Daylight

Tuesday, November 26, 1816

“A hundred and thirty-nine,” Crispin said. “That was the stone at Tyburn turnpike. I could not read it, but the man called it.”

“Then you have four miles of your reckoning left, and we have rather less of road.”

Linnea rubbed the glass with her glove. There was nothing to see but lamps, strung out along Oxford Street in a brown fog, and the lit windows of shops going by. It was near eight o’clock. Tabitha was asleep across Mercy’s lap with a doll in each fist, and Pip was asleep against Linnea’s own shoulder, with her mouth open, and would have denied it.

They had been two days on the road. On Monday they had crossed Brackenhope Bridge at a quarter past six, in the dark, with the lamps showing a new parapet as white as a tablecloth. Pip had let down the glass to look at it.

“It’s higher than me,” she had said, with approval. “He said a foot. He’s done more.”

There had been frost on every mile to Worcester, and the roads were like iron. Crispin kept the milestones in a column, and the times of the changes, and the names of the inns. He had left Preece a page of instructions for the rain gauge, written out fair and signed. Tabitha had been sick once, tidily, into a basin that Mrs. Hobday had foreseen.

They had slept at the Mitre in Oxford, in one great bed and a truckle. Linnea had lain awake between two sets of cold feet.

“What if he says go home?” Pip had asked out of the dark.

“Then I shall say no. I have had a good deal of practice at hearing it from you.”

Pip had snorted, and then been quiet for some time. “He won’t shout,” she had said at last. “He never does. I wish he would. You can shout back at shouting.”

“Yes,” Linnea had said. “I have thought the same.”

It had sleeted today from Wycombe onward. She had spent the last three stages going over what she meant to say, and she had worn it down to very little. She found that she was not at all afraid of saying it. She was only afraid that she would find the door shut when she got there.

The coach turned, and turned again, and the wheels ran quieter. It stopped.

Brackenhope House stood in its row with every shutter closed. There was no light in any front window, and the lamp over the door had not been lit. It looked like a house where somebody had died.

Pugh was down from the box before the steps were. He knocked like a sergeant.

Nobody came for so long that she had time to get down herself, stiff in every joint, and stand on the wet flags with the sleet on her face. Then there were bolts, and the door opened a foot, and a candle showed in it.

Bat Oakes looked out. He was in his waistcoat, with a boot brush in his hand. He saw the coach and the four steaming horses. He saw the nurse handing a sleeping child down to Pugh, and a boy climbing out with a ledger. Then he saw who was standing on the step.

“Thank God, Your Grace,” he said.

His voice cracked on it. He pulled the door wide and stood back against it, as straight as his leg would let him.

“Is he in the house, Oakes?”

“He’s not been out of it but three times, and those after dark in a closed hackney. Mr. Quince twice and the counsel once.” Oakes had dropped his voice. “He’s not let me near him with a razor since Thursday. He don’t go to bed. He sits in the library with that paper, and he has the shutters barred front and back like a siege. I’ve known him two and twenty years, ma’am. I’d sooner have him as he was last winter. He was only dead then. Now he’s dead and he knows what he’s missing.”

“Has he eaten?”

“What I stand over.”

“Then Mrs. Jessop will find something hot for four travellers and a duke, and you will stand over all of us. Give the children the fire in the hall. I shall be a quarter of an hour.”

She took off her wet cloak and gave it to him. She kept the reticule. Crispin was looking at her, from beside the hall table, with the ledger held to his chest.

“I am going to speak to him first,” she told him. “Then it will be your turn. I promise you shall have it.”

The library door was at the back of the hall. She did not knock.
***
It was nearly dark inside. The fire had burned down to a red heap, and there was one candle, at the far end of the long table. The chandelier still hung in its holland bag, and half the shelves were sheeted. The room smelled of cold ash.

He was sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves. He had his back to the wall and his face to the door, and in front of him lay a single sheet of paper in a clerk’s hand.

He stood up when he saw her. He did it slowly, with one hand on the table. He had ten days of dark-fair beard, and it was grey along the line of the scar where the hair would not grow. His eye was sunk in his head. Even so, he brought his face square to her across the length of the room. She could have wept at that, and she did not.

“Linnea.” It came out hoarse. “How are you here?”

“By Worcester and Oxford, like anybody else.”

“I heard a child.”

“You heard three. They are in your hall. I asked each of them whether they would come, and none of them took long over it.”

“You brought them a hundred and forty miles in November. Over—” He stopped.

“Over your bridge. Yes. Pip put her head out to measure your parapet, and she thinks it very handsome. The Chancellor may ask to see the heir, Gideon. I did not choose to have him two days away, at a schoolroom window.”

His hand tightened on the table edge. She walked up the room until there were only three yards of carpet between them.

