An Hour by the Clock

The path to the chapel had been dug that morning, and thirty-one people went along it two by two with their breath going up in front of them.

Hester walked beside her godmother and carried the prayer book for both. Lady Halewood had come out in a fur tippet and four shawls. She put her cane down hard at every step, as if the snow had been impertinent.

“No clergyman,” she said. “The curate cannot get up the pass, and I suppose the Almighty is to take us as He finds us. Who reads?”

“Lord Wardlow, ma’am. Lady Cecily told me so at breakfast.”

“Then we shall be here until the thaw.”

A week ago Hester would have laughed, and kept the line for Saturday. She said nothing, and looked at the wall they were passing.

There was a stone set against the outside of the chapel, a yard from the door. Somebody had cleared the snow from it with his hands. The marks of the fingers were still there, frozen hard. It was a small plain slab, and the letters were cut deep.

TOM PICKERING, A CLIMBING BOY. DIED IN THIS HOUSE 23 DECEMBER 1796, AGED 8 YEARS.

She had time to read it once before the line carried her in. The boy now had a name, and she had not been ready for that.

The chapel would have fitted inside the nave at Wickenden with room to spare. It had six oak benches, a plain table with two candles, and a reading desk on the north side. There was no stove. The family and guests took the two front benches, and the household filled the rest. Ned Varley stood at the back with the grooms, because there was nowhere left to sit. Lord Halewood settled himself at the end of the second bench and began to look at his fingernails.

Lord Wardlow stood up at the reading desk in his black coat. He opened the book and laid his left hand flat on the wood beside it.

Then he waited.

It was perhaps three breaths. Hester counted them without meaning to. Nobody in the benches behind her coughed or shifted. The whole household of Scarrow sat as still as people sit when a man is threading a needle.

“‘Dearly beloved brethren,’” he said.

The words came out whole and level, and she saw his hand ease on the desk.

She had heard the service read every Sunday of her life. She knew where a nervous curate ran and where a vain one lingered. This was different from both. He read steadily for a line or two, and then he stopped, always just before a word and never after it. He stopped before brethren, and before dissemble, and before pardoned. Each time, the left hand closed on the edge of the desk. Each time he waited, and went on as cleanly as before.

There had been a ploughboy at Wickenden called Joe Tansley, who could sing like a thrush and could not say his own name to a stranger. Her father had taught him to stand quiet until the word was ready to come, and to pay no heed to anybody who would not wait for it. Joe had never managed it for more than a sentence.

This man had managed it for a lifetime. He did not stammer. She did not think anybody in London had ever heard him stammer. He came to the hard place and stood there until it let him through. He did it in front of his servants and in front of his sister, and in front of a man who had laughed at him two nights ago. She understood then that he did it in the House of Lords before four hundred people, and had done it for forty minutes in May.

She knew what she had made of that. One hears that he has hopes of sitting down by Michaelmas. She had thought him pompous. She had thought he liked the sound of himself.

Her face burned in the cold.

He left out the Absolution, as a layman must, and read a collect in its place. She noticed it because she was her father’s daughter, and she liked him for knowing. The Colonel made the responses a full second behind everybody else and twice as loud. Mrs. Marsden found his place for him with her finger.

For the first lesson he read from Isaiah. “‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.’” He stopped before darkness, and the wait was a long one.

Hester looked down at the book in her lap. She could not look at him just then. A man who paid so dearly for each word would hardly spend one that he did not mean. And she had taken forty of his and thrown them away in nineteen of her own, and been paid two guineas for it.

He read the shepherds out of St. Luke, and the collect for the day, and prayed for the King, who was blind and mad at Windsor. Then he gave them the grace, and shut the book.

“A happy Christmas to you all,” he said, in his ordinary voice. “There is ale in the servants’ hall, and nobody is to do anything this afternoon that can be left till tomorrow.”

The benches emptied in a cheerful noise. In the doorway Ned caught Hester’s eye and came sideways through the press.

“I were down at the Row at first light, miss. Eyre’s lad slept sitting up against the bolster, and he’s taken a whole cup of the honey water. She says he barks still, but he fetches his breath after.”

