will be never. Go and write something cutting.”

Lady Halewood sat beside her in the best chair, which had been carried in from the library. She had come up the Winnats on Saturday, in her fur tippet, declaring that the place was still all rock and wind. She had her cane across her knees, and Hester’s mother on her other hand.

“She had a letter from that Denham in March,” Lady Halewood was saying. “Four sides of it. He had been misled. He had been young. His mother had been ill.”

“Poor man,” said Mrs. Ludlow mildly.

“Poor fiddlestick. Tell her what you wrote, Lady Cecily.”

Cecily did not look up from her list. “I sent it back with a line at the foot. I said I was sure he would understand what I owed to my sister.”

Lady Halewood gave her bark. Naomi, behind the chair, laughed until she had to hold on to it. She had done the Earl of Soot’s voice for him at dinner on Tuesday, at his own request. He had said gravely that it was too fast.

“WHAT IS THE JOKE, LETTICE?”

“MR. DENHAM, IVO.”

“Who?” said the Colonel. Nobody thought that he needed telling.

Hester went to the hearth.

The mason had been at the chimney-breast on Monday. He was Joseph Wain, whose father had broken through a schoolroom wall with bars. A line was cut in the stone at the height of a man’s eyes, deep and plain.

TOM PICKERING, AGED 8, 1796.

Above it was a round bed, three inches across and half an inch deep.

Ned Varley stood beside it in a brown coat with a board of lime putty in one hand and a small trowel in the other. He had been under-steward since Lady Day. The calf pocket-book stuck out of his coat, and his hair was wetted flat. He had swept this flue himself a week ago, though he had two men under him now who might have done it. It had taken two-and-twenty lengths.

Adrian came across the hall to them. He came straight through the middle of it, and he looked at the hearth the whole way.

The talk stopped. The Scarrow people knew how to wait for him.

He took the brass out of his pocket. He held it in his open palm a moment, under the candles. It was worn smooth at the rim, and there were two holes in it for thread.

“I picked this up in this house when I was eleven,” he said. He breathed at the full stop. “It has a sweep’s name on it. The boy who wore it has his own name there, in the stone. I have carried the one for three-and-twenty years. I should like them both to stay here now, where people can read them. Ned.”

He held it out. Ned put down the trowel and took the plate in both hands.

“I wore one of these,” Ned said. He was not loud, for once. “Same name. It were on my cap four year.”

“I know that you did. That is why I asked you.”

Ned buttered the bed with the putty. He set the brass into it and pressed with the heel of his hand, and ran his thumb round the rim to bring it level. He wiped the stone clean with his cuff. Then he stood back and looked at it, with his ears scarlet.

“She’s true,” he said. “She’ll not come out of that.”

Jessop had the black end of last year’s log on a salver. It had been kept all the twelvemonth in the cellar, and last year it had burned in the library. Adrian took it and held it to a candle until it caught. Then he knelt on the hearthstone, where no fire had been lit at Christmas since the year 1796, and put the flame to the bark of a new ash butt.

It ran along the log. The smoke went up straight and clean.

“She draws,” Ned said. “I told you she’d draw.”

Adrian stood. He looked up the chimney-breast, at the brass and the line beneath it. He waited, and Hester saw that he was waiting because he chose to.

“Tom Pickering,” he said. “A happy Christmas to you all.”

“CAPITAL!” shouted the Colonel, a full second late, and the hall broke into noise.

Hester found his hand. It was warm, and it was open.

“You looked to your left,” she said. “The first day I came here, you walked us across this hall as fast as you decently could, and you would not.”

“There was nothing there then that I could bear to read.”

Hannah Eyre had brought Sam to the hearth to see. He stood with the wooden horse under his arm and spelled out the T. Mr. Dakin, the curate, had got up the pass for once. He told Mrs. Ludlow with great care that the hoar-frost was scattered like ashes and the snow given like wool. Hester had it from Naomi that he had been practising.

Jonas had Ned by the sleeve.

“His lordship said that you would shew me your knees.”

“Did he?” Ned glanced at Jessop, and grinned. “Well, I’m under-steward now. Mr. Jessop can’t have my hide. Come behind that screen.”

They were gone for a minute. Jonas came back with his eyes round.

“Like a saddle,” he told Hester. “Exactly like. Padgett will never believe it.”

“Then you must not hit him for it.”

“I shall not need to. I am taller than he is now.”
***
“Paper,” said Lady Halewood. She struck the flags with her cane. “I have sat in this draught for an hour being edified. I will not play at cards on the eve of Christmas. You know the rhymes. Frost, lost, quill, will. Ten minutes by Lord Wardlow’s watch, and anybody who does not scan shall be laughed at.”

