Michaelmas Frost

Monday, September 30, 1816

“You have the whole of the quilt again,” Gideon said. “I woke at five with one corner of it, like a man clinging to a raft.”

“You woke at five? You were snoring at five. I heard you.”

“I do not snore.”

“You do it very quietly, and only on your back. I find it rather restful.” Linnea pushed half the quilt across to him. “Is it white again?”

He was nearer the window. He raised himself on his elbow and looked down into the walled garden. The grey light fell on his bare shoulder and on the left side of his face, which he no longer covered until Oakes came at seven.

“Only on the wall tops. It was harder yesterday.”

Yesterday had been Michaelmas. Crispin had read twenty-nine degrees at eight o’clock and had come to the breakfast table quite pale with it. They had walked to church along a lane where every hedge was furred white. Beyond the hedges the wheat had stood in its drills, still green and with the ear only half filled, and there had been frost on every blade of it. Gideon had stopped at a field gate and looked at it for a full minute before he said a word.

Five weeks had gone by since she had led him across a wet garden by the hand. She had not known that a person could be so happy and still get any work done.

He slept now. He slept six hours most nights and seven on some, with his arm across her waist, and the boards in the dressing room had not spoken since August. Oakes had taken to knocking at the passage door and coughing before he brought the water. He had never said one word about it to her, though he had begun to call her “ma’am” in a voice that was almost fond.

The two o’clock dinners had grown loud. Pip argued with her uncle about everything, from the height of the new parapet to whether a dragoon could beat a pirate. Tabitha sat against his left arm as a matter of right and fed him the parts of her dinner that she did not want. Crispin laughed often, and it no longer sounded as if it hurt him. Yesterday there had been a goose, and Gideon had carved it with what he declared was a cutlass. Linnea had given up her tally somewhere past twenty, for want of fingers.

She had drawn plates sixty-nine and seventy. She had left the foot of each sheet bare.

“I shall ride up to Gwilliam after breakfast,” he said. “I want to know what two frosts do to an ear that is still in milk. I think I know already.”

“It stops filling. The grain shrivels in the husk.” She sat up and felt for her spectacles. “He will tell you it does not matter, and then he will show you a handful, and you will see that it does.”

“You know him tolerably well.”

“I know farmers. I have buried a good many with my father.”

He kissed her shoulder, on the freckles, and got out of bed. She watched him cross to the white door. She found that she liked watching him do very ordinary things.
***
At eight she was on the east lawn in her cloak. The copper funnel stood on its patch of grass, level, well away from the wall, and Crispin was crouched over the measuring glass with his nose an inch from the marks.

“Nought,” he said. “And thirty-three on the thermometer. That is four degrees better than yesterday.”

“Write it, then.”

He wrote it. Then he did not close the ledger. He stood with it open against his chest and looked at the rim of the funnel, and she saw that there was something else. With Crispin there was generally a pause first, while he made sure of his figures.

“Aunt Linnea, may I ask you a question that is not about weather?”

“You may ask me any question you like.”

“It is about the law. I thought you might know, and I did not like to ask Nurse.” He drew a breath. “If you had a son, would he be duke instead of me?”

She had half expected that it would come one day. She had not expected it this morning, on a frosty lawn, from a boy of ten holding a rain glass.

“What has put that in your head?”

“Mercy was talking to Betsey in the night nursery on Saturday. They thought I was asleep. Betsey said that there would be a cradle wanted before long, the way things were going, and Mercy said, ‘And then where is Master Crispin?’ She told Betsey to hush after that.” He frowned at the funnel. “I have been trying to work out where I would be.”

Linnea put her hands inside her cloak. She would not lie to him. She had asked that for these three children before she agreed to anything else.

“The answer in law is yes,” she said. “A duke’s own son comes before his brother’s son. If your uncle and I had a boy, he would be the next Duke of Brackenhope, and you would not.”

He nodded slowly. He had clearly worked it out for himself and had only wanted it confirmed.

“Is there going to be one?”

“There is none coming now, that I know of. There may be one some day. I cannot promise you that there will not.”

“The paper Uncle Pargeter wrote said ‘the heir presumptive to a dukedom.’ Mr. Pym’s report said that the heir ought to be brought up at Brackenhope. I read it three times.” His voice was level and very careful. “So I thought that perhaps that was what the court was for. They were keeping the heir here. If I were not the heir, there would be nothing to keep.”

She understood then what he had been carrying since Saturday, and it took her breath for a moment.

“Crispin, I can tell you what I think about that, and I think it very strongly. But I am not the person who went to London for you, and it is not my word you need. That part of the question belongs to your uncle. Will you come and ask him?”

He went a little white. “Now?”

“Now, before he rides out. I shall come with you, if you like, and I shall not say a word unless you want me to.”

He thought about it. Then he shut the ledger and put the pencil in its loop.

