Half Moon Street

Lord Wardlow’s side of the desk was empty at nine, and it was still empty at eleven.

Hester sat on her own side of the inkstand with the fourth page of his speech in front of her. He had passed her four since Tuesday morning, one at a time, and she had been as unkind to each as he had asked. He argued every cut, slowly, and gave way when she was right and not a moment before. She had found that she liked it a great deal.

She had gone over the fourth page last night. It was the one about the brine. She had struck out nineteen words and written three in the margin, and now there was nobody to hand it to.

“Our host has deserted us,” Lord Halewood said from the armchair. He had sat in the same one yesterday, turned to the same angle. “I asked Jessop where he was, and Jessop said ‘Out, my lord.’ There are two feet of snow at the door. One would like to know where a man goes, out.”

“He is out, Halewood,” said Mr. Brome. He did not lift his eyes from his book. “He will be in to dinner.”

“You are as good as Jessop. Is it a saint’s day in Derbyshire, the twenty-third? I see the servants are all walking about on tiptoe. Even the red-headed boy has stopped whistling.”

“WHAT DOES HE SAY, LETTICE?”

“HE ASKS WHERE WARDLOW IS, IVO.” Mrs. Marsden’s round face was not smiling, for once. “IT IS THE TWENTY-THIRD.”

The Colonel looked at his wife. Then he looked at the fire, and said nothing at all. In four days Hester had not known him to do that.

Lord Halewood glanced from one to the other of them with lazy interest. Then his pale eyes came round to the desk.

“Miss Ludlow will know. She has become quite his lordship’s right hand.”

“I know nothing, my lord. I am answering a wine merchant.”

“So you were yesterday. He must be a very pressing wine merchant.”

She was saved by a step in the passage. Lady Cecily came to the open door in a holland apron, with a ball of string in her hand. She did not come in. She had not come into any room where Lord Halewood was sitting since Saturday, except to dine.

“Miss Ludlow, can your godmother spare you? I have twenty-two parcels to tie before dark, and Mrs. Orme has the mince pies.”

“With all my heart,” said Hester, and shut the fourth page into her blotting-book.
***
The still-room was a narrow stone closet off the kitchen passage. It had shelves of jars to the ceiling and bunches of lavender hung from a beam, and it smelled of cloves. There was no fire in it, but the kitchen range was on the other side of the wall and the warmth came through the stones.

Everything was laid ready on the long table. There was a chest of tea, a sugar loaf with the nippers beside it, a bolt of red flannel, a crock of raisins and a row of tobacco twists. At the end sat a saucer of new sixpences.

“One parcel for each house on Scarrow Row,” Lady Cecily said. “A quarter of tea, two pounds of sugar, three yards of flannel, a pound of raisins and a twist for the man. A sixpence for every child, wrapped in a screw of paper so that it is not lost in the tea. Here is the list. The figure after the name is the children.”

Hester ran her eye down it. Bagshaw, 4. Frith, 2. Eyre, 1. Heathcote, 0. There were twenty-two names. She took up the scissors.

“If you will weigh, I will cut and tie.”

They worked without talking for a quarter of an hour. Hester measured the flannel against the edge of the table, folded the brown paper and drew the string twice round and under. She did not have to think about it. Her hands had done it every December since she was fourteen.

“You tie as though you had been bound apprentice to a grocer,” said Lady Cecily.

“To a vicarage. We made up forty at Wickenden every Christmas. They were a good deal smaller than these.”

“My mother began these. I have done them since I was twelve.” Lady Cecily tipped tea into the scale with a steady hand. “It is the one room in the house that I can be sure of today. Lord Halewood would not know where to find a still-room, and he would not come into one if he did.”

It was an opening. Hester knew one when it was offered. She had lived on them for a year and nine months.

She did not want to take it. She had lain awake two nights with a patent in her head, and there was a second paragraph that she had not yet dared to look at. She had to know, and she was afraid of what she would be told.

“Lady Cecily, may I ask you a thing that I have no right to ask?”

“You may ask. I may not answer.”

“On Saturday, when Lord Halewood stepped down from the coach, I thought for a moment that you would fall.” Hester kept her eyes on the knot. “I have wondered since whether my godmother ought to have set him down at Derby, whatever he said. If we brought you some harm, I should like to know it.”

Lady Cecily put down the scoop.

She was silent long enough for Hester to tie the parcel and write Frith on it. Then she gave a short breath that was almost a laugh.

“You have wondered. Of course you have. You have eyes, and so has everybody else in the house.” She looked at Hester straight. “I shall tell you, Miss Ludlow. All London had the story wrong a year and a half ago, and I should like one person to have it right. I would sooner tell it than have it guessed at across my own dinner table.”