“I have come a long way to say a short thing,” she said. “You once asked me to hear the whole of what you had to say before I answered. I ask the same of you now.”

He said nothing. She took that for leave, and she would have gone on without it.

“I am not a debt you can discharge. I came because I love you, and I think you lied to me on the fourteenth.”

It was very quiet. A coal fell in the grate.

She watched it reach him, as he had watched his four words reach her. He did not move at all. But the blood came up into his face under the beard, and then went again, and his breath went out as if he had been struck under the ribs.

“I do not want an answer to the first,” she said. “I have not come for one. As for the second, I asked you a question that night, and you gave me a sentence that was true as far as it went. I know how that is done. I have done it to you three times, and I recognised it in the end. It took me ten days, which does me no credit.”

“Linnea—”

“I have not finished. There are two things that I am going to do. Tomorrow at nine I shall be at Mr. Quince’s, with his draft in my hand. I shall swear my own affidavit as soon as he has it fair. I shall swear it under my own name, and I shall be in Lincoln’s Inn Hall when it is read. You told your counsel that I should swear nothing. He has been misinformed. It is my lie that Mr. Skrine has hold of. I told it, and I shall be the one to answer for it. You have no more right to answer for me than to sign my drawings.”

“They will read it all out. Your father’s hands. The coal merchant. Skrine will make a meal of every word.”

“Then I shall hear him do it. I had rather that than read of it in the Journal in a house inside your park wall.” She drew a breath. “The second thing is that paper.”

His eye went down to the sheet on the table. It did not stay there long. She thought that he could no longer bear to look at it, and that he could not leave it either.

“That one is a clerk’s copy,” she said. “I mean the one in Mr. Skrine’s chambers. I am going to see it with my own eyes, and I am going to lay it beside her own hand. Mrs. Hobday has given me Lady Edmund’s receipt book. Did she write to you in Spain?”

He was slow to answer. “Every month.”

“Mrs. Hobday says so too. She says a number of other things, and she is so angry that her cap shook. I shall not repeat them tonight. You have had ten days alone with that page, and you will not be argued out of it in ten minutes. I do not ask you to disbelieve it. I only tell you that I have not seen it, and that I do not take a thing on Mr. Pargeter’s word when I can go and look.”

“Quince compared the hand.”

“Mr. Quince had five minutes, and he is not in the habit of looking at lines all day. I am.” She folded her hands. “So that is what I shall do. You may come with me, or you may sit here. I should a great deal rather that you came. But I shall go in either case, and you cannot stop me. You saw to that yourself, in a deed with two red seals. I am the freest woman in England, Gideon. It was you who made me so, and you cannot now complain of where I choose to go.”

She had finished. Her knees were not quite steady, now that it was said, and she kept them locked.

He stood a long moment. He looked at her as he had looked at the gap in the bridge. She could not tell what was going on behind that one tired eye. She saw his throat work.

Then he said, “Where is the boy?”

“By the hall fire.”

He came round the table. He passed close enough for her to feel the cold coming off his shirt. He did not touch her. He went down the room and out, and she followed him as far as the door.
***
Mrs. Jessop had lit the hall lamp. Mercy sat on the settle with Tabitha heavy in her lap. Pip had woken and was on the bottom stair with her arms round her knees. Crispin stood on the hearthstone, with his heels together.

Gideon stopped in front of him. He was unshaven and coatless. He looked down at a boy of ten, and for a moment he had no words.

“I left without speaking to you,” he said. “You were at the window. I saw you, and I knew that you had seen me. I got into the chaise. I could have come up three flights of stairs, and I did not. It was ill done, and it was cowardly. I beg your pardon, Crispin.”

The boy’s lips had gone white. “I wrote it down, sir.”

“You were right to. May I see?”

Crispin opened the ledger at November and held it up. Gideon read the entry for the fifteenth. He read the red column under it, twelve strokes now. She saw the scarred side of his mouth tighten.

“‘Did not say,’” he said. “That is exact. I had nothing to say that was fit for you to hear, so I said nothing. I did the same last winter, for six months, and I told myself then that it was grief. A man may do a wrong thing twice, but he ought not to do it a third time. I shall not go from you again without a word. If I must go, you will hear from me where I am going and why, and when I mean to come back.”

“Does the other promise stand? The one in the study?”

“It stands. I never took it back. I only behaved as though I had, and I should think that looked much the same from a window.”

Crispin considered this. He was not a boy to be hurried, and Gideon did not hurry him.

“Yes, sir,” he said finally. “It looked the same.” He took the pencil from its loop. He turned to the hall table and wrote on the line for the twenty-sixth, slowly. Then he showed it. London, 8 p.m. Found him.

“May I add to that?” Gideon asked.