“I should like you to come,” he said.
***
Gideon was in the study, booted for the ride, with the Michaelmas rent book open on the desk and Preece’s last three reports beside it. He looked up as they came in, and he looked at the boy’s face, and he put down his pen.

“Sir,” Crispin said. He stood on the carpet with his heels together. “I have asked Aunt Linnea a question, and she has answered half of it. She says the other half is yours.”

“Then let me have the whole.”

The boy gave it to him in order, like a report. He told about the cradle and what Mercy had said, and the words in the petition. He finished with his own conclusion and did not look away while he said it.

Gideon had risen. He came round the desk. He did not go down on his knee, because Crispin would have hated it. He leaned back against the edge of the desk, which brought his face nearer the boy’s.

“Your aunt told you the law correctly. If I have a son, he stands before you. I cannot alter that, and I shall not pretend to you that it could not happen. In May I told her that you were my heir and I wanted no other. I meant it when I said it. I had not the least expectation then of being glad that I was married. I am glad now. So there may be a cradle one day, though nobody has ordered one.”

Crispin swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“That is the first part. Here is the second. You are my heir today. I have no other, and you will be bred to it as if there never could be one. You will ride the farms with me and sit beside me at the audit when you are older. You will learn what a quarter of wheat costs and what a labourer eats. None of that will be wasted on you, whatever happens. A man who knows those things is wanted on this land, whether he is a duke or not.”

“And if I am not the heir?”

“Then you are still my boy.” Gideon said it in the same level voice, but she saw his hand tighten on the edge of the desk. “No law made you so, and no cradle can change it. I did not go before Mr. Pym for the sake of a coronet. I went for a boy who nails his father’s thermometer to a window and will not write down what he has not measured. I went for his sisters as well. If there were ten sons in this house, I should go again tomorrow, and for the same three people. Your place at Brackenhope does not depend on what you are to inherit. I ought to have told you so before you had to ask.”

Crispin’s chin was not quite steady. He held it up.

“Is that a promise, sir?”

“It is. I will shake hands on it, if you will.”

He held out his hand. The boy looked at it for a second. Then he put his own into it, thin and ink-stained, and they shook once, firmly, as two gentlemen might close on a horse.

“Thank you, sir.” Crispin let out a long breath. He appeared to consider the matter settled, and his mind went straight on to the next thing. “If there were a baby, he would not be able to read the gauge for a long time. Seven years, I should think.”

“Then you would have to keep it for him and teach him how. I should not trust anyone else with it.”

“No,” Crispin agreed gravely. “It wants to be the same hour every day.” He bowed to them both and went out. They heard him break into a run in the library, which he never did.

Gideon stayed where he was, with his hand still half open.

“He has been carrying that since Saturday,” Linnea said. “Two nights.”

“He has been carrying it since May. I gave it to him on the schoolroom hearthrug, when I told them all that the court wanted the heir kept safe.” He rubbed his jaw. “Did I look at him? I meant to. I was afraid I might be looking at the stovepipe.”

“You looked at him the whole time. It was very well done, Gideon.”

“I shall speak to Mercy.”

“Let me. She said nothing unkind, and she will cry for a week if it comes from you.”

He nodded. He seemed to need a moment, and he took it as he took most of them, by turning to the wall above his desk.

The scarlet heath hung there in its narrow black frame. She had grown used to it in five weeks. She brought him his coffee in this room some mornings, and she had taught herself to look at the rent books and the inkstand.

“I had the whole set down again last week,” he said. “It was the night you were up late with the seventieth. I laid them out along the library table in their order, from the first to the sixty-fourth. I am no judge, as you know. But you have taught me to look at the cuffs, and I can see a thing when sixty-four of them are in a row. The early plates are correct. From about the middle, they are alive.” He touched the edge of the frame. “This is one of the late ones. Your father never drew better than in his last years. I wish I had walked down that lane and told him so while I could.”

Linnea stood on the carpet where Crispin had stood.

A minute ago, in this room, she had watched him tell a child the truth when a kinder story lay ready to his hand. He had promised her plain dealing in a wet glasshouse, and he had kept to it ever since. She had promised him the same, and had asked him to hear plain things besides. It needed only one sentence. He did not draw that one. I did.

She opened her mouth.

She saw the lettering at the foot of the plate, the neat capitals she had copied so carefully. She saw her father on the fourth morning with his shaking hands folded in his lap, and the tears running into his neckcloth. He had never asked her to keep silent. She had done it for him, because she had seen what the truth would cost a proud old man. Now he was eight months in his grave, and still she could not make herself be the one to tell it.

“He would have been very glad to hear it,” she said.

That was true. It was the second time she had told a true thing in order to step round the other one, and it sat in her throat like a stone.

Gideon turned from the wall. She thought that he was going to ask her something. He had a way of looking at her when she had gone quiet.

There was a knock, and Oakes put his head round the door.

“Post, Your Grace. The boy’s horse cast a shoe on the hill, or you’d have had it an hour since. There’s one from Mr. Quince.”
***
It was a single sheet. Gideon broke the wafer standing and read it through. She watched his face close, line by line, into the stiff mask she had not seen for five weeks.