“You need not.”

“I know that I need not. Cut me another length of flannel.”

Hester cut it.

“On the twenty-second of April last year, Lord Halewood made me an offer of marriage. He wrote it. He did not call. I had danced with him three times, and he sent me two sides of letter-paper.” Lady Cecily weighed sugar as she spoke. “I refused him by the same day’s post. I have the letter still. I keep it to remind me what a compliment looks like when it is addressed to a banker.”

“And he would not take the refusal?”

“He went to my brother, as the head of my family. I was not in the room. I am told that Adrian heard him out, and then told him to his face that he wanted my twenty thousand pounds and did not want me, and that the answer would be the same if he asked every year until the money was spent.” She set the sugar down on the paper. “My brother does not often speak quickly. I understand that he did so then.”

“I can believe it.”

“Lord Halewood bowed and went away smiling. He has smiled at us ever since. It is how one knows.” Her mouth tightened. “That is half of Saturday. I shall give you the other half, since you will have heard some of it in Hill Street. Everybody did.”

Hester’s hands had gone cold. She folded paper so that they should have something to do.

“That spring I was engaged to be married. Mr. Rupert Denham. It was to be in September.” Lady Cecily said the name as she might have read it off the list. “At the end of May my old nurse was taken ill. Her name was Winifred Larkin. She had Adrian from his cradle, and me from mine. When I was grown she went to live with her sister in London, and we saw her every Season. The sister keeps a lodging-house in Half Moon Street.”

Hester had known the street was coming, and it struck her hard all the same.

“The house is let to single gentlemen on the first and second floors. Larkin had the back room at the top. It was a growth, the physician said, and nothing to be done. From the first of June I went to her every evening and sat with her until she slept. Her sister had the lodgers to see to, and Larkin wanted somebody of her own.”

“You went alone?”

“I meant to take my maid. Then my maid took a fever, and I went alone, in a hackney, sooner than not go. Adrian was at the House every night until twelve. I did not tell him. He would have forbidden it, or he would have come himself, and he had enough to carry.” She shrugged a little. “It was foolish. I knew that it was foolish. I thought that nobody would look at one woman in a plain cloak coming out of a door at eleven o’clock.”

“But somebody looked.”

“Somebody did. On Saturday the fourteenth of June it was in the Weekly Lantern. Do you read Mrs. Nettle, Miss Ludlow?”

“I have seen it.”

“Then you may have seen that one. ‘Lady C— C— was seen leaving a gentleman’s street at an hour when no lady pays calls.’ You see how clever it is. She does not say that I called on a man. She gives the street and the hour, and she leaves the rest to London.” Lady Cecily smoothed a sheet of brown paper flat with her palm. “And London obliged her. There was an officer of the Guards lodging on the first floor of that house. I never set eyes on him. I learned his name from other people, three weeks later.”

Hester remembered writing it. She had sat at her table in Colebrooke Row on a warm Wednesday night with the window open, and she had tried “a bachelor’s street” first and crossed it through for “a gentleman’s”. She had thought it the neater word. She had thought, too, that a young woman with twenty thousand pounds and an earl for a brother could bear a paragraph.

“Larkin died on the nineteenth,” Lady Cecily said. “I was with her. I came out of that door for the last time at four in the morning. By then there were people who would cross Bond Street so as not to bow to me.”

“Could you not tell them the truth?”

“I told it. Adrian told it. A dying nurse in an attic, in that street, at that hour. It sounded exactly like the excuse a clever girl would make, and people told me so with a great deal of sympathy. Adrian wished to make the Lantern print a denial. His solicitor said that a denial would only print the thing a second time, and he was right.” She took up the string and cut it. “Mr. Denham wrote on the third of July. He did not come to ask me whether it was true. He wrote that he was sure I would understand what he owed to his mother.”

“He was not worth your having,” said Hester. It came out low and rough, and she could not have stopped it.

“No. I have had a year and a half to arrive at that, and I arrived some time ago. I do not grieve for him.” For the first time her voice was not quite steady. “I grieve that I cannot go to London. I like Derbyshire very well. I should like it better if I were able to leave it.”

She pushed the weighed tea across the table. Hester wrapped it and tied it. The string would not lie flat, and she had to do the knot twice.

She could say it now. It was I. I had it in a letter and I did not ask one question, because the street was right and the hours were right. It would take ten words. And then this small, straight woman would look at her across the raisins, and the door of this house would be shut on her, with the pass full of snow outside it. After that it would be Hill Street’s door, and the tea caddy in Islington would be empty by Lady Day.

It was cowardice, and she knew it for cowardice. She tried to tell herself that she was thinking of her mother. She was thinking of herself as well.

