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THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 192.)
CHAPTER IX.
Mr Tucker.
In which Mr. Kinross calls a boy Mister, nobody in particular pays for a drawing school, Clemency buys eight colours and no crimson, and the King is proclaimed at Temple Bar.
The boy was at the river wall again on Friday the fourteenth of January, at half past three, with his copies delivered and the empty wrapper under one arm, and his little book open on the coping, drawing.
Mr. Kinross had watched him do it for a fortnight from the second bench without thinking about him. He thought about him now, because the frost had come down harder in the night and the boy’s hands were blue, and because he had been standing at that wall for twenty minutes with his tongue between his teeth, as though the river would not keep. Mr. Kinross got up. He could not have said why. He had not spoken to anybody in that garden since the first of January except Figgis, who did not count, being weather; and he went down the walk with the un
comfortable sense of a man breaking a rule he had made for himself, and not knowing which rule it was.
The boy heard him on the gravel, and turned, and went white, and then red, and then stood very straight with his back to the wall and his book held against his coat.
“I beg your pardon, sir.”
“For what?”
The boy did not seem to know. He looked at the wrapper under his arm, and at the book, and at Mr. Kinross’s boots, which were the only part of Mr. Kinross that he appeared able to look at.
“I’m not to stop, sir. Only the gentleman in Paper Buildings sends an answer back by me, and it’s never ready till four, and his clerk sends me down to wait for it.”
“Then you are not stopping,” said Mr. Kinross. “You are waiting. It is a different thing; the whole of the law turns on it.” He looked at the book. “May I see?”
There was a pause, in which he could see the boy weighing it, as though a great deal hung on the answer, and perhaps it did. Then the book was held out to him, at arm’s length, as Mr. Ogle had held out the sale.
It was a dozen spoilt sheets sewn together, with somebody’s deed showing through each of them from the back; and Mr. Kinross turned them over standing at the river wall, with the frost on his hat, and forgot that it was cold. There was the round church; there were the old trees, bare; there was the gardener, scowling at his own walk, and Figgis in the door of the lodge, telling somebody the weather. There were two Benchers he knew, two of the old gentlemen who govern the Inn, going in to dinner, so exactly themselves that he laughed aloud, and the boy jumped. And there, on four leaves near the end, drawn so lately that the black-lead had not yet rubbed, was a gentleman on the second bench under the plane.
It was himself. He had not known that anybody in London had looked at him long enough to draw him. He
was not flattered, for the boy had not flattered him; he was a long, dark, uncomfortable person, sitting very still in a coat that was too good for the weather, and reading as though the book owed him money. But he had been looked at, as he had looked at railings and boots and kitchens all that winter, by somebody who wanted to know what was there; and he stood at the wall and did not know what to say.
Near the end, as he turned a leaf, the boy’s hand came out quickly and turned two together, so that he should not see the one between. Then the boy went scarlet, because he knew that he had been seen to do it.
Mr. Kinross did not ask. He had kept a good many things himself that winter, and he knew what it looked like from the outside.
“Who taught you?”
“Nobody, sir.”
“Nobody draws like this whom nobody has taught.”
“The pictures did, sir. At the Hospital.” The boy said it to the boots. “I’m from the Foundling. We went past them every day.”
“Mr. Hogarth’s,” said Mr. Kinross, who had been taken to see them at twelve years old by his uncle, and had looked at the children more than at the pictures. “You chose your masters well. What is your name?”
“Tucker, sir. Tobias.”
“Then I am obliged to you, Mr. Tucker,” said Mr. Kinross, and gave him back the book. “You have made me look a great deal more patient than I am.”
The boy took the book and held it. He did not say anything at all. He had gone quite still, in the way of a small animal that has been touched where it did not expect to be; and Mr. Kinross, who had meant to ask him whom he was bound to, saw the face shut at the very beginning of the question, and did not ask it. He knew that face. It was the face of somebody who has been told all his life that he may be sent back, and believes that a gentleman who asks the name of your master is a gentleman who means to write to him.
“Do you go to any school of drawing?”
“No, sir.”
“Would you?”
The boy looked up, for the first time, into his face; and Mr. Kinross was sorry he had asked, because he saw that it was a question nobody had ever put to him, and that the answer was too large to come out.
St. Dunstan’s struck four in Fleet Street. The boy started, and said that the gentleman in Paper Buildings would have the answer ready, and went away up the walk at a run, with the wrapper under his arm and the book inside his coat; and at the corner of
the walk he stopped, and turned round, and stood a moment, and then ran on.