He held it out to her without a word.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 27th September.

Your Grace, I have this day been served with notice that Mr. Pargeter has taken exceptions to the Master’s report. They are four in number and I enclose a copy. Three of them are a restatement of Mr. Skrine’s argument of the 6th of August and need not alarm us. The Lord Chancellor has appointed to hear them at Lincoln’s Inn Hall on Tuesday, the 3rd of December.

The fourth is of another kind. It states that fresh matter has come to the petitioner’s knowledge since the hearing, which goes to the fitness of the household, and that he will bring it before his lordship by affidavit. I have applied to Mr. Skrine to know its nature and have been refused. I do not know what it is. I do not care to be in that position, and I shall not rest in it. I should be obliged if Your Grace and Her Grace would consider whether there is any circumstance, however slight, which has not been laid before me.

I have the honour to be, &c., N. Quince.

“Fresh matter,” Gideon said. He had gone to the window. “I have been asking myself what there is. He cannot touch the farms, for Pym has had the books. The children are well, and the nurse and the rector have sworn to it. I have dined in that schoolroom a hundred and thirty times.” He turned round. “The house is sound. So he will go for a person. He went for me in March, and for the marriage in July. I am trying to think what he has left.”

Linnea was reading the last sentence of the letter a second time. Any circumstance, however slight.

She thought of a counting room over a shop that sold sermons. Mr. Nettleship had held a drawing to the window there and remarked that the colour was hardly a month dry. He had looked at the carmine on her forefinger, and then at a pigeon. He had spoken of an engraver named Greave who had an eye like a hawk, and who had said that the old gentleman’s hand grew surer at the end.

Mr. Greave had no reason on earth to keep quiet. He did not even know that there was anything to keep.

Rupert Pargeter had known what the labourers at the bridge were paid within a day of arriving at Ludlow. He had got it from an ostler. He had known the size of Gideon’s wheat purchase to the quarter. He liked to stand in an inn yard and ask kindly questions until somebody told him a thing. Mr. Greave worked in London, where Pargeter had his counsel. There were also a hundred and sixty subscribers, any one of whom might have noticed that a dead clergyman was still sending in fresh plates.

There were twenty plates, sold for money under a name that was not the artist’s. Mr. Skrine had already called her a contrivance. She could hear what he would call her next, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, before the Lord Chancellor of England.

She was cold to her fingers’ ends. She had last been as cold as this in January, at a bedside.

“Linnea. You are as white as the paper.”

“I am frightened,” she said. It was the truth, and it was all of it that she could get out. “He says he does not know what it is. I did not think that there was anything Mr. Quince did not know.”

Gideon came and took the letter from her, and then he took her hands. His were warm. He chafed hers between them, the stained fingers and the rest, as he might have warmed a recruit’s on a winter picket.

“We have nine weeks. Quince will find it out, since that is what I pay him for. Meanwhile there is frost on green wheat on five and forty farms, and I can do something about that today, which I cannot about Mr. Skrine.” He searched her face. “Is there anything else?”

“The frost is enough for one morning,” Linnea said. “Go to Gwilliam.”

He kissed her forehead and went.

She stood in his study with the plate on the wall and the rent book open beneath it. She knew what she had just done. He had asked her a plain question, and she had answered it with the weather.

She told herself the reasons, and they were not bad ones. Until the wheat was cut and carried he would not have an hour to himself, nor would any man on the estate. She could not put this on him in the same week as a ruined harvest. It would mean writing to Quince, and to Nettleship, and perhaps a journey, at the very time he was wanted in every field. She would be saying to him, I have lied to you since Midsummer, and now it may cost you the children, and then sending him out to count sprouted sheaves.

They were sound reasons. She knew quite well that she was also afraid.

The dinner at two was as loud as ever. Pip had heard about the handshake and demanded one of her own, on general grounds. Gideon gave it, with great ceremony, and then had to give Tabitha one too. Linnea laughed in the right places. She ate what was put before her and could not have said what it was.

That night he slept. He had come home from Upper Hope at dusk with a handful of shrunken green grain in his pocket, and he had sat over the maps until eleven. Then he had come to bed and gone out like a snuffed candle, on his back, with his hand open on her hip.

Linnea lay awake beside him in the dark and listened to him breathe. It had always been he who lay awake. She had never before been the one keeping watch.

Gwilliam had said that he would cut within the fortnight, ripe or not. The corn would be down by the middle of October, and carried by the end of it if the weather held. Then there would be a day when nobody was needed in a field.

She would tell him on that day. She would tell him all of it, from the fourth morning in the autumn of 1813 to the bare strip at the foot of plate seventy. She would write to Quince herself by the same post, and she would take whatever came of it.

She made the promise to the ceiling, and to her father, and to the man asleep at her side. She meant to tell him as soon as the harvest was in.
***