Four Thousand Quarters

Wednesday, December 4, 1816

“Mr. and Mrs. Pargeter, Your Grace,” Oakes said. “On foot from the Holborn end, for there’s still no hackney will go east of the lane. I’ve put them in the front room. He looks like a man that’s been dug up.”

Gideon set down his cup. It was ten by the breakfast-room clock. Quince had come at nine with the Chancellor’s order written fair, and he sat squaring it to the edge of the table. Linnea was opposite, with a list of what must be packed for seven tomorrow morning.

“The children stay upstairs,” Gideon said. “Tell Mercy that nobody comes down until I send.”

“I told her before I told you.”

Gideon looked at his wife. Three weeks ago he would have been at the door already, with his mind made up on the stair.

“I had rather not see him without you,” he said. “Will you come?”

“I was going to ask whether I might.” She took off her spectacles, polished them and put them on again. “I saw his face yesterday when the old gentleman said ‘accounts’. The letter did not frighten him half so much. I have been wondering about it ever since.”

“So have I. Mr. Quince, bring a pen.”

Mrs. Jessop had pulled the sheets off a sofa and three chairs in the front drawing room. The shutters were folded back in their boxes, and the grey daylight came in off the street.

Rupert Pargeter stood on the hearthrug with his hat in both hands. He had not been to bed. His sandy hair was flat, and the fresh colour had gone out of his skin and left it like putty. He bowed. He looked at the carpet and at Quince’s bag, and he did not once look at Gideon’s face. In July he had looked at nothing else.

His wife sat by the window, as far from him as the uncovered chairs allowed.

“I made him come, Your Grace,” Dorothea Pargeter said. Her thin voice shook, but she kept on. “I have been his wife fourteen years and never seen a book of his. Yesterday the judge said that he must show his accounts, and I saw how he took it. I asked him at the inn what was in them. He said that he would sooner tell it once than twice. So he is to tell it here, where I can hear it and you can.”

“Then sit down, Mr. Pargeter,” Gideon said. “I do not care to be stood over in my own house.”

Pargeter sat on the edge of the sofa. Linnea took the chair on Gideon’s left. Quince went to the table in the window and uncapped his ink.

“The peace did it,” Pargeter said. He spoke to his hat. “I bought all through the spring of the year fifteen, at war prices, as my father always did. Then Bonaparte was beaten, and the ports opened, and by Christmas wheat was at sixty shillings. Two houses in Bristol stopped payment in December. I could not have paid ten shillings in the pound.”

“Go on.”

“Bella’s fortune stood in my sole name, after my father died. It was thirty thousand pounds in the Funds, doing nothing.” He wet his lips. “In January I sold twelve thousand pounds of the stock. I put it into wheat. Four thousand quarters, at sixty.”

Dorothea made no sound at all. She had put one hand flat against her chest.

“I know corn, Your Grace. It could not stay at sixty. I meant to sell at eighty and buy the stock back, and nobody would have been a penny the poorer. Then the spring came, and I saw what sort of year it was to be.”

“And at eighty?” Linnea asked.

“I thought that it would see ninety.”

“It has been past ninety since October, sir.”

He did not answer that. Gideon remembered him in the drawing room at Brackenhope, rubbing his hands at the price as a man does at a good fire.

“Your bill was filed in March,” Gideon said. “Two months after you sold.”

“A guardian may ask what his wards are worth. You would have set Mr. Quince to look into the fund the first time the boy wanted a school.” Pargeter’s voice had sunk. “If they were at Clifton, nobody need ask until Crispin was one and twenty. I should have had it all back long before.”

“I got a room ready,” Dorothea said. “It looks on the Down. I aired the bed every week.”

“I would have been good to them, Dolly. You know that I would.”

“I daresay you would. And Bella’s letter?”

He turned his hat round by the brim.

“I had thirty of her letters in my desk,” he said at last. “It is not difficult, when it is one’s own sister.”

“You wrote her name.” His wife’s face had gone as grey as his. “Yesterday that lawyer called this lady a forger before all those people, and you sat beside me and patted my hand.”

For three weeks Gideon had imagined having this man within reach. He had thought of it on the Edge in the rain, and in a barred library with a clerk’s copy before him. He had expected to want him by the neckcloth. He found that he was looking at a frightened tradesman on a borrowed sofa, and that the anger had gone cold and steady.

“You put words into a dead woman’s mouth,” he said. “I carried them in my coat for three weeks, and I very nearly lost a great deal more by them than three children. I shall not forgive it, and I do not suppose that you ask me to. But it is not what we have to settle this morning. Mr. Quince, tell him where he stands.”

