A Hatpin at Least

Lord Halewood had been talking since Derby, and Hester had learned to hear the wheels over him.

He sat with his back to the horses, beside Pruett, her godmother’s maid, who had made herself as narrow as she could. He was eight-and-thirty, sandy-haired and well dressed, with pale blue eyes that never rested long on a companion. He had a pleasant voice. He was using it now to describe the Winnats Pass to three women who were looking at it.

“Limestone,” he said. “Quite four hundred feet on either hand. They say a pair of lovers were murdered here for their money, and one sees why the place was chosen. There cannot be a witness for a mile.”

“There is a sheep,” said Lady Halewood.

She had both hands folded on the head of her ebony cane. Her white hair was as neat on the fourth day of the journey as it had been on the first, and her black eyes had been fixed on her stepson’s neckcloth since breakfast.

“I shall ask you again, Everard, since we are nearly there. You were going into Cheshire.”

“The Fanshawes have the measles, ma’am. All five children. I told you so at the George.”

“You told me at eleven o’clock last night, when your box was already strapped behind my coach. I call that sending word. I do not call it asking.”

“What should I have done? Kept Christmas alone in a Derby inn?” He smiled at her. “Wardlow will not turn a man from his door in such a week. He is so very much in favour of charity.”

“He did not invite you.”

“He invited you, ma’am, and I confess that surprised me more.”

Hester looked out of the window. The road climbed between two walls of grey rock, and the horses had been at a walk for a quarter of an hour. There was thin, frozen grass and a great deal of wind. The sky sat on the top of the pass like a lid, low and heavy, the colour of slate.

It was the same sum she had been doing for thirty miles, and it would not come out. Lord Halewood did not like the country. He did not like his stepmother, who received him four times a year and counted the spoons afterward. He laughed at the Climbing Boys Bill at every table in London. Yet since Derby he had looked like a man on his way to the play, with a good seat taken.

She had her own trouble, and it was nearer. In an hour she would curtsey to a man who had offered a hundred guineas for her name. She had settled what to do about that somewhere north of Leicester. She would be dull. She would fetch and carry and say “Yes, ma’am,” and keep her eyes on her plate. A companion was a piece of furniture, and nobody ever suspected the furniture.

“Hester,” said her godmother, “you are biting your glove.”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

“Do not beg my pardon. Stop.”

The pass let them out at last onto high open ground. They went four miles over it, by Lord Halewood’s reckoning, which he gave aloud at each milestone. Then the coach turned in at a pair of stone gateposts, and Hester saw Scarrow Hall.

It was long and square and grey. It was built of the same stone as the great dark edge of rock that stood up behind it, so that the house looked as if it had been cut out of the hill and pushed forward a little. There were a great many chimneys. She counted fourteen stacks before the drive turned, and thought before she could stop herself, The Earl of Soot has a good deal to sweep.

That was Mrs. Nettle, who was not asked here. Hester shut the thought away.

A butler with grey hair came down the steps, and two footmen after him. Lady Halewood was handed out first, and stood on the gravel looking the house up and down like a woman deciding whether to buy it. Hester followed with the travelling rug and her godmother’s reticule and the book that had not been opened since Barnet.

The Earl of Wardlow was standing in the open doorway with his sister beside him.

He was taller than Hester remembered, and leaner. There was grey in the black hair at his temples that she had not been near enough to see in London. He came down two steps and bowed over her godmother’s hand.

“Lady Halewood. You are welcome to Scarrow.” He said it slowly, as she had heard he said everything. “I hope the pass did not shake you.”

“I have been shaken for a hundred and sixty-five miles, Lord Wardlow. Four more made no difference.” She turned to the small fair woman in black. “Lady Cecily. It was good of you to write.”

Lady Cecily Calver curtseyed and began to say something civil about fires. She had hazel eyes and a very direct way of using them. Hester had put her in a paragraph once and had never stood within ten yards of her, and she found now that she did not want to meet those eyes at all.

Then the coach rocked on its springs behind them, and Lord Halewood stepped down onto the gravel, settling his cuffs.

Lady Cecily stopped in the middle of a word.

The colour left her face so fast that Hester took half a step toward her, thinking she would fall. She did not fall. She stood perfectly straight, with one hand closed on the fold of her skirt, as white as the frost on the lawn.

Lord Wardlow had moved too, and he had not moved toward his sister. He had come down one more step, toward the coach, and his face had changed. His sister’s free hand came out and rested on his sleeve. It was the lightest touch, and it stopped him as if she had taken him by the collar.