“FROST, IVO. LOST. QUILL. WILL.”

“Same as last year? Capital. I’ve a fox left over.”

Cecily sent for pencils. They wrote on their knees round the new fire, eight of them and Jonas, with the Row looking on over its ale. Hester sat on a stool with her spectacles on. She wore them everywhere now. Adrian stood at the corner of the chimney-breast and wrote against the stone.

The Colonel’s fox was a year older and no faster. Mrs. Marsden had kept her robin. Mr. Brome’s was upon the third reading, and it rhymed lost with what the other side had done, and he was cheered for it by people who had not followed a word.

“Mine,” said Jonas. He stood up to read it, as his father would have made him.

“‘Old Caesar never built a bridge in frost.
I looked it up, to see if I had lost.
My sister pays my Latin with her quill;
I’ll pay her back in Greek. She says I will.’”

“He scans,” said Lady Halewood. “The boy eats, and he scans. Dorothea, you may keep him. Now mine, and I shall not read it twice.”

She unfolded the sheet and held it at arm’s length. The red case was in her lap, unopened.

“‘I gave a goddaughter to rock and frost.
I told her I should miss her. I have lost
The only hand that ever cut my quill.
I do not say I’m sorry. Nor I will.’”

“Ma’am,” said Hester. She had to stop, as she had the year before.

“Do not gape, child. It was the rhyme. I came a hundred and sixty-five miles to see how you wear my gloves, and you wear them very well. Lord Wardlow, you have been smirking at that wall for five minutes.”

“I was told to scan, ma’am. I was not told to be prudent.”

He read it at his own pace.

“‘My wife has thirty-three peers in the frost;
She prints each name, for fear that one be lost.
I married her to turn aside her quill.
It has not turned. I do not think it will.’”

Mr. Brome roared. Cecily dropped her pencil. Bagshaw, who had caught only the word wife, laughed for company, and Frith laughed a moment later so as not to be behind.

“It was a term of the marriage,” Hester said, when she could be heard. “The fourth. He agreed to it in a very cold gallery.”

“And yours, Lady Wardlow?” said Mr. Brome. “I hope that it is impertinent.”

“It is not. I have been impertinent since March, and I am resting.”

She had written it in three minutes, and she had not bitten her lip over it. She looked up once at the brass.

“‘This hearth has kept, each Christmas, its own frost,
For three-and-twenty years, for one boy lost.
Tonight it burns. I lay aside my quill.
His name will say the rest. It always will.’”

Nobody laughed, and it was not that kind of quiet. Mrs. Orme wiped her eyes with her apron. Ned looked hard at the fire.

Adrian did not say anything. He came away from the wall and stood behind her stool, and put his hand on her shoulder, and left it there.

“WHAT DID SHE SAY, LETTICE?”

Mrs. Marsden told him, every line, at the top of her voice. The Colonel listened to the end. Then he blew his nose like a trumpet and said that it was a capital thing in a woman.

“I have a piece of news,” Hester said to her godmother, low, under the noise. “It is for May. I have told my husband and nobody else.”

The black eyes went over her, from her face to the hand that lay on the front of her gown.

“I knew it on Saturday. You got out of that coach like a woman carrying eggs.” Lady Halewood turned her cane on the flags. “I shall be godmother, naturally. I do not ask. I have had some practice, and I arrange it rather well.”

The great door opened on a draught that bent every candle.

It was old Isaac Heathcote, with his crook, and there was white on the shoulders of his coat. He pulled his hat off to the company.

“Beg pardon, my lord. I thought you’d wish to know. It’s coming over Mam Tor, and it’s coming thick. Winnats’ll be shut by morning.”

“Then we shall want the hay sledges at first light,” Adrian said. “And somebody had better find Ned a pole.”

“I have nine sacks of flour and six ton of coal,” said Cecily. “It may do as it pleases.”

“I was asked until Twelfth Day,” Lady Halewood said. “I shall stay until Twelfth Day.”

Jonas wanted to know if it would be as deep as a sunk fence.

Hester went to the door with her husband and stood on the top step in the cold. The first flakes were coming down past the lamps, large and slow and very many. Beyond the park wall the dip of the pass had gone grey, and the road to London with it.

Behind them the fire was burning in the great hall. Somebody had begun to sing, badly, and she thought that it was the Barber brothers.

“We are shut in,” she said.

“With a deaf colonel and a great deal of mutton.”

“And one desk.”

“It is nine feet long. I think that we shall manage.”

She put her inky hand into his. The snow came on over the Winnats, and fell on the chapel roof and the fourteen chimney stacks, and on the dug path between. Nobody in the house minded it at all.