Eight Guineas

At five in the morning the ink was so cold that it dragged on the pen.

Hester had been up since half past four. She sat at the small table with a blanket round her shoulders and one candle, and her father’s writing-box open in front of her. Her spectacles pinched her nose. The fire had gone out in the night, and she could see her breath.

She did not mind. She had written ninety-five Notebooks in a cold bedroom in Islington, and this one was a good deal warmer.

The Christmas column had been in her head since Leicester. A Christmas in mourning was a gift to a satirist, and she had only to unwrap it. She wrote quickly for an hour and then went back to the top and read it through with the pen held ready beside the lines.

A Christmas in black has this to recommend it: nobody need be told what to wear, and nobody may be asked to dance. Several gentlemen of our acquaintance are bearing up wonderfully.

That would do. So would the Countess who had put her footmen into black gloves and her lap-dog into a black ribbon, and had been heard to say that the dog felt it most. Hester had seen the ribbon herself.

There was a paragraph about a banker’s wife and a set of jet she was said not to have paid for. Hester had that from Pruett, who had it from the jeweller’s boy. She looked at it for a moment and struck it out. It hurt less than it had in Mr. Garrow’s office, and she supposed she was getting used to it.

That left the Earl.

The Earl of Soot will bring in his bill again with the spring. Their lordships are advised to bring their night-caps.

She read it twice, which she did not usually need to do. It was neat and it was fair comment. A man who spoke for forty minutes had laid himself open to it.

Yesterday that same man had walked beside her for a mile and argued quickly and well, and had stopped dead on his own drive when she caught him out about Dean Swift. He had looked pleased to be caught. She had not expected that, and she had thought about it more than once before she slept.

But she was paid for the Earl of Soot. He was worth two hundred copies a week in the Season, and the Earl always stayed in.

She made her fair copy without a blot, folded it, and closed it with a wafer. On the outside she wrote Mr. P. Garrow, Crane Court, Fleet Street, London. She had never once put the name of the paper on a direction, and she was gladder of the habit this morning than she had ever been. A dozen trades had their offices in Crane Court. Mr. Garrow might have been an attorney, or a seller of wigs.

The rough draft went under the tray of the box with the others, because she kept everything. Her spectacles went in on top. She turned the key, tried the lock twice, and dropped the black ribbon back inside the neck of her gown. Then she pushed the box behind the grey dress in the wardrobe and washed her hands in water that had a skin of ice on it. The stain on her middle finger stayed where it was.
***
She found the butler at half past eight, at the foot of the great staircase.

There was an oak table there against the wall, and on it lay a flat leather bag with a brass lock and a brass plate that said SCARROW. Jessop was winding the tall clock beside it.

“I have a packet for London, if you please,” Hester said. “Is there a post today?”

“There is a post every day but Sunday, miss. The boy rides up from Castleton at five in the afternoon. He brings our bag and takes that one down.” Jessop shut the clock case and held out his hand. “I shall see that it goes.”

She gave it to him with the direction downward. She watched his face while he turned it over, and could not have said whether he read it. He was sixty years old and had been a butler for twenty of them, and his face told her nothing whatever. He took a small key from his waistcoat, opened the bag, and slid the packet inside. The lock clicked.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Not at all, miss.”

It was done. By Thursday night it would be on Mr. Garrow’s desk, and on Saturday it would be in print, and there would be two guineas waiting in his drawer against her return. She went up to her godmother with a lighter step.

Lady Halewood was sitting up in the blue room in a cap and three shawls, drinking chocolate. She looked Hester over as she might have looked over a bill.

“You have ink on your cuff.”

“I was writing to my mother, ma’am.”

“At some length, it would seem.” The black eyes rested on her a moment more. “I do not want you until noon. Pruett is going to do something to my hair, and I dislike to be watched. Go and walk about the house.”

“Is there anything I should look for?”

“Whatever he is hiding. A man does not keep a place this size without hiding something in it. And if you meet my stepson in a passage, see which way he is going and take the other.”

So Hester walked about the house.

It was larger than it had looked from the drive, and plainer. She found a long gallery on the first floor, with a row of windows down one side and a row of dark-haired Calvers down the other. She found a billiard room that smelled of chalk and cold. From the gallery windows she could see the park, white with frost, and the sky pressing down on the Edge behind. It was the same yellowish grey as it had been coming home from church, and there was no wind at all.

She was at the end of the gallery when she heard a rattling.

It came from below, a dry scraping rattle, steady as a saw, and with it somebody whistling. She followed it down a back stair and through a stone arch, and came out into the great hall.

Somebody had nailed a sheet of sacking right across the mouth of the enormous fireplace. In front of it knelt a young man in his shirt-sleeves, with hair the colour of a new copper penny. There was a slit in the sacking, and through the slit he was feeding a long cane, hand over hand, up into the chimney. A bundle of more canes lay beside him on the flags.

