Frost, Lost, Quill, Will

Twenty-two parcels made a full load for the hand-sledge, and Ned had roped them down under a sheet of oilcloth as if they were going to Leicester.

Wardlow stood in the stable yard at ten o’clock and looked at the sky. It was clear for the first time in five days, a hard pale blue, and the cold had teeth in it. He had slept three hours. He never slept much on the night of the twenty-third, and he had learned long ago that the cure for it was work.

“The track is trodden as far as the sunk fence, my lord,” Shaw said. “After that it’s what the lads made coming up for the flour. One man wide.”

“Then we go one man wide. Ned in front with the pole. You and Amos on the ropes. I shall walk behind and pick up what falls off.”

“And I shall walk behind you, my lord, if I may.”

He turned. Miss Ludlow had come down the trench from the kitchen door. She wore the grey gown kilted up a hand’s breadth, a thick brown cloak, and the stoutest pair of boots he had ever seen on a lady. She had his sister’s list in her hand.

“Lady Cecily cannot leave the house while my godmother keeps her bed, and Mrs. Marsden would be lost in the first drift. Somebody ought to go with these who knows what is in them.” She held up the list. “I tied every one. I know that the Bagshaws’ has four sixpences and the Heathcotes’ has none, and an ounce of tobacco over.”

“It is a mile, Miss Ludlow. In two feet of snow.”

“It was two miles from my mother’s door to Fleet Street, and I walked it every Saturday in worse boots than these.”

“Fleet Street is paved.”

“So I had noticed.” She did not smile. She had not smiled this morning at all, he realised. There was a tired look about her eyes, and she was meeting his own less readily than she had on Tuesday. “I am not asking to be carried, my lord. I am asking to walk behind a sledge.”

He hesitated. He did not like it. He would be answerable to Lady Halewood for every toe she froze. But she was not his to forbid, and he could find no flaw in the reason she had given.

“If you go in to the waist,” he said, “I shall not pretend to be surprised.”

“Then you will have the satisfaction of having warned me. That is always something.”

They went out under the arch in a line. The snow squeaked underfoot. For the first quarter mile nobody spoke except Ned, who called out the depth at every sounding as if he were taking a ship into harbour.

She had not asked where he had been yesterday. Everybody else had found a way of not asking it that was louder than a question. Brome had clapped him on the shoulder at dinner. His aunt had patted his hand. Miss Ludlow had passed him the fourth page of his speech across the inkstand this morning, with nineteen words struck out and three written in, and had said only, “The brine. I think you had it nearly right.” He had been more grateful for that than he could well have explained.

Scarrow Row was a single terrace of gritstone under the shoulder of the hill, twenty-two doors in a line, with smoke going straight up from every chimney. The men had dug a path along the front of it. Sampson Bagshaw was at the near end with a shovel.

“Level’s dry, my lord. Dry as a kiln. We go back in on Monday.”

“And the old length?”

“Timbered in your larch, sound as a church. Barmaster went in with his lantern on Saturday, and the old oak had rotted, so there’s no thief in it. Abel’s lot did the far half.” Bagshaw scratched his jaw. “They didn’t do it badly.”

“I shall tell him you said so.”

“I’d as soon you didn’t, my lord.”

They went from door to door. Wardlow knew every face that came to one. He knew which man had a bad chest and which woman had buried a child at Michaelmas, and he said the few things that could be said. It was slow, and he was slow at it. Miss Ludlow stood half a step behind him with the list, and put the right parcel into his hand each time before he had turned to look for it.

At the ninth door, nobody came.

He knocked again. It opened a hand’s breadth. Hannah Eyre looked out, a girl of twenty or so with her hair coming down. She said, “Thank you, my lord, God bless you,” and took the parcel through the gap, and shut the door.

Through the wood he heard a child cough. It was a harsh, hollow sound, like a dog shut in a cellar.

“That is croup,” said Miss Ludlow.

She had stepped past him and knocked before he could answer. She did it with her knuckles, three times, quite gently.

“Mrs. Eyre? I am nobody at all. I am a vicar’s daughter out of Hertfordshire, and I have heard that cough in forty cottages. Will you let me see him?”

There was a pause. The door opened again, a little wider.