“Thank you, Ned. That is the best thing I have heard today.”

It was true, and she held on to it all the way back along the path.
***
She had an hour before she must dress her godmother for dinner. She locked her door and took the oak box out of the wardrobe.

Her mother would be sitting down to the goose in Colebrooke Row about now, with Naomi and Jonas. The rent had gone to the landlord this morning. That, at least, was honestly paid.

She lifted the black ribbon over her head and turned the key. She took out the two sheets of thick letter-paper and laid them on the table. From her blotting-book she took a third sheet and put it between them. It was Lord Wardlow’s own paper, off the library desk. On it, without a blot, were four lines about a sweep’s boy in the frost.

She put on her spectacles and drew the candle close.

She had told herself on Wednesday night that she would not believe it until she had seen his hand. She had seen it last night for the space of a breath, stooping to the hearthrug, and she had made herself wait a whole day to be sure. She was her father’s daughter in that as well.

She started with the letter d, because there was one in nearly every line. In the verse, the word was lordship. The stem of the d did not stand up. It was thrown back to the left in a long loop that curled over the letter before it, like the lash of a whip. She looked at the note of the second of May. Lord W—. The d was the same. She looked at the note of the ninth of June. Lady C— C—. It was the same again, to a hair.

She went on, though she no longer needed to. The g in great had the open tail that she had marked in both notes. The b in boy climbs was the b in climbing boy, with a small hook at the top. Even the dash after W was made the same way, a little too long and tilted upward at the end.

Three sheets lay before her, written in a year and a half, and one man had written them all. He had sat in the armchair by the library fire all this week, with his fingertips together, watching her write.

She took off her spectacles and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

Lord Halewood had asked a girl for her twenty thousand pounds and been refused. He had been told the reason to his face by her brother. Seven weeks later he had stood in Half Moon Street, or paid somebody to stand there. Then he had written to the cleverest pen in London, and she had done the rest for him. Eleven months after that he had wanted a bill lost. He had written again, and she had obliged him a second time. She had found him the neater word on each occasion.

She had thought herself a looking-glass. He had picked her up like a stone and thrown her at them, twice.

He could not know whom he had thrown. He had directed his notes to Crane Court, as anybody might who wished Mrs. Nettle to hear a thing. She was sure of that much. If he had known that the Notebook was written in his stepmother’s own house, he would have found some use for it before now.

She could prove what he had done. Nobody else in England could. She had only to carry these three sheets downstairs and lay them on the long desk, and Lady Cecily’s name would begin to be mended before the snow was off the pass.

And each of the two notes began, in that looped and easy hand, Mrs. Nettle may care to know.

She might cut the top line off. She looked at the scissors in the tray of the box for a moment, and was ashamed of having looked. It would make no difference besides. He would ask how Lady Halewood’s companion came to have them, and with whose date in the corner. There was one answer to that.

Then the two guineas would be gone, and Hill Street with them. Her mother would be told, in that narrow parlour, that the printer in Fleet Street had no more copying to give.

She had half the truth in her hands. She could not spend it without paying over the other half.

She put the three sheets into the box together, with the verse on top. She turned the key and tried the lock twice.
***
It was a quiet dinner, considering the goose. Lord Halewood was civil to everybody, and that made Hester feel a little sick. He praised the stuffing. He picked up Mrs. Marsden’s napkin for her. Hester watched his white hand carry a glass to his mouth, and thought of it moving across a sheet of letter-paper, and could not finish her pudding.

At the head of the table Lord Wardlow said little. Once he looked at her and seemed about to speak, and did not.

In the drawing room afterward her godmother took the chair nearest the coals and looked about her.

“My book. I had it in the library last night, by the large chair. Fetch it, Hester. And do not let the gentlemen keep you. They will be on to the corn laws by now.”

Hester took a candle and went.

The library door stood wide, as it always did. Nobody was there. The great ash log had burned down to a red bed that lit the hearthstone and very little else. She found the book on the floor beside the best chair. She ought to have gone back with it at once.

She went to the desk.