Mr. Kinross went back to his chambers and wrote a letter to his attorney.
Mr. Merridew of Lincoln’s Inn had done Mr. Kinross’s business for nine years, and had never yet been asked to do anything he could not enter in a book under a heading. He read the letter twice, on the Saturday morning, with his client sitting opposite, and then looked up over it with the expression of a man who has been asked to convey an estate in the moon.
“A boy.”
“A boy who draws. He carries copies into the Temple for a law-stationer every afternoon, at about half past three, and waits at the river wall for an answer to carry back. You will find him without difficulty; he is the only person in the Inner Temple who is happy.” Mr. Kinross had his hat on his knee. “He is to go to a school of drawing. Mr. Sass’s, in Bloomsbury, is the best; they send boys on from it to the Academy Schools. You will pay the fees, by the quarter, in advance. You will pay his master for the afternoons the boy loses from the shop, at whatever the master says they are worth, and a little more, so that the master is glad of it. And you will see that the boy has paper.”
“In whose name?”
“In nobody’s.”
Mr. Merridew laid the letter down.
“Sir, I have been asked to do a good many things in nobody’s name. Most of them were not things a man would wish to put his name to. This is the first time I have been asked to do a kindness that way.”
“Then you will find it new. If anybody asks, the money comes from a gentleman who wishes to be nobody in particular.”
“And the master’s name? His direction? I shall need both.”
“You will need both,” said Mr. Kinross. “I do not.” He stood up. “I do not wish to be told the master’s name, or where the boy lives, or how he does, or whether he is grateful. Most particularly not that.”
Mr. Merridew looked at him for some time.
“Most gentlemen,” he said, “like to know what they are paying for.”
“I know exactly what I am paying for,” said Mr. Kinross, and went out.
He did know. He had looked at a dozen spoilt sheets of paper at a river wall and found in them a thing made carefully, for nobody, by somebody who did not know whether it was good, because nobody had ever told him. He had been doing the same thing himself for a year, in Albemarle Street, without a name; and the only difference between them, that he could see, was Ardoch, the land in Scotland that
paid for everything he did, and an uncle who had taken him to look at the Hogarths. It had nothing to do with her. He would have said so; and he did not know where the boy lived.
The boy had said it on the stair on Tuesday the eighteenth, outside the door on the jar, while Kit read on into the second volume of Ivanhoe: that he meant to be hung at Somerset House.
He did not say it as a wish. He said it as Kit might have said that he meant to be called to the bar: as a thing that would happen, given the time, and the money, and the drawing from the antique, which he had heard you had to do first, from the casts. He had found out where the Academy hung its pictures in May, and how many there were, and that a boy of fourteen had been hung there last year; and he told Clemency these things on the dark stair, in a whisper, so as not to interrupt Kit, with the exactness of a clerk reading back a deed.
She went back to her chair by the door, and did not hear the next chapter at all.
Under her bed there was a portfolio of drawings that nobody had seen, and that she had told herself for a year that nobody would ever see; and below her on the stair was a boy who had never been told that he could not be seen, and so meant to be. She did not know which
of them was the fool. She suspected, as she sat in the draught with her hands in her lap, that it was not the boy.
On Monday the twenty-fourth she went to Bloomsbury with three of his drawings in her reticule.
She had asked him for them on the Saturday, and he had chosen them himself, slowly, at the turn of the stair, from the loose sheets he kept under his board, holding each up to the window and putting most of them back: the round church, the gardener with his broom, and two Benchers going in to dinner. He never asked what she wanted them for. He gave them to her as though he were giving her the book itself; and she noticed, without seeming to, that he did not offer her the book.
Mr. Sass’s was a tall plain house in Bloomsbury with a brass plate, and in the hall a smell of size and chalk, and through an open door a long room full of plaster gods and young men drawing them. The gods were very white and had no clothes on. The young men had a good many clothes on, and were all, as far as she could see, about nineteen, and all drawing the same foot.
The master was engaged, and was not to be seen. The young man who kept the door that morning took the three drawings in to him, holding them by the corners as though they might go off; and came out again in ten minutes,
a good deal more respectful than he had gone in.
“He says, ma’am, who drew them?”
“A boy of fourteen,” said Clemency, “who has never been taught.”