“I have brought you one more than you bargained for,” said Lady Halewood. Her voice was dry and quite loud. “My stepson joined my coach at Derby. I did not ask him to, and I am well aware that you did not. If you choose to send him to the inn at Castleton I shall not think the worse of you.”

“Ma’am, you are severe,” Lord Halewood said. He made a very graceful bow. “Lady Cecily. Wardlow. My friends in Cheshire are down with the measles, and I find myself a beggar at your gate. I throw myself on your mercy.”

Nobody spoke. The wind pulled at Hester’s bonnet strings. She could see a muscle working in Lord Wardlow’s jaw.

His sister answered.

“It will be dark within the hour, Lord Halewood, and I would not send anybody down the Winnats in the dark.” Her voice was thin, but it held. “Jessop, the east room for his lordship, and a fire lit. Lady Halewood, will you come in out of this wind?”

She had not said that he was welcome. Hester noticed it, and noticed that Lord Halewood had noticed, and that it had not troubled him in the least.

What is that about? asked the part of her that was paid two guineas a week for asking. She was ashamed of how quickly it had spoken. Whatever had just happened on these steps had cost that young woman something, and it was no business of the Lantern’s.

“Hester, come here,” said her godmother. “Lord Wardlow, my goddaughter, Miss Ludlow. She is the only reason I arrive anywhere with both my gloves.”

Hester curtseyed with the rug over her arm, and kept her eyes at the level of his waistcoat, as furniture should.

“Miss Ludlow and I have met,” said Lord Wardlow.

She looked up. She could not help it.

“Have you?” said Lady Halewood. “She never told me so.”

“It was in your own house, ma’am. In May.” He paused, and Hester had time to remember all of it: the crush on the stairs in Hill Street, the heat of four hundred candles, and a tall man by the mantelpiece two days after his bill was lost. Somebody had mentioned the Lantern to him. He had said that Mrs. Nettle was a spiteful spinster with a pen for a hatpin. And Lady Halewood’s companion, passing behind him with a shawl, had said that a hatpin at least held something up.

She had been pleased with it for a week. She had never supposed he had turned round far enough to see her face.

“I said a foolish thing about a hatpin,” he went on. “Miss Ludlow was good enough to tell me what a hatpin is for.”

“I am surprised you remember it, my lord.”

“I remember being answered.” His dark eyes stayed on her a moment longer than a waistcoat required. “It does not happen to me so often that I forget the occasion.”

He gave his arm to her godmother and took her up the steps. Hester followed with the rug, and found that her heart was going much too fast for a piece of furniture.

They went in through a great stone hall, the oldest part of the house. It had a fireplace a coach might have turned in. The hearth was swept bare, and there was no fire in it, though it was December and the cold struck up through her boots. Lord Wardlow walked his guests across that hall more quickly than was quite polite, and did not once look to his left.
***
They were eight at dinner, and Hester learned the other three in the drawing room beforehand.

Colonel Marsden was Lord Wardlow’s uncle on his mother’s side. He was six-and-sixty and red in the face, and he spoke as if the whole company were on the far side of a parade ground. His wife was plump and smiling, and repeated things to him at the same pitch. They were both very deaf, and appeared to be the happiest people in Derbyshire.

Mr. Brome had arrived an hour before the coach. Hester knew his name from the Commons reports. He was stout and bald, and he shook her hand as kindly as if she had been somebody.

Precedence was hard on Lady Cecily. Lord Halewood was the first gentleman among the guests, and so it was Lord Halewood who gave his arm to the lady of the house. She laid two fingers on his sleeve as she might have laid them on a hot dish, and walked in with her chin up.

Hester was put between Mrs. Marsden and Lord Halewood, across the table from Mr. Brome. It was a small table for so large a room. Lord Wardlow sat at the head of it, only one place from her, with her godmother on his right hand.

She ate her soup and was dull. She was dull through the fish as well.

“Ludlow!” said the Colonel, across the whole length of the cloth. “Would that be the Shropshire Ludlows?”

“Hertfordshire, sir. My father was vicar of Wickenden.”

“What does she say, Lettice?”

“A VICAR, Ivo. In HERTFORDSHIRE.”

“Ah! Capital,” said the Colonel, and went back to his mutton with every sign of content.

Mr. Brome smiled at her over the candles. “You must forgive us in advance, Miss Ludlow. Wardlow and I shall talk about chimneys until Twelfth Day. We cannot help it. We bring the bill in again in the spring.”

