The Leads

Thursday, July 18, 1816

“It is printed, sir,” Crispin said. “It is in the Journal. They would not print it if there were nothing in it.”

It was ten minutes before three in the morning. Gideon had been walking the east passage, as he walked most nights, and had seen a line of light under the schoolroom door. He had found his nephew at the window in his nightshirt, with a candle, his ledger and yesterday’s Salopian Journal folded small.

“Read it to me.”

The boy read. His voice was thin and careful. “‘A learned astronomer of Bologna has given out that on Thursday the eighteenth of July the sun will be extinguished, and the world left in darkness. Spots of unusual size have for some weeks been visible upon the sun’s face to the naked eye.’”

“And you believe him.”

“I don’t know, sir. That is what’s the matter.” Crispin turned the ledger round on the sill. “I counted. From the first of May to today is seventy-nine days. It rained on fifty-one of them. There was a fire lit every day in June. It was forty-four degrees in the second week of May, and sleet on your wedding. Papa never knew a year like it. Mr. Preece never did. Something is wrong with the sun. That isn’t the newspaper. That’s my book.”

Gideon looked at the ruled columns. The boy had built his case as Quince would, from his own evidence. He could not be told not to be silly.

“I have no astronomy,” Gideon said. “I can find north by a star, and that is all. I cannot tell you that the gentleman in Bologna is wrong.”

“Then he may be right.”

“He may. I will tell you what I do know. I have stood to arms at this hour on more mornings than I could count for you. On every one of them, some man in the lines was certain of what the day would bring. He was mostly wrong.”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly,” Gideon said. He would not lie to him. “Nobody sleeps the night before. One learns to sit it out in company. May I?”

Crispin moved the newspaper. Gideon sat down on the other end of the window seat, with his long legs in the way of everything. He did not know what else to offer. He had no comfort that was also true.

They sat. The candle burned. After a while the boy’s shoulder was against his arm, and neither of them remarked on it.

At half past three the door opened.

Linnea stood there in her grey cloak, with a lantern. Her hair was in its plait and her spectacles were on. Behind her stood Mercy Onions with an armful of blankets, and Pip in a coat over her nightgown, and Tabitha, yawning, with a doll in each hand.

“Oh, good,” Linnea said. “You are both up. That saves me two doors. Boots, Crispin, and your warmest jacket. Bring the ledger and a pencil.”

The boy stared at her. “Where are we going?”

“To the leads of the old tower. You asked me at supper what time the sun rose, and you did not eat your pudding. I can add.” She set the lantern on the table. “You have a thermometer, a rain gauge and a book. You do not take the word of a man in Bologna for a thing you can go and read off for yourself. The tower looks east to Brown Clee. If the sun means to come up today, that is where it will do it.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then you will be the first person in Shropshire to write it down, and we shall all be together.” She looked at Gideon. “Duke, yours is the best watch in the house.”

He was already on his feet. He found that he was a good deal lighter than he had been five minutes ago. She had brought no answer either. She had brought a staircase and something to do.

“Single file on the stair,” he said. “The lantern goes first, with me. Each of you keeps a hand on the rope. Mercy last, and nobody passes Mercy.”
***
The old tower was the first Brackenhope, built before there was a duke in it. The stair wound up inside the wall, worn hollow in the middle of every step. At the top he put his shoulder to a low door, and they came out onto a flat roof of grey lead with a breast-high parapet.

It was cold enough to see their breath, in the middle of July. The valley lay under them full of mist. To the east Brown Clee was a long black shape against a sky that was only a little less black.

“What is the almanac hour?” he asked.

“A few minutes before four,” Linnea said. “The hill will keep it from us longer than that.”

He took out his watch and opened it. It wanted nine minutes of the hour.

They waited. Mercy put a blanket round each child. The sky behind the hill went from black to slate, and from slate to the colour of dishwater. No birds sang. Crispin stood with both hands on the parapet and his ledger held under his chin.

Something pulled at Gideon’s coat, low down. He knew that pull.

“I can’t see,” said Tabitha.

She was a foot shorter than the wall. Mercy had the lantern and the spare blankets. Gideon looked down at the top of a fair head.

“I could lift you,” he said. “If you will have it.”

She thought it over for a long time. Then she put both dolls under one arm and held up the other.

He had the watch in his right hand, so he took her on his left. She weighed nothing. She sat on his forearm with her knees against his ribs, on the side where he could see nothing at all. He had to turn his head to find her. She was looking at the patch from six inches away, gravely, as she might look at a strange dog.

“Pirate,” she said. It sounded less like a warning and more like a name.

“There!” Pip cried. “There, on the edge!”

A thin red line had come up out of the shoulder of the hill. It thickened as they watched. It became a rim, and then a half, and then the whole of it stood clear. It was a dull red disc with no rays to it, like a heated shot seen through smoke. The haze was so thick that a man could look straight at it.

There were dark marks on its face.

“Sir, the time!”

“Eleven minutes past four.”

Crispin wrote it. His pencil shook. Then he looked up, and his lips moved. “One. Two. And one more, lower down. Three spots, sir. Two together and one apart.”

“I see them.”

“So that part was true.” He wrote again. Gideon read it over his shoulder. Sun rose 4.11. Hazy. Red. Three spots. “But it hasn’t gone out.”

“No,” said Linnea. “It looks to me like a sun with a bad cold. It is up, however.”

“He said today, Aunt Linnea. Today isn’t over until it sets.”

Gideon expected her to argue. She only nodded, as if the boy had corrected a figure.

“That is quite fair. Then we shall come up again this evening and see it down over Wenlock Edge, and you will write that as well.” She felt in her cloak pocket. “It will be brighter in a few minutes. When it is, nobody looks at it bare. You will use this.”

