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THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 205.)
CHAPTER X.
Look No Further.
In which Mr. Tucker tells a lie out loud and clears a bench of frost, the Author advertises a Thing whose Name is not known, Mr. Kinross turns back at the mouth of Salisbury Court, the Cabinet does not dine, and the Warden takes a squire.
On Saturday the fifth of February the boy came back to the river wall with a japanned box under his arm.
He had been four afternoons at Mr. Sass’s in Bloomsbury, drawing a plaster foot, and on the Saturday he was a stationer’s boy again, with copies for Paper Buildings and an answer to wait for; but he was not the same boy. Mr. Kinross saw it from the second bench before the boy had reached the wall. He walked differently. He walked like somebody who had been told, by people who knew, that he was worth the trouble of teaching; and he came down the eastern walk in the frost, and touched his hat to the second bench, and went pink, and then did a thing he had never done. Instead of stopping at
the wall, he came straight on to the bench.
“If you please, sir. I’ve done one in colour.”
It was the gardener again, scowling at his walk; but the gardener was in colour now, and the cold had got into him. The boy had done him on a spoilt sheet torn to the size of his hand, laying each touch of colour down once, beside the last, and leaving it there, as though he could not spare the paint to go back. The old man’s face was made of light red and white and umber, and the bare tree over him of a few dark dashes, and the sky of three broad strokes that looked grey until one looked again, and then were blue and black and white, side by side.
Mr. Kinross looked at it for a long time.
“You did not learn that at Mr. Sass’s.”
“No, sir. They only give us chalk there, and the foot.” The boy considered the foot, with respect. “I’ve done it nine times. Mr. Sass came by me three times and never said a word, and the big boys say that’s the most he ever says. I did this at home, on the stair, by the window.” He touched the corner of the box. “With these.”
“Mr. Sass did not give you those.”
“No, sir. Somebody in particular did.”
He said it with great exactness, as he said everything; and Mr. Kinross, who had given his attorney that phrase the other way about three weeks before, heard it come back to him from the far side, and could not tell whether the boy meant anything by it. He decided that the boy was only being exact. He did not know that the boy had been nearly sure, since the last Thursday in January, whom he was talking to; and that the boy, who would not for the world have let him be thanked for a thing he had not given, had been careful to get it right.
Mr. Kinross wished very much to know who the somebody was, and could not ask, for the same reason that he could ask nobody anything that winter. He said that the somebody had chosen well; and the boy said, “Yes, sir,” with such entire conviction that
Mr. Kinross was a little jealous of whoever it was, and was amused at himself for it, and gave the gardener back.
The boy put him into the book. And as he turned the leaves to find his place, his hand went out near the end, as it had in January, and turned two together.
Mr. Kinross had seen him do it once before, and had not asked, and had meant never to ask. But he had sat on that bench for five weeks waiting for somebody who had once stood at that wall, and the boy drew at the wall every afternoon of his life; and the question was out before he could stop it, quietly, as one asks a thing that does not matter.
“Is it a lady?”
The boy stood quite still, with his hand flat on the book.
“Nobody in particular, sir,” he said. “I made her up.”
He said it to the gentleman’s boots. He went scarlet from his collar to his hair, and he did not take his hand off the book.
Mr. Kinross had kept chambers in the Temple for six years, which is long enough to learn what a lie sounds like, and he knew what kind of lie this was. It had not been told to hide a fault. It had been told to keep somebody. And it had been told in the very words he had given Mr. Merridew, to keep himself out of a kindness; the boy must
have had them out of an attorney’s letter, and was using them, as he had, to put a thing out of reach. Twice in a quarter of an hour the boy had handed him back his own phrase. Perhaps the boy knew whom he was talking to; if he did, neither of them could say so. There was one way to have the leaf: to let the boy know for certain whom he was obliged to, and ask again. That was the one thing he had paid not to do.
He said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Tucker. That was not my business,” and looked at the river; and after a moment the boy breathed again, and took his hand off the book.
At four the boy went away up the walk at a run, and at the corner of the walk he stopped and turned round, as he always did. Mr. Kinross raised his hand. He had never done it before, and the boy stood so long looking at it that he was very nearly late for Paper Buildings.
He had lied to the gentleman. He had kept a thing from Miss Lydiard in January, by not saying it, and that had not felt like lying; but this had been a lie out loud, with words in it, to a gentleman who had called him Mister, and who had once asked him Would you? He carried it up to Paper Buildings and all the way home, and it was heavier than the copies. He would have given anything in the world, except the leaf,
to take it back.
He could not take it back. On the Monday the frost came down hard again; and he came into the garden with the afternoon copies ten minutes before three, when there was nobody in it but the gardener, and went up to Paper Buildings by way of the second bench. When Mr. Kinross came down at three, every bench in the garden was white except his own, which had been wiped from end to end, roughly, as if with a sleeve, and was only wet.
Mr. Kinross supposed that it was the gardener, and thought the better of the gardener, who had never before shown any sign of knowing that he was there. The boy came down from Paper Buildings at half past three and stood at the wall with his back to the bench, drawing, and kept his right arm close against his side, where the cuff of his coat was wet through and beginning to stiffen in the cold. He did it on every hard afternoon that he was in the Temple for the rest of that winter; and Mr. Kinross went on thinking better of the gardener.
Lady Ardoch had come south with a plan, and it was not going well.
The plan was Miss Lauder, who had a complexion and her father’s acres and a great deal of patience, and who had been brought four hundred miles from Edinburgh in the depth of winter
to be in the same house as Mr. Kinross. Mr. Kinross was never in it. He breakfasted early, which was new, and went out, which was not; he came home at dark, sat through dinner with an air of courteous absence, and answered when he was spoken to, generally correctly. Miss Lauder said that he was very civil. Lady Ardoch said that he had been civil since he was one-and-twenty, and that she had not brought Miss Lauder from Edinburgh to be treated civilly.
“You have the look,” she said to him on the Sunday, across the tea-table, “of your uncle, when he was at the bar and had a cause he could not win. He would sit and look at the fire as if it owed him money. You look at books the same way; you had it from him. Is there somebody?”
“There is the King, ma’am.”