“He’s nobbut a cold, miss. It’s nowt his lordship need be troubled with.”

“His lordship is not troubled. He is going to stand outside and be cold himself. How long has he barked like that?”

“Sin‘ Tuesday night.” The girl’s face worked. “It’s worse when it gets dark. He can’t fetch his breath. Will’s down at the level, and there’s no getting to Castleton for the doctor, and I’ve nowt to pay him with if there were.”

“May I come in?”

She went in. Wardlow stayed on the step, as he had been told. He had to stoop to see under the lintel.

It was one room, and it was full of smoke. There was a bed in the corner, and on it lay a boy of three, flat on his back under every blanket in the house. Each breath he drew made a sound like tearing cloth.

Miss Ludlow did not exclaim. She took off her gloves and put them in her pocket. She folded back the blankets and lifted the child and sat down on the edge of the bed with him upright against her shoulder. One arm went under him and the other hand lay flat between his shoulder-blades.

“There, sir. That is better than lying down, is it not? You shall look at the fire over my shoulder.” Her voice was low and perfectly easy. “Mrs. Eyre, he must not lie flat. Not tonight nor tomorrow. Prop him with the bolster, or hold him as I am doing. Have you a kettle?”

“Aye, miss.”

“Fill it and keep it on the boil, near the bed, with the lid off. He wants the steam. It loosens the throat. And he may drink as much warm water as he will take, a spoonful at a time. Have you honey?”

“No, miss.”

“We have,” said Wardlow from the door. “Ned. Run up to Mrs. Orme. A jar of honey, and a pound of candles, and you are to be back within the half hour.”

Ned was gone before he had finished. Wardlow looked about him for something that needed a man of six feet. The bucket by the door was empty. He took it to the pump at the end of the Row, broke the ice on the trough with his heel and brought it back full. Then he fetched an armful of peat from the lean-to and built up the fire until it drew clean. It was the first useful thing he had done all morning.

When he looked up from the hearth, the boy’s breathing had eased. It was still rough, but there was more room in it. Hannah Eyre was sitting on the bed beside Miss Ludlow, and she was talking, fast and low, and crying a little as she talked.

He caught some of it. They had been out of candles for a week. She had sat up two nights in the dark, listening. Will had had no wage since the eighth, and she had not liked to tell the Hall, with the flour sent already.

She had held this cottage for three years, and had never said so much to him in all of them. She had said it to a stranger in a grey gown in five minutes. He noticed that. Then the child coughed again, and he went to fill the kettle a second time, and it passed out of his mind.

“A man will come down at dusk and again at first light,” he told her when they left. “If the boy is worse at any hour, you send to the Hall. You do not wait until morning. Do you understand me?”

“Aye, my lord.” She looked at Miss Ludlow and not at him. “Thank you, miss.”

They did the other thirteen doors. It was past noon when the sledge turned for home, empty and light, with Shaw and Amos glad to be done.

He walked beside her, where the track allowed it.

“Who taught you that?”

“Nobody. One learns it.” She was flexing the fingers of her right hand. The child had been heavy. “My mother had the house and the little ones. My father had the church. Somebody had to have the parish, and I was the eldest. I began going round with him when I was fourteen, and after a year or two I went round without him.”

“For how long?”

“Ten years. Until he died.”

“And then?”

“Then the living was given to another gentleman, and he wished to be in by Lady Day. We had six weeks.” She said it very evenly. “It is nobody’s fault. A vicarage belongs to the vicar.”

He walked on some yards. Ten years of that work, and then six weeks to pack it up. Now she counted an old woman’s gloves, and was paid nothing for it that he could see.

“You must miss it.”

“I miss being of use.” She glanced at him and away. “I do not want to be pitied for it, my lord. I have a great deal to be—” She stopped, and seemed to change what she had meant to say. “My godmother feeds me. She is not obliged to.”

“I was not pitying you. I was thinking that I have a steward who could not have done what you did in that room.”

“Your steward could not have carried the bucket so far without spilling it. We each have our talents.”

It was more like her, and he was glad to hear it. He was about to say so when Shaw called from behind that the sledge wanted to come by.

She stepped off the track to her left to give it room. The snow there looked as level and as firm as a tablecloth.