She brought out a piece of glass the length of her hand, bound round the edges with paper. One side of it had been smoked black over a candle.

Pip had gone still. “That’s old glass. It’s green.”

“It is the largest piece of three hundred and seven. I asked Mr. Tudge to keep it for me in May. A broken pane is still glass, and I thought I should find a use for it.” Linnea gave it to Crispin. “It turns out to be the only thing in the castle that one can look at the sun through.”

Crispin held it up. Pip stood and watched him do it. Her face worked, as it had on the stool by the drawing-room fender ten days before. She had hardly spoken a word since then, to anyone.

Gideon saw her hand come out of her blanket. It went into Linnea’s, and gripped.

“Aunt Linnea, I’m sorry about the bargain.”

Linnea did not crouch, or exclaim. She closed her stained fingers round the small ones.

“Thank you, Pip. I know what it costs you to say that word.”

“I’m not sorry it was true.” The chin was up. “I’m sorry I gave it to him.”

“Then you are sorry for exactly the right thing.”

“I’m a bit sorry about the brush as well. I’m still not sorry about the tea.”

“No,” said Linnea. “The tea was rather clever.”

Gideon looked away over the parapet, because his niece would not want to be watched. Ten days ago he had stood in his own hall and believed that the child had only repeated his orders. He had not thought that she might get past what he had arranged. Linnea had told her that the truth was not finished, and then had left her a candle and waited.

There was a weight against his neck. He turned his head, carefully.

Tabitha had fallen asleep. Her cheek lay on his left shoulder, and her curls were against his jaw, along the scar. The wax doll’s head was digging into his collarbone. He could feel her breath through his neckcloth.

He did not shift her, though his arm had begun to ache. He would have stood there until noon. He carried her down himself, all the worn steps of the stair, and nobody was allowed to take her from him.
***
The sun kept its place all day behind the haze. Crispin looked for it out of the schoolroom window between each mouthful of his dinner. At seven the whole family climbed the tower again.

It went down at eight minutes past eight by Gideon’s watch. It went down blood-red over Wenlock Edge, and it lit the mist in the valley and every red stone of the castle to the same colour. Crispin watched it through the smoked glass to the last thread.

“It lasted,” he said. His voice cracked. “The whole day. He was wrong.”

“Write it.”

The boy wrote. Sun set 8.08. Astronomer mistaken. He underlined the last word twice and shut the book. He looked five years younger and ready to fall down where he stood.

Tabitha had asked for Gideon’s arm again, quite as a matter of course, and had gone to sleep on it before the sun touched the hill. Mercy lifted her off his shoulder now.

“Bed, the three of you, and no talking on the stair. Come, Master Crispin. Miss Pip, take the lantern.”

Their steps went down inside the wall and faded.

He had meant to follow. Linnea had not moved from the western parapet, and so he did not move either.

The red was still on everything. It was on the lead under their feet and on her brown hair and the silver rims of her spectacles. The wind had dropped.

“You sat up with him,” she said. “Mercy told me. You had been there since before three.”

“I had nothing to tell him. You had.”

“I had nothing to tell him either. I had a tower.” She smiled a little, at the hills. “My father used to say that half of all fear is sitting indoors with it.”

“He was right. I have proved it for him at some length.”

She turned her head at that. She was on his left, as she always seemed to be now. He turned to her without thinking about it.

He had been thinking all day about a word. Crispin had made him think of it. The boy had feared there would be no tomorrow. For most of a year Gideon had not much cared whether there was. He had got through each day because it was a duty. He had done the same in the field.

It was different now. He wanted the first Tuesday in August, and the bridge finished, and a tub that might flower. He wanted to know what she was keeping a tally of.

“It will rise tomorrow,” he said.

“I believe that is now established. Crispin has it in ink.”

“I should like you to be there.”

She looked at him. “On the leads? At four?”

“I am not speaking of the roof.”

“No,” Linnea said, after a moment. “I did not think you were.”

He did not know which of them moved. He knew that her hand was on the front of his coat, flat, and that his own had come up to her shoulder, and that he had bent his head. Her spectacles struck his cheekbone. She gave a short breath that was half a laugh, pulled them off, and held them shut in her fist against his collar.

Then her mouth was under his.

He had not kissed a woman since before Belgium. He had not known how the scar would serve him. The left corner of his mouth was stiff, and he could feel only half of what he should there. He was clumsy with it, like a man writing with the wrong hand. She had plainly never been kissed in her life. She did it as she did everything else. She gave it her whole attention and was in no hurry, and she meant to find out how the thing was made.

It went on a long time. Her lips were cold from the air and then they were warm. She tasted faintly of the tea she had drunk at seven. Her free hand came up and settled along his jaw, on the left, with her thumb on the line of the scar. He felt that through his whole body. Nobody had touched that side of his face except a surgeon and Oakes with a razor.

He got his fingers into the thick plait at the back of her neck. She leaned into him, all her tall strong length, and he felt her heart going as hard as his own. They got their noses wrong once, and righted it, and neither of them stopped.

It was he who stepped back. He had to. He had told this woman that he would not trouble her. Another half minute would have made a liar of him on his own roof.

He stood a pace off, breathing like a man who has run up the tower. The light was going. Her mouth was red and her plait was half pulled down. She was blinking at him without her spectacles, and she did not look troubled.

“That was not in the settlement,” he said.

His voice came out hoarse. He heard how it sounded, like a quartermaster finding an item he had not been issued, and he could not mend it.

Linnea unfolded her spectacles and put them on. They sat crooked. She looked him full in the face through them, the patch and the scar and the whole of it.

“No,” she said. “It was not.”

She did not sound sorry. He searched himself for it, as a man feels himself over for a wound after a charge. He was not sorry either.
***