Six Hundred and Twelve

Monday, May 27, 1816

“Second waggon’s away, Your Grace,” said Preece at the rectory gate. “Fifty pots on her, and the tilt lashed down.”

Gideon looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes behind the first. Good. Keep that interval. If two of them meet on the hill, neither can pass, and I will not have the horses backed with that load. Who is at the leader’s head?”

“Young Hotchkiss. He has his orders. A walk the whole way, and round by the lodge to miss the ruts.”

“And if he trots?”

“Then Sergeant Oakes will have his hide at the other end. I told him so.”

That would answer. Oakes was at the orangery with two garden boys, a lit stove and a plan of the staging that the Duchess had drawn herself, every tier lettered. Each pot would go from the straw to the shelf it was meant for. Gideon had moved four troops of dragoons and their baggage over the Pyrenees with less paper.

It was a dry day, the first since the wedding. Crispin had read his gauge at eight and written a nought with great satisfaction. The sky was the colour of pewter and the wind off Brown Clee was cold enough for March, but nothing was falling out of it, and that was all Gideon asked.

He turned back into the garden.

The glasshouse stood open to the air at its eastern end. Tudge, the estate carpenter, was working along the roof from a plank laid across two trestles, cutting out the old putty with a hacking knife. He was a slow, sour, excellent workman who had told Gideon at seven that morning that it could not be done in a day. It was now eleven, and he had stopped saying so.

Behind him came the Duchess.

She had another plank, and she had put off her cloak and rolled her sleeves above the elbow. As Tudge freed each pane she slid both hands under it, flat, and lifted it clear of the bars as a person lifts a wet page. She would not let the men touch the glass. She said that they would hold it by the edges.

“Three hundred and one,” she called down.

“Three hundred and one,” Crispin repeated, and wrote.

The boy sat on an upturned bucket with the ledger on his knees. He had ruled it himself the night before, with a column for the number, a column for the bay and a column for the row. He wrote each figure as if a general would inspect it.

Gideon took the pane from her hands. That had become his post, without anybody appointing him to it. He carried it four paces to the trestle table, where Philippa stood with a pot of red lead and a small brush.

“Bottom corner,” he said. “Same side as the last.”

“I know.” She painted a careful 301, with her tongue between her teeth. “I’ve done three hundred. You don’t have to say it every time.”

“No. I beg your pardon.”

She looked up, startled. He supposed that he had not begged her pardon before.

From the table the numbered glass went to Pugh, who bedded it on edge in a crate of straw. Daniel Pugh was one of the six men Preece had found idle in the village, and one of the two who had come home from the wars to no work. He had served eleven years in the Shropshire regiment, and it showed in his back. At seven o’clock he had looked at the patch for one second, quite openly, and said, “Waterloo, sir? Your Grace, I should say.”

“Waterloo. And you?”

“Toulouse. I’ve a ball in the hip yet.”

Neither of them had said more than that. Gideon had found, to his surprise, that he minded that look less than any he had met in a year.

He minded the hedge more. There had been faces along it since eight, women with baskets and old men with nothing to do, come to see the rector’s glasshouse taken to pieces. They had come to see him, too. He was in his shirtsleeves in the open, half a mile outside his own wall, with the left side of his face to the lane as often as the right.

He had found that it could be done by attending to the next thing, and the next thing was a pane of glass.

“Three hundred and two.”

He went back for it.

He took it from her, and that was when he became aware that he was looking at her arms.

They were bare from the elbow, and he had not seen them so before. She was freckled there as she was across the nose, thickly, down to the wrist. The inside of the forearm was pale, and a long muscle stood up in it when she took the weight of the glass. There was red lead on one wrist bone and a scratch across the other. Her arms were strong and well used. He realised that he had been watching them, pane after pane, for the better part of an hour.

He had no business to be watching them. He had told this woman, in this building, that he would not trouble her.

On Thursday he had been in his dressing room when her key turned. He had heard the bolt go across. Before he could decide what he felt about it, he had heard it come back. He had stood there with one boot off for some time. He still did not know what it meant. He knew only that the door was unlocked, and that he would never try it.

“Duke,” she said from above him. “I have three hundred and three waiting, and you have three hundred and two.”

He was standing under her plank with the pane in both hands.

“So I have,” he said, and carried it to the table.

She was not laughing at him. She was pushing her spectacles up with her forearm, since her hands were full, and frowning at the next bar. He thought it very likely that she had no idea what he had been looking at.