“The King was mad for nine years before he died, and you never looked at a fire for him in your life. I did not ask about the King.” Lady Ardoch put down the teapot. “Nathaniel, I have known you since you were in petticoats. You look at books, and at me when I have said something foolish. I have never once seen you look at a fire. I should like to know what is in it.”
He did not tell her. He could not have told her, if he had wished to, in any terms she would have understood: that he was looking for a young woman
whose name he did not know, and whose face he did, by walking down every court in Fleet Street in turn, like a man taking an inventory. His aunt would have sent for a doctor. He said that it was a very good fire, and went to bed.
Clemency wrote the eleventh number in the first week of February, in the back room, in her slate-coloured gown, with the Warden’s sentence on the desk beside her where she could see it.
She had read it until she knew it by heart: the Warden going down into the town, street by street, asking no man anything, and looking into every door like one who has lost a thing whose name he does not know, and means to find it by the shape. At about the fifth reading she had decided that she could not tell whom he was looking for. At about the tenth she had decided that it did not signify, since whoever it was, it was she; and she did not choose to be found by the shape. She had not decided whether she wanted him to stop.
She answered him on the Sunday night. She put it in the middle of the number, at breakfast in Mount Street, where Mr. Mortimer was reading the advertisements in the Morning Post aloud, as he did every morning without being asked; and he came upon one that puzzled him, and read it out twice:
LOST, a Thing whose Name is not known. The Gentleman who is looking for it by the Shape is respectfully informed that it is very well where it is, and is begged to look no further. No Reward.
“It must be a dog,” said Mr. Mortimer.
“Nobody advertises a dog without a reward,” said Mrs. Mortimer; and Miss Mortimer poured out the tea, and said nothing whatever.
Clemency read it over at midnight and laughed aloud, and put her hand over her mouth, so as not to wake her mother; and then sat for a long time with the candle and was not laughing at all. She did not know whether she had written it to make him stop, or to let him know that she had seen him look. She was honest enough to suspect that it was the second. A woman who does not wish to be found does not advertise.
She let it stand. It was the best thing in the number.
That afternoon, on the stair below, Toby had painted Mrs. Dunning by the light of the landing window, with the japanned box open on the step beside him. He had done her cheeks in light red and white, and not a scrap of crimson, and Mrs. Dunning had never looked so well in her life; and he had given her, Clemency saw as she went down, the face of a woman who
has just been told a thing she knew already, and is glad of it.
“You said faces aren’t the colour people think, miss,” he said, without looking up. “They aren’t. I looked.”
Mr. Kinross came to Salisbury Court on Thursday the tenth of February, at a quarter to nine in the morning.
He had meant to come on the last day of January. Then the heralds had taken the Monday, and his aunt the Wednesday, and the March Albemarle, which he was getting out himself with Mr. Ogle, the better part of every morning since; and it was the tenth before he stood in Fleet Street again, at the top of the next turning east of Water Lane.
He knew what day it was. On the tenth of every month she went up Baldwin’s stairs in Paternoster Row with a number under her cloak, at an hour he could have named within a quarter; and he had settled with himself in January that Paternoster Row on the tenth was the one place in London where he would not stand and wait for her. He had not chosen the day. The order of the streets had chosen it. He thought of turning back; but it seemed to him more honest to keep to the order than to the calendar, and he went down the court, slowly, looking at doors.
It was a narrow street, running down from Fleet Street towards the
river, and at the bottom it opened into a little square of tall old houses round a pump, with a printing-press going somewhere behind a ground-floor window, so that the whole square thumped gently, like a heart. He came out of the court into it, in the frost; and he had taken three steps when a door opened on the far side, under a board that said DUNNING, LAW-STATIONER, and out came the boy.
He had a parcel of copies under one arm, and he came out talking over his shoulder to somebody in the shop, and laughing; and a woman’s voice, warm and exasperated, followed him out into the square to tell him to button his coat. He buttoned it, which he would not have done for anybody else, and went off across the square at a run, towards the far corner, without once looking towards Salisbury Court.
Mr. Kinross stepped back into the mouth of the court.
He had told an attorney that he did not wish to know the master’s name, or where the boy lived, or how he did, or whether he was grateful; and now he knew three of the four, without anybody’s telling him, because he had walked down a street to look for somebody else. The master’s name was Dunning. The boy lived in this square. And he did well: he was laughed at kindly by a woman in a shop, and buttoned his coat when he was told.
That was more than Mr. Kinross had paid for, and more than he had any right to know.
Then another thought came to him, standing in the mouth of the court.
The boy drew at the river wall, where she had stood in August. He kept one leaf in his book that he would not show, and he had lied, scarlet to the hair, to keep it. And he lived here, a quarter of a mile from the wall, within a walk of the Temple, which was where Mr. Kinross had reasoned at New Year that she must live. There were twenty windows round that pump. Behind any one of them—
He did not let it finish. If she lived in this square, he would be looking for her through the boy, who had lied to him on the Saturday to keep her out of his reach. That was not quite honest, since it was the order of the streets that had brought him here, and not the boy; he knew it, and let the argument stand. He would not search the boy’s square for her.
There was a plainer reason, too. The window of the shop under the board had a man behind it, looking out at the frost; and that man had written to Lincoln’s Inn in January to ask who the gentleman was, and been told nothing. Mr. Merridew had written to say so, as a thing his client ought to know. A gentleman in a good coat who stood about the square looking up at the
windows would be the answer to Mr. Dunning’s question before the morning was out; and by night the boy would know for certain whom he was obliged to; and a boy who knows whom he is obliged to is never quite free again. Mr. Kinross’s uncle had taken him to see the Hogarths when he was twelve, and had never once in his life reminded him of it. It was the best thing anybody had ever done for him, and he had been grown before he understood that it had been done on purpose.
So he turned round in the mouth of Salisbury Court, and went back up into Fleet Street, and on towards the next turning east; and he left the little square where the boy lived out of his inventory, as a man leaves out one room of his own house.