It was the sunk fence. He had time to say “Not—” and then she was gone.

She did not fall so much as descend. One moment there was a tall woman in a brown cloak. The next there was a bonnet, two arms and a startled face at the level of his knees, and all the rest of her was under snow.

“Miss Ludlow!”

“I am quite well,” said the face. “I appear to be standing on something. I do not know what.”

“It is the bottom of a ditch. Give me your hands.”

She put them up. He took her by both wrists, set his heels and pulled. For a moment nothing happened at all. Then the drift gave her up all at once. She came out much faster than he was ready for, and he went over backward onto the track with her on top of him in a shower of snow.

She rolled off him and sat up. Her bonnet was over one ear. Her hair had come down on one side, and there was snow in it, and in her eyelashes, and packed into the neck of her cloak.

“You said to the waist,” she said. “I should like it noted that I went in to the armpits.”

He began to laugh.

It was not as funny as that. He knew it, and he could see that she knew it. She had her hand over her mouth and her shoulders were shaking, and when she caught his eye she was off again, worse than before. He sat in the snow like a boy of ten and laughed until his ribs hurt. Shaw and Amos were studying the horizon. Ned, coming back along the track with his pole, had the decency to stop and look hard at the Edge.

When he could, Wardlow got to his feet and gave her his hand. She took it and stood. He brushed the snow from her shoulder, and then from her sleeve, and found that he was holding her arm. She was very close. Her face was pink and wet, and her eyes were bright with something beyond the laughing.

He let go.

“You will want a fire,” he said. It came out slowly, even for him.

“I shall want a great deal of hot water, my lord. And I shall thank you not to tell my godmother.” She set her bonnet straight, with hands that were not quite steady.

They walked the last quarter mile without speaking. He had not laughed on a Christmas Eve since he was eleven. He kept turning that over, the whole way up to the arch.
***
The yule log was the butt of an ash that had come down in the Hall wood two winters ago. It took Ned and both footmen to carry it into the library at six o’clock.

They burned it in this room now. Wardlow knelt and lit it himself, as his father had, with the black end of last year’s log that Jessop kept all the twelvemonth in the cellar. The bark caught and the flame ran along it. His uncle shouted “CAPITAL!” and the whole household, crowded in the doorway, clapped and went away to its supper and its ale.

Lady Halewood had come downstairs for the first time since Monday. She sat in the best chair in three shawls, with her cane across her knees, and looked about the room.

“So this is where you have all been hiding. One fire and eight people. It is like the Ark, with fewer conveniences.” Her black eyes went round the circle. “Well, I will not play at cards on the eve of Christmas, and I will not be read to. Hester, you have had quite enough of that desk. Lord Wardlow, have you paper?”

“As much as you please, ma’am.”

“Then we shall have bouts-rimés. You know it? I give four rhymes. Every one of you writes four lines that end in them, in the order I say, and reads them aloud. You have ten minutes by that clock. Anybody who does not scan shall be laughed at.”

“What rhymes?” asked Cecily. She had taken the chair furthest from Halewood, and she was almost smiling.

The old lady considered the window, and then the desk.

“Frost. Lost. Quill. Will.”

“WHAT ARE THEY, LETTICE?”

“FROST, IVO. LOST. QUILL. AND WILL.”

“Ah!” said the Colonel, and took a pencil in his fist like a man going into action.

Wardlow sat down on his own side of the inkstand. Miss Ludlow was on hers, in the black gown, with her hair very neat and no trace about her of the sunk fence. She looked at her paper for perhaps twenty seconds. Then she wrote four lines straight off, almost without lifting the pen. She read them over and bit her lip.

He looked at his own blank sheet. He ought to have been building something safe. He knew already what he was going to write, and it would not be safe, and it came easily. He wrote it fast. The clock said four minutes.

“Time,” said Lady Halewood. “Colonel Marsden, you are the senior officer.”

The Colonel’s had a fox in it, and a hound called Quill, and would have gone better to a drum. Mrs. Marsden’s was about a robin. Brome had written on the prospect of mutton until Twelfth Day, and it made everybody laugh. Cecily’s was four neat lines on the coal cellar. Then Lady Halewood unfolded her own and read it out in her driest voice.

