Three Hundred and Seven

Sunday, November 24, 1816

The four sheets lay in a row on her bench, and Linnea had come out before church to look at them. She did it as some people press on a bruise.

She had finished the last on Saturday at dusk. Plate seventy-two was the Erica jasminiflora from Hackney, with its long white tubes, and it was the best thing she had ever done. She had held her brush over the foot of it for some minutes. Then she had washed the brush and put it in the jar.

All four sheets were bare at the foot. The book was finished, and she could not put a name to the end of it.

She fed the stove from the shed. She crouched at the warm end and parted the tall blades of the Strelitzia, and there was a leaf half unrolled and no bud. Eleven heaths had died of the October damp. The rest stood on their tiers and wanted nothing from her that she could not give.

It was ten days since he had gone. She had counted them, because Crispin counted them, in a new column that he had ruled without telling anybody.

She had not been idle in those ten days, and she had never in her life known how to be. On two mornings she had stood in the granary with Preece and measured out wheat by the peck to four hundred and eleven people at seventy-six shillings. She had heard Pip’s spelling. She had sat down every day at two o’clock to a table with an empty chair at it. Every day Tabitha had looked at the chair and then at the door.

At night she had lain on her own side of the wide bed. The white door was shut. He had shut it himself, and she had not opened it.

Those were the terms.

She had believed him. She saw now how easily she had done it. It had fitted something she had known about herself long before she knew him.

She was useful. She had been useful to her father for three years, as a pair of steady hands when his own failed. He had loved her, and he had wept, and he had let her letter his name twenty times and never once said that it must stop. She did not blame him. But she had learned from it what she was for.

Gideon Kynaston had needed a woman who could look at him across a Master’s table without flinching. She had done it. Afterwards she had been of use in a wheat field and a rickyard, and for a few weeks in a bed. Then her usefulness had turned into a danger to his suit, and he had paid her off handsomely and gone. Quince’s draft of the Dower House settlement had come on Thursday. It lay in her writing case with the tape still on it.

A man was free to keep to his own bargain. She had told herself so each morning, and the tenth time was no easier than the first.

The church bell began. She took off her apron and went to find three children and their gloves.
***
Mr. Aldridge preached on the widow’s cruse. He was brief, and he looked at nobody in particular. The castle pew held a duchess, three children and a nurse, and Linnea felt the parish see who was missing.

In the porch afterwards the women curtsied to her as they always had. Mrs. Bebb asked after the seed. Old Mrs. Gwilliam took Linnea’s hand in both of hers and held it hard.

“We don’t read London papers up our way, Your Grace,” she said. “Isaac lit his pipe with that one.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Gwilliam.”

“He says to tell you the Long Field’s showing green. Thin, but green.”

Linnea got as far as the lych-gate before she had to stop and polish her spectacles.

She walked home behind the children. The lane was hard with frost, and the bare hedges were full of fieldfares. Pip went ahead with her hands in her pockets, kicking a stone. Crispin walked beside Mercy and did not talk.

She was thinking about a sentence in a clerk’s hand. She had heard it read once, twelve days ago, and she found that she had it nearly whole. The Duke is not fit; he frightens them. She had thought at the time that Rupert Pargeter must have got his kind question in the drawing room from his sister.

She had been so sunk in her own disgrace that she had never asked anyone whether the sister had really thought so. There was one woman in the castle who would know.
***
Mrs. Hobday was in the housekeeper’s room with her Sunday cap on and the Bible open. She rose and shut it over a ribbon.

“I want to ask you something that is not in the Monday books,” Linnea said. “Sit down, please. It concerns Lady Edmund, and I should not ask if it did not matter.”

The housekeeper sat, very upright.

“A letter has been put before the court in London. Mr. Pargeter swears that his sister wrote it to him from this house, on the second of November last year. She begs him to take the children if she should die. She says that the Duke is not fit, and that he frightens them. She says that Tabitha screams if he comes into a room.” Linnea folded her hands. “The Duke has read it, and he believes it. I think it is the chief reason he is in London and I am here. You saw her every day of that autumn. Did she think it?”

Mrs. Hobday’s face did not move for a moment. Then two spots of colour came up on her cheekbones.

“Her ladyship? Of His Grace?” She said it as she might have said that a kitchen maid was accused of stealing spoons. “I never heard such stuff in thirty years of service. Lady Edmund came to this house a bride of nineteen, and His Grace was a captain in Portugal three years after. She wrote to him every month he was abroad. I saw the covers go into the bag, Your Grace, and I saw his come back with the army mark on them. She read the answers out at breakfast, and Lord Edmund used to say she was a better brother to him than he was.”

“And when he came home?”