He went back to King’s Bench Walk at noon and wrote the sixteenth number of the Warden, which was due that day and which he had been putting off for a week. It went faster than any number he had written since the summer. A boy came into it whom he had not expected, and he let him in. He saw well enough what he was doing. At a quarter to nine he had turned his back on a square so that a boy should not know whom he was obliged to; at noon he gave the Warden a boy, and a name to call him by, and took him up the stair into his service. The Warden might keep him. Mr. Kinross might not; and
he wrote it as fast as he could, because it was the only way he had. He had refused a thought that morning, in the mouth of Salisbury Court, about who else might live in that square; it did not come back while he wrote.
Clemency had gone up Salisbury Court a quarter of an hour before him, with the eleventh number under her cloak, and turned east into Fleet Street while he was still in the Strand; and at a quarter to nine, while he stood in the mouth of the court, she was going up Baldwin’s stairs in Paternoster Row.
There was nobody in the door of the Chapter. Mr. Radcliffe, when she asked, told her why, with no expression at all, which in Mr. Radcliffe did duty for a smile. Mr. Hindley was upstairs in the Chapter at that moment, by special invitation, at breakfast with two of Baldwin’s partners, discussing the advertising of Manchester cotton goods in the pages of the London. He would be discussing it, Mr. Radcliffe thought, until eleven. The partners had been told that he was the most considerable man in the Lancashire trade, and were very anxious to hear him on fustian.
“I said that I would give the Chapter something else to look at,” said Mr. Radcliffe, counting out the twelve guineas. “I have given it fustian. To the Author, on delivery.” He shut the
drawer. “You may use the front door this month, madam.”
Fustian had been her father’s trade. She did not say so. She used the front door, and walked home by Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street in the frost, with the twelve guineas in her glove, and turned down Salisbury Court before ten; and the court was empty, and so was the square, except for the pump and the press, and nobody had been there at all.
They buried the old King at Windsor on the night of the sixteenth, by torchlight. London put up its shutters for the day, and the bells tolled at intervals until dark, and Kit wore his crape band to the Temple and back.
A week later, on Wednesday the twenty-third, Lady Ardoch gave a small dinner in Grosvenor Square: eight at table, in black, for Miss Lauder and her father and four people who did not matter. When the ladies had gone up, Mr. Kinross went to the window of the dining-room, to get away from Miss Lauder’s father on the subject of drainage, and saw that somebody was watching the square.
He would not have seen it at Christmas. He had spent seven weeks since then watching doors, and he knew what a man looks like who is doing it; and there were two of them in Grosvenor Square that night,
in frieze coats, one at the railings of the garden and one at a corner, who had been there, he thought, when he came home at dusk. They were not watching his house. They were watching Lord Harrowby’s, on the far side of the square, where the Cabinet was to dine that evening, as one of the newspapers had said; and the front of the house was very quiet for a house that expected the Cabinet.
Next door to it there was a dinner at the Archbishop of York’s, and carriages were coming and going under the lamps. Mr. Kinross watched the two men watch them. Presently one of the men went off at a run towards Oxford Street. Mr. Kinross thought it odd, and then thought no more of it, because Miss Lauder’s father had come to the window to go on about drainage, and his aunt was sending down to say that there was tea.
At ten the square was quiet. In the morning it was in every newspaper in London.
A band of men had meant to come into Grosvenor Square that evening, while the Cabinet sat at dinner at Lord Harrowby’s, and murder them all at table, and carry off two of their heads in a bag. They had been waiting in a hayloft in Cato Street, off the Edgware Road, less than a mile away, for word from their watchers in the square. The
dinner had been put off in secret, because the Government had known of the plot all along, from somebody inside it; and before the plotters could set out, the Bow Street officers had gone up the ladder into the loft, and one of the officers had been run through with a sword. Some of the plotters were taken there and then, and the rest were being hunted all over London.
Lady Ardoch read it at breakfast, in her bed, and sent for her nephew.
“They meant to murder the whole Cabinet,” she said, “across this square, while I was giving a dinner within a stone’s throw of them; and I had nothing on the table but a turkey and a fricassee. Nathaniel, I shall never be able to tell anybody.”
The March Albemarle was to go to press that afternoon. Mr. Ogle came to Grosvenor Square at ten with the last sheet, and with a paragraph from Mr. Wray to go at the foot of it, written overnight in a fine heat. The knives of Cato Street, Mr. Wray said, had been sharpened in Paternoster Row, by the Whig magazines and their comic writers, who had taught the lower orders to laugh at their betters; and he named the Ludgate, which had stopped in January and could not answer. He was careful not to name the Mortimers; nobody who read the paragraph could have supposed he meant anything else.
Mr. Kinross read it twice, and held
the press.
Mr. Baldock had once held his press to put a page in. Mr. Kinross held his to take one out. He kept it until evening, while Mr. Ogle sat in the library and looked at the clock; and then he struck out Mr. Wray’s paragraph, and put in six lines of his own, which said what had happened in Cato Street and in Grosvenor Square, and that an officer had been killed in the doing of his duty, and nothing else at all.
“Mr. Wray will say that we are soft on the Radicals, sir,” said Mr. Ogle.
“Mr. Wray may say what he likes,” said Mr. Kinross, “about a magazine that can answer him.”
When Mr. Ogle had gone, he went to the window again and looked out at the square under the lamps. The men in frieze coats were gone. He thought of them standing at the railings for a whole day and the half of a night, watching a door behind which nothing was ever going to happen, and taking the carriages at the wrong house for the thing they were waiting for; and the thought that he had refused in the mouth of Salisbury Court came back to him, and stood at the railings, and would not go away.
On the Tuesday, which was the twenty-ninth, Lady Ardoch observed at breakfast that it was leap year, when a lady might speak first, by an old law of Scotland, and that this was the very
day that made it so; and looked at Miss Lauder. Miss Lauder said that she had never heard of it. Mr. Kinross said that it had been a joke for as long as anyone could say, and that it was not a law but a story; and went east, to finish the south side of Fleet Street.
There was not much of it left: the passages by St. Bride’s, and Bride Lane, and the courts that ran down behind them towards Bridge Street. In January, Whitefriars had taken him for a bailiff. It was said in the courts that the Government had had somebody among the plotters from the first, who went about with them and asked nothing and listened to everything; and a gentleman who walked down every court in turn, looking at doors and asking nobody anything, was something worse than a bailiff in the last week of February. A woman in Bride Lane took her child indoors when she saw him coming, and shut the door. A man at the bottom of a court said loudly to his neighbour that they had had enough of that sort since Wednesday. Mr. Kinross went on to the end of the south side, because he had said he would, and there was nothing at the end of it. There was one square on it that he had not looked into.
