Wool, Then Ashes

The road down to Castleton was white with frost and as hard as iron, and they took it at a walk.

Wardlow had ordered both carriages for half past nine. His sister went in the first with Lady Halewood and the Marsdens. He rode in the second with Brome, Miss Ludlow and Halewood, because he would not put Halewood in a closed carriage with Cecily, and he did not think the man should be left alone with anybody else’s conversation.

It was four miles to St. Edmund’s. Nobody said much. The Winnats closed over them and let them go again, and through the glass the sky had a thick, still look he did not care for. He had said eleven words to Halewood since yesterday afternoon. Every one of them had been civil, because he had given Cecily his word.

She had come to the library before breakfast to see that he kept it.

“He stays until Tuesday,” she had said. “There is no travelling on a Sunday, and I will not have it told in London that I could not sit in a room with him for two days. On Tuesday you may lend him your own horses to the Sheffield coach.”

“I should prefer tonight.”

“I know you would. Tuesday, Adrian.”

So it was to be Tuesday. He would carry the man’s box down the steps himself.

The Scarrow pew was a square oak box at the front of the nave, with benches on three sides, and from his corner of it he could see every one of his guests without turning his head. He had come to church to say his prayers. He found, by the end of the first lesson, that he was doing a sum instead.

He began with Lady Halewood.

She sat bolt upright with her cane planted between her feet and her black eyes on the pulpit, daring it to bore her. She was sharp enough to be Mrs. Nettle. She had proved that again last night at the foot of his stairs. He had asked who wrote her letters, and she had looked him up and down.

“I write my own, Lord Wardlow,” she had said. “I have never found anybody I could trust to be rude enough. Hester does the cards and the tradesmen. Why? Do you want a secretary? You cannot have mine.”

Then she had laughed at him and gone up to bed.

It was the answer of a woman with nothing to hide, or of one who hid things very well. He had her letter of acceptance in his desk, and he had looked at it again at midnight. The hand was large and square and it wasted nothing. A person who wrote like that might turn a paragraph. But the Notebook had come out every Saturday for a year and nine months without missing one, and a column like that took patience, with drafts written and crossed through and written again. He could not picture Lady Halewood crossing anything through.

Halewood sat beside her with his hat on his knee and his pale eyes on the ceiling.

There was malice enough in him for all ninety-four columns, and for ninety-four more. Wardlow had known that since the April of last year, when he had told the man to his face why Cecily had refused him. Halewood had smiled then exactly as he had smiled on the gravel yesterday. But the sum was against him. He kept his own rooms. He had dined in Hill Street on two of the eleven evenings and no more. And Wardlow had never heard that he had done one week’s steady work in his life, let alone ninety-four.

Halewood wished Wardlow harm, that was certain, and it did not make him Mrs. Nettle. Wardlow made himself keep the two things apart.

The companion was left.

She was on the bench across from him, sharing a prayer book with his aunt. She wore a plain grey gown. The thumb of her right glove had been darned, neatly, in thread that did not quite match. She was tall for a woman, with brown hair put away under a plain bonnet, and she had kept her eyes down since the first hymn.

He had thought about her for some time after the hatpin, in May. He had thought about her again last night. They cannot have come back in order to be lost a second time. It was quick, and what was more it was exact; she had found the flaw in his arithmetic before he had finished speaking. He had lain awake over it, and then he had made himself be sensible.

Half of London had made that joke about his forty minutes. A quick tongue was common enough. What Mrs. Nettle had, besides wit, was knowledge. She knew which countess had quarrelled with her milliner and which bishop had dined where. People told such things to their equals. Nobody told them to a vicar’s daughter in a darned glove. She was the one sent out of the room for a shawl just as the talk grew interesting, and she had not a shilling. The Notebook was written by somebody with a place in the world.

He crossed her off, and was a little sorry to do it.

The vicar was away at Buxton with his chest. The curate, Mr. Dakin, was a young man with a heavy cold, and he had chosen his text to suit the weather. He climbed into the pulpit, sneezed, and opened the great Bible.

“The hundred and forty-seventh Psalm,” said Mr. Dakin thickly. “The sixteenth verse. ‘He giveth snow like ashes: he scattereth the hoar-frost like wool.’”

Across the pew, Miss Ludlow’s lips moved.

“Like wool,” she said, under her breath. “The hoar-frost is like ashes.”