“The night the chaise brought him from Dover she had his bed warmed three times, because it was late. She saw him on the steps in his bandages and gave him her hand as cheerfully as you please. Then she came into my linen room and shut the door and cried into a pile of pillow cases. She was crying for him. She said, ‘They have hurt him so, Hobday, and he was such a handsome boy.’ She dried her eyes, and she said we would have him right by the spring if only we could keep him at table.”

“And Tabitha?”

“Miss Tabitha was three. She met a strange tall man with half his head in linen, on the stairs, and she shrieked. Any child would. It happened once. Her ladyship laughed about it and said the child would be on his knee by Easter.” The housekeeper’s mouth went thin. “He did shut himself up. I’ll not deny it. She fretted over that. But she fretted for him, and she was never afraid of him. And I never in my hearing knew her call him ‘the Duke’ to her own family. It was ‘Gideon’, or ‘your uncle’. I’m not saying a sworn paper is false. I am a servant, and it is not my place. I’m saying I should want to see it.”

“So should I,” Linnea said slowly.

Mrs. Hobday got up. She unlocked a press in the corner and took out a thick quarto bound in marbled boards, with the corners worn white.

“This was hers. She kept it from the year she married, and she left it in my still room, since I was the one who made the things up. Nobody has asked me for it.” She opened it near the end and laid it on the table. “That is the last she ever wrote in it.”

It was a quick, sloping hand, with long tails to the letters. Oct. 20th, 1815. A posset for G., who does not sleep. New milk, a glass of sack, nutmeg, a spoonful of honey. Hobday to send it up at eleven without his asking, for he never will ask.

Linnea read it twice. It had been written thirteen days before the second of November.

“He drank it,” Mrs. Hobday said. “Every night, till the fourteenth. He never knew whose order it was.”

“May I take this to London?”

“I should think the worse of you if you left it, Your Grace.”
***
She carried the book out to the glasshouse, because she could think there. She laid it on the bench beside the four bare sheets, and sat down on her stool in her Sunday gown.

She had not been there five minutes when the door opened and shut. Crispin came down the path with his ledger under his arm. He stopped a yard off, as he always did.

“Aunt Linnea, may I show you something?”

“Of course.”

He opened the ledger on the bench. It was the page for November. There was the date, with three readings and the rain and the weather, in his careful round hand. On the fifteenth, in the last column, he had written more than weather. Uncle G. left 6.30 a.m. in a chaise. Did not say. Under it, ruled in red, was the new column, with a stroke for each day since.

“I didn’t write what I thought,” he said. “I only wrote what I saw.”

“I know. You never write anything else.”

“I have been thinking about it for ten days. I think I have it right now.” He drew a breath. “He shut the door for six months last time. You opened it. Are you going to let him?”

She looked at him. He was quite white, and he held her eye.

“He told me to stay here, Crispin. He has arranged a house for me. He said that I was to have no more to do with the lawsuit.”

“He told us a great many things in May. He said he would dine at two, and he did. He said he would not send us away, and he hasn’t. He keeps the things he says, when he says them properly.” The boy frowned at his own page. “This time he didn’t say anything. He got into the chaise. I was at the window, and he saw me. I think that when he can’t say a thing properly, he goes behind a door. He did it when Papa died. It wasn’t because he didn’t care about Papa.”

“No,” Linnea said. Her throat hurt. “It was not.”

“Then it might not be because he doesn’t care about us. Or you.” He shut the ledger. “I can’t go and fetch him. I am ten. You are a duchess, and there is a coach.”

“Something was brought to him from London, Crispin. It was a paper that says a hard thing about him, and he believes it. Mrs. Hobday does not. I do not know yet who is right.”

“Then somebody ought to go and measure it,” Crispin said.

The door opened again before she could answer. Pip came in backwards, shutting it with her heel, with both hands held in front of her. She was carrying something wrapped in a handkerchief. She looked at her brother with great disfavour.

“I wanted her by herself.”

“I shan’t listen,” Crispin said, and went to look at the wheat trays.

Pip came up to the bench. She put the handkerchief down and unfolded it, corner by corner.

It was a piece of old glass, a little larger than a playing card, three-sided, with one edge wound round in darning wool so that it should not cut. It had the faint green of deep water. In the corner, in red lead, in a seven-year-old’s painstaking figures, was the number 307.

“I took it out of the sack,” Pip said. “In May, when he wasn’t looking. It’s been in my stocking drawer.”

“Why did you keep it?”

“At first it was so I’d remember I broke it. I thought somebody ought to.” She scowled at the glass. “Then I kept it because he picked up the bits. He got down on the path, and he didn’t shout. I thought I’d forget he did that if I didn’t have something.”

Linnea did not touch it. She waited.

“I said a thing to you, twice. I said it in the night nursery when I gave you back the bit of brush.” Pip’s chin came up. “You didn’t only come for the plants. I know that now. I’ve known it ages. You drank the salt and you left the candle, and you smoked the glass for Crispin, and you counted the peas for Tabby when she was sick. People don’t do that for plants.”