The two numbers came out on the same morning, the first of March, which was a Wednesday. They had
both been handed in on the tenth of February, one in Paternoster Row and one in Albemarle Street; and neither of the two people who wrote them knew what was in the other.
Mr. Kinross bought the London at the bookseller’s in Piccadilly, as he had in February, on his way east; and he opened it at the counter, at the Mortimers, and read the advertisement standing there, with the young man waiting for his half-crown.
It was an answer. It was the first she had made him since January, and she had made it in the Warden’s own words: a thing whose name was not known, looked for by the shape. He had written that sentence for one reader, and she had read it. One writer had answered another, across two magazines, as the whole town might watch them do and never know it. She was answering the Warden. She did not know whose the Warden was; he was still sure of that.
He paid the young man, and went out into Piccadilly with the London under his arm, and considered it as he walked, as he would have considered a clause. It was not a refusal. A woman who means to refuse does not give a page of her number to it, with a joke about a dog. But it was a request; and it was the first thing she had ever asked of him, though she had no notion whom she was asking. He could give
it her. The south side of Fleet Street was done, and the courts thought him a spy, and there was nothing left of the search but asking, which he had never done and would not. He would look no further.
He would keep the second bench, all the same. That was not looking. That was waiting; and the whole of the law turned on it.
He did not know that he had obeyed her already, in the one place that mattered, before she had asked it of him in print.
Kit brought both numbers into Salisbury Square that evening, and read the eleventh number of the Mortimers aloud, and laughed at the advertisement until he had to sit down. Mr. Mortimer was quite right, he said: it was a dog, and the Author had lost it, and was very glad. Lucy said that she thought it was a lover.
Mrs. Lydiard put down the cuff.
“It is neither,” she said. “It is somebody who has been looked for, and is not yet sure she minds.”
“She?” said Kit. “The Author’s a man, Mama. Pelham says so.”
“Then he is a man who has been looked for,” said Mrs. Lydiard, “and is not sure he minds”; and she took up the cuff again. She did not look at her elder daughter. That was worse.
When they had gone to bed, Clem
ency took the Albemarle into the back room and read the sixteenth number of the Warden.
The Warden was at Ludlow still, and he had gone down the kitchen stair again, as he had in December, to look at the people who kept the castle. On the fourth page there was a boy.
In the kitchen at Ludlow there was a boy who turned the spit, a foundling of the town, very small, whom nobody troubled to call by his name; and on the whitewash of the wall behind the fire he had drawn, with a stick burnt black at the end, the face of every man who came down the stair. The Warden stood a long while before the faces, and found his own among them, and did not know whether to be angry. Then he asked the boy his name, and called him by it, with Master before it, which no man had done; and the next morning the boy went up the stair behind him, carrying his helm.
She read it once, and put it down on the desk, and sat quite still.
There was one boy in London who drew the face of everybody he saw. There was one man in London who could have put him into the Warden. And she knew better than anybody how the Warden was written: about the tenth of the month, by a man who put into it, as she did, whatever he had been looking at.
He had looked at Toby, then. He had stood before the boy’s faces, as the Warden stood before the whitewash,
and found his own among them; he had asked the boy his name, and called him by it, very likely, with Mister before it, which nobody in Toby’s life had ever done. And somewhere in the month between, an attorney in Lincoln’s Inn had written to Mr. Dunning, at the door below her own, that a gentleman who would not give his name would pay for the boy to learn to draw.
Mr. Dunning had guessed an old gentleman of the Inn. He was not old.
It had been his hand, then, that went into her purse ahead of her in January, and took out the one thing in it she had wanted to give away. She had won the boy his place in a hall in Bloomsbury on the Monday, and he had paid for it from Lincoln’s Inn on the Thursday, and neither had known that the other was there. They had crossed again, as their letters had crossed in the autumn. She did not mind it now. That alarmed her more than anything in the number.
And the Warden’s boy carried his helm. She had seen that helm before, on the stair, in a drawing of Toby’s: set down on a garden bench beside a knight who had taken it off to read. Mr. Kinross had never seen that drawing. To him a helm was a thing that squires carry. To her it was the one Toby had drawn, picked up off the bench and carried up the stair behind him.
He’s never looked at me, Toby had
said on Twelfth Night. It had been true then. It had stopped being true at some time since, and Toby had not told her; and she understood why the boy had come up the stair two at a time in January with his face shining, and stopped, and said something else. He had been keeping it. She did not grudge it him. She had kept a great deal herself.
The attorney had written to this door. Then the gentleman knew where the boy lived; and if he knew that, he knew a square off Fleet Street with a pump in it, and a law-stationer’s, and a stair. He did not know who lived two pair of stairs up. Or he knew, and had not come up them. She could not tell which.
She was wrong in her reasoning, since he had forbidden anybody to tell him where the boy lived; and right in the fact, since the tenth of February.
She had told him that very morning, in print, at twelve guineas, to look no further; and he had been at her door already, by the post, a month ago, to do a thing for somebody she loved, and had gone away again without a word, as the Warden would have done.
She had known for months what he wrote. She knew now what he did. It was a great deal worse, because it could not be answered in a number.
(To be continued.)
THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 205.)
CHAPTER X.
Look No Further.
In which Mr. Tucker tells a lie out loud and clears a bench of frost, the Author advertises a Thing whose Name is not known, Mr. Kinross turns back at the mouth of Salisbury Court, the Cabinet does not dine, and the Warden takes a squire.
On Saturday the fifth of February the boy came back to the river wall with a japanned box under his arm.
He had been four afternoons at Mr. Sass’s in Bloomsbury, drawing a plaster foot, and on the Saturday he was a stationer’s boy again, with copies for Paper Buildings and an answer to wait for; but he was not the same boy. Mr. Kinross saw it from the second bench before the boy had reached the wall. He walked differently. He walked like somebody who had been told, by people who knew, that he was worth the trouble of teaching; and he came down the eastern walk in the frost, and touched his hat to the second bench, and went pink, and then did a thing he had never done. Instead of stopping at the wall, he came straight on to the bench.
