Frith Street

Sunday, December 1, 1816

“Forty,” Linnea said. “Dr. Yarrow’s note says he seldom has fewer on a Sunday. He writes that they are all harmless, and that most of them are deaf.”

“Then I shall speak up,” said Gideon.

The carriage had stopped in Frith Street behind two others. There was a lamp over a narrow door, and every window on the first floor was lit. He could see heads moving behind the blinds.

He had not walked into a drawing room full of company since a ball in Brussels, the June before last. He had gone into that one with two eyes and a whole face, and had been called away from it before supper.

He had done what she asked of him, every day since Tuesday. On Wednesday morning he had come down his own steps, shaved, at ten o’clock, with her hand on his arm. They had walked the length of Brook Street and across Bond Street in broad daylight. People had looked, at him and at her. A woman outside a milliner’s had nudged her friend. He had kept walking, and Linnea had talked to him about the price of London coal.

On Thursday he had stood beside her in a dusty office off Chancery Lane while she laid her bare hand on a Testament. She had sworn to four sheets of Quince’s engrossing, and she had owned all twenty-four plates, from the forty-fifth to the sixty-eighth. She had sworn to her father’s hands and to the coal merchant, and to the lie she had told in Paternoster Row. Her voice had been as steady as it was before the Master. He had watched her sign it, and he had thought that he had never led a charge that took more nerve.

Skrine had refused them a sight of the letter. He had written that the original would be produced in Lincoln’s Inn Hall on Tuesday and not before.

Linnea had shown Gideon the receipt book instead. He had read the last entry, the posset ordered for G., who does not sleep, in Arabella’s quick, sloping hand. He had drunk that posset every night for three weeks and never asked who sent it. He had sat a long time with the page. It had not altered the other paper. A woman might be kind to a man and still judge him unfit to rear her children. He thought it was very like her to have done both.

He had tried twice since Tuesday to say what he owed his wife. Each time she had stopped him, with two fingers or a look. Show me. She was quite right, since he had given her words in August and taken them back in November.

“You need not do this one,” she said now. Her hood was up and he could see only her spectacles. “I asked you for daylight. I did not ask for a party. I can go up alone and face my own subscribers.”

“I know you can. You would do it very well.” He picked up his hat. “Is Nettleship in that room?”

“Dr. Yarrow says he never misses.”

“Then I am coming up.”
***
The stair was steep and smelled of camphor and old paper. A manservant took their names at the top and looked twice at Gideon’s face before he opened the door.

“The Duke and Duchess of Brackenhope.”

It was a long, low room, lined to the ceiling with cabinets. There were tables covered in dried plants under glass, and a good fire, and candles everywhere. There were mirrors as well, two of them, in gilt frames. He saw himself in the nearer one before he could help it, with the black silk and the white line.

The talk died as a fire does under a wet blanket. It went out in the middle of the room first and then at the edges. Forty faces turned. Most of them were elderly men in black. There were five or six ladies in turbans. He saw a quizzing glass go up, and a naval coat, and a clergyman with his teacup stopped halfway.

They had all read the Chronicle. He could tell it from the way their eyes went from his face to hers and then to her hands.

Linnea’s fingers tightened in the bend of his left elbow. She was holding her portfolio against her side with the other arm.

By the far chimneypiece stood a neat, pale man with ink on his cuff. He had begun to bow, and had thought better of it, and he was now looking at the carpet.

Gideon had meant to wait for his host. He found that he could not stand in that silence a second longer and let her stand in it.

“Gentlemen. Ladies.” He used the voice that had carried across a rickyard. “I shall save you the trouble of wondering. My wife drew the last twenty plates of Corfield’s Heaths and four more. Any gentleman who feels cheated may say so to my face, such as it is.”

For one beat the room stayed quiet.