He did not know what to make of her. On Thursday night she had stood in his study door, seen her father’s plate on the wall and gone as quiet as a church. Then she had said good night, quite civilly, and gone upstairs without the rent book. He had taken it for grief. He had sent the book up with her chocolate in the morning and said nothing.

“Three hundred and six.”

“Three hundred and six,” said Crispin.

Philippa painted it. Then, instead of leaving the glass for Pugh, she picked it up herself.

“I can carry them. I’ve watched how. It’s only to there.”

“Flat hands,” the Duchess said from the plank, without turning round. “Underneath. And walk.”

Philippa walked. She delivered pane 306 to the crate with enormous dignity, and Pugh took it from her as gravely as he would have taken a regimental colour.

“Three hundred and seven.”

Gideon set it on the table. The child numbered it, blew on the paint and slid her hands beneath. She was pleased with herself now. She was hurrying, and she turned to see whether her brother was watching.

Her boot found the handle of Crispin’s bucket.

She did not fall. But the pane left her hands and struck the brick path edge on, and it broke with a clean, shocking sound that stopped every man in the garden.

Nobody spoke. At the hedge a woman drew in her breath.

Philippa stood among the pieces with her arms still held out. All the colour had left her face. She did not look at the glass, or at the Duchess. She looked at Gideon, with her shoulders drawn up to her ears and her black brows down, and he knew that look. He had seen it on boys of sixteen who had lost a horse through their own carelessness and were waiting for the major.

She was waiting to be shouted at. She thought he was the one who would do it.

He had no idea what to say. Every word that came to him was one he would have used on a trooper.

“Pip.” The Duchess had come down off her plank. “Show me your hands. Both sides.”

The child held them out. They were shaking.

“No cuts. Good. Stand still a moment, you have glass by your foot.” She turned Philippa’s palms over once more and let them go. “Well, that is one. There are six hundred and eleven others, and I have every hope of them. Crispin, write ‘broken’ against three hundred and seven, and the bay and the row beside it, so Mr. Tudge can cut a new one to the size.”

“Bay F, row four,” said Crispin. He wrote it down. “Broken.”

“I can cut him in an hour,” Tudge said from the roof, grudgingly. “It’s only crown glass.”

“There, you see.” The Duchess picked the brush out of the red lead, wiped the handle on her apron and held it out. “You are at three hundred and eight.”

Philippa did not take it. She was still looking at Gideon.

He understood then that the thing was not finished until he had done something. He went down on one knee on the path and began picking up the pieces, the large ones first, and laying them in his left hand.

“Step back, Philippa. Toward the table. Mind the small bits.” He kept his voice as it had been all morning. “I once put a gun and its limber into a Spanish river through looking over my shoulder. It took forty men a day to get it out. This will take me two minutes.”

She stepped back. He heard her breathe.

“Did they shout at you?” she asked.

“My colonel did. For a quarter of an hour.”

“Did it help?”

“No,” Gideon said. “The gun was just as wet.”

There was a small silence above his head. Then the brush was taken out of the Duchess’s fingers, and he heard the lid of the paint pot scrape.

When he stood up, with a handful of broken glass, his wife was looking at him. Her look was direct and grave, and he could find no flattery in it. But she nodded to him, once, as she had in the library when he turned his face to the window.

He found that he wanted that nod more than was reasonable. He went to find a sack for the glass.
***
They dined at two, as agreed, on the rectory lawn, with a cloth spread over the grass and a basket sent down by Mrs. Hobday. There was cold mutton and bread and a seed cake. The men had theirs under the wall, with a can of beer.

Gideon sat on the ground with his back against an apple tree. Crispin read him the list. They were at four hundred and forty, and the fourth waggon had gone. Philippa ate with red fingers and asked whether the gun had been a big one. Tabitha sat on Nurse Onions’s lap on the far side of the cloth and watched him over a crust.

She had been watching him all day. He had felt it at the trestles, and at the gate, and each time he crossed the lawn. She had spent the morning on a rug with a rag doll and had not played with it.

He did not look back at her. He was learning that much. A shy horse would come to a man who stood and looked at something else.

By four the roof was out. By five the last of the side lights were in straw, and Crispin closed his ledger on six hundred and eleven panes and one sad entry. The sixth waggon had taken the last of the three hundred pots. Tudge and the men were knocking out the pegs of the frames, and the house that had stood there since before the Duchess was grown was a skeleton of grey bars against the sky.

She stood and looked at it for a moment with her arms folded. She had rolled her sleeves down. Gideon noticed that, and was half sorry and half relieved.