“In breach of trust, upon his own confession,” Quince said from the window. “The accounts must be with the Master in twenty-eight days, and they will show a deficiency of twelve thousand pounds. The court may commit him to the Fleet until it is made good. As to the letter, there is his affidavit that it came by the post. That is perjury.”

“It is all there,” Pargeter said quickly. “Every shilling of it, in my lofts at Bristol. But I cannot put four thousand quarters on the market in a month, Your Grace. I should break the price, and I would not see seventy. Give me time, and the children lose nothing.”

Gideon turned to his wife.

She was sitting with her stained hands folded, and she was watching Dorothea Pargeter. He had decided for her once, in a library, with a lie. He had told her in a carriage what he would do the next time.

“Linnea,” he said. “What do you think?”

Pargeter’s head came up. He had plainly never in his life seen a man put that question to his wife on a matter of twelve thousand pounds.

“I think that a man in the Fleet sells no wheat,” she said slowly. “So the first thing is the money. I want the whole of it back in court, where he cannot touch it again. How long would it take to sell honestly, Mr. Pargeter, without breaking your market?”

“Till the end of January.”

“Then the last day of January, and not a day after. Would the court allow that, Mr. Quince?”

“If the guardian consents, I believe the Master will.”

“The second thing is bread.” She looked at Gideon. “Your four hundred quarters feed Brackenhope. They do not feed Ludlow. There is a relief committee in the town, and Mr. Aldridge sits on it. It buys what it can and sells it by the peck under the market, and it can get hardly any. That wheat in Bristol was bought with the children’s money. I should like some of it to be eaten by people who cannot pay ninety shillings. Let six hundred quarters go to the committee at seventy-six. That is what you gave in June.”

“Six hundred, at seventy-six?” Pargeter had done the sum before she finished. It seemed to be the one thing still working in him. “That is twenty shillings under the price, madam. It is six hundred pounds given away.”

“Six hundred quarters at three pounds sixteen is two thousand two hundred and eighty,” Gideon said. “You gave eighteen hundred for them. You will clear four hundred and eighty pounds on your charity, and I do not call that giving it away. Six hundred to Ludlow, then, carried at your charge. I have two things to add, and my wife will tell me if they are wrong.”

“Say them,” said Linnea.

“You resign the trust. Mr. Quince will draw the deed, and the court will appoint whom it pleases. And you do not come near those children again. You will keep away from Brackenhope and from this house, and you will send them no letters. You will ask no more questions of ostlers. Crispin is ten. When he is a man he may seek you out if he chooses, and that will be his affair.”

Pargeter nodded. He did not seem able to do more.

“I would add one thing,” Linnea said. “Mrs. Pargeter knew nothing of this. Anybody can see it. She should not be shut out with him.”

Gideon thought of a wax doll that had come from Bristol on a thin lap. It was upstairs now, with one shoe lost under a bed.

“No,” he said. “She should not. Mrs. Pargeter, you may write to them, if you wish it.”

Dorothea had begun to cry. She did it without noise, with her face turned to the window.

“Are they in the house?” she asked. “I should not speak. I should only like to see them go by a door.”

Gideon looked at Linnea again. She shook her head a very little.

“I think not today, ma’am, with this in the room,” Linnea said gently. “Write to them at Christmas. They will answer. Crispin will tell you what the thermometer read, and Tabitha will send you a drawing that he will have to explain.”

“As to the letter,” Gideon said, “the Chancellor has it under seal. I shall not ask him to open it while these terms are kept. That is all I can promise for him. Mr. Quince?”

The solicitor had been writing the whole time. He read it over in his level voice, in four heads. The twelve thousand pounds were to be paid into court on or before the thirty-first of January. Six hundred quarters were to go to the Ludlow committee at seventy-six shillings. The trust was to be resigned. The last head was the children.

He brought the sheet across the room. He did not take it to Pargeter first. He gave it to Linnea.

“Your Grace will wish to look through it.”

She took it by the edges and held it up to the window.

“Whatman,” she said. “Eighteen sixteen. It is honest paper.”

Gideon felt his mouth pull, on both sides. Pargeter flinched as if he had been touched with a hot iron.

He signed. His hand was not steady, and the pen spluttered at the end of his name. Quince witnessed it and sanded it.

At the door Pargeter stopped. He raised his eyes at last, as far as Gideon’s neckcloth.

“I never disliked Your Grace. I should wish that understood.”

“You laid your hand on a boy’s shoulder and asked whether I frightened him,” Gideon said. “Good day, sir.”

Dorothea was the last out. She stopped before Linnea and held her brown pelisse closed at the throat.

