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THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 162.)
CHAPTER VIII.
Out of a Book.
In which Mr. Kinross buys a Whig magazine with his own money and searches the wrong side of Fleet Street, a boy on the stairs draws a knight, and the Author goes out the back way.
The year eighteen hundred and twenty came in on a Saturday, in a hard frost; and at eight o’clock in the morning it found Mr. Kinross in Albemarle Street, where his Tory magazine the Albemarle was published, as the first of every month had found him since the Warden began; but this time the house did not know why he had come.
Mr. Radcliffe had gone to Baldwin’s, the booksellers in Paternoster Row, at Christmas, as he had said he would. His name was still over the shop, because the painter had not been told, and his chair was still behind the desk in the front office, because the shopmen had not dared to move it; and the half-sheet with the sale on it was handed to Mr. Kinross by Mr. Ogle, the senior shopman, who had spoken to him perhaps twice in all the months he had
been coming there.
“Mr. Radcliffe left word, sir,” said Mr. Ogle, “that you were to have this on the first, and that I was not to ask why.” He held it out at arm’s length. “And I have not, sir.”
The December number had sold twenty fewer copies than the November. There were letters on the desk: three clergymen now, about the kitchen, and the lady in Clapham, who had written again about the nursery. Mr. Kinross read them standing, and left them where they lay, for the man who would answer them. He had had seven weeks to find that man, and had found that London was full of men who could manage a magazine, and had not one in it who could manage a magazine and hold his tongue.
The Ludgate was not on the table.
Mr. Radcliffe had always put it there, on the corner nearest the door, without being asked. No one else in the house knew that it was wanted, so it was not there. Mr. Kinross stood for some moments looking at the bare corner of the table. Then he went out into Piccadilly and bought it himself, at a bookseller’s where he had never once asked for anything Whig; and the young man behind the counter, who had evidently heard of the Ludgate, handed it across with the face of a man who has been asked by a bishop for gin.
On the back of the wrapper, in two lines of small type, the Proprietor begged leave to inform his readers that the Ludgate would be suspended after the present number. Mr. Kinross read the two lines twice. He had never met Mr. Baldock, and had spent a year wishing him out of business. Now that it was done, he did not like it.
He took the magazine back to Albemarle Street, and up to the first floor, where Mr. Radcliffe had given his dinners to authors who might be of use to him. The chairs were in holland covers, and the fire was not lit. He sat down in his greatcoat, by the cold grate, and read the ninth number of the Mortimers from the beginning, because he would not let himself hunt through it for himself.
He did not have to look. It was in the fourth chapter.
Mr. Mortimer stood on the pavement outside his house in Mount Street while his wife went in, and looked down, for the first time in nine numbers, into his own area, the sunk yard below his railings; and he said to nobody in particular, in a voice that was not quite his own:
“One of us has. Lately.”
Mr. Kinross had said it himself, on his own pavement, on the fifteenth of November, to a young woman in mended boots who had asked whether anybody in Grosvenor Square ever looked at a railing. He had meant that he had looked at his own because the Mortimers had made him. And she had taken the words home, and given them to Mr. Mortimer, exactly as he had said them, and Mr. Mortimer had said them into his area.
She had answered his Warden before. She had answered him in the eighth number, out of the housekeeper’s book; but that had been one book answering another. This was a woman answering a man, in his own words, from his own pavement; and she must have written it, he reckoned, in November, before the turtle and the fish, when she supposed him to be nothing but a gentleman who had looked at his railings.
He sat for some time with that. Then he went on, because there was
more of the number, and he did not leave a thing unread for liking one part of it too well.
On the last leaf but one, Miss Mortimer walked in St. James’s Park with her maid on a December morning, to be out of the house while the housekeeper’s book was gone over. The maid had chilblains, and said so. They came along the water. And then, between the chilblains and the water, there was a sentence that had not been in any number before it:
By the water a gentleman stood marking a magazine in pencil, with the look of a man who is quite certain that nobody is reading him.
Mr. Kinross found that he had a pencil in his hand. He had been marking the number as he read it, as he marked everything. He put the pencil down on the holland cover of the chair beside him, very carefully, as if it were not his.
He had never in his life marked a magazine in St. James’s Park.
He sat in Mr. Radcliffe’s cold drawing-room and considered this, as he would have considered a date in one of his boxes that did not agree with the others. She did nothing by accident. She had moved his railings in the seventh number because they were in the wrong place, and she had put them, to the inch, where they were. If she had
put him in St. James’s Park, there was a reason; and he could think of only one way to find it, which was the way she had found his kitchen.
He got up, and went down the stairs past Mr. Ogle, who did not ask, and walked down St. James’s Street to the park.
It was not yet ten, and the park was nearly empty. The frost lay white on the grass, and on the backs of the cows by the Spring Gardens gate, where a woman was selling milk warm from them to two nursemaids and a soldier. The long straight water of the canal was frozen along its edges and not yet across; the ducks had crowded together in the open middle of it, complaining; and three boys on the bank were throwing stones on to the ice to see whether it would bear.
Mr. Kinross went along the water until he came to the place where, as near as he could judge, Miss Mortimer and her maid would have passed a gentleman standing; and he stood there himself, with the Ludgate under his arm, and looked about him.
There was nothing to see. There were the Horse Guards at one end and Buckingham House at the other, and the water between, and two other gentlemen walking, each with a newspaper; and nobody looked at Mr. Kinross, because in St. James’s Park every
gentleman had something to read and nobody had a name.
It was then that he understood her.
She had moved him, as she had moved the railings; but the railings she had moved to where they were, and him to where he was not. She had kept him out of the Temple, where the pencil would have been known by the end of the week. She had done for him, in a sentence, what he had resolved on his walk to Temple Bar to do for her; and she could only have done it if she had seen him there.
He stood quite still by the water, and was back in the garden in August: the second bench, the hot gravel, the fourth number of the Mortimers in his hand; and a step on the gravel, which he had heard without looking up. It had come down the eastern walk, and stopped somewhere below him for a while, and come back, and passed behind his bench. He had been writing competent in her margin; and she had walked behind him while he wrote it. He would have given a good deal of the Albemarle to have that afternoon back, and lift his head.
For a moment, reading the sentence again, he heard the other meaning in it, the one a writer would hear: a man who is quite certain that nobody is reading him. Then he put it by. She had seen a pencil and a magazine, and never a manuscript, for he
had never taken one into the garden. Radcliffe could have told her the rest, and Radcliffe told nobody anything. Wray could have told her whose magazine it was, and would tell anybody, for a paragraph; but not who wrote in it, because Wray did not know. She thought him a gentleman who read the Mortimers with a pencil and supposed himself unobserved. It was true, and quite bad enough. She did not know that he wrote the Warden. He was sure of it.
He walked a long while in the park after that, by the water and away from it, and could not afterwards have said where; and it was nearly four, with the light going, when he came into the Temple and went straight down to the garden, past the porter’s lodge, where Figgis put his head out to tell him that it was a hard frost, as though he had arranged it. The garden was empty. The gravel was frozen, and the river was very low and very bright between the barges, and the Surrey shore had gone grey. He went down the eastern walk to the river wall and stood at it, which in six years he had never done.
From the wall one saw the river. When one turned to go back up the walk, the first thing one saw was the second bench. The step in August had stopped here.
A person does not stand at a river wall in August, in the heat, for the sake
of the Surrey shore, unless she has the habit of it. She had come there often, then, and she lived within a walk of it. He had supposed since the night of the turtle that she lived east of Temple Bar. He knew now that she lived near enough to the Temple to come into its garden after three, and go home again before anybody missed her. It brought London down from a million souls to a few streets; and every one of them, he reflected, was full.