“If you please, sir. I’ve done one in colour.”
It was the gardener again, scowling at his walk; but the gardener was in colour now, and the cold had got into him. The boy had done him on a spoilt sheet torn to the size of his hand, laying each touch of colour down once, beside the last, and leaving it there, as though he could not spare the paint to go back. The old man’s face was made of light red and white and umber, and the bare tree over him of a few dark dashes, and the sky of three broad strokes that looked grey until one looked again, and then were blue and black and white, side by side.
Mr. Kinross looked at it for a long time.
“You did not learn that at Mr. Sass’s.”
“No, sir. They only give us chalk there, and the foot.” The boy considered the foot, with respect. “I’ve done it nine times. Mr. Sass came by me three times and never said a word, and the big boys say that’s the most he ever says. I did this at home, on the stair, by the window.” He touched the corner of the box. “With these.”
“Mr. Sass did not give you those.”
“No, sir. Somebody in particular did.”
He said it with great exactness, as he said everything; and Mr. Kinross, who had given his attorney that phrase the other way about three weeks before, heard it come back to him from the far side, and could not tell whether the boy meant anything by it. He decided that the boy was only being exact. He did not know that the boy had been nearly sure, since the last Thursday in January, whom he was talking to; and that the boy, who would not for the world have let him be thanked for a thing he had not given, had been careful to get it right.
Mr. Kinross wished very much to know who the somebody was, and could not ask, for the same reason that he could ask nobody anything that winter. He said that the somebody had chosen well; and the boy said, “Yes, sir,” with such entire conviction that Mr. Kinross was a little jealous of whoever it was, and was amused at himself for it, and gave the gardener back.
The boy put him into the book. And as he turned the leaves to find his place, his hand went out near the end, as it had in January, and turned two together.
Mr. Kinross had seen him do it once before, and had not asked, and had meant never to ask. But he had sat on that bench for five weeks waiting for somebody who had once stood at that wall, and the boy drew at the wall every afternoon of his life; and the question was out before he could stop it, quietly, as one asks a thing that does not matter.
“Is it a lady?”
The boy stood quite still, with his hand flat on the book.
“Nobody in particular, sir,” he said. “I made her up.”
He said it to the gentleman’s boots. He went scarlet from his collar to his hair, and he did not take his hand off the book.
Mr. Kinross had kept chambers in the Temple for six years, which is long enough to learn what a lie sounds like, and he knew what kind of lie this was. It had not been told to hide a fault. It had been told to keep somebody. And it had been told in the very words he had given Mr. Merridew, to keep himself out of a kindness; the boy must
have had them out of an attorney’s letter, and was using them, as he had, to put a thing out of reach. Twice in a quarter of an hour the boy had handed him back his own phrase. Perhaps the boy knew whom he was talking to; if he did, neither of them could say so. There was one way to have the leaf: to let the boy know for certain whom he was obliged to, and ask again. That was the one thing he had paid not to do.
He said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Tucker. That was not my business,” and looked at the river; and after a moment the boy breathed again, and took his hand off the book.
At four the boy went away up the walk at a run, and at the corner of the walk he stopped and turned round, as he always did. Mr. Kinross raised his hand. He had never done it before, and the boy stood so long looking at it that he was very nearly late for Paper Buildings.
He had lied to the gentleman. He had kept a thing from Miss Lydiard in January, by not saying it, and that had not felt like lying; but this had been a lie out loud, with words in it, to a gentleman who had called him Mister, and who had once asked him Would you? He carried it up to Paper Buildings and all the way home, and it was heavier than the copies. He would have given anything in the world, except the leaf, to take it back.
He could not take it back. On the Monday the frost came down hard again; and he came into the garden with the afternoon copies ten minutes before three, when there was nobody in it but the gardener, and went up to Paper Buildings by way of the second bench. When Mr. Kinross came down at three, every bench in the garden was white except his own, which had been wiped from end to end, roughly, as if with a sleeve, and was only wet.
Mr. Kinross supposed that it was the gardener, and thought the better of the gardener, who had never before shown any sign of knowing that he was there. The boy came down from Paper Buildings at half past three and stood at the wall with his back to the bench, drawing, and kept his right arm close against his side, where the cuff of his coat was wet through and beginning to stiffen in the cold. He did it on every hard afternoon that he was in the Temple for the rest of that winter; and Mr. Kinross went on thinking better of the gardener.
Lady Ardoch had come south with a plan, and it was not going well.
The plan was Miss Lauder, who had a complexion and her father’s acres and a great deal of patience, and who had been brought four hundred miles from Edinburgh in the depth of winter
to be in the same house as Mr. Kinross. Mr. Kinross was never in it. He breakfasted early, which was new, and went out, which was not; he came home at dark, sat through dinner with an air of courteous absence, and answered when he was spoken to, generally correctly. Miss Lauder said that he was very civil. Lady Ardoch said that he had been civil since he was one-and-twenty, and that she had not brought Miss Lauder from Edinburgh to be treated civilly.
“You have the look,” she said to him on the Sunday, across the tea-table, “of your uncle, when he was at the bar and had a cause he could not win. He would sit and look at the fire as if it owed him money. You look at books the same way; you had it from him. Is there somebody?”
“There is the King, ma’am.”
“The King was mad for nine years before he died, and you never looked at a fire for him in your life. I did not ask about the King.” Lady Ardoch put down the teapot. “Nathaniel, I have known you since you were in petticoats. You look at books, and at me when I have said something foolish. I have never once seen you look at a fire. I should like to know what is in it.”
He did not tell her. He could not have told her, if he had wished to, in any terms she would have understood: that he was looking for a young woman whose name he did not know, and whose face he did, by walking down every court in Fleet Street in turn, like a man taking an inventory. His aunt would have sent for a doctor. He said that it was a very good fire, and went to bed.
Clemency wrote the eleventh number in the first week of February, in the back room, in her slate-coloured gown, with the Warden’s sentence on the desk beside her where she could see it.
She had read it until she knew it by heart: the Warden going down into the town, street by street, asking no man anything, and looking into every door like one who has lost a thing whose name he does not know, and means to find it by the shape. At about the fifth reading she had decided that she could not tell whom he was looking for. At about the tenth she had decided that it did not signify, since whoever it was, it was she; and she did not choose to be found by the shape. She had not decided whether she wanted him to stop.