Then the naval officer gave a bark of laughter. A lady in a purple turban laughed after him, and somebody said “Hear him!” from the back. It ran round the walls. It was the kind of laughter he had heard in a mess tent when a thing everybody dreaded had been said aloud by the colonel.

At his side Linnea made a small, strangled sound. He did not dare look at her.

“I heard that,” said a high, cracked voice. “I heard every word, and I am the deafest man in Soho. Let me through, Babington, you are standing on my foot.”

The company parted. A very small old man came through it in a black velvet skullcap and a coat dusted with snuff. He was seventy and bent like a shepherd’s crook, and he had a large brass-rimmed glass hung round his neck on a ribbon. He looked up at Gideon’s face from somewhere near the third waistcoat button, with great interest and no embarrassment at all.

“Sabre,” he said. “A clean one. I was a surgeon’s mate before I was a botanist. You are Brackenhope. I am Yarrow.” He turned his back on the Duke at once. “And you are the young woman who has been correcting my Latin by letter since Thursday. Is that the portfolio? Give it here. No, to the table by the lamp. Babington, move those ferns.”

Linnea went with him. She had to let go of Gideon’s arm to do it, and he let her go. He stood where he was, in the open floor, with the candles on his left side, and discovered that nobody was looking at him any longer. They were all crowding toward the lamp.

He followed. He was a head taller than most of the room and could see over it.

She had untied the tapes. She laid the first sheet on the green cloth. It was a low heath with crowded flowers of green and yellow, one of the three he had bought for her at Hackney. At the foot, where he had seen only a bare strip in October, there was a line of lettering in a round hand that he knew from six months of household notes.

L. Brackenhope del.

It caught him under the ribs, on the side where the lance had gone in.

“Plate sixty-nine,” Linnea said. Her voice was not quite steady. “Erica banksii. It is the first I have signed with my own name, Dr. Yarrow. The twenty-four before it were mine as well. I have sworn to that on oath, and I should like you to hear it from me before you hear it from a lawyer. My father named the plants and wrote the notes. He could not hold a pencil after the autumn of the year thirteen.”

Yarrow did not answer. He had bent until his nose was six inches from the paper, and he had put his glass to the dissection at the foot of the sheet, where a single flower lay opened with its parts in a row.

He was a long time over it. The room waited. Gideon heard the fire, and somebody’s watch.

“Eight anthers,” the old man said at last, to the paper. “Awned. The awns the right length, which Andrews has never once managed. The ovary drawn from the life and not out of another man’s book.” He straightened as far as he ever could. He glared round at the company. “I have told people for two years that Corfield had improved. I told Banks so in this room. I said the old parson had learned to see at sixty-five, and that there was hope for all of us. And the whole time it was a girl in Shropshire with better eyes than his.”

“He had very good eyes, sir,” said Linnea. “He taught me where to look.”

“I daresay he did. He did not teach you that.” Yarrow jabbed a brown finger at the opened flower. “How do you tell banksii from sebana, madam, when neither is in bloom?”

“By the leaf, sir. Banksii carries its leaves in threes, and they are blunt. Sebana has them shorter and more crowded, and the bark peels.”

“And when both are in bloom?”

“Then I do not trust the corolla at all. I open one and look at the anthers. My husband says that a heath wears its regimental facings on the inside.”

Yarrow’s mouth fell open. He turned his whole bent body to look up at Gideon.

“Did you say that?”

“I am afraid I did, sir. I was holding the lens at the time.”

“Facings,” the old man said. “Cuffs and collars. God help us all. It is the best account of the genus I have heard in forty years, and it comes from a dragoon.” He began to wheeze, and it was some seconds before Gideon understood that he was laughing. “It goes in the letterpress. I shall put it in myself. Salisbury will have a fit.”

The other three sheets came out. They went from hand to hand down the table, held by the edges. A thin man in spectacles had pushed to the front and was holding the white jasminiflora up to a candle.