“He says he can tell that, ma’am. He says the boy has never drawn a cast in his life and has an eye like a hawk, and he will see him, and if the boy can draw a foot by Lady Day he will take him.” The young man consulted a paper. “The terms are four guineas the quarter, paid in advance, and the boy finds his own chalk.”
Four guineas the quarter.
She thanked him, and took the drawings back, and went out and stood on the pavement and did the sum.
The Lady Day rent was in the drawer already, twelve pounds out of December’s money, and was not to be touched. Everything else until the tenth of February was the London’s twelve guineas: the coals and the candles, Kit’s boots, Lucy’s spring gown, and whatever broke. Four guineas was a third of it, to the shilling. It was everything that the Lydiards had learned since Bread Street to do without, put together and given to a law-stationer’s boy who was nothing to them, so that he could go and draw feet.
She stood on the pavement for a long time, with the plaster gods behind
her in the window, and made up her mind.
She had never in her life spent money that was already promised to something else. It was the whole of her art and the whole of her character, and she had been proud of both. Walking home down Holborn with the drawings in her reticule, she knew that she was going to do it, out of the London’s money, and tell nobody, and manage the rest as she had managed everything else; and she was not in the least afraid. She had given things unseen before, a ribbon for Lucy and a bonnet, and let Kit have the thanks; but those had been for the family, out of what the family could spare. This was for a boy who was nothing to them, out of what they could not.
Mr. Kinross took the south side of Fleet Street from the second week, as he had said he would.
He began at the Temple and went east: into Mitre Court and out of it, and down Bouverie Street, which was new and had nothing to hide, and into the old lanes of Whitefriars behind it, where a hundred years before the debtors of London had lived in sanctuary and the bailiffs could not come. They had remembered it. Within two days the whole of Whitefriars had decided that he was a bailiff after all, come to see whether the old privilege still
held; and a man in Ram Alley stood in his doorway with his arms folded and watched him the whole length of it, without a word, as a farmer watches a fox go along a hedge.
It was slow work. Whitefriars was a warren of courts that opened into other courts, and passages that went under houses and came out in yards, so that a man who meant to see every door in it must go over the same ground three times; and he meant to see every door. It took him the rest of January. He did not see her. He looked at faces under bonnets and at boots and at the windows over shops, and asked nobody anything, and went down to the second bench at three; and every afternoon the boy came through with his copies, and came down again from Paper Buildings at half past three, and touched his hat to the second bench, scarlet, and stopped at the wall to wait for his answer, and drew; and every afternoon at four went away up the walk at a run, and turned at the corner, and ran on.
In the last week of January the news came up from Sidmouth that the Duke of Kent was dead, of a chill caught walking in the wet, at two-and-fifty, with a daughter eight months old; and Fleet Street put black in its windows.
By the last Saturday in January Mr. Kinross had come as far as Water Lane.
Toby told her on the last Thursday in January, at night, on the stair.
He did not whisper it. He came up the stair two at a time, which he had never done, and stood on the step below her with his face shining, and said it all at once and backwards, so that it took her some time to put it in order.
A letter had come for Mr. Dunning that morning, from an attorney in Lincoln’s Inn. Mr. Dunning had read it in the shop, and then read it again, and then called Toby in from the yard with the letter in his hand; and for one dreadful minute, though he did not tell Miss Lydiard this part, Toby had thought that it was the gentleman from the garden, writing to send him back. Then Mr. Dunning called Mrs. Dunning down from the kitchen, and she read it, and sat down on the stool behind the counter and cried, which frightened Toby more, until he understood that it was the good kind. There was a gentleman who would pay for Toby to go to Mr. Sass’s in Bloomsbury, to learn to draw from the casts, four afternoons in the week; and would pay Mr. Dunning for the afternoons, more than they were worth; and would pay for paper. The attorney had been very particular that it was not to be asked who the gentleman was. Mr. Dunning had asked anyway, being Mr.
Dunning, and the attorney had written back by the afternoon post that the gentleman wished to be nobody in particular.
“Nobody in particular,” said Toby, as though it were a title. “That’s what it says, miss. Mr. Dunning showed me.”
Clemency stood on the stair with the candle, and could not speak.
She was glad. She was so glad that it hurt, somewhere under her ribs, like running. And under the gladness, small and shameful and perfectly distinct, was something else: the sense of a hand that had gone into her purse ahead of her and taken out the only thing in it she had wanted to give away. She had been forestalled all her life by people with money. She had not expected to mind it in this, and she minded it so much that she was ashamed, and was ashamed again of minding.