The boy gave him the pencil. Gideon bent, and wrote four words beneath in his square black hand, and gave the book back. Crispin read them. His chin shook once. He shut the ledger, and stepped forward, and put his forehead against his uncle’s shirt front, without a word. Gideon’s hand came up and rested on the fair head.

Linnea could not see what he had written. She found that she did not need to.

“You’ve got a beard,” Pip said from the stair. Her voice was very gruff. “It’s horrible. It’s two colours.”

“I am told so. It comes off in the morning.”

“We came over your bridge. It’s higher than you said.”

“I thought that I had better be on the safe side.”

“Well.” Pip scowled dreadfully at the newel post. “You ought to have been on it sooner.”

“Yes, Philippa,” he said. “I ought.”

There was a stir on the settle. Tabitha had opened her eyes. She looked about her at the strange hall, and the lamp, and the sheeted chairs. Then she saw him, beard and all, and she studied him for a moment with great doubt. She looked at the black silk, and her face cleared.

“Pirate,” she said. She held up both arms, with the dolls in them.

He lifted her out of Mercy’s lap. He took her on his left arm, as he had on the leads in July. She put her head down in the hollow of his shoulder and was asleep again before he had reached the stair. He went up with her, slowly, past Pip, who got up and followed with her boots unlaced. Mercy went after them with the candle, and Crispin last.

Linnea sat down on the settle. Oakes brought her a cup of soup without being asked and stood over her while she drank it, and neither of them said anything.
***
It was a quarter of an hour before he came down.

He stopped on the last stair. He had put on a coat, and he had not thought to button it. She stood up. There was the width of the hall between them, black and white squares under the lamp.

“They are in bed,” he said. “Philippa asked me whether you and I had quarrelled. I told her that I had quarrelled with you, by myself, and that you had come to finish it.”

“That is fair.”

He came down the last step and stood there. She saw him gather himself. She had seen him do it in a wet lane before Isaac Gwilliam, and on the bank of the leat with a rope round his waist. This was harder for him than either. He had given orders for fifteen years, and before that he had been bred to give them.

“I have decided for two people in my life, without asking them,” he said. “One was my brother, and one was you. I was wrong both times, and I do not trust my own judgment tonight.” His voice dragged. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

She had thought about that, too, between Wycombe and Uxbridge.

“Come out of this house with me. In daylight.”

His head came up.

“I do not mean a closed hackney after dark. You are to come on foot down your own steps tomorrow morning, shaved, with me on your arm. We shall go to Mr. Quince’s by the open street, and afterwards to Mr. Skrine’s, and next week to the hall, by the front door. People will stare. Some of them will have read the Chronicle, and they will stare at me as well. We shall let them. I will not have Mr. Pargeter tell the Chancellor that the Duke of Brackenhope has gone back behind his shutters. And I will not have it be true.”

He looked at her for a long time. The lamp lit the left side of his face, the patch and the pale line and the rough beard. She felt in her reticule. She took out the handkerchief and crossed the hall and put it into his hand.

He unfolded it. The glass lay in his palm, greenish, with its edge bound in wool and its three red figures.

“From Pip,” Linnea said. “She took it out of your sack in May. She says that you are stupid about saying things, and that you will know what it is.”

He closed his fingers over it very carefully. His eye was bright.

“Linnea. What you said to me in that room. On the fourteenth I—”

“Not yet.” She put two fingers against his coat, to stop him. “You are worn out and you have not slept, and I have been two days in a coach. I do not want it tonight, in the dark, because I have run you to earth. You gave me words once, in front of my father’s plant, and you took them back in a library. I shall not weigh any more words until I have seen something. Show me.”

He stood quite still. Then he nodded, once.

“Oakes.”

“Your Grace.” The sergeant had been at the back of the hall the whole time, looking at a wall.

“The razor at seven. My blue coat. And the key to the shutter bars. Mrs. Jessop has it.”

“I’ll see to the shutters, Your Grace. It’s past ten.”

“No. I barred them myself. Bring me the key.”

Oakes brought it. It was an iron thing on a loop of tape. Gideon put the piece of glass into his breast pocket, took the key and a candle, and opened the door of the front drawing room.

She went as far as the threshold. The room was full of shrouded shapes, and it was very cold. He set the candle on a sheeted table and went to the first of the three tall windows. The iron bar lay across the shutters, with a padlock at the end of it. He turned the key. He lifted the bar down and stood it against the wall, and folded the leaves back into their boxes, one side and then the other.

The glass behind them was black and running with sleet. A lamp burned across the way. A hackney went by, and the driver looked in at the lit window as he passed.

Gideon did not step back from it. He went on to the second window, and then the third. Then he crossed the hall to the dining room, with the key in his hand, and she heard the first bar come down in there.
***