“Greave, Your Grace,” he said to Linnea, without looking away from it. “I have cut your last twenty on copper. I said to Mr. Nettleship that the old gentleman’s hand grew surer. I never thought to be put on paper for it by an attorney. I was asked a civil question in a coffee house by a sandy gentleman from the country, and I gave a civil answer. I am sorry for it.”

“You told the truth, Mr. Greave. I had not. You have nothing to regret.”

“Well, I shall cut these four as they deserve, then. This white one will be the best plate in the book.”

Gideon looked for Nettleship. The publisher had come as far as the end of the table. He stood there with his hands behind him, and he was pink from his neckcloth to his hair.

“Your Grace,” he said to Linnea, low. “I was required to say on oath what I believed. I could not say otherwise.”

“I should have thought the less of you if you had, sir. I wrote to tell you so a fortnight ago, and I did not send it. I have been slow about a good many letters.”

“What I want to know,” said the lady in the purple turban loudly, “is whether I am to have my last part. I have paid for seventy-two plates, and I have sixty-four, and I do not care a button whether they were drawn by a rector or his cook, so long as they match.”

“Seventeen parts are engraving, ma’am,” said Nettleship. “The eighteenth lies on that table.”

“Then somebody had better say so in writing,” Yarrow said, “since writing is what the lawyers want. Babington, you have a decent hand. Take a sheet out of that drawer. Put this down.”

He dictated it standing, with his glass swinging. The undersigned, being subscribers to the work entitled Corfield’s Heaths, had seen the drawings numbered sixty-nine to seventy-two. They declared themselves satisfied that plates forty-five to sixty-eight were by the same hand. They did not consider themselves deceived in the value of what they had bought. They desired that the work be completed by Linnea, Duchess of Brackenhope, and that her name should stand upon the title page beside her father’s.

“Beside it,” Linnea said quickly. “Not in place of it. The book is his.”

“I said beside. I am deaf, madam, I am not careless.” Yarrow took the pen and signed first, in a hand like a spider’s. “Now the rest of you. Subscribers only. If you have been borrowing your neighbour’s copy, you may stand back.”

They came up one at a time. The naval officer signed, and the lady in the turban, and the clergyman who had finished his tea. A stout physician signed and told Linnea that he had the scarlet cerinthoides framed in his consulting room. Gideon heard that and said nothing. He stood a little behind her left shoulder, with his hat in his hand, and counted.

Babington numbered the names in the margin as they dried. The last was thirty-one.

“Thirty-one of a hundred and sixty, in one room, on one evening,” said Yarrow. “The rest are in the country, and I shall write to the ones who can read. Nettleship! You swore one paper for that fellow Skrine. Will you swear another for this lady? That these names were set down in your presence, freely, and that not one subscriber has asked you for his money back?”

Nettleship went pinker still.

“Not one has, Dr. Yarrow. Two have written to ask whether Her Grace takes commissions.” He bowed to Linnea, properly, as he had in his counting room. “I told you in August that the second duty of my trade was to print the truth on a title page. I shall swear it tomorrow morning, if Mr. Quince will draw it, and I shall be very glad to.”

Gideon saw his wife put her hand flat on the green cloth, as she did when her knees wanted a seat. He moved his arm, and she took it without looking round.

They were kept another hour. She was asked about peat and crocks and rain water, and a dispute about the Hackney loam nearly came to blows without her. He was asked by the naval officer where he had got his wound, and by the physician whether the socket troubled him in frost. He answered both. A lady asked whether it was true that he had four hundred quarters of wheat and was selling it under the market, and when he said that it was, she told him he was a fool and shook his hand.

Nobody flinched in that whole room. He noticed it only on the stair, going down.
***
The carriage smelled of cold leather. Pugh shut the door on them, and the wheels began to turn over the stones of Soho.

She had the signed paper on her knee. She had not let go of it since Babington sanded the last name. The lamps went by outside, and each one showed him her face for a moment.