He would not ask. To ask was to tell. He would take the courts in order, from the Bar eastward, one at a time and each in its place, as he had taken the years of the fourth Henry; and he would begin on Monday with the north side, because it was on his left hand, and leave the south side, his own side of Fleet Street, for the second week, since it was the side he knew, and she could hardly be living under his nose. And every afternoon, after three, he would sit on the second bench, because she had come there once, and might again.
Kit brought the Ludgate and the Albemarle home that evening from the Temple gate, as he had brought every number since the summer, and read the ninth number of the Mortimers aloud with his back to the fire.
He read Mr. Mortimer on his pavement without stopping; for Kit, the
line was only Mr. Mortimer being odd, which he often was. He read Miss Mortimer in the park, and the maid’s chilblains, which Lucy said were very like her own; and he read the gentleman by the water, and laughed.
“That’s Pelham,” he said, with deep satisfaction. “To the life. He marks everything, and nobody reads him.”
“Nobody reads anything Pelham writes,” said Lucy. “That is why he is so cross.”
Mrs. Lydiard, at the cuff of Kit’s other shirt, said that she hoped Mr. Pelham did not stand about in St. James’s Park in December, at his time of life; and Clemency, who had been very still, let her breath go.
He had read it, then, or would read it by tonight. She had known since the sentence went to Gedge that he would; she had not known what it would be like to sit in Salisbury Square on the evening he did, and not know what he thought of it. It was like having posted a letter to somebody who would never answer, except that he might.
She read the fourteenth number of the Warden in the back room, when the others had gone to bed. It was the Marches in snow, and the King’s letters, and nothing whatever about kitchens or pencils. He had written it, she reckoned, before he could have seen the ninth number of the Mortimers; any answer to that could not come before
the first of February; and she found that she had counted the days.
She had not been to the river wall since the first of December.
She had given it up on the night she found out whose pencil it was. She had not meant to give it up. She had only found, on the first fine afternoon after that, that she could not walk in at the Inner Temple gate without wondering whether he was on his bench; and since she could not go to the wall without passing the bench, and could not pass the bench now without his knowing her, if he looked up, for the young person from his pavement; and once the ninth number was out, he would only have to put the young person, the garden and the gentleman with the pencil together to know who had written it. So she had gone home instead. She had gone home every afternoon since. It was the one place in London where nobody had ever wanted anything of her, not even a price, and she had not known until she lost it how much of the week she had spent waiting to be there.
It was a quarter of a mile. It might as well have been Edinburgh.
Mr. Kinross began on the Monday, as he had said he would, at Temple Bar, with the north side.
He went into every court and alley between the Bar and Fetter Lane, and
then between Fetter Lane and Shoe Lane: into courts with a pump in them and courts with a printing-press, and one with a tree, which was dying; and up passages so narrow that he must turn his shoulders to them, which came out into little squares that he had not known were there, with washing across them, frozen stiff. He went in the mornings, early, at the hour when the women of a house go out to the baker’s and the pump; and he looked at faces under bonnets, and at boots, and at the windows of lodgings over shops. He did not look in at any door. He asked nobody anything.
By the Wednesday three of the courts north of Fleet Street had decided among themselves that he was a bailiff’s man, and a fourth, which knew better, that he was a gentleman looking for a lady who did not wish to be found. This was the truth. A woman in Johnson’s Court emptied a basin from an upper window so near his hat that he could not suppose it to have been an accident.
He did not see her. He had not expected to see her in a week. He had been nine years over the second Richard and the fourth Henry, and was not finished yet.
At three, every afternoon, he went down to the garden and sat on the second bench, with the Albemarle or the Ludgate or whatever he had
brought, in a frost that never once broke; and he did not mark it, because he found that he could not hold a pencil now without feeling it looked at. The garden was empty in that weather, except for the gardener, who swept the walks as if he bore them a grudge, and the lawyers’ clerks who cut through it with their bundles, and did not look at him. One of them, a small boy in a coat too large for him, came through every afternoon at about half past three with a parcel of engrossments, and stopped by the river wall on his way back, and drew in a little book with a stump of black-lead, with his tongue between his teeth. Mr. Kinross noticed him, as he noticed everything that week, and did not think about him.
Figgis told him, every afternoon at the gate, that he would take his death.
“Very likely,” said Mr. Kinross.
He could have stood in Paternoster Row at nine on the tenth and seen her come with the number under her cloak. He knew the day, and he knew the door, if she took Radcliffe’s terms; for Radcliffe had told him in November that he meant to take the Mortimers to Baldwin’s, if he could. At Lord Ashcombe’s table he had kept his lordship away from that door by warning him that Mr. Wray would hear of it; and he had not said it only for his lordship’s sake. He would not wait for her on a publisher’s stair, like a dun. He
would find her at her own door, or not at all.
On the Wednesday there was a letter from Edinburgh. His aunt would come south in the first days of February, for the Season, the months when the fashionable world came to town, with Miss Lauder and Miss Lauder’s father, who had business before the Lords; she had heard nothing from her nephew since Christmas, and took this to mean that there was nothing to hear. Mr. Kinross read it on the second bench, in the frost, and put it in his pocket, and went on not marking the Albemarle.
She did not come, and the reason was sitting on the second bench.
On the Thursday, which was Twelfth Night, the pastrycooks’ windows in Fleet Street were full of cakes that nobody in Salisbury Square could afford. Kit had brought home, instead, the first volume of Ivanhoe, which Mr. Pelham had bought on the day it came, as everybody had, and had lent to his clerk after a chapter because the Saxons made him sleepy; and Kit was reading it aloud in the front room, a little each night, because the candles were counted.
He had got to the tournament. Clemency left him there at nine, with the knight who had no name riding into the lists with Desdichado on his shield,
which Kit said was Spanish for disinherited, and took the candle and the scuttle and went down for the coals, which were kept, by arrangement with Mr. Dunning, in the cellar under his shop.
There was a boy sitting on the stairs below their door, in the dark.
He scrambled up when the light came round the turn, and flattened himself against the wall; and she knew him, as one knows a person one passes on a stair. He was Dunning’s boy. The Dunnings had taken him from the Foundling Hospital at Michaelmas, bound for seven years, and Mrs. Dunning, who had no children living, had told everybody in the Square that he was a good boy and ate next to nothing. Clemency had nodded to him on the stair perhaps twenty times since October, and he had nodded back, and they had neither of them said a word. He was fourteen, she had been told, and might have passed for twelve. He was small and thin and fair, with a quick, anxious face, and a coat bought for him to grow into.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” he said. “I wasn’t listening.”
He had been listening. Kit’s voice came through the door quite plainly; Kit read Ivanhoe as he read the Mortimers, in the voice he kept for Mr. Pelham’s opinions, which was meant for a jury and carried to the street.
“You’ll take cold,” said Clemency.
“Yes, miss.” He did not move. “He’s just come in. The knight. Nobody knows who he is.”
“No,” said Clemency. “Nobody does.”
He had a board on his knees, she saw, of the kind the law-stationers use to carry a skin of parchment without creasing it; and on the board, held down by his thumb, was a sheet of paper that had been written on, on the other side, in a fair round hand. She held the candle lower without meaning to, and he did not snatch it away. He looked at her instead, quickly, to see what she would do, as if a great deal depended on it.
It was a knight in armour, sitting on a garden bench under a bare tree, with a river behind him. He had his helmet off and set on the bench beside him, and a book open on his knee; and in his right hand, in his steel glove, he held a pencil. The armour was all wrong. It had joints where no armour has joints, and none where it has; the boy had plainly never seen a suit of it nearer than a print-shop window. But the face was right. It was a long, plain, guarded face, with nothing in it that it had not decided to let out; and the boy had seen, as she had seen on the pavement, that it was not succeeding.