“Who would do such a thing?” she said at last.
“Nobody knows, miss.” Toby considered it. “Mr. Dunning says it’s some old gentleman of the Inn that’s seen me drawing in the garden. He says the Benchers are all mad, and that’s the best kind.”
It was the obvious answer, and she did not take it at once. She thought, for the length of a breath, of another gentleman in the Inner Temple: one rich enough to own a magazine, who put
his name to nothing, and had written in the Warden that a thing might be done for nothing at all; and who sat every afternoon on the second bench, a few yards from where this boy drew. Then she remembered what Toby had said to her on Twelfth Night: He’s never looked at me. A man does not pay for a boy he has never looked at. She put the thought away, and took the old gentleman of the Inn instead; and she liked the old gentleman very much.
Toby had something else to say. She saw it come up into his face and stop there.
He had meant to tell her about the gentleman on the second bench. He had meant to tell her all the way up the stair: that the gentleman had come down to the wall, and looked at his book, and laughed at the Benchers, and called him Mr. Tucker. Nobody had ever called him Mr. Tucker. He had said it to himself all the way to Paper Buildings, and all the way home, and under his blanket in the little room at the back that Mrs. Dunning had meant for one of hers; and he had meant to give it to Miss Lydiard on the stair, because she was the only person in the world he gave things to. And now that he stood on the step below her, with the candle between them, he found that he could not. It was the only thing he had ever had that was entirely his own. He kept it. And he thought he knew
who nobody in particular was, because only one person in the world had ever asked him Would you?; and he kept that too. He did not know that it was the first lie he had ever told her, because he had not said anything; and neither of them knew that it was the one thing she needed to be told.
“I’m to go on Tuesday,” he said instead. “If I can draw a foot by Lady Day, he’ll keep me. That’s the twenty-fifth of March, Mrs. Dunning says.”
They were the terms she had been given herself, on the Monday, in the hall in Bloomsbury, word for word. The master had remembered the three drawings. She had won the boy his place; and somebody she would never know had paid for it.
“You will draw a foot by Lady Day,” said Clemency, “if I have to take off my boot.”
She had four guineas that nobody now wanted, and she did not want them back.
She took some of them to Ackermann’s in the Strand on the Friday. She had stood at that window in October, wanting a cake of carmine, and had gone away with a ribbon for Lucy instead; and the carmine had come to her afterwards all the same, in an Ackermann’s paper on her desk, from her mother, who never went to the Strand and had never said a word
about it. This time she went in, and stood at the counter for a quarter of an hour, and bought, after a great deal of thought and in the teeth of the young man’s advice, a japanned box with eight cakes of colour in it, and two brushes, and a saucer.
She chose the colours herself. White, because he drew on brown paper and spoilt sheets, where there was no white to leave. Yellow ochre, and umber, and light red, for faces and the walls of the Temple; vermilion, for the sails of barges; Prussian blue, for the river and the sky; a green, for the trees in summer, which he had seen only turning; and black. The young man said that there should be a crimson, and offered her carmine. She said that there should not, and paid, and went home with the box under her cloak, and found that it had cost her very nearly what her own black would have cost, if she had followed the town into black for the Duke of Kent, which Salisbury Square had not. Bombazine had gone up fourpence a yard since the news from Sidmouth; she had noticed it, and been glad that she need not buy any.
Her mother saw the Ackermann’s paper under her cloak when she came in, and looked at it, and at her, and said nothing, as she had said nothing in October; and Clemency understood that in all her life she had never once given
anything unseen without being seen by one person.
The King died that Saturday night, the twenty-ninth of January.
Nobody in London heard it until the Sunday. The old King had been mad and blind for nine years, shut up at Windsor in a purple gown with a long white beard, playing the harpsichord and talking to people who had died; and it was a long time since anybody but his doctors had thought of him as a man who could die at all. Then on the Sunday morning the great bell of St. Paul’s began to toll, slowly, over the whole of the City; and Salisbury Square, a quarter of a mile below it, heard every stroke.