“‘I’ve borne the coach, the mutton and the frost;
I count my gloves, and find that none is lost.
For that I thank the girl who holds my quill.
I do not thank her often. Now I will.’”

Miss Ludlow looked up. There was more in her face than the verse seemed to deserve. She said, “Ma’am,” and could not go on.

“Do not gape, child. It was the rhyme. Read yours.”

“Mine is impertinent, ma’am.” She turned to Wardlow. “My lord, it was written in three minutes, and I should like leave to burn it.”

“I asked you on Tuesday to be unkind, Miss Ludlow. I have not withdrawn it.”

She took a breath, and read.

“‘A certain Earl began his speech in frost;
The swallows came, and still the verb was lost.
My lords, before he dips another quill,
Send home for supper, and then make your will.’”

Brome gave a roar. Cecily put both hands to her face. The Colonel, who had caught “Earl” and “supper” and guessed the rest, slapped his knee and demanded it again. Lady Halewood barked twice. Wardlow heard his own laugh among theirs. It had been a joke between the two of them at this desk since Tuesday, and he liked hearing it said aloud.

“I am answered before I have spoken,” he said, when the noise allowed. “Mine was written at the same time, ma’am. I give you my word that I did not look across the frontier.”

He read it at his own pace.

“‘There is a lady, sharper than the frost,
Who cannot give a wandering verb for lost.
She mends the curate’s psalm, the Earl’s poor quill,
And he must thank her, much against his will.’”

They laughed again, nearly as long. Brome said, “Good God, Wardlow, it scans,” in honest amazement. Cecily was looking at her brother as if he had stood up and danced.

Miss Ludlow did not laugh. She had turned in her chair, and she was looking at him.

He had been looked at a great deal in his life. He was an earl and he was tall. This was another matter. Her eyes went over his face slowly and seriously, as she read a page that she meant to get right. He did not know what she saw there. He found that he did not want her to stop looking.

“The curate,” she said at last, quietly. “You put in the curate.”

“He had earned a line of his own.”

“Charming,” said Halewood. “I come last, I think. I fear mine is in a graver key.”

He had written it on his knee by the fire, in a hand full of long easy loops, without a blot. He held the sheet up to the candle and read it out in his pleasant voice.

“‘The sweep’s boy shivers in the Christmas frost.
His lordship weeps; a vote or two is lost.
Tears cost a great man nothing, nor his quill.
The boy climbs on, and so, I think, he will.’”

Nobody laughed. A log shifted on the hearth.

“WHAT DOES HE SAY, LETTICE?”

Mrs. Marsden did not tell him.

Wardlow had not moved. Yesterday he had stood eight hours beside a stone. He felt his left hand close, and he felt his sister’s eyes on him from across the room, and he remembered what he had promised her.

“That is not wit, Everard,” said Lady Halewood. “It is only spite, and you have gone to the trouble of rhyming it.”

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

“The boy climbs on,” Wardlow said. He took his time over it. “Yes. That is exactly how the matter stands tonight. I am obliged to you for putting it so plainly, Halewood. I shall try to have it otherwise by the spring.”

Halewood bowed from his chair. He looked a little disappointed.

Cecily rose and said something about the mince pies. Brome got up heavily to help her with the tray. The Colonel was still asking what had been said, and the room broke up into small talk.

Miss Ludlow had gone white during those four lines. Wardlow had seen it. She was angrier than he was, and he could not account for it, and it warmed him more than the fire did.

Now she stood. She went round the circle quietly, as a companion clears away the cups, and took up the papers one by one. She had the Colonel’s fox and Mrs. Marsden’s robin. She took her godmother’s from the arm of the chair, and Brome’s and Cecily’s from the sofa. She came back to the desk for her own. Then she held out her hand for his, and he gave it to her.

Halewood had let his fall on the hearthrug. She stooped for it last, and laid it on top of the rest.

She stood a moment with her back to the room and her head bent over that sheet. It was a longer look than four spiteful lines were worth, and she had heard them once already. Then she squared all eight together and slid them into her blotting-book, and closed it.

Wardlow watched her do it. He could not think what she wanted with Halewood’s verse.
***