Clemency knew the face. She had looked at it for a quarter of an hour
on its own pavement in November, and she had seen it shut.
“Who is it?” she said; and she was pleased to hear that her voice was perfectly ordinary.
“It’s the knight that hasn’t got a name, miss. The Disinherited.” He touched the edge of the paper. “Only I gave him the gentleman’s face. Off the second bench, in the Temple garden. Because nobody knows his name either.”
“Doesn’t anybody?”
“He doesn’t talk to anybody, miss. He sits there every afternoon now, since New Year’s Day, in the frost, and reads; and Mr. Figgis at the gate says he’ll take his death, and he says, very likely.” The boy considered the drawing. “I go by him twice a day with Mr. Dunning’s copies for Paper Buildings. He’s never looked at me. He looks like a knight out of a book.”
Clemency did not laugh. It was a near thing.
For he was a knight out of a book; he was the Lord Warden of the Marches, and he wrote the book himself, by the month, and the boy who had drawn him in his armour did not know it, and never would unless somebody told him, and nobody would. She stood on the stair with the candle and the empty scuttle, and was so nearly overcome, by laughter or by something next door to it, that she was obliged to look at the
scuttle very hard.
Every afternoon since New Year’s Day: since the morning the Ludgate came out. He had read the ninth number, then, on the first; and he had gone back to his bench in a hard frost, every day since, to sit where any passer-by could see him. She thought she understood it. It was a gentleman’s answer to being laughed at. He had been told, in print, that he stood about by the water marking magazines in the belief that nobody saw him; and he had gone and sat where everybody could, to show whoever had written it that a man could be laughed at and keep his seat. It was exactly what the Warden would have done, and she found it absurd, and very affecting.
There was another explanation, and she priced it, as she priced everything: that he sat there in the frost because he was waiting for somebody, and that the somebody was the young person from his pavement. She marked it down at once. Gentlemen of Grosvenor Square did not sit out a January in the Temple for a young woman who had come about a place; and she had been sold at seven guineas a number for long enough to know what the market thought she was worth.
She was quite wrong. He was not sitting there to be looked at. He was sitting there to look.
“It’s good,” she said. “You’ve got his face.”
He went pink, from the collar up.
“I don’t know about armour, miss.”
“Nobody in London knows about armour. You know about faces. That’s the hard part.”
Under her bed was a portfolio of drawings of the Mortimers, and she had never finished a face in it, because she could never decide what a face would look like at the moment it understood. Among them was the garden of the Inner Temple, seen from the river wall, with a gentleman on the bench under the second plane, too small to have a face.
The boy had given him one.
“Who taught you?” she said.
“Nobody, miss.” He thought about it, being honest. “There were pictures at the Hospital. On the stairs, and in the room where the Governors sat. We went past them every day, to our dinners; and on Sundays the ladies came to look at them, and at us.” He said it without any complaint, as he might have said that it had rained. “There was one of Moses, miss, being brought to the lady that found him. It’s his own mother brings him, only she mayn’t say so. We used to look at that one.”
Clemency looked at the drawing, so as not to look at him.
“What do they call you?”
“Tucker, miss. Tobias Tucker. The Hospital gave it me, when I was took in.” He seemed to feel that it wanted some defence. “Mrs. Dunning calls me Toby.”
“Then so shall I, if I may.” She looked at the back of the sheet, where the fair round hand ended in the middle of a word. “Does Mr. Dunning know you draw on his paper?”
All the colour that had come into his face went out of it at once.
“It’s the spoilt ones, miss. Only the spoilt ones. When the clerk blots, or gets a word wrong, it’s spoilt, and it goes for lighting the fire.” He had both hands on the board now. “I only take them after. I never took a good one.”
She saw, as plainly as she had ever seen a price, what he was afraid of. He had been at Dunning’s a quarter of a year, and nobody had sent him back yet; and he did not know, because nobody had ever told him, that a boy was not sent back to the Hospital for drawing on paper that was going on the fire.
“I shan’t tell him,” said Clemency. “It’s nothing to do with me what Mr. Dunning lights his fire with.”
He looked at her for a long moment, to see whether she meant it; and then he believed her, all at once and entirely, as she had never seen anybody believe anything. It was a little alarming.
“Have you any more?”
He had a book. It was a dozen spoilt sheets, folded and sewn with a thread that had been begged from Mrs. Dunning; and he took it out of his coat and gave it to her, and stood one step below her while she turned it over by the candle, and watched her face and not the book. There was the round church in the Temple, and the old trees in the garden, bare, and the gardener with his broom, scowling at the walk; there was Mr. Figgis in the door of his lodge, unmistakably Figgis; there were two old Benchers going in to dinner, one of them already asleep; and every one of them had a face, and every face was somebody. Near the end of the book, as she turned the leaf, he put out his hand quickly and turned two leaves together, so that she should not see the one between; and then went red, because he knew she had seen him do it.
She did not ask. She knew a good deal about keeping things that were not anybody else’s business. She gave him the book back.
From the foot of the stairs Mrs. Dunning’s voice came up, warm and exasperated, like the smell of supper.
“Toby! Your supper’s spoiling, and so are you!”
He was gone before she could say good night. He was down the stair and round the turn with the board under his arm, and then, a moment later,
back again, for the scuttle, which she was still holding; and he took it out of her hand without a word and went down to the cellar with it in the dark, and brought it up full, and set it outside the Lydiards’ door, and was gone again before she could thank him. Nobody had carried coals for her since Bread Street.
When she went in, she did not shut the door. She left it on the jar, a hand’s breadth, and moved her chair next to it, where the draught was, which nobody else wanted. Kit was in the lists still, and the knight with no name had overthrown the Templar.
“Clem, you’re letting the cold in.”
“I’m warm,” said Clemency; which, for once, was true.
On the Saturday she walked out to Islington to see Mr. Baldock, because the tenth of January was on Monday, and the Author owed Mr. Radcliffe an answer by then.
He lived in Canonbury, in a narrow house with a garden that he had never had time to look at; and he was looking at it now, from the window of his parlour, with his feet on the fender and a book face down on his knee, like a man who has been put out to grass and suspects the grass. He was very glad to see her, and said so; and then he took off his spectacles, and put them on again, and was brisk.
“I have read a novel,” he said. “Everybody has; I was told I should. It is very long, and very fine, and there are a great many knights in it, and a tournament, and a siege; and the only man in the whole of it who expects to be paid is the moneylender, and the knights treat him abominably for asking.” He shut the book. “I suppose that is what is meant by romance. You have come about Radcliffe.”
“The Author must answer him by Monday.”
“Then the Author will go to him.” He said it at once, as he gave the price of paper. “There is nothing else to be done, and you know it, or you would not have walked out to Canonbury in a frost to be told so. I have no shop. I shall not have one before Lady Day, and very likely not after it. Radcliffe pays twelve guineas, on the tenth, on delivery; the London, Baldwin’s new magazine, will be read by everybody who reads, which is more than ever read the Ludgate; and he does not ask your name. Go to him.”
Clemency looked at the fire.
“Mr. Radcliffe published the Warden,” she said, “from the first number.”
“He did. And he has kept the name of the man who writes it from the whole of London, from the first number until now; and he dines out on not telling it, which is the surest sign I
know that he never will.” Mr. Baldock regarded her over the spectacles. “If you want a secret kept, Miss Lydiard, give it to a man who is proud of keeping one. I have known Radcliffe five-and-twenty years. He has never yet told anybody anything that he could sell for more by keeping.”
She did not say that she knew the name herself; that she had known it for five weeks, and had found out what it cost to keep it every day of them, and so knew better than anybody in London what Mr. Radcliffe had been doing for a year. She said nothing. But it was that, more than the twelve guineas, which decided her.