“I thought I should mind it more,” she said.

“Do you not?”

“I mind it. But the plants are in the warm, and nothing is going to London.” She drew a breath. “There is one thing left.”

It stood alone on the brick floor at the western end, where the warmest corner had been. It was a tub of oak staves, banded with iron, as wide as a cartwheel. Out of it rose a clump of leaves like nothing he had seen in an English garden. They were taller than Crispin, grey-green and leathery, each one a long blade on a stiff stalk, like the paddles of a boat stood on end.

“That is the one that takes four men,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then it shall have five. Pugh, Hotchkiss, the poles. Preece, bring the low cart to the path and take the tailboard off.”

He took off his coat again and put his own shoulder to it. They ran two ash poles through the iron handles and lifted on his word. It was a dead, awkward weight, and the leaves swayed over their heads. The Duchess walked beside them the whole way with one hand up, steadying a stalk, saying, “Gently. Gently. Mind the gatepost.”

They set it down on the cart bed without a jolt. Pugh grinned at him across the tub, and Gideon found that he was grinning back, with a face that had not been built for it lately. He felt the scar pull.

He put his coat on. The wind was colder.

There was a brass plate screwed to one of the staves, gone brown with age. He crouched by the cart wheel to read it. The letters had been cut by hand, not very evenly.

Strelitzia reginae. Cape of Good Hope. Sown March 1809.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The Queen’s flower. Sir Joseph Banks named it for Queen Charlotte when the first one came to Kew.” She had come to stand at his shoulder. “A sea captain brought my father nine seeds from the Cape in a twist of paper. They are black, with a tuft of orange wool on each, like something off a child’s bonnet. He sowed all nine, and this is the one that came.”

“March of the year nine.” He touched the cold brass. That was the spring his mother had died, while he was in Portugal. The letter had reached him in June. “It is the same age as Philippa.”

“Two months younger. Pip has done a great deal more with her time.”

“What does it do?”

“So far it has made leaves. A new one every few months, for seven years. It has had the best corner and the most coal and it has never once flowered.” She laid her hand flat against one of the tall blades, as he had seen her lay it on the frame of the glasshouse door. “It is supposed to be orange and blue, like a bird’s head with a crest. I have only ever seen an engraving. So had he.”

“Then why keep it?”

She was silent a moment.

“He said seven years. He had it from a gardener at Kew, that from seed they want seven years before they will flower, and that nothing will hurry them. He used to count it off every March, on that label, with his thumb. In January he could not get out of bed to look at it, and he asked me every morning whether there was a bud.” Her voice was quite even. “Seven years is this year.”

Gideon looked up at her from where he crouched. She was not crying. She was looking at the plant with her jaw set, as if it had an account to settle with her.

He thought of the paper on the glass door, to be taken down by the purchaser, and of what the nurseryman’s two hundred pounds had not been going to include. He doubted that any nurseryman would give house room to a tub that had done nothing in seven years. She had said on the ninth that she would not leave it behind. He saw now that she had not known how she was going to keep that promise.

“It has the south wall waiting for it,” he said. “The one behind the orangery, where the old flue runs. Preece tells me that it is the warmest ten feet in the garden.”

“I know. I chose it.”

“Then it had better flower at Brackenhope. I shall take it very ill if it does not, after carrying it.”

She looked down at him, and a real smile came into her face, quick and crooked. He had not seen it before. It changed her whole face.

He was still looking at it when her eyes went past him, to his left, and widened.

“Don’t turn round,” she said, very low.

He had been about to. It was his blind side, and for a year he had never let anything come up on it. Every nerve he had told him to turn.

He stayed as he was, on his heels by the cart wheel, with one hand on the brass plate.

He heard it then. There was a small sound in the grass, and a pause, and another. Somebody was breathing through her mouth, quickly, like a child who has run upstairs. Across the lawn Nurse Onions had half risen from the rug with her hand at her throat. The Duchess shook her head at her, a very little, and the nurse sank back.

Another step came. He could see nothing on that side. He fixed his eye on the uneven letters, Sown March 1809, and read them over again.

Something touched the skirt of his coat.

It was the lightest pull, low down, about the height of his knee. Two fingers and a thumb had hold of the cloth. They held it for as long as it took him to draw one breath, feeling what a pirate’s coat was made of.

He did not move, and he did not speak.

The fingers let go. There was a gasp and a flurry of small boots, and he turned his head at last. A white pinafore and a mop of fair curls were going back across the rectory lawn as fast as four-year-old legs could carry them.
***