Wardlow doubted that anybody else heard it. His uncle would not have heard a cannon. She did not look up as she said it. He did not believe she knew she had spoken. A wrong word had gone past her and she had put it right, in church, as another woman might straighten a picture on a wall.

Mr. Dakin said it wrongly three times more in the course of his sermon. Each time her mouth tightened at the corner, and each time Wardlow found himself waiting for it.

He knew that itch. It kept him at his desk until midnight, moving one clause from the front of a sentence to the back. He had not expected to see it on the face of a lady’s companion. He did not put her back into the sum, but he did not think so easily of the darned glove after that.

Outside, the churchyard was full of his own people in their Sunday black. Sampson Bagshaw and Abel Frith were standing a yard apart by the lych-gate, and they took their hats off at the same moment.

“Seven inches at the mark last night, my lord,” Bagshaw said.

“It’ll be nine by Tuesday,” said Frith. He did not look at Bagshaw as he said it, but he had said it, and three days ago he would have choked first.

“Good,” Wardlow said. “Then keep at it.”
***
The horses made hard work of the last hill. It was a mile from the park gate to the Hall door, most of it uphill, and where the drive lay in the shadow of the wall the frost had not lifted all day. At the gate Wardlow put the glass down and told his coachman to stop.

“I shall walk up,” he said. “It will spare them my weight.”

“I should like to walk too, my lord, if I may.” It was Miss Ludlow. She already had her hand on the strap. “I have been four days in a coach. And my godmother made me bring thick boots. I should be sorry to have carried them a hundred and sixty-five miles for nothing.”

Halewood raised his eyebrows and said that he admired energy in others. Brome said that at his figure he was better as ballast. Wardlow handed her down onto the frozen gravel, and the two carriages went on at a crawl, with the pair of them walking beside the rear wheel in plain sight of every window.

They went fifty yards in silence. She walked well, with a long stride that did not ask him to shorten his.

“You were kind to my curate,” he said.

“My lord?”

“Wool. Then ashes.”

Her colour came up at once. “Did I say it aloud? I beg your pardon. It is a vicarage habit. My father used to get the text wrong on purpose, to learn which of us was awake.”

“And were you always awake?”

“I was the eldest. I had to be.”

He considered that for a few paces. Then he said what he had got out of the carriage to say.

“In May, you took Mrs. Nettle’s part.”

“I took the hatpin’s part.” She kept her eyes on the drive. “It had been insulted, and it was not there to answer.”

“You said that it held something up. I have wondered since what you meant.”

“A looking-glass, I suppose. My father said that satire was the only sermon the rich would sit through to the end.”

“Your father preached with his name on the church door.” He paused, hunting for the rest. “A looking-glass is a fine thing, Miss Ludlow. But whoever holds this one takes care to stand behind it.”

“Would you like your reflection any better for seeing her hand?”

“I should know whom to answer.”

“You may answer in the House of Lords, my lord, which she may not. You have a seat there, and a great many acres, and I daresay a solicitor.” She did look at him then. Her eyes were grey, and a good deal less meek than they had been in church. “A peer who cannot bear a paragraph should not ask for a law. You wish to tell every householder in England how his chimney is to be swept. The householders may surely tell you what they think of it.”

“They may. They do. They tell me at my own door, to my face, and I know their names.” He heard his voice sharpen and did not check it. “A writer who will not sign her name has not earned an opinion of my courage.”

“Her name? You are very certain that it is a lady.”

“I said ‘spinster’ in May, and you corrected me only as to the hatpin.”

That surprised a laugh out of her. It was short, and she bit it off, but he had heard it.

“Perhaps she cannot afford to sign,” she said. “A name costs some people more than it costs others.”

“Then let her not spend other people’s.”

She did not answer that. It was the first time in two days she had not had something ready, and he had expected to enjoy it. He found he did not much. They walked ten yards with only the wheels grinding beside them.

“If what she prints is true—” Miss Ludlow began.

“And if it is not?”

“Then somebody ought to say so.”

“To whom? I cannot leave my card on a pen-name.”

“No.” She frowned at the frost. “No, I see that. That is a real difficulty.” Then her chin came up again. “But you will not tell me that all satire is cruelty. Would you have silenced Dean Swift?”

“Swift put his name to—”

“He did not, my lord. He did not put it to the Drapier’s Letters. The government offered three hundred pounds to anybody who would give him up.” She said it very steadily. “Nobody took it, I believe.”