“There is one other thing,” said Mr. Baldock, “and then I have done. Hindley came here on Christmas Eve.”
She turned round. She had heard Mr. Hindley once, in October, through a door that did not shut, selling her to Mr. Baldock; she had never seen his face.
“In a new coat. He wished to know who delivers the Mortimers. Not who writes them: he could hardly ask me that, since half the Row believes he does. Who comes up the stairs on the tenth.” Mr. Baldock’s face did not change at all. “I told him that I was a plain man too, and that plain men did not tell each other things. He went away in a very bad temper, and did not pay his hackney-coachman, who came
back and asked me for it. I paid him. It is the last money I shall lay out on the Mortimers, and I grudged it more than all the rest.” He took off his spectacles again. “Somebody has given Mr. Hindley a reason to look. I do not know who. Go to Radcliffe early, and take the number under your cloak.”
When she rose to go he got up too, which he never did, and went with her to the door, and stood on the step in the frost without his hat.
“I had the best thing I ever published,” he said, “for seven guineas a number. I shall be ashamed of that until I die. It was the price I could pay, and you took it, and I let you.” He held out his hand. “Go to Radcliffe, Miss Lydiard. He will pay you better, and he will not deserve it either.”
Paternoster Row at nine o’clock on a Monday morning in January was as dark as most streets at dusk: a lane of booksellers so narrow that the houses on either side might have read each other’s titles, and the dome of St. Paul’s standing up behind them in the frost. Baldwin’s was at number forty-seven. A few doors along, at the corner of Chapter House Court, was the Chapter Coffee-house, where the trade drank its coffee and sold its secrets; and in the doorway of the Chapter stood a tall man, stamping his feet.
Clemency priced him from the boots up, because she could not help it.
The boots had been soled twice, and the coat was new. He had spent on his back what he had saved on his feet. He was watching the door of number forty-seven as a cat watches a hole in the wainscot; and he looked at her as she went by him, and away again at once, without interest, because she was a woman, and he was waiting for the Author.
She went up Baldwin’s stairs with the tenth number under her cloak.
Mr. Radcliffe received her in a small front room on the first floor, with a fire in it and a press, and a window on to the Row; and he rose when she came in. He was a large, pale, careful man, with an Edinburgh voice that London had not quite flattened; and he looked at her once, from her bonnet to her boots, as a bookseller looks at a binding, and then at her face, and then did not look at her again in any way that she could object to.
“The Author of the Mortimers,” he said, in the voice in which he gave a price.
“The Author has sent the tenth number,” said Clemency, “by hand.”
“By the only hand that could, I think.” He took the number from her and weighed it, as Mr. Baldock had always weighed it; and then he did a thing that Mr. Baldock had never done,
and read the first leaf through at the window, on his feet, for the price. She watched him do it. It was like watching somebody count her change.
“Yes,” said Mr. Radcliffe, at the foot of the leaf. He put it down. “I read the ninth on the first. Standing up, which I do not do.” He unlocked a drawer. “Twelve guineas. I am told that there is a form of words.”
“Mr. Baldock used to say, To the Author, on delivery.”
“Then I shall say it.” He counted it out on the table, a ten-pound note and two sovereigns and twelve shillings, exactly as Mr. Baldock had counted it out all the autumn; and he did not ask her to count it after him, and she did not. “To the Author, on delivery. You will find, madam, that I keep to the terms. Twelve guineas, no name, the tenth of every month; and the Author does not dine. I have underlined it. I have never in five-and-twenty years had a contributor who would not dine, and I find I like it better than I expected.”
“And the Author’s name?”
“I do not ask for what I do not need,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “I should only have to keep it.” He locked the drawer. “And now I shall tell you a thing that is not in the terms, and you may do as you like about it. There is a man in the door of the Chapter.”
“In a new coat,” said Clemency.
“And not paid for.” Mr. Radcliffe did not smile; he seemed not to have the habit. “His name is Hindley. He is a Manchester man, and in town he does not rise before ten; I have dined with him, and I know. He has been in that doorway since eight, and he has drunk three dishes of the Chapter’s coffee, which is a thing I have never seen done; and he is not reading the newspaper. He is watching my door, on the tenth of the month, at nine in the morning.” He looked at her across the table. “He will be watching it when you go out.”
Clemency stood quite still, with the twelve guineas in her glove. She had walked past him a minute ago, and he had looked at her, and away.
“He did not know me,” she said.
“No. He is watching for a man,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “The whole of the Row has been looking for a man since October, because Mr. Hindley let it think it had found one; and he has come to believe it himself.” He went to a door at the back of the room, which she had taken for a cupboard, and opened it on a narrow stair that went down into the dark and smelt of paper. “It is a common failing in the trade, madam, to look for what one has been selling. This stair goes down through the warehouse, and comes out in a court behind the Row. I should go that way this month; and next month,
if you will allow me, I will see that the Chapter has something else to look at.”
She went to the door. Then, because he had kept the terms, and because she had never in her life been given anything for nothing without asking why, she turned on the top step.
“Mr. Radcliffe. Why?”
He considered the question as he had considered the first leaf: honestly, and for the price.
“Because the Author’s ninth was worth the twelve,” he said. “And because I have been keeping one name in this trade for a year, madam, and have found that it is a thing a man gets the taste for.”
She went down through the warehouse in the dark, between stacks of paper higher than her head, and came out into a court she did not know, and found her way by the dome, and walked home by Ludgate Hill with twelve guineas in her glove, which was a quarter’s rent and the coals, and no one in the world behind her.
Mr. Radcliffe stood at his window after she had gone, and watched Mr. Hindley stamp his feet in the door of the Chapter. He did not know her name, and did not mean to. He knew her face now, and her voice, and her boots, which had been mended at the toe; and he thought, without wishing to, of a sentence in the ninth number about a gentleman by the water, and of
the only man he had ever known who marked a magazine in pencil.
Then he put the thought where he put everything, and locked it, and went down to the shop to see about the February number.
On the Monday night Kit came to the end of the tournament.
The knight with no name had won the second day, as everybody had known he would; and they brought him before the Lady Rowena to be crowned, and the marshals unlaced his helmet; and he was a young man, very pale, with blood on his face, and the whole of the lists knew him. He was Ivanhoe. He fell down at her feet.
“There!” said Lucy, enchanted. “I knew it was him from the first chapter.”
“So did everybody,” said Clemency. “That is the pleasure of it.”
“Then what is the use of the helmet?” said Kit, who had not known, and was put out.
“To make the people in the book wait,” said Clemency, “while everybody else enjoys themselves.”
Mrs. Lydiard looked at her elder daughter, and then at the door, and said nothing.
The door to the stair stood on the jar, where Clemency had left it. Beyond it, on the dark stair, somebody very small let out a breath that he
had been holding since the marshals touched the helmet.
Clemency sat with her hands in her lap and thought about knights.
She knew the name of hers. She had known it since the first of December, and it had been no use to her at all; for it is one thing to know the knight’s name from the first chapter, with a
book on one’s knee, and quite another to know it from the lists. He sat every afternoon now on the second bench, a quarter of a mile away, in a hard frost, with his helmet off, to show that he did not mind being looked at; and she could not go and look.
(To be continued.)
THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 162.)
CHAPTER VIII.
Out of a Book.
In which Mr. Kinross buys a Whig magazine with his own money and searches the wrong side of Fleet Street, a boy on the stairs draws a knight, and the Author goes out the back way.
The year eighteen hundred and twenty came in on a Saturday, in a hard frost; and at eight o’clock in the morning it found Mr. Kinross in Albemarle Street, where his Tory magazine the Albemarle was published, as the first of every month had found him since the Warden began; but this time the house did not know why he had come.