She said nothing. She wrote Eyre on the parcel, and the pen shook.

“You are very quiet,” said Lady Cecily. “I have shocked you.”

“You have not shocked me. I am ashamed. Of London, I mean. Of all of us who sat at tables and listened.”

“You did not sit. You fetched the shawls, from what I can see.” It was said almost kindly, and that was the hardest thing to bear yet. “There. That is my story, and you have it right. I do not ask you to keep it. It was never mine to keep.”

They did six more parcels. The pile at the end of the table grew. Hester counted them, because counting was better than thinking, and made it eighteen.

“There is another thing you had better know,” Lady Cecily said. “You asked Jessop this morning where my brother was.”

“I did. I beg your pardon. He would not say.”

“He will never say. Nobody has ordered him not to. It is only that we do not make conversation of it.” She began to wrap the nineteenth sixpence in its screw of paper. “On this day in the year 1796, a climbing boy died in this house. It was in the chimney of the great hall. My father had sent to Sheffield for a sweep, because there was company coming for Christmas. I was two years old and remember nothing. Adrian was eleven, and he was in the house.”

Hester sat down on the stool behind her. She had not meant to.

“They buried the child outside the chapel wall. Nobody knew what parish he came from. There is a stone, and you may read it if you walk that way. My brother goes there on this day every year, and stays until the light goes. He takes nothing to eat. He does not speak of it when he comes in, and we do not ask him.”

“He has never told you?”

“Larkin told me what I know. She was in the house that day. There is more, and he has not told it to me, and I am his sister.” Lady Cecily twisted the paper shut. “There has been no fire on that hearth at Christmas since. Ned sweeps the flue every year in this week, with the machine, so that it is done and no child has done it. That is all the ceremony there is.”

Fire or no fire, Ned had said, and he had turned his back.

Hester thought of the fourteen chimney stacks she had counted from the coach, and of the neat little thought she had had about them. She thought of the name she had given him. She had found it in the spring of last year, the week his bill was first talked of, and she had been delighted with it. It had gone into the Lantern more times than she could count. It had been said in every drawing room she carried a shawl through, and it had surely been said in his hearing. He would have known, each time, what soot it was that he had on him.

“I am sorry,” she said. It was a poor thing to say, and it was all she could manage.

“So am I. It was two-and-twenty years ago, and he will be sorry for it when he is eighty.” Lady Cecily looked at the pile. “Three more. Then I shall let you go back to your wine merchant.”

They tied the three. Hester wrote the last name, and counted the row once again from the end, and it came to twenty-two.
***
It was past four when she went up. The gallery was unlit and bitterly cold, and she stopped at the last window because something had moved outside it.

The light was nearly gone. Below her the snow lay blue across the park. To the east of the house stood a small building with a bell-cote, which must be the chapel, and a single line of footprints ran out to it from the stable arch. A man in a dark greatcoat was coming back along that line, slowly, with his head down. He had no hat on. Halfway to the house he stopped and stood, and then he came on.

She did not wait to see him reach the door. She had no right to watch that.

In her room she turned the key behind her and lit her candle at the fire. She drew the black ribbon over her head, took her father’s box from behind the grey gown and unlocked it.

The patent note lay at the top, where she had left it on Monday. The other lay beneath it. It was on the same thick paper. She had written 9 June 1817 in the corner.

Mrs. Nettle may care to know that Lady C— C—, who is to marry Mr. D— in the autumn, has been seen on each of the last eight evenings leaving a house in Half Moon Street, alone, toward eleven o’clock. The house is let to single gentlemen.

Each word of it was true, and it had been put together to deceive. Whoever wrote it had stood in that street eight nights running, or had paid somebody to stand there. He had known perfectly well what a careless woman with a column to fill would make of it.

She laid the two sheets side by side under the candle and put on her spectacles.

They began with the same six words. The capital M was made the same way in both, with a long loop thrown back over the top. The g’s had the same open tail. She had known when she packed the box that they were in one hand. She had not thought about what that meant until now.

The two notes had come eleven months apart. One was aimed at the sister and one at the brother. A single person had written both, and he had sent them to the one pen in London that could be trusted to sharpen them and not to ask.

That person hated the Calvers. He had wanted the girl disgraced and the bill lost, and he had got both. He had used her to do it, twice, and it had cost him two sheets of letter-paper.

A name came into her head. It came easily, as the patent had, and the lady in Half Moon Street.

She would not have it. She had printed two things because they fitted, and both had been lies. She had never in her life seen a line of that man’s writing. Until she had, she had nothing more to go on than she had had on the ninth of May.

She sat with a note in each hand while the candle burned down an inch. Below her a door closed, and she heard his slow step cross the hall.
***