“So one hears,” said Lord Halewood. He turned the stem of his glass between two fingers. “The House is looking forward to it extremely, Wardlow. Last May a man had hardly time to finish his nap.”

At the foot of the table, Lady Cecily’s fork stopped above her plate. Lady Halewood said, “Everard, you are a guest,” in the voice she used for dogs.

Lord Wardlow put down his knife. He did not look at Lord Halewood at all.

“I am told that I was long,” he said. Then, to Hester’s dismay, he turned his head toward her. “Miss Ludlow is a clergyman’s daughter. She has sat through more long speaking than any of us. I should like her opinion. Is it so great a sin?”

She ought to have said that she really could not tell, and looked at her plate.

“My father preached for twenty minutes by his watch, my lord,” said Hester. “He held that no soul was ever saved after the twentieth, and that a good many were lost again.”

Mr. Brome laughed out loud. Mrs. Marsden laughed, and then shouted the whole of it into her husband’s ear, with the result that the Colonel laughed by himself a little later, and longest.

“I spoke for forty,” Lord Wardlow said. “By your father’s reckoning, then, I lost the House of Lords twice.”

“Only once, my lord. They cannot have come back in order to be lost a second time.”

That took the table. Even her godmother gave the short bark that served her for laughter, and Lady Cecily, who had not smiled since the gravel, smiled now. Lord Halewood laughed half a beat behind the rest, and he was watching his host while he did it.

Lord Wardlow was not angry, and that unsettled her. One corner of his mouth had moved, and he inclined his head to her as a fencer does when he has been touched.

“Once, then,” he said. “I am obliged to you. I have been over-counting my losses since May.”

Hester looked at her plate at last, a good deal too late. Her face was hot. She had come a hundred and sixty-five miles resolved to be furniture, and she had not lasted to the second course.

It was worse than that. She had just made, aloud and at his own table, very nearly the same joke that Mrs. Nettle had made in print on the Saturday after the vote. Every wit in London had made some version of it that week. It was the commonest jest of the Season. She told herself so three times while the plates were changed, and each time it sounded a little less comforting.

She said nothing more until the ladies rose, and felt him glance her way twice.
***
Her room was at the far end of the passage from her godmother’s. It was small and plain and warmer than her bedroom in Colebrooke Row had ever been. Somebody had lit the fire and put a hot brick in the bed, and she was grateful to whoever had thought of it.

Her box stood at the foot of the bed, corded as it had left Hill Street. She undid it and lifted out the grey gown and the second black one. Underneath lay the thing she had packed first.

It was an oak writing-box, a foot and a half long, with a sloped lid and a brass lock. Her father had written his sermons on it for thirty years, and his initials were cut small under the handle. He had left her very little else. She set it on the table by the candle and opened it.

Her spectacles were inside, and paper, and three pens. Beneath the tray were the notes.

She had told Mr. Garrow the truth. She kept everything. Each scrap that had ever come to Mrs. Nettle by way of Crane Court was there, tied in bundles by the quarter, with the date she had received it written on the corner. Most were scrawled on the backs of bills. Two were on good thick letter-paper, both in the same looped, easy hand and both unsigned. She had moved those two to the top after Saturday. One had told her of a patent, and the other of a lady seen in Half Moon Street.

She looked at them and thought of a white face on the steps.

Then she shut the lid, turned the key and tried the lock twice. The key went on a length of black ribbon, and the ribbon went round her neck and down inside her gown, where it lay cold against her skin. She pushed the box to the back of the wardrobe and hung the grey gown in front of it.

She had brought to this house, in her own hands, the only proof in the world that she was Mrs. Nettle. She could not have left it in Islington for Jonas to find, and it had seemed sensible on Tuesday.

It was nearly ten. Her godmother would be coming up, and would expect her drops measured and her book laid open. Hester took her candle and went out into the passage.

It ran along one side of the staircase hall, with only an oak rail between it and the drop. Sound came up that well as clearly as up a chimney. She could hear the Colonel saying good night to somebody at the top of his voice. A door closed behind him.

In the quiet that followed there was the tap of an ebony cane on the stone below, and another step beside it, slower and heavier.

“Lady Halewood,” said Lord Wardlow. His voice was unhurried and perfectly pleasant. “Before you go up. There is a thing I have often wondered, and you will forgive my asking it. You hear from half of England, and you answer all of them. Who writes your letters for you?”
***