“Morning, miss!” he said, without stopping. “Mind your gown. It comes through the cloth, do what you will.”

“Good morning. I heard the noise. I did not mean to interrupt you.”

“You’ll not interrupt me. I can talk and do this. I can talk and do most things, Mr. Jessop says, and it’s not meant kindly.” He grinned at her over his shoulder. “You’ll be Lady Halewood’s young lady. I’m Ned Varley.”

“Hester Ludlow.” She came nearer, holding her skirt back. “What is it that you are doing?”

“Sweeping the flue, miss. From down here, with my feet on the floor, where feet belong.” He pulled a fresh cane from the bundle and showed her the end of it. There was a brass socket there, cut with a screw. He set it against the end of the cane that stuck out of the sacking and twisted, and the two became one. “That’s all the secret. Hollow cane, three foot to a length, and each one screws into the next. There’s a head on the first, made of whalebone. It goes up shut and opens like an umbrella when you pull the cord. Then you work it.” He pushed and drew, and the rattle began again, far up inside the stone. “She’ll go round a bend, and all. That’s what folk won’t believe till they see it.”

“How many lengths does this chimney want?”

“Two-and-twenty. It’s a great old wide thing with a bad turn in it.” He nodded at the bundle. “I’ve seventeen up.”

Hester watched the cane go in. She had written a good deal about this machine, one way and another. She had never seen one. It was an awkward thought, and she set it aside to look at later.

“And it does the work as well as a boy?” she said.

“Better. A brush doesn’t get frightened. A brush doesn’t stick.” He screwed on the eighteenth length. “I should know, miss. I were one.”

“A brush?”

He laughed so loudly that it rang off the roof. “A boy! A climbing boy. In Sheffield, four year.”

She looked at him. He was nineteen or twenty, wiry and quick, with good shoulders and a face that had plainly never held a grudge for longer than a morning. She could not put him inside a chimney.

“How old were you?”

“Six, when my mother’s man sold me. She were dead, and he’d no use for me. The sweep gave him two guineas.” Ned said it as cheerfully as he had said the rest. “They rub your knees and elbows with brine, see, by a hot fire, to make them hard. That’s the worst of it, the first month. After that you don’t feel so much. I’ve knees like a saddle to this day. I’d show you, only Mr. Jessop would have my hide.”

“I shall take your word for the knees,” said Hester, and he grinned again.

“I were small, that was my trouble. They kept me on the nine-inch flues because I’d fit. Then in the year nine, his lordship came through Sheffield. He weren’t the Earl then. He went into every sweep’s yard in the town, asking what they’d take for a boy’s indentures, and they laughed at him. My master said eight guineas for me. He meant it for a joke. Nobody gives eight guineas for a thing they can get for two.”

“And Lord Wardlow paid it.”

“Counted it out on the lid of the copper, miss, and never said a word. I thought I’d been sold to a worse one.” He shook his head at his ten-year-old self. “He fetched me here in a chaise. They fed me in the kitchen till I were sick, and then they fed me again. I’ve been here ever since. I can read, now, and cast up a column. Going on ten year.”

Hester found that she had her hands gripped together. She loosened them.

It did him credit. She would say so freely. A rich man might buy one boy for eight guineas and still mean to make his fortune out of the rest, and one kind act did not make a paragraph false.

She was being fair, and she noticed that it took more effort than usual.

“I have heard it said in London,” she began carefully, “that his lordship has an interest in this machine. That he owns a share in the patent, and so stands to profit if the bill is carried.”

Ned stopped with the nineteenth cane in his hand. For the first time since she had come in, he stared at her.

“Profit? Him?” He was too astonished even to laugh. “Miss, he gives them away.”

“Gives them?”

“Forty, up to now. Forty of these, brush and canes and cloth and all, in a deal crate with the carriage paid. Any parish that writes to say it’ll keep a man to work one, it gets one. Sheffield’s had six. Chesterfield, Derby, Bakewell. There’s one gone as far as Leicester.” He jabbed the cane toward the sacking. “I pack them. I’ve packed thirty of the forty with these hands, in straw. I see the maker’s bills when the crates come up from London, because I check them off for Mr. Jessop. His lordship pays the price that’s printed, same as you would. He’s never had a penny out of one of them. He’s a good few hundred pound the other way.”

“He owns no part of it at all?”

“He owns that one there, and the spare in the stable loft.” Ned’s forehead creased. “Who told you he did?”

“It was only said. In London.”

“London,” said Ned, as a man might speak of a neighbour’s dog. He turned back to the hearth and screwed the cane home rather hard.

Hester stood where she was. The flags were very cold under her boots.