There was no question of anybody’s not going into black. Mrs. Lydiard had a black gown laid by in the press, and took it out. Kit was to have a crape band for his hat, which Mr. Pelham required of his clerk and which Mr. Pelham would not pay for. Lucy, who had a new bonnet from Ludgate Hill and had been looking forward to the spring in it, put black ribbons on it and cried, and said that it was not for the King. And Clemency, who had spent her black at Ackermann’s two days before, took her grey gown down to the wash-house in the yard and dyed it herself with logwood and copperas. It had to be done on the Sunday, which
her mother said was wrong and allowed, because the King was dead and Monday was Mrs. Dunning’s washing-day, when the copper would not be free; so she stirred it with a stick for the whole of a Sunday afternoon, while the bell went on overhead.
It came out the colour of a wet slate. It was not black. It was the best that could be done, and she wore it.
She gave Toby the box that night, on the stair, with the bell still going over the roofs.
He did not take it at first. He looked at it in her hands, and then at her, and then at the box again, as though it might be meant for somebody on the stair behind him; and when she put it into his hands he held it against his coat, shut, the way he held his book. Then he sat down on the step and opened it, and counted the cakes with one finger, touching each, and said nothing for so long that she began to be afraid she had chosen wrong.
“There isn’t a red,” he said at last. “Not a proper red. For mouths.”
“You can make a mouth without it,” said Clemency. “Light red and white, and not too much of either. Faces are mostly not the colour people think they are.”
It was not quite true, and she knew it. Carmine was the colour faces were made of. There was a cake of it in her desk upstairs, in her mother’s paper,
and she had not put it in the box; and she did not ask herself whose face she was keeping it for.
He considered this, and looked up at her face in the candlelight, as though to see whether it were true; and then nodded, and shut the box, very gently, as if it were asleep.
“Is it from him too, miss? From nobody in particular?”
“No,” said Clemency. “This one is from somebody in particular.”
He was so happy that for a moment he very nearly told her about the gentleman on the second bench, and Mr. Tucker, and all of it, because she had given him something and he had nothing else in the world to give her back. He opened his mouth to do it. Then he remembered that the gentleman wished to be nobody in particular, and that it was not his to give; and he shut it again, and said thank you, miss, twice, and went down the stair in the dark with the box held in both hands, carefully, as Mrs. Dunning carried eggs.
They proclaimed the new King on the Monday, because the Sunday was the thirtieth of January, when another king had once lost his head, and nobody liked to begin a reign on it.
All Fleet Street came out to see the heralds come to Temple Bar. They came from Charing Cross in the middle
of the day, in their tabards, with the trumpeters before them and the Horse Guards behind; and the City shut its gates in their faces, as it always did, so that a herald might knock and be asked who was there, and be let in by the Lord Mayor, and proclaim King George the Fourth on the City side of the Bar as he had already proclaimed him on the other. Every window was let. Every post had a boy on it. London, which had been governed by the new King for nine years under another name, and had not liked it, cheered him with the greatest goodwill in the world.
Toby had a post. It was the best post in Fleet Street, at the corner of Chancery Lane, and he had held it since ten against two printers’ devils and a sweep; and from the top of it, over all the hats, he could see the whole street.
He saw the heralds, and the gates swing open. He saw the Lord Mayor’s coach, and the trumpets go up. And then, because he was who he was, he stopped looking at any of it, and looked at faces.
The gentleman from the second bench was standing in the gateway of the Inner Temple, in black, a little apart from everybody, with his hat in his hand, not cheering. Twenty yards east of him, on the step of a hatter’s, a little above the crowd, stood Miss Lydiard, between her brother and her sister, in a gown the colour of a wet
slate; and she was not cheering either. Neither of them was looking at the heralds. The gentleman was looking at the faces in the crowd, slowly, one by one, as Toby did, with his back to the hatter’s. Miss Lydiard was looking at the gentleman.
Toby sat on his post and held on, and looked from one to the other. They were the only two faces in Fleet Street that he had ever drawn more than once; and there they were, in one look, with the proclamation going over them. She could see the gentleman. The gentleman, who was looking for somebody, was looking the other way. Toby could not have said why that should matter, or why it made him want, very much, to have his board.
Then the gentleman began to turn round; and Toby saw Miss Lydiard see it. She did not move her head. She put her hand on her brother’s arm, and stepped down off the hatter’s step into the crowd, behind him, as the trumpets went; and the crowd took her east with the heralds towards the City. When it had gone by, the gateway was empty, and so was the step.
The Albemarle and the London came into Salisbury Square together on the Tuesday, the first of February, with black rules round their title-pages, put in at the last moment by printers who had been up all night.