She answered him on the Sunday night. She put it in the middle of the number, at breakfast in Mount Street, where Mr. Mortimer was reading the advertisements in the Morning Post aloud, as he did every morning without being asked; and he came upon one that puzzled him, and read it out twice:
LOST, a Thing whose Name is not known. The Gentleman who is looking for it by the Shape is respectfully informed that it is very well where it is, and is begged to look no further. No Reward.
“It must be a dog,” said Mr. Mortimer.
“Nobody advertises a dog without a reward,” said Mrs. Mortimer; and Miss Mortimer poured out the tea, and said nothing whatever.
Clemency read it over at midnight and laughed aloud, and put her hand over her mouth, so as not to wake her mother; and then sat for a long time with the candle and was not laughing at all. She did not know whether she had written it to make him stop, or to let him know that she had seen him look. She was honest enough to suspect that it was the second. A woman who does not wish to be found does not advertise.
She let it stand. It was the best thing in the number.
That afternoon, on the stair below, Toby had painted Mrs. Dunning by the light of the landing window, with the japanned box open on the step beside him. He had done her cheeks in light red and white, and not a scrap of crimson, and Mrs. Dunning had never looked so well in her life; and he had given her, Clemency saw as she went down, the face of a woman who has just been told a thing she knew already, and is glad of it.
“You said faces aren’t the colour people think, miss,” he said, without looking up. “They aren’t. I looked.”
Mr. Kinross came to Salisbury Court on Thursday the tenth of February, at a quarter to nine in the morning.
He had meant to come on the last day of January. Then the heralds had taken the Monday, and his aunt the Wednesday, and the March Albemarle, which he was getting out himself with Mr. Ogle, the better part of every morning since; and it was the tenth before he stood in Fleet Street again, at the top of the next turning east of Water Lane.
He knew what day it was. On the tenth of every month she went up Baldwin’s stairs in Paternoster Row with a number under her cloak, at an hour he could have named within a quarter; and he had settled with himself in January that Paternoster Row on the tenth was the one place in London where he would not stand and wait for her. He had not chosen the day. The order of the streets had chosen it. He thought of turning back; but it seemed to him more honest to keep to the order than to the calendar, and he went down the court, slowly, looking at doors.
It was a narrow street, running down from Fleet Street towards the
river, and at the bottom it opened into a little square of tall old houses round a pump, with a printing-press going somewhere behind a ground-floor window, so that the whole square thumped gently, like a heart. He came out of the court into it, in the frost; and he had taken three steps when a door opened on the far side, under a board that said DUNNING, LAW-STATIONER, and out came the boy.
He had a parcel of copies under one arm, and he came out talking over his shoulder to somebody in the shop, and laughing; and a woman’s voice, warm and exasperated, followed him out into the square to tell him to button his coat. He buttoned it, which he would not have done for anybody else, and went off across the square at a run, towards the far corner, without once looking towards Salisbury Court.
Mr. Kinross stepped back into the mouth of the court.
He had told an attorney that he did not wish to know the master’s name, or where the boy lived, or how he did, or whether he was grateful; and now he knew three of the four, without anybody’s telling him, because he had walked down a street to look for somebody else. The master’s name was Dunning. The boy lived in this square. And he did well: he was laughed at kindly by a woman in a shop, and buttoned his coat when he was told. That was more than Mr. Kinross had paid for, and more than he had any right to know.
Then another thought came to him, standing in the mouth of the court.
The boy drew at the river wall, where she had stood in August. He kept one leaf in his book that he would not show, and he had lied, scarlet to the hair, to keep it. And he lived here, a quarter of a mile from the wall, within a walk of the Temple, which was where Mr. Kinross had reasoned at New Year that she must live. There were twenty windows round that pump. Behind any one of them—
He did not let it finish. If she lived in this square, he would be looking for her through the boy, who had lied to him on the Saturday to keep her out of his reach. That was not quite honest, since it was the order of the streets that had brought him here, and not the boy; he knew it, and let the argument stand. He would not search the boy’s square for her.
There was a plainer reason, too. The window of the shop under the board had a man behind it, looking out at the frost; and that man had written to Lincoln’s Inn in January to ask who the gentleman was, and been told nothing. Mr. Merridew had written to say so, as a thing his client ought to know. A gentleman in a good coat who stood about the square looking up at the
windows would be the answer to Mr. Dunning’s question before the morning was out; and by night the boy would know for certain whom he was obliged to; and a boy who knows whom he is obliged to is never quite free again. Mr. Kinross’s uncle had taken him to see the Hogarths when he was twelve, and had never once in his life reminded him of it. It was the best thing anybody had ever done for him, and he had been grown before he understood that it had been done on purpose.
So he turned round in the mouth of Salisbury Court, and went back up into Fleet Street, and on towards the next turning east; and he left the little square where the boy lived out of his inventory, as a man leaves out one room of his own house.
He went back to King’s Bench Walk at noon and wrote the sixteenth number of the Warden, which was due that day and which he had been putting off for a week. It went faster than any number he had written since the summer. A boy came into it whom he had not expected, and he let him in. He saw well enough what he was doing. At a quarter to nine he had turned his back on a square so that a boy should not know whom he was obliged to; at noon he gave the Warden a boy, and a name to call him by, and took him up the stair into his service. The Warden might keep him. Mr. Kinross might not; and he wrote it as fast as he could, because it was the only way he had. He had refused a thought that morning, in the mouth of Salisbury Court, about who else might live in that square; it did not come back while he wrote.
Clemency had gone up Salisbury Court a quarter of an hour before him, with the eleventh number under her cloak, and turned east into Fleet Street while he was still in the Strand; and at a quarter to nine, while he stood in the mouth of the court, she was going up Baldwin’s stairs in Paternoster Row.
There was nobody in the door of the Chapter. Mr. Radcliffe, when she asked, told her why, with no expression at all, which in Mr. Radcliffe did duty for a smile. Mr. Hindley was upstairs in the Chapter at that moment, by special invitation, at breakfast with two of Baldwin’s partners, discussing the advertising of Manchester cotton goods in the pages of the London. He would be discussing it, Mr. Radcliffe thought, until eleven. The partners had been told that he was the most considerable man in the Lancashire trade, and were very anxious to hear him on fustian.