She did not need the box to remember the words. They had been printed on Saturday, the ninth of May, three days before the peers voted. Lord W— loves the climbing boy so well, one hears, that he has bought the machine which is to replace him. It was twenty-one words, and it would fit on a calling card. People had said it over to one another on the stairs in Hill Street while she carried shawls behind them, and she had gone home that week as pleased as she had ever been in her life.

The bill had been lost by five votes.

She had asked about it. She had told Mr. Garrow so, nine days ago, with some heat. She had asked a patent agent’s clerk, who could not say, and her godmother’s man of business, who did not know. Nobody would tell her it was false. She had taken that for proof, because the sentence was so good and it was already Wednesday.

Her father would have known the difference between a thing nobody had denied and a thing that was true. He had taught it to her himself, at the vicarage table.

She had always believed she was hard only on those who had earned it. She had been hard on this man, and she had been wrong, and it had cost him his bill. She did not know yet what it had cost the boys.

“You’ve gone white, miss,” Ned said. “It’s the soot. It gets in the throat. Stand over by the door.”

“I am quite well.” Her voice came out thin. She tried for something ordinary to say. “Why is this chimney swept, when there is never a fire in it?”

For the first time, Ned did not answer at once.

“It’s done every year, this week,” he said. “Fire or no fire.” He bent to the bundle for the twentieth cane, and kept his back to her, and whistled no more.
***
“Well?” said Lady Halewood at noon. “What is he hiding?”

“He gives away sweeping machines, ma’am. To parishes. Forty of them, at his own cost.”

“I asked what he was hiding, and you tell me what he advertises.”

“I do not think he has advertised it. I never heard of it in London.”

Her godmother turned her cane slowly on the carpet. “Then he is a fool or a Christian, and I had not thought him either. Find my place. We were at the shipwreck.”

Hester read aloud for two hours and could not afterward have said who was drowned. At three o’clock she looked up to turn a page, and saw the first flakes come down past the window. They were large and slow and very many. By the time she had finished the chapter she could no longer see the park wall.

It was after four before she was free. She went to her room and locked the door, and took the oak box out of the wardrobe.

The note lay where she had put it, at the top of the bundle. It was on thick, good letter-paper, in a looped and easy hand, and in the corner she had written 2 May 1818. There was no name to it.

Mrs. Nettle may care to know that Lord W—, who is so warm a friend to the climbing boy, has lately bought a share in the patent of the very machine his bill would oblige every householder in England to employ.

Somebody had written that who knew it was a lie, or had not cared. She had made it shorter, and better, and sent it out to do its work. The lie had been his, whoever he was. The wit had been hers, and the wit had done the harm.

She put the note back and turned the key.

Then she thought of the night-caps.

She stood quite still in the middle of the room. There was a packet in the hall, directed in her hand, and in it was one more neat little sentence about the Earl of Soot. It was fair comment, she told herself again. It was nothing to the patent. It was only a joke about a long speech.

She did not want it printed. She did not want to be paid for it.

She took her candle and went down.

The staircase hall was full of cold. The front door stood half open on a whirl of white, and Jessop was holding it against the wind. Inside it stood a boy of twelve or so, caked with snow to the thighs. Lord Wardlow was beside him in a greatcoat, with snow melting on his shoulders and in the black of his hair.

“He got as far as the second bend, my lord,” the boy was saying. “I seen him from the top. The pony were in to its girth. He shouted up he’d not try it, and he turned round.”

“He was right.” Lord Wardlow spoke slowly, and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “So were you, Dick, to come and tell me. Go round to the kitchen and get dry. Tell your grandfather I shall want him at first light.”

The boy went. Jessop put his weight to the door and shut the storm out, and the hall was suddenly quiet.

Lord Wardlow turned and saw her on the stairs.

“Miss Ludlow.” He paused, as he did before most things. “I am sorry. Jessop tells me you had a packet for London. There will be no post tonight. The boy could not get up the Winnats.”

“And tomorrow, my lord?”

“If this falls all night, I think not tomorrow. Nor for some days.” He glanced at the leather bag on the table. “It will be safe where it is. There is a letter of my own in there, to keep it company. They shall both go down the first hour the road is open. Was it pressing?”

She could have asked for it back. She could have said that she wished to add a line. Then Jessop would have unlocked the bag and handed her the packet across his master’s sleeve, with Mr. Garrow’s name and Crane Court uppermost. Lord Wardlow’s solicitor had stood in Crane Court a fortnight ago, in the middle of the Lantern’s office.

“It was nothing that will not keep, my lord,” said Hester.

He bowed and went away toward the library, shaking the wet from his coat. Jessop took up his lamp and followed.

She stayed on the stairs with her candle. The bag lay on the oak table with its brass lock shining. In it, side by side, were his letter and hers. Hers held the Earl of Soot and his night-caps. It would lie there, in his house, for as long as the snow chose.

On Saturday, for the first time in a year and nine months, there would be no Notebook. There would be no two guineas either. And she could not get that packet out without telling somebody why.
***