Mr. Radcliffe had gone to Baldwin’s, the booksellers in Paternoster Row, at Christmas, as he had said he would. His name was still over the shop, because the painter had not been told, and his chair was still behind the desk in the front office, because the shopmen had not dared to move it; and the half-sheet with the sale on it was handed to Mr. Kinross by Mr. Ogle, the senior shopman, who had spoken to him perhaps twice in all the months he had been coming there.
“Mr. Radcliffe left word, sir,” said Mr. Ogle, “that you were to have this on the first, and that I was not to ask why.” He held it out at arm’s length. “And I have not, sir.”
The December number had sold twenty fewer copies than the November. There were letters on the desk: three clergymen now, about the kitchen, and the lady in Clapham, who had written again about the nursery. Mr. Kinross read them standing, and left them where they lay, for the man who would answer them. He had had seven weeks to find that man, and had found that London was full of men who could manage a magazine, and had not one in it who could manage a magazine and hold his tongue.
The Ludgate was not on the table.
Mr. Radcliffe had always put it there, on the corner nearest the door, without being asked. No one else in the house knew that it was wanted, so it was not there. Mr. Kinross stood for some moments looking at the bare corner of the table. Then he went out into Piccadilly and bought it himself, at a bookseller’s where he had never once asked for anything Whig; and the young man behind the counter, who had evidently heard of the Ludgate, handed it across with the face of a man who has been asked by a bishop for gin.
On the back of the wrapper, in two lines of small type, the Proprietor begged leave to inform his readers that the Ludgate would be suspended after the present number. Mr. Kinross read the two lines twice. He had never met Mr. Baldock, and had spent a year wishing him out of business. Now that it was done, he did not like it.
He took the magazine back to Albemarle Street, and up to the first floor, where Mr. Radcliffe had given his dinners to authors who might be of use to him. The chairs were in holland covers, and the fire was not lit. He sat down in his greatcoat, by the cold grate, and read the ninth number of the Mortimers from the beginning, because he would not let himself hunt through it for himself.
He did not have to look. It was in the fourth chapter.
Mr. Mortimer stood on the pavement outside his house in Mount Street while his wife went in, and looked down, for the first time in nine numbers, into his own area, the sunk yard below his railings; and he said to nobody in particular, in a voice that was not quite his own:
“One of us has. Lately.”
Mr. Kinross had said it himself, on his own pavement, on the fifteenth of November, to a young woman in mended boots who had asked whether anybody in Grosvenor Square ever looked at a railing. He had meant that he had looked at his own because the Mortimers had made him. And she had taken the words home, and given them to Mr. Mortimer, exactly as he had said them, and Mr. Mortimer had said them into his area.
She had answered his Warden before. She had answered him in the eighth number, out of the housekeeper’s book; but that had been one book answering another. This was a woman answering a man, in his own words, from his own pavement; and she must have written it, he reckoned, in November, before the turtle and the fish, when she supposed him to be nothing but a gentleman who had looked at his railings.
He sat for some time with that. Then he went on, because there was
more of the number, and he did not leave a thing unread for liking one part of it too well.
On the last leaf but one, Miss Mortimer walked in St. James’s Park with her maid on a December morning, to be out of the house while the housekeeper’s book was gone over. The maid had chilblains, and said so. They came along the water. And then, between the chilblains and the water, there was a sentence that had not been in any number before it:
By the water a gentleman stood marking a magazine in pencil, with the look of a man who is quite certain that nobody is reading him.
Mr. Kinross found that he had a pencil in his hand. He had been marking the number as he read it, as he marked everything. He put the pencil down on the holland cover of the chair beside him, very carefully, as if it were not his.
He had never in his life marked a magazine in St. James’s Park.
He sat in Mr. Radcliffe’s cold drawing-room and considered this, as he would have considered a date in one of his boxes that did not agree with the others. She did nothing by accident. She had moved his railings in the seventh number because they were in the wrong place, and she had put them, to the inch, where they were. If she had put him in St. James’s Park, there was a reason; and he could think of only one way to find it, which was the way she had found his kitchen.
He got up, and went down the stairs past Mr. Ogle, who did not ask, and walked down St. James’s Street to the park.
It was not yet ten, and the park was nearly empty. The frost lay white on the grass, and on the backs of the cows by the Spring Gardens gate, where a woman was selling milk warm from them to two nursemaids and a soldier. The long straight water of the canal was frozen along its edges and not yet across; the ducks had crowded together in the open middle of it, complaining; and three boys on the bank were throwing stones on to the ice to see whether it would bear.
Mr. Kinross went along the water until he came to the place where, as near as he could judge, Miss Mortimer and her maid would have passed a gentleman standing; and he stood there himself, with the Ludgate under his arm, and looked about him.
There was nothing to see. There were the Horse Guards at one end and Buckingham House at the other, and the water between, and two other gentlemen walking, each with a newspaper; and nobody looked at Mr. Kinross, because in St. James’s Park every
gentleman had something to read and nobody had a name.
It was then that he understood her.
She had moved him, as she had moved the railings; but the railings she had moved to where they were, and him to where he was not. She had kept him out of the Temple, where the pencil would have been known by the end of the week. She had done for him, in a sentence, what he had resolved on his walk to Temple Bar to do for her; and she could only have done it if she had seen him there.
He stood quite still by the water, and was back in the garden in August: the second bench, the hot gravel, the fourth number of the Mortimers in his hand; and a step on the gravel, which he had heard without looking up. It had come down the eastern walk, and stopped somewhere below him for a while, and come back, and passed behind his bench. He had been writing competent in her margin; and she had walked behind him while he wrote it. He would have given a good deal of the Albemarle to have that afternoon back, and lift his head.
For a moment, reading the sentence again, he heard the other meaning in it, the one a writer would hear: a man who is quite certain that nobody is reading him. Then he put it by. She had seen a pencil and a magazine, and never a manuscript, for he had never taken one into the garden. Radcliffe could have told her the rest, and Radcliffe told nobody anything. Wray could have told her whose magazine it was, and would tell anybody, for a paragraph; but not who wrote in it, because Wray did not know. She thought him a gentleman who read the Mortimers with a pencil and supposed himself unobserved. It was true, and quite bad enough. She did not know that he wrote the Warden. He was sure of it.
He walked a long while in the park after that, by the water and away from it, and could not afterwards have said where; and it was nearly four, with the light going, when he came into the Temple and went straight down to the garden, past the porter’s lodge, where Figgis put his head out to tell him that it was a hard frost, as though he had arranged it. The garden was empty. The gravel was frozen, and the river was very low and very bright between the barges, and the Surrey shore had gone grey. He went down the eastern walk to the river wall and stood at it, which in six years he had never done.
From the wall one saw the river. When one turned to go back up the walk, the first thing one saw was the second bench. The step in August had stopped here.
A person does not stand at a river wall in August, in the heat, for the sake
of the Surrey shore, unless she has the habit of it. She had come there often, then, and she lived within a walk of it. He had supposed since the night of the turtle that she lived east of Temple Bar. He knew now that she lived near enough to the Temple to come into its garden after three, and go home again before anybody missed her. It brought London down from a million souls to a few streets; and every one of them, he reflected, was full.
He would not ask. To ask was to tell. He would take the courts in order, from the Bar eastward, one at a time and each in its place, as he had taken the years of the fourth Henry; and he would begin on Monday with the north side, because it was on his left hand, and leave the south side, his own side of Fleet Street, for the second week, since it was the side he knew, and she could hardly be living under his nose. And every afternoon, after three, he would sit on the second bench, because she had come there once, and might again.
Kit brought the Ludgate and the Albemarle home that evening from the Temple gate, as he had brought every number since the summer, and read the ninth number of the Mortimers aloud with his back to the fire.