He stopped walking. She went on two paces and had to turn.

He had honestly forgotten that, and she had it by heart, sum and all, as she had the psalm. He ought to have been annoyed. He was aware instead of a most unsuitable pleasure, the kind he took in a hard question at the sough.

“Swift was defending a whole kingdom against bad coin,” he said. “He was not counting the gowns in a lady’s wardrobe.”

“The gowns may be bad coin too, when the weaver who made them is on the parish.”

“Then let her write about the weaver.”

“Who would buy the paper?” she said, and he had no answer to that either.

They had come to the top of the hill. The carriages were drawing up at the steps, and Jessop was coming down. Wardlow realised that he had been talking for the best part of a mile, quickly, without once building a sentence beforehand. He could not remember when he had last done that with a stranger.

She had realised something too, for she was flushed, and she had the look of a person who has stayed too long at a party.

“You argue a great deal better walking than you are said to do standing, my lord,” she said. “You should make your speech on a hill.”

“The House of Lords is on very flat ground.”

“That is a pity.” She curtseyed, and went quickly up the steps to take her godmother’s rug.

He stood and watched her go in. He told himself that he had learned nothing from the last mile that was of any use to his sum. That was true, and he did not regret the mile at all.
***
“A word, Wardlow,” said Brome. “Out here, if you can bear the cold. I do not want it said over the sirloin.”

They walked along the terrace on the south side of the house. Brome had his hands behind him and his bald head sunk into his collar. He was fifty-eight, and he had sat in the Commons for half his life, and he had never once told Wardlow a comfortable lie.

“I read your eleven pages last night, in bed.”

“And?”

“They are sound. I could swear to every word before a magistrate.” Brome sighed. “And if you read them to the Lords in the spring, you will lose by more than five.”

Wardlow said nothing. He had known it. It was a different thing to hear it in another man’s voice.

“I shall get it through my House again. That is my trade, and I do not ask you to help me with it. But I cannot carry yours.” Brome stopped and faced him. “Those men are not against you. I have dined with half of them. They would as soon children were not burned as otherwise. They voted to keep their chimneys as they are because nothing you said gave them a reason to put themselves out. You gave them the number of boys, and they sat there not caring. You have to make them feel it, Wardlow. Give them one boy.”

Wardlow’s left hand had closed at his side, around a brass plate that was a hundred feet away on his desk.

There was one boy. He was buried outside the chapel wall, not three hundred yards from this terrace. On Wednesday it would be twenty-two years. Wardlow had never spoken his name in the House. He was not sure he could get it out before the House, or before anybody.

“I do not know how it is done,” he said at last.

“I think you do. I had the glass down, coming up the drive.” Brome’s kind, plain face creased. “I did not catch the words, but I heard the tune. You were not making sentences for that young woman. You were talking like a man who meant it, and fast.”

“I was angry.”

“Then be angry on paper. Good God, you have cause.” He clapped Wardlow on the arm. “Think about it. I am going in to the fire.”

Wardlow did not follow him. He stood at the end of the terrace with the cold coming through his coat and looked out over the park.

There was a man coming down off Scarrow Edge with two dogs. In front of him came the sheep, the whole hill flock, moving in a grey stream toward the low fields by the dower house. It was Isaac Heathcote, who had been shepherd here since before Wardlow was born. Heathcote did not work on the Sabbath for anything short of a death.

Wardlow went down the terrace steps and across the grass to meet him.

“Isaac. It is Sunday.”

“Aye, my lord, and I’ll answer for it.” The old man took off his hat and put it on again. “I’d not have fetched them down today for owt less. Look yonder.”

He pointed west with his crook. Beyond the dip where the Winnats lay, the long broken back of Mam Tor stood up against the sky. The cloud above it had changed since morning. It was lower and thicker, and it had turned a dull yellowish grey, like old wool. Nothing in it moved.

“I’ve not seen it stand like that sin‘ the year fourteen,” Heathcote said. “That’s snow, my lord. By tomorrow night, and a great deal of it.”

Wardlow looked at the sky, and then at the one road that led out under it.

“And the pass?”

“Winnats?” The shepherd shook his head slowly. “Winnats’ll fill to the top. Whoever’s under your roof tomorrow night, my lord, you’d best like their company. You’ll not be shut of them this side of Christmas.”
***