“I shall go back with him. Somebody must see that he does it, and I have nobody else.” She swallowed. “Thank you for letting her keep the doll.”

Gideon told the children at two, over Mrs. Jessop’s boiled fowl, in as few words as the truth would go into. Their uncle Pargeter had taken some of their money, he would pay it back, and he would not be coming. Their aunt would write. Crispin asked how much and wrote the figure down. Philippa said that she had always known he was a smiler. Tabitha asked only whether the doll must go back, and was told that it need not.
***
The children were asleep by nine, three in a bed at the end of the passage, with Mercy on a truckle across the door.

His room still smelled of camphor. There was a fire in it tonight. In August he had lain on this bed in his shirt and breeches and watched a line of candlelight under the door beside the wardrobe. The door stood wide now. She had opened it herself an hour ago.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed with one boot off when she came through.

She was in her wrapper, with her plait over her shoulder and a candle in her hand. She set the candle on the washstand. She took off her spectacles and folded them, and laid them beside it.

“You gave me an instruction in this house once,” Linnea said. “I was to wait until the court was done and I owed you nothing, and then I might ask you again or not, as I chose. It was done yesterday. I have gone over my accounts, and I do not owe you a farthing.” She was pink to the hair, and smiling. “So I am asking. Will you take me to bed, Gideon?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Is that all? You gave me a hundred words in August.”

“I have learned to be brief. Yes, with all my heart, and the door has been open this hour.”

He stood, in one boot, and felt behind his head for the knot. The black silk came away. He laid it on the washstand beside her spectacles, and the air was cool on his closed lid.

She watched him do it. Her eyes were very bright.

“I did not ask for that.”

“No. You did not need to.”

She came and kissed him there first. Then she looked down. “You cannot possibly mean to do this with a boot on.”

He got rid of the boot, and she laughed at him while he hopped. She undid his shirt herself, button by button, taking her time over it. He unplaited her hair. He did it slowly, because he liked the weight of it coming loose over his wrists. When the wrapper went, and the nightgown after it, she stood in the firelight with gooseflesh down both arms.

“It is December,” she said. “I did not think of that when I planned my speech.”

“Come here, then.”

It was a bachelor’s bed, and narrow. It also creaked. They found that out at the same moment, and lay rigid, listening for the passage. Nothing stirred. She put her face into his shoulder and shook with laughter, and he felt it all through him, her breasts against his chest and her cold feet between his shins.

“If Mercy comes,” she whispered, “you will have to say that you had a nightmare.”

“Mercy has had three children in her bed for a week. She would not hear a troop of horse.”

He kissed her mouth, and her throat, and the freckles on her shoulder. There was no hurry in it, and nothing left to prove. In August he had gripped a table in this house to keep his hands from her. He let them go where they liked now, down the long dip of her back and over her hip and along her thigh. She did the same. Her stained fingers found the lance scar and went on past it, lower, and he caught his breath.

“Is that right?” she asked. She was not in the least anxious about it.

“You know perfectly well that it is.”

“I like to hear you say so.”

She pushed him onto his back. She came over him with her hair falling round them both like a tent, and settled herself, and stopped there to look at him. He lay under her with his face bare. He could see all of her with his one eye, the flush on her breasts and the firelight along her thighs.

“I walked up and down beyond that wall in August,” she said. “Six steps and six back.”

“I counted them.”

“I do not mean to walk tonight.”

She took him into her slowly, with her lip caught in her teeth and her eyes on his. She set the pace herself, and it was unhurried. He held her hips and let her find what she wanted. The bed complained, and she laughed again, breathlessly, and did not stop for it. He put his mouth to her breast, and her hands tightened in his hair. After a while neither of them was laughing. She moved faster, and said his name against his forehead. When it took her she bit his shoulder to keep quiet. He felt that, and the long shudder through her body, and he let himself follow her.

Afterwards there was the matter of the quilt, which was made for one. She took most of it. She lay along his left side with her head under his jaw and her leg across his.

“I want something,” she said, when her breathing had slowed. “I have been thinking of it since Frith Street.”

“Name it.”

“I want my own name on my own work. I mean on every sheet, from now on, and on whatever comes after the Heaths. I lettered another name four and twenty times, and I never knew how much I minded until I had written my own.” She raised her head. “Mr. Nettleship says that two people have asked for commissions. I mean to take them. I shall sign them, and if anybody asks who drew them, they will be told.”

He put his hand up and pushed the hair back from her face.

“You have had it since Sunday,” Gideon said. “I read it at the foot of a green and yellow heath, over the heads of forty botanists, and it hit me harder than the lance did. Linnea Brackenhope.”
***