He read Mr. Mortimer on his pavement without stopping; for Kit, the line was only Mr. Mortimer being odd, which he often was. He read Miss Mortimer in the park, and the maid’s chilblains, which Lucy said were very like her own; and he read the gentleman by the water, and laughed.
“That’s Pelham,” he said, with deep satisfaction. “To the life. He marks everything, and nobody reads him.”
“Nobody reads anything Pelham writes,” said Lucy. “That is why he is so cross.”
Mrs. Lydiard, at the cuff of Kit’s other shirt, said that she hoped Mr. Pelham did not stand about in St. James’s Park in December, at his time of life; and Clemency, who had been very still, let her breath go.
He had read it, then, or would read it by tonight. She had known since the sentence went to Gedge that he would; she had not known what it would be like to sit in Salisbury Square on the evening he did, and not know what he thought of it. It was like having posted a letter to somebody who would never answer, except that he might.
She read the fourteenth number of the Warden in the back room, when the others had gone to bed. It was the Marches in snow, and the King’s letters, and nothing whatever about kitchens or pencils. He had written it, she reckoned, before he could have seen the ninth number of the Mortimers; any answer to that could not come before
the first of February; and she found that she had counted the days.
She had not been to the river wall since the first of December.
She had given it up on the night she found out whose pencil it was. She had not meant to give it up. She had only found, on the first fine afternoon after that, that she could not walk in at the Inner Temple gate without wondering whether he was on his bench; and since she could not go to the wall without passing the bench, and could not pass the bench now without his knowing her, if he looked up, for the young person from his pavement; and once the ninth number was out, he would only have to put the young person, the garden and the gentleman with the pencil together to know who had written it. So she had gone home instead. She had gone home every afternoon since. It was the one place in London where nobody had ever wanted anything of her, not even a price, and she had not known until she lost it how much of the week she had spent waiting to be there.
It was a quarter of a mile. It might as well have been Edinburgh.
Mr. Kinross began on the Monday, as he had said he would, at Temple Bar, with the north side.
He went into every court and alley between the Bar and Fetter Lane, and then between Fetter Lane and Shoe Lane: into courts with a pump in them and courts with a printing-press, and one with a tree, which was dying; and up passages so narrow that he must turn his shoulders to them, which came out into little squares that he had not known were there, with washing across them, frozen stiff. He went in the mornings, early, at the hour when the women of a house go out to the baker’s and the pump; and he looked at faces under bonnets, and at boots, and at the windows of lodgings over shops. He did not look in at any door. He asked nobody anything.
By the Wednesday three of the courts north of Fleet Street had decided among themselves that he was a bailiff’s man, and a fourth, which knew better, that he was a gentleman looking for a lady who did not wish to be found. This was the truth. A woman in Johnson’s Court emptied a basin from an upper window so near his hat that he could not suppose it to have been an accident.
He did not see her. He had not expected to see her in a week. He had been nine years over the second Richard and the fourth Henry, and was not finished yet.
At three, every afternoon, he went down to the garden and sat on the second bench, with the Albemarle or the Ludgate or whatever he had
brought, in a frost that never once broke; and he did not mark it, because he found that he could not hold a pencil now without feeling it looked at. The garden was empty in that weather, except for the gardener, who swept the walks as if he bore them a grudge, and the lawyers’ clerks who cut through it with their bundles, and did not look at him. One of them, a small boy in a coat too large for him, came through every afternoon at about half past three with a parcel of engrossments, and stopped by the river wall on his way back, and drew in a little book with a stump of black-lead, with his tongue between his teeth. Mr. Kinross noticed him, as he noticed everything that week, and did not think about him.
Figgis told him, every afternoon at the gate, that he would take his death.
“Very likely,” said Mr. Kinross.
He could have stood in Paternoster Row at nine on the tenth and seen her come with the number under her cloak. He knew the day, and he knew the door, if she took Radcliffe’s terms; for Radcliffe had told him in November that he meant to take the Mortimers to Baldwin’s, if he could. At Lord Ashcombe’s table he had kept his lordship away from that door by warning him that Mr. Wray would hear of it; and he had not said it only for his lordship’s sake. He would not wait for her on a publisher’s stair, like a dun. He would find her at her own door, or not at all.
On the Wednesday there was a letter from Edinburgh. His aunt would come south in the first days of February, for the Season, the months when the fashionable world came to town, with Miss Lauder and Miss Lauder’s father, who had business before the Lords; she had heard nothing from her nephew since Christmas, and took this to mean that there was nothing to hear. Mr. Kinross read it on the second bench, in the frost, and put it in his pocket, and went on not marking the Albemarle.
She did not come, and the reason was sitting on the second bench.
On the Thursday, which was Twelfth Night, the pastrycooks’ windows in Fleet Street were full of cakes that nobody in Salisbury Square could afford. Kit had brought home, instead, the first volume of Ivanhoe, which Mr. Pelham had bought on the day it came, as everybody had, and had lent to his clerk after a chapter because the Saxons made him sleepy; and Kit was reading it aloud in the front room, a little each night, because the candles were counted.
He had got to the tournament. Clemency left him there at nine, with the knight who had no name riding into the lists with Desdichado on his shield,
which Kit said was Spanish for disinherited, and took the candle and the scuttle and went down for the coals, which were kept, by arrangement with Mr. Dunning, in the cellar under his shop.
There was a boy sitting on the stairs below their door, in the dark.
He scrambled up when the light came round the turn, and flattened himself against the wall; and she knew him, as one knows a person one passes on a stair. He was Dunning’s boy. The Dunnings had taken him from the Foundling Hospital at Michaelmas, bound for seven years, and Mrs. Dunning, who had no children living, had told everybody in the Square that he was a good boy and ate next to nothing. Clemency had nodded to him on the stair perhaps twenty times since October, and he had nodded back, and they had neither of them said a word. He was fourteen, she had been told, and might have passed for twelve. He was small and thin and fair, with a quick, anxious face, and a coat bought for him to grow into.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” he said. “I wasn’t listening.”
He had been listening. Kit’s voice came through the door quite plainly; Kit read Ivanhoe as he read the Mortimers, in the voice he kept for Mr. Pelham’s opinions, which was meant for a jury and carried to the street.
“You’ll take cold,” said Clemency.
“Yes, miss.” He did not move. “He’s just come in. The knight. Nobody knows who he is.”
“No,” said Clemency. “Nobody does.”
He had a board on his knees, she saw, of the kind the law-stationers use to carry a skin of parchment without creasing it; and on the board, held down by his thumb, was a sheet of paper that had been written on, on the other side, in a fair round hand. She held the candle lower without meaning to, and he did not snatch it away. He looked at her instead, quickly, to see what she would do, as if a great deal depended on it.
It was a knight in armour, sitting on a garden bench under a bare tree, with a river behind him. He had his helmet off and set on the bench beside him, and a book open on his knee; and in his right hand, in his steel glove, he held a pencil. The armour was all wrong. It had joints where no armour has joints, and none where it has; the boy had plainly never seen a suit of it nearer than a print-shop window. But the face was right. It was a long, plain, guarded face, with nothing in it that it had not decided to let out; and the boy had seen, as she had seen on the pavement, that it was not succeeding.
Clemency knew the face. She had looked at it for a quarter of an hour
on its own pavement in November, and she had seen it shut.
“Who is it?” she said; and she was pleased to hear that her voice was perfectly ordinary.
“It’s the knight that hasn’t got a name, miss. The Disinherited.” He touched the edge of the paper. “Only I gave him the gentleman’s face. Off the second bench, in the Temple garden. Because nobody knows his name either.”
“Doesn’t anybody?”