“Thirty-one,” she said. “I thought that there might be three or four who would not turn their backs. And you announced me like a town crier. ‘Such as it is.’ I nearly disgraced myself.”

“It seemed better to give them the worst of our case first. I had it from a witness I once heard.”

She laughed. It was short and breathless, and he had not heard it since the night of the kiln.

He had stood up before forty strangers an hour ago without much trouble. What he had to do now was far harder. He turned on the seat until he faced her.

“Linnea. You told me to show you something before I spoke. I do not know whether I have shown you enough. I am going to speak now, and you may stop me again if you choose.”

She did not put up her hand. She folded both of them on the paper.

“I love you,” Gideon said. “I lied on the bridge night. It was never the terms.”

A lamp passed. Her eyes were very wide behind the glass.

“I made one clause myself, in your father’s glasshouse, and I broke it in my own library. You asked me a plain question. I stood there with my hands behind me, and I gave you four words that I knew you would take for a no. I meant you to. I had stopped on the bridge at five minutes to ten, and I had counted who had gone down that road on my account. I could see you going down it next, to be pulled to pieces in a court for me. I thought that if you believed me cold, you would stay where you were safe. I decided it for you, and I used a lie to do it. It is the worst thing I have done to anyone living.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was.”

“I am not asking you to pass over it. I only tell you what is true, since I ought to have told you on the fourteenth. I had loved you for a long while by then. I think it began in a furrow. I knew it on the leads, and when you fell asleep on the sacks in Gwilliam’s barn. I had no practice at saying such a thing, and you know that I do not say things well. Philippa has explained it to me.”

“She explained it to me too. She sent you a piece of glass.”

“It is in my breast pocket. It has been there since Tuesday.” He drew a breath that hurt. “That is the whole. I shall not go behind a door again. If I am afraid for you, I shall say that I am afraid, and you will tell me that you mean to do the thing regardless, and I shall hold your cloak.”

She was silent for the length of a street. He let her be.

“I was very angry,” she said at last. “I am still, a little. I expect to be angry on and off until Christmas, and I shall tell you each time.” She took off her spectacles. Her hand was shaking. “I believed you, Gideon. For ten days. I thought that I had been useful and was done with.”

“I know it. I would give my other eye to have those days back.”

“Keep the eye. I have a use for it.” Her voice broke on the last word. “You walked into that room. You did it for my name, when you would not do it a year ago for your own. I asked to be shown something, and I have been shown it. Say the first part again. I heard the rest.”

He said it again. He was still saying it when she got her hand into his neckcloth and pulled his mouth down to hers. The paper with thirty-one names slid off her knee to the floor of the carriage, and neither of them picked it up until Oxford Street.
***
Mrs. Jessop had left a candle on the landing. The house was quiet. He had her hand in his, and her hair was half down, and he had been thinking since Soho Square about the door of her room.

She opened it and stopped on the threshold.

The fire had been made up. The great bed stood with its curtains looped back. Mercy Onions was asleep in the armchair beside it, with her cap over one eye.

Tabitha lay in the exact middle of the bed, on her back, with a doll on either side of her. Philippa lay crosswise at the foot, with one plait in her mouth and both feet out of the covers. Crispin was on the near edge in his nightshirt, with his ledger under his cheek for a pillow.

“She woke and wanted the pirate,” Mercy whispered, starting up. “And then Miss Pip would come, and then Master Crispin said he would only sit till you were back. I’ll carry them, Your Grace.”

“Leave them,” Gideon said.

Linnea was laughing without any sound, with her forehead against his sleeve.

He took off his boots. She took off her shoes. There was a foot of mattress on Crispin’s side and rather less on the other. He lay down on the narrow one in his clothes, and she on the wide one in hers, and they looked at each other over three sleeping heads.

Tabitha turned over and put a hot, small foot against his ribs. There was no room in that bed for anything else, and he found he did not want it otherwise.
***