“No. They do not.”

“So I was wrong about you. I heard a bargain, and I thought that was all there was. You said it wasn’t finished, and it wasn’t.” She pushed the glass an inch across the bench. “He made the bargain as well. So perhaps it wasn’t all there was with him either, and he’s too stupid to say. He’s stupid about saying things. You should take him that. He’ll know what it is.”

She did not wait to be thanked. She turned round and marched up the path, collecting her brother by the sleeve as she went, and the door shut behind them both.

Linnea sat with the shard in front of her.

Those were the terms.

She made herself hear it again. She listened as she would have listened to a pot, for the note it gave back.

She had asked him a plain question that wanted a yes or a no. Was it only ever a bargain? He had given her neither. He had given her four words that were true as far as they went. There had been terms, and he had named them. He had said it with his hands behind his back and his eye on her face. All his colour had gone as he said it.

She knew that way of answering. She had used it three times herself. She had opened her mouth under this very roof to tell him who drew the plate on his wall, and had told him about top lights. She had said that her father would have been glad, and that the frost was enough for one morning. Each of those was a true thing, set down where the real one should have gone.

She had done it because she was afraid. She had been afraid of his face when he knew, and of costing him the children, and most of all that he would think less of her.

He had promised in May never to lie to her. For six months he had kept that at some cost. When he broke it, it was on the anniversary of the worst night of his life. He had just taken the chair he had once refused, and he had a letter in his coat that said he was unfit to be near a child. Two people had died on an errand of his. He had stood in the library and looked at a third person who was getting ready to go to London on his account.

She saw it whole, then. He had not been paying her off. He had been getting her off the road before the bridge.

He had been afraid, as she had been afraid. They had each of them looked at the stovepipe.

It did not make her less angry. It made her a good deal more so, and she was glad of the anger. She had been cold and obedient for ten days, and she found that she liked herself better in a temper.

He had no right to decide it for her. She would tell him so. She would tell him to his face, a hundred and forty-three miles off.

She pulled the first sheet toward her. It was Sunday, and she had never in her life taken up a pen for work on a Sunday. She thought that her father would have forgiven a line of lettering. He might even have asked for it, if he had been braver, and she ought to have been braver for both of them.

She dipped her finest pen. She did not use his neat capitals. She wrote in her own round hand, at the foot of plate sixty-nine. L. Brackenhope del.

It looked very odd, and she let it dry. Then she signed the seventieth, and the seventy-first, and last the white jasminiflora. Her hand did not shake on any of them.
***
She packed the portfolio herself. The four plates went in between boards, with the receipt book and Quince’s draft of her affidavit. She put in the three letters she had folded on the night of the audit and never sent. She did not open the Dower House paper. She left it in its pink tape on the dressing table. The shard went into her reticule, in its handkerchief.

Then she climbed to the schoolroom. They were at their tea. Three faces came up.

“I am going to London tomorrow, to your uncle,” she said. “He has not sent for me. I shall be going against his wish, and you should know that. I mean to swear to the truth about my drawings under my own name, and I mean to look at a paper. The Lord Chancellor sits a week on Tuesday. He may ask to see the heir, and I had rather the heir were in Upper Brook Street than two days off. So I should like all three of you to come, and Mercy with you. It is a long, cold road. Anybody who would sooner stay may stay.”

“Try and leave me,” said Pip.

Crispin had put down his bread. “Who will read the gauge?”

“Whom would you trust?”

He thought hard. “Mr. Preece. He is exact. I shall write the hour out for him.”

“Is the pirate at London?” Tabitha asked.

“He is.”

“Then I’m coming,” said Tabitha, and went on with her milk.

Mercy Onions was already counting flannel petticoats on her fingers.

Linnea went down by the great stair. Mr. Preece had come up to the hall on some Sunday errand, and she kept him five minutes. Tudge was to have the stove and the top lights, an inch, in any weather. The garden boy was to have her hazel stick, and she would show him at dawn how to use it.

“You told me once that you hoped a trustee need only admire,” she said. “I am afraid I must ask more of you for a fortnight.”

“I’ll ring every pot myself, Your Grace,” Preece said. He was turning his hat. “And I’ll say what Mrs. Hobday won’t. It’s time somebody went.”

Mrs. Hobday was at the baize door. She had plainly been there for some while.

“I want the travelling coach, Mrs. Hobday, with four horses and Pugh on the box beside the coachman. We sleep at Oxford. I shall want hot bricks and a basket, and every rug in the house.”

“The bricks have been in the oven since noon, Your Grace,” said the housekeeper. “At what hour?”

“At six in the morning,” Linnea said. “Not a minute after.”
***