“I said that I would give the Chapter something else to look at,” said Mr. Radcliffe, counting out the twelve guineas. “I have given it fustian. To the Author, on delivery.” He shut the
drawer. “You may use the front door this month, madam.”
Fustian had been her father’s trade. She did not say so. She used the front door, and walked home by Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street in the frost, with the twelve guineas in her glove, and turned down Salisbury Court before ten; and the court was empty, and so was the square, except for the pump and the press, and nobody had been there at all.
They buried the old King at Windsor on the night of the sixteenth, by torchlight. London put up its shutters for the day, and the bells tolled at intervals until dark, and Kit wore his crape band to the Temple and back.
A week later, on Wednesday the twenty-third, Lady Ardoch gave a small dinner in Grosvenor Square: eight at table, in black, for Miss Lauder and her father and four people who did not matter. When the ladies had gone up, Mr. Kinross went to the window of the dining-room, to get away from Miss Lauder’s father on the subject of drainage, and saw that somebody was watching the square.
He would not have seen it at Christmas. He had spent seven weeks since then watching doors, and he knew what a man looks like who is doing it; and there were two of them in Grosvenor Square that night, in frieze coats, one at the railings of the garden and one at a corner, who had been there, he thought, when he came home at dusk. They were not watching his house. They were watching Lord Harrowby’s, on the far side of the square, where the Cabinet was to dine that evening, as one of the newspapers had said; and the front of the house was very quiet for a house that expected the Cabinet.
Next door to it there was a dinner at the Archbishop of York’s, and carriages were coming and going under the lamps. Mr. Kinross watched the two men watch them. Presently one of the men went off at a run towards Oxford Street. Mr. Kinross thought it odd, and then thought no more of it, because Miss Lauder’s father had come to the window to go on about drainage, and his aunt was sending down to say that there was tea.
At ten the square was quiet. In the morning it was in every newspaper in London.
A band of men had meant to come into Grosvenor Square that evening, while the Cabinet sat at dinner at Lord Harrowby’s, and murder them all at table, and carry off two of their heads in a bag. They had been waiting in a hayloft in Cato Street, off the Edgware Road, less than a mile away, for word from their watchers in the square. The
dinner had been put off in secret, because the Government had known of the plot all along, from somebody inside it; and before the plotters could set out, the Bow Street officers had gone up the ladder into the loft, and one of the officers had been run through with a sword. Some of the plotters were taken there and then, and the rest were being hunted all over London.
Lady Ardoch read it at breakfast, in her bed, and sent for her nephew.
“They meant to murder the whole Cabinet,” she said, “across this square, while I was giving a dinner within a stone’s throw of them; and I had nothing on the table but a turkey and a fricassee. Nathaniel, I shall never be able to tell anybody.”
The March Albemarle was to go to press that afternoon. Mr. Ogle came to Grosvenor Square at ten with the last sheet, and with a paragraph from Mr. Wray to go at the foot of it, written overnight in a fine heat. The knives of Cato Street, Mr. Wray said, had been sharpened in Paternoster Row, by the Whig magazines and their comic writers, who had taught the lower orders to laugh at their betters; and he named the Ludgate, which had stopped in January and could not answer. He was careful not to name the Mortimers; nobody who read the paragraph could have supposed he meant anything else.
Mr. Kinross read it twice, and held the press.
Mr. Baldock had once held his press to put a page in. Mr. Kinross held his to take one out. He kept it until evening, while Mr. Ogle sat in the library and looked at the clock; and then he struck out Mr. Wray’s paragraph, and put in six lines of his own, which said what had happened in Cato Street and in Grosvenor Square, and that an officer had been killed in the doing of his duty, and nothing else at all.
“Mr. Wray will say that we are soft on the Radicals, sir,” said Mr. Ogle.
“Mr. Wray may say what he likes,” said Mr. Kinross, “about a magazine that can answer him.”
When Mr. Ogle had gone, he went to the window again and looked out at the square under the lamps. The men in frieze coats were gone. He thought of them standing at the railings for a whole day and the half of a night, watching a door behind which nothing was ever going to happen, and taking the carriages at the wrong house for the thing they were waiting for; and the thought that he had refused in the mouth of Salisbury Court came back to him, and stood at the railings, and would not go away.
On the Tuesday, which was the twenty-ninth, Lady Ardoch observed at breakfast that it was leap year, when a lady might speak first, by an old law of Scotland, and that this was the very
day that made it so; and looked at Miss Lauder. Miss Lauder said that she had never heard of it. Mr. Kinross said that it had been a joke for as long as anyone could say, and that it was not a law but a story; and went east, to finish the south side of Fleet Street.
There was not much of it left: the passages by St. Bride’s, and Bride Lane, and the courts that ran down behind them towards Bridge Street. In January, Whitefriars had taken him for a bailiff. It was said in the courts that the Government had had somebody among the plotters from the first, who went about with them and asked nothing and listened to everything; and a gentleman who walked down every court in turn, looking at doors and asking nobody anything, was something worse than a bailiff in the last week of February. A woman in Bride Lane took her child indoors when she saw him coming, and shut the door. A man at the bottom of a court said loudly to his neighbour that they had had enough of that sort since Wednesday. Mr. Kinross went on to the end of the south side, because he had said he would, and there was nothing at the end of it. There was one square on it that he had not looked into.
The two numbers came out on the same morning, the first of March, which was a Wednesday. They had both been handed in on the tenth of February, one in Paternoster Row and one in Albemarle Street; and neither of the two people who wrote them knew what was in the other.
Mr. Kinross bought the London at the bookseller’s in Piccadilly, as he had in February, on his way east; and he opened it at the counter, at the Mortimers, and read the advertisement standing there, with the young man waiting for his half-crown.
It was an answer. It was the first she had made him since January, and she had made it in the Warden’s own words: a thing whose name was not known, looked for by the shape. He had written that sentence for one reader, and she had read it. One writer had answered another, across two magazines, as the whole town might watch them do and never know it. She was answering the Warden. She did not know whose the Warden was; he was still sure of that.