Her own side was bare. On his, to the right of the inkstand, lay five pages of the speech, and at the corner of the blotter lay the round brass plate. She had seen his hand go to it thirty times since Tuesday. She had never asked what it was. It was on his side of the frontier.

She set the candle down on the common ground and bent to look, with her hands behind her back.

It was three inches across and worn smooth at the rim. There were two holes in it for thread. In the middle were letters that she could read from where she stood. O. HOBB, MASTER SWEEP, SHEFFIELD.

“You may pick it up. The treaty said nothing about brass.”

She straightened so fast that the candle flame leaned over. Lord Wardlow stood in the doorway. He came in slowly and left the door open at his back. In the hall beyond, Jessop went past with a tray.

“I beg your pardon, my lord. I came for my godmother’s book. I had no business to be looking.”

“You have looked at it every day this week, and you have never asked. I have been grateful for that.” He came round to his own side of the desk. He did not sit. “You read the stone this morning. I saw you.”

“Yes.”

“Then you have his name. You may as well have the rest.” He paused, and it was the pause from the chapel, with his left hand flat on the desk beside the plate. “Nobody has it but me. My sister has a part. I should like one person to have it right.”

Lady Cecily had said those same words over the raisins. Hester’s throat closed.

“I am listening, my lord.”

“My father had company coming for Christmas. Twenty people. The great hall chimney smoked, and he sent to Sheffield for a sweep. The man came on the twenty-third with two boys. His name was Hobb.” He touched the brass with one finger. “The flue is very old. It is wide at the bottom. Twenty feet up it turns, and narrows to nine inches. Tom Pickering was eight years old and small for it. They sent him because he was small.”

He was looking at the plate and not at her.

“The schoolroom was above the hall in those days. The flue runs up behind its wall. I was there by myself that morning, at my Latin. About ten o’clock I heard a knocking in the wall. It came three or four times, and stopped. Then it came again.”

Hester did not move.

“I thought it was the boy at his work. I thought he was scraping. But it did not sound like scraping.” He waited, and she saw his hand shut. “You have heard me speak, Miss Ludlow. I was worse at eleven. I could not get through a sentence. My father disliked to hear me try. I had been taught that I was not to open my mouth until I knew exactly what I meant to say, and was sure that it was true.”

“And you were not sure.”

“I was not sure. If I ran down to a hall full of men and said that the boy was stuck, and he was only sweeping, I should have had to say it before all of them. And been laughed at.” His voice was quite even. “So I waited, to be certain. I put my ear against the wall and I watched the schoolroom clock. I waited an hour.”

The log settled on the hearth. Hester could hear her own breathing.

“The knocking grew slower. A little before eleven it stopped altogether, and then I was certain. I ran down and found my nurse, and I got it out to her, and she fetched my father. Hobb had known for half an hour that the boy was fast. He had been shouting up the flue at him to stop sulking. They sent for the estate mason and broke through the schoolroom wall with bars. It took until noon.”

“He was dead?”

“He was dead. The soot had come down on him at the turn.” He stopped for a long time before the next word. “The mason was a careful man. He put his hand on the boy’s chest, and he said that he could not have been gone half an hour.”

Hester shut her eyes for a moment. It was a simple sum, and a boy of eleven would have done it then and there.

“His cap had come off among the bricks. That plate was sewn to the front of it, so that people would know whose boy he was. I picked it up. Nobody saw me. I have had it ever since.” He drew a breath. “I never told my father about the hour. I think Larkin guessed it. She never said so. And you will tell me now that I was a child.”

“You were eleven.”

“I was old enough to tell the time.”

She had a dozen answers, and she was known for her answers. Every one of them was true, and none would have been of the least use to him. He had had twenty-two years to think of them himself.

She thought of the name she had given him. He had worn it all through two London Seasons, knowing what soot it was. She could not tell him that she was sorry for it, and tonight that was the heaviest thing she carried.

His hand still lay on the desk beside the brass, closed hard, with the knuckles pale.

Hester reached across the inkstand. She had not been asked, and she did it without looking at the open door. She laid her hand over his.

It was cold. She felt it go still under her palm. He did not draw it away.
***