“He doesn’t talk to anybody, miss. He sits there every afternoon now, since New Year’s Day, in the frost, and reads; and Mr. Figgis at the gate says he’ll take his death, and he says, very likely.” The boy considered the drawing. “I go by him twice a day with Mr. Dunning’s copies for Paper Buildings. He’s never looked at me. He looks like a knight out of a book.”
Clemency did not laugh. It was a near thing.
For he was a knight out of a book; he was the Lord Warden of the Marches, and he wrote the book himself, by the month, and the boy who had drawn him in his armour did not know it, and never would unless somebody told him, and nobody would. She stood on the stair with the candle and the empty scuttle, and was so nearly overcome, by laughter or by something next door to it, that she was obliged to look at the scuttle very hard.
Every afternoon since New Year’s Day: since the morning the Ludgate came out. He had read the ninth number, then, on the first; and he had gone back to his bench in a hard frost, every day since, to sit where any passer-by could see him. She thought she understood it. It was a gentleman’s answer to being laughed at. He had been told, in print, that he stood about by the water marking magazines in the belief that nobody saw him; and he had gone and sat where everybody could, to show whoever had written it that a man could be laughed at and keep his seat. It was exactly what the Warden would have done, and she found it absurd, and very affecting.
There was another explanation, and she priced it, as she priced everything: that he sat there in the frost because he was waiting for somebody, and that the somebody was the young person from his pavement. She marked it down at once. Gentlemen of Grosvenor Square did not sit out a January in the Temple for a young woman who had come about a place; and she had been sold at seven guineas a number for long enough to know what the market thought she was worth.
She was quite wrong. He was not sitting there to be looked at. He was sitting there to look.
“It’s good,” she said. “You’ve got his face.”
He went pink, from the collar up.
“I don’t know about armour, miss.”
“Nobody in London knows about armour. You know about faces. That’s the hard part.”
Under her bed was a portfolio of drawings of the Mortimers, and she had never finished a face in it, because she could never decide what a face would look like at the moment it understood. Among them was the garden of the Inner Temple, seen from the river wall, with a gentleman on the bench under the second plane, too small to have a face.
The boy had given him one.
“Who taught you?” she said.
“Nobody, miss.” He thought about it, being honest. “There were pictures at the Hospital. On the stairs, and in the room where the Governors sat. We went past them every day, to our dinners; and on Sundays the ladies came to look at them, and at us.” He said it without any complaint, as he might have said that it had rained. “There was one of Moses, miss, being brought to the lady that found him. It’s his own mother brings him, only she mayn’t say so. We used to look at that one.”
Clemency looked at the drawing, so as not to look at him.
“What do they call you?”
“Tucker, miss. Tobias Tucker. The Hospital gave it me, when I was took in.” He seemed to feel that it wanted some defence. “Mrs. Dunning calls me Toby.”
“Then so shall I, if I may.” She looked at the back of the sheet, where the fair round hand ended in the middle of a word. “Does Mr. Dunning know you draw on his paper?”
All the colour that had come into his face went out of it at once.
“It’s the spoilt ones, miss. Only the spoilt ones. When the clerk blots, or gets a word wrong, it’s spoilt, and it goes for lighting the fire.” He had both hands on the board now. “I only take them after. I never took a good one.”
She saw, as plainly as she had ever seen a price, what he was afraid of. He had been at Dunning’s a quarter of a year, and nobody had sent him back yet; and he did not know, because nobody had ever told him, that a boy was not sent back to the Hospital for drawing on paper that was going on the fire.
“I shan’t tell him,” said Clemency. “It’s nothing to do with me what Mr. Dunning lights his fire with.”
He looked at her for a long moment, to see whether she meant it; and then he believed her, all at once and entirely, as she had never seen anybody believe anything. It was a little alarming.
“Have you any more?”
He had a book. It was a dozen spoilt sheets, folded and sewn with a thread that had been begged from Mrs. Dunning; and he took it out of his coat and gave it to her, and stood one step below her while she turned it over by the candle, and watched her face and not the book. There was the round church in the Temple, and the old trees in the garden, bare, and the gardener with his broom, scowling at the walk; there was Mr. Figgis in the door of his lodge, unmistakably Figgis; there were two old Benchers going in to dinner, one of them already asleep; and every one of them had a face, and every face was somebody. Near the end of the book, as she turned the leaf, he put out his hand quickly and turned two leaves together, so that she should not see the one between; and then went red, because he knew she had seen him do it.
She did not ask. She knew a good deal about keeping things that were not anybody else’s business. She gave him the book back.
From the foot of the stairs Mrs. Dunning’s voice came up, warm and exasperated, like the smell of supper.
“Toby! Your supper’s spoiling, and so are you!”
He was gone before she could say good night. He was down the stair and round the turn with the board under his arm, and then, a moment later, back again, for the scuttle, which she was still holding; and he took it out of her hand without a word and went down to the cellar with it in the dark, and brought it up full, and set it outside the Lydiards’ door, and was gone again before she could thank him. Nobody had carried coals for her since Bread Street.
When she went in, she did not shut the door. She left it on the jar, a hand’s breadth, and moved her chair next to it, where the draught was, which nobody else wanted. Kit was in the lists still, and the knight with no name had overthrown the Templar.
“Clem, you’re letting the cold in.”
“I’m warm,” said Clemency; which, for once, was true.
On the Saturday she walked out to Islington to see Mr. Baldock, because the tenth of January was on Monday, and the Author owed Mr. Radcliffe an answer by then.
He lived in Canonbury, in a narrow house with a garden that he had never had time to look at; and he was looking at it now, from the window of his parlour, with his feet on the fender and a book face down on his knee, like a man who has been put out to grass and suspects the grass. He was very glad to see her, and said so; and then he took off his spectacles, and put them on again, and was brisk.
“I have read a novel,” he said. “Everybody has; I was told I should. It is very long, and very fine, and there are a great many knights in it, and a tournament, and a siege; and the only man in the whole of it who expects to be paid is the moneylender, and the knights treat him abominably for asking.” He shut the book. “I suppose that is what is meant by romance. You have come about Radcliffe.”
“The Author must answer him by Monday.”
“Then the Author will go to him.” He said it at once, as he gave the price of paper. “There is nothing else to be done, and you know it, or you would not have walked out to Canonbury in a frost to be told so. I have no shop. I shall not have one before Lady Day, and very likely not after it. Radcliffe pays twelve guineas, on the tenth, on delivery; the London, Baldwin’s new magazine, will be read by everybody who reads, which is more than ever read the Ludgate; and he does not ask your name. Go to him.”
Clemency looked at the fire.
“Mr. Radcliffe published the Warden,” she said, “from the first number.”
“He did. And he has kept the name of the man who writes it from the whole of London, from the first number until now; and he dines out on not telling it, which is the surest sign I know that he never will.” Mr. Baldock regarded her over the spectacles. “If you want a secret kept, Miss Lydiard, give it to a man who is proud of keeping one. I have known Radcliffe five-and-twenty years. He has never yet told anybody anything that he could sell for more by keeping.”
She did not say that she knew the name herself; that she had known it for five weeks, and had found out what it cost to keep it every day of them, and so knew better than anybody in London what Mr. Radcliffe had been doing for a year. She said nothing. But it was that, more than the twelve guineas, which decided her.
“There is one other thing,” said Mr. Baldock, “and then I have done. Hindley came here on Christmas Eve.”
She turned round. She had heard Mr. Hindley once, in October, through a door that did not shut, selling her to Mr. Baldock; she had never seen his face.
“In a new coat. He wished to know who delivers the Mortimers. Not who writes them: he could hardly ask me that, since half the Row believes he does. Who comes up the stairs on the tenth.” Mr. Baldock’s face did not change at all. “I told him that I was a plain man too, and that plain men did not tell each other things. He went away in a very bad temper, and did not pay his hackney-coachman, who came
back and asked me for it. I paid him. It is the last money I shall lay out on the Mortimers, and I grudged it more than all the rest.” He took off his spectacles again. “Somebody has given Mr. Hindley a reason to look. I do not know who. Go to Radcliffe early, and take the number under your cloak.”