He paid the young man, and went out into Piccadilly with the London under his arm, and considered it as he walked, as he would have considered a clause. It was not a refusal. A woman who means to refuse does not give a page of her number to it, with a joke about a dog. But it was a request; and it was the first thing she had ever asked of him, though she had no notion whom she was asking. He could give
it her. The south side of Fleet Street was done, and the courts thought him a spy, and there was nothing left of the search but asking, which he had never done and would not. He would look no further.
He would keep the second bench, all the same. That was not looking. That was waiting; and the whole of the law turned on it.
He did not know that he had obeyed her already, in the one place that mattered, before she had asked it of him in print.
Kit brought both numbers into Salisbury Square that evening, and read the eleventh number of the Mortimers aloud, and laughed at the advertisement until he had to sit down. Mr. Mortimer was quite right, he said: it was a dog, and the Author had lost it, and was very glad. Lucy said that she thought it was a lover.
Mrs. Lydiard put down the cuff.
“It is neither,” she said. “It is somebody who has been looked for, and is not yet sure she minds.”
“She?” said Kit. “The Author’s a man, Mama. Pelham says so.”
“Then he is a man who has been looked for,” said Mrs. Lydiard, “and is not sure he minds”; and she took up the cuff again. She did not look at her elder daughter. That was worse.
When they had gone to bed, Clemency took the Albemarle into the back room and read the sixteenth number of the Warden.
The Warden was at Ludlow still, and he had gone down the kitchen stair again, as he had in December, to look at the people who kept the castle. On the fourth page there was a boy.
In the kitchen at Ludlow there was a boy who turned the spit, a foundling of the town, very small, whom nobody troubled to call by his name; and on the whitewash of the wall behind the fire he had drawn, with a stick burnt black at the end, the face of every man who came down the stair. The Warden stood a long while before the faces, and found his own among them, and did not know whether to be angry. Then he asked the boy his name, and called him by it, with Master before it, which no man had done; and the next morning the boy went up the stair behind him, carrying his helm.
She read it once, and put it down on the desk, and sat quite still.
There was one boy in London who drew the face of everybody he saw. There was one man in London who could have put him into the Warden. And she knew better than anybody how the Warden was written: about the tenth of the month, by a man who put into it, as she did, whatever he had been looking at.
He had looked at Toby, then. He had stood before the boy’s faces, as the Warden stood before the whitewash,
and found his own among them; he had asked the boy his name, and called him by it, very likely, with Mister before it, which nobody in Toby’s life had ever done. And somewhere in the month between, an attorney in Lincoln’s Inn had written to Mr. Dunning, at the door below her own, that a gentleman who would not give his name would pay for the boy to learn to draw.
Mr. Dunning had guessed an old gentleman of the Inn. He was not old.
It had been his hand, then, that went into her purse ahead of her in January, and took out the one thing in it she had wanted to give away. She had won the boy his place in a hall in Bloomsbury on the Monday, and he had paid for it from Lincoln’s Inn on the Thursday, and neither had known that the other was there. They had crossed again, as their letters had crossed in the autumn. She did not mind it now. That alarmed her more than anything in the number.
And the Warden’s boy carried his helm. She had seen that helm before, on the stair, in a drawing of Toby’s: set down on a garden bench beside a knight who had taken it off to read. Mr. Kinross had never seen that drawing. To him a helm was a thing that squires carry. To her it was the one Toby had drawn, picked up off the bench and carried up the stair behind him.
He’s never looked at me, Toby had said on Twelfth Night. It had been true then. It had stopped being true at some time since, and Toby had not told her; and she understood why the boy had come up the stair two at a time in January with his face shining, and stopped, and said something else. He had been keeping it. She did not grudge it him. She had kept a great deal herself.
The attorney had written to this door. Then the gentleman knew where the boy lived; and if he knew that, he knew a square off Fleet Street with a pump in it, and a law-stationer’s, and a stair. He did not know who lived two pair of stairs up. Or he knew, and had not come up them. She could not tell which.
She was wrong in her reasoning, since he had forbidden anybody to tell him where the boy lived; and right in the fact, since the tenth of February.
She had told him that very morning, in print, at twelve guineas, to look no further; and he had been at her door already, by the post, a month ago, to do a thing for somebody she loved, and had gone away again without a word, as the Warden would have done.
She had known for months what he wrote. She knew now what he did. It was a great deal worse, because it could not be answered in a number.
(To be continued.)
Edited by Michael Cummins. Written in full collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude models, and set here as it might have appeared in a London magazine of 1820. Read the announcement, with the plan of London.
A Subscriber who missed our last Number asks what a japanned box may be. It is a box lacquered black and polished, in imitation of the work of Japan, which is why it shines like a carriage door. The one in our story holds eight cakes of colour, and no crimson.
A Lady at Clapham asks what frieze is. It is a coarse woollen cloth with a rough nap, the wear of carters, watchmen and working men. A man in a frieze coat is not asked to dine in Grosvenor Square; but nobody can stop him standing in it all night.
A Correspondent at Norwich asks who the Bow Street officers are. They are the officers of the police magistrates at the office in Bow Street, Covent Garden, who are sent wherever a felon is to be taken. The town calls them the Runners, and they do not care for it.
A Gentleman of the Country asks what is meant by the Cabinet. It is the King’s principal ministers, who meet to settle the business of the Government, and who dine at one another’s houses by turns. All London knew it; and so, it now appears, did some people in Cato Street.
Several Readers ask why the late King was buried by night. It is the custom of the Royal Family to be buried by torchlight, in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, while the bells toll in London. The Princess Charlotte was buried so, two years ago.
A Kitchen-maid asks what is meant by turning the spit. The spit is the iron bar on which the joint is roasted before the fire. It must be turned the whole time, by a jack, or by a little dog in a wheel, or, in old kitchens, by a boy.
Miss L. inquires whether a lady may speak first in leap year. Custom says that she may, and has said so for as long as anybody can remember; but custom has never yet been known to make a gentleman answer.
A Correspondent asks who carries a knight’s helm. His squire.
A Correspondent writes that he has found the Thing advertised in the Mortimers, and asks for the reward. There is none.