When she rose to go he got up too, which he never did, and went with her to the door, and stood on the step in the frost without his hat.
“I had the best thing I ever published,” he said, “for seven guineas a number. I shall be ashamed of that until I die. It was the price I could pay, and you took it, and I let you.” He held out his hand. “Go to Radcliffe, Miss Lydiard. He will pay you better, and he will not deserve it either.”
Paternoster Row at nine o’clock on a Monday morning in January was as dark as most streets at dusk: a lane of booksellers so narrow that the houses on either side might have read each other’s titles, and the dome of St. Paul’s standing up behind them in the frost. Baldwin’s was at number forty-seven. A few doors along, at the corner of Chapter House Court, was the Chapter Coffee-house, where the trade drank its coffee and sold its secrets; and in the doorway of the Chapter stood a tall man, stamping his feet.
Clemency priced him from the boots up, because she could not help it.
The boots had been soled twice, and the coat was new. He had spent on his back what he had saved on his feet. He was watching the door of number forty-seven as a cat watches a hole in the wainscot; and he looked at her as she went by him, and away again at once, without interest, because she was a woman, and he was waiting for the Author.
She went up Baldwin’s stairs with the tenth number under her cloak.
Mr. Radcliffe received her in a small front room on the first floor, with a fire in it and a press, and a window on to the Row; and he rose when she came in. He was a large, pale, careful man, with an Edinburgh voice that London had not quite flattened; and he looked at her once, from her bonnet to her boots, as a bookseller looks at a binding, and then at her face, and then did not look at her again in any way that she could object to.
“The Author of the Mortimers,” he said, in the voice in which he gave a price.
“The Author has sent the tenth number,” said Clemency, “by hand.”
“By the only hand that could, I think.” He took the number from her and weighed it, as Mr. Baldock had always weighed it; and then he did a thing that Mr. Baldock had never done,
and read the first leaf through at the window, on his feet, for the price. She watched him do it. It was like watching somebody count her change.
“Yes,” said Mr. Radcliffe, at the foot of the leaf. He put it down. “I read the ninth on the first. Standing up, which I do not do.” He unlocked a drawer. “Twelve guineas. I am told that there is a form of words.”
“Mr. Baldock used to say, To the Author, on delivery.”
“Then I shall say it.” He counted it out on the table, a ten-pound note and two sovereigns and twelve shillings, exactly as Mr. Baldock had counted it out all the autumn; and he did not ask her to count it after him, and she did not. “To the Author, on delivery. You will find, madam, that I keep to the terms. Twelve guineas, no name, the tenth of every month; and the Author does not dine. I have underlined it. I have never in five-and-twenty years had a contributor who would not dine, and I find I like it better than I expected.”
“And the Author’s name?”
“I do not ask for what I do not need,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “I should only have to keep it.” He locked the drawer. “And now I shall tell you a thing that is not in the terms, and you may do as you like about it. There is a man in the door of the Chapter.”
“In a new coat,” said Clemency.
“And not paid for.” Mr. Radcliffe did not smile; he seemed not to have the habit. “His name is Hindley. He is a Manchester man, and in town he does not rise before ten; I have dined with him, and I know. He has been in that doorway since eight, and he has drunk three dishes of the Chapter’s coffee, which is a thing I have never seen done; and he is not reading the newspaper. He is watching my door, on the tenth of the month, at nine in the morning.” He looked at her across the table. “He will be watching it when you go out.”
Clemency stood quite still, with the twelve guineas in her glove. She had walked past him a minute ago, and he had looked at her, and away.
“He did not know me,” she said.
“No. He is watching for a man,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “The whole of the Row has been looking for a man since October, because Mr. Hindley let it think it had found one; and he has come to believe it himself.” He went to a door at the back of the room, which she had taken for a cupboard, and opened it on a narrow stair that went down into the dark and smelt of paper. “It is a common failing in the trade, madam, to look for what one has been selling. This stair goes down through the warehouse, and comes out in a court behind the Row. I should go that way this month; and next month,
if you will allow me, I will see that the Chapter has something else to look at.”
She went to the door. Then, because he had kept the terms, and because she had never in her life been given anything for nothing without asking why, she turned on the top step.
“Mr. Radcliffe. Why?”
He considered the question as he had considered the first leaf: honestly, and for the price.
“Because the Author’s ninth was worth the twelve,” he said. “And because I have been keeping one name in this trade for a year, madam, and have found that it is a thing a man gets the taste for.”
She went down through the warehouse in the dark, between stacks of paper higher than her head, and came out into a court she did not know, and found her way by the dome, and walked home by Ludgate Hill with twelve guineas in her glove, which was a quarter’s rent and the coals, and no one in the world behind her.
Mr. Radcliffe stood at his window after she had gone, and watched Mr. Hindley stamp his feet in the door of the Chapter. He did not know her name, and did not mean to. He knew her face now, and her voice, and her boots, which had been mended at the toe; and he thought, without wishing to, of a sentence in the ninth number about a gentleman by the water, and of the only man he had ever known who marked a magazine in pencil.
Then he put the thought where he put everything, and locked it, and went down to the shop to see about the February number.
On the Monday night Kit came to the end of the tournament.
The knight with no name had won the second day, as everybody had known he would; and they brought him before the Lady Rowena to be crowned, and the marshals unlaced his helmet; and he was a young man, very pale, with blood on his face, and the whole of the lists knew him. He was Ivanhoe. He fell down at her feet.
“There!” said Lucy, enchanted. “I knew it was him from the first chapter.”
“So did everybody,” said Clemency. “That is the pleasure of it.”
“Then what is the use of the helmet?” said Kit, who had not known, and was put out.
“To make the people in the book wait,” said Clemency, “while everybody else enjoys themselves.”
Mrs. Lydiard looked at her elder daughter, and then at the door, and said nothing.
The door to the stair stood on the jar, where Clemency had left it. Beyond it, on the dark stair, somebody very small let out a breath that he
had been holding since the marshals touched the helmet.
Clemency sat with her hands in her lap and thought about knights.
She knew the name of hers. She had known it since the first of December, and it had been no use to her at all; for it is one thing to know the knight’s name from the first chapter, with a book on one’s knee, and quite another to know it from the lists. He sat every afternoon now on the second bench, a quarter of a mile away, in a hard frost, with his helmet off, to show that he did not mind being looked at; and she could not go and look.
(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, with its rules turned in mourning for the King. Read the announcement, with the plan of London.
An Inquirer asks what the Foundling is. It is the Hospital for deserted children at the top of Lamb’s Conduit Street, in Bloomsbury, founded by Captain Coram, where the pictures given by Mr Hogarth and his friends may be seen. It gives the children it takes in new names, and at fourteen binds its boys apprentice.
A Young Gentleman of the Temple, who ought to know, asks what an engrossment is. It is a deed copied out fair, in a large hand, for signing. The law-stationers do it for the lawyers, and spoil a good many sheets in the doing.
A Lady at Hampstead asks what is kept on Twelfth Night. It is the evening of the sixth of January, the last of Christmas, when the pastrycooks fill their windows with Twelfth-cakes, iced and gilt, with a bean and a pea baked in them for a king and a queen of the evening.
Several Ladies write that they cannot say Desdichado. It is Spanish, and means disinherited. It stands on the shield of the knight with no name, in the romance which all the town is reading this winter.
A Correspondent asks whether a knight may hold a pencil. In a drawing, he may.
The verses of Amicus are declined, with thanks.