Kit had bought the London himself, at half a crown, out of his own forty pounds; since the Ludgate had stopped, he said, a man had to follow the Mortimers somewhere, and Pelham would not. He read the tenth number aloud with his back to the fire, as he had read every number since the summer, and said at the end of it that the London printed them on better paper than Baldock ever had, and that it had not done them any harm.
When they had gone to bed she took the Albemarle into the back room and read the fifteenth number of the Warden.
She had counted the days to it. She had known since the first of January that whatever he had to say to a sentence about a gentleman by the water could not be in print before the first of February; and she had told herself, all through January, that he would say nothing, because there was nothing a gentleman could say to it. She was wrong. It was on the third page.
The Warden went down into the town that evening from the castle, alone and on foot, and went through it street by street to the river, and asked no man anything; and those who saw him said afterwards that he looked into every door like one who has lost a thing whose name he does not know, and means to find it by the shape.
She read it three times. Then she
sat with the candle and tried to decide what it meant, and found, for the first time in her life, that she could not make the sum come out.
He was looking for somebody. That much was plain. She had seen him do it on the Monday, in the gateway of the Temple, looking at the faces in the crowd one by one; and he was looking, as she had looked for his kitchen, by going and seeing, asking nobody. But for whom? In January, on the stair, she had priced the notion that he sat on his bench in the frost waiting for a young woman who had come about a place, and marked it down. She took it out again now, and looked at it. If the Author of the Warden was looking for the Author of the Mortimers, then he was looking for a writer, as the whole of the Row was looking; and he would find a woman in a dyed gown two pair of stairs up over a law-stationer’s, who had come down his area steps under false pretences, and taken his paragraph in August, and sent him the housekeeper’s account, and put him by the water in a sentence. If he was looking for the young person from his pavement, he did not know that she was the Author; and he was looking for something else altogether, which she did not let herself name.
She did not know which it was. She sat in the back room in her slate-coloured gown until the candle was out,
and found that she did not know which she would mind more.
Mr. Kinross had conducted the February Albemarle himself, with Mr. Ogle, having found nobody else to do it; and he had read every word of his own magazine in proof for the first time, down to the advertisements for trusses. On the first he bought the London at a bookseller’s in Piccadilly, and found the Mortimers in it.
She had taken Radcliffe’s terms, then. She had gone up Baldwin’s stairs on the tenth, where he had refused to wait for her; and Radcliffe had seen her face, and paid her, and would keep it, as he kept everything. It was Kinross who had sent Radcliffe to her. Now Radcliffe would keep her from him too.
He read the tenth number through, looking for a sentence that was his. It was Christmas in Mount Street: the family’s dinner, and then the servants’ hall’s, and what each of them cost, to the farthing. There was not a railing in it, nor a pencil, nor anybody by the water; and he was more disappointed than he would have liked anybody to know.
At half past three he went down to the garden. The boy did not come. It was the first of the four afternoons at Mr. Sass’s; and Mr. Kinross sat on the second bench in the frost and understood that he had paid, among
other things, to lose the only person in the Temple who was glad to see him.
Lady Ardoch came south on the Wednesday, in black from her bonnet to her boots, having heard of the King at Doncaster and bought her mourning at Stamford in a single afternoon, which she said was the only good thing she had ever known come out of Stamford. She had Miss Lauder with her, in black also, and Miss Lauder’s father, who had business before the Lords and did not see why the King’s dying should stop it.
Mr. Kinross went home to Grosvenor Square in the afternoon to receive them, because there was nobody else to do it, and stood in his own drawing-room while his aunt told him that the Season was ruined, that there would be no balls before Easter and very likely none after it, that a girl could not be brought out in bombazine, and that he looked as though he had been sitting out of doors in a frost, which she supposed was the Temple. Miss Lauder said that black became nobody, and looked at him to see whether he would contradict her; and he did not, because he had not heard.
He was thinking of Water Lane.
The next turning east of it was Salisbury Court. He had meant to take it on the Monday; and on the Monday they had proclaimed the King.
(To be continued.)
THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 192.)
CHAPTER IX.
Mr Tucker.
In which Mr. Kinross calls a boy Mister, nobody in particular pays for a drawing school, Clemency buys eight colours and no crimson, and the King is proclaimed at Temple Bar.
The boy was at the river wall again on Friday the fourteenth of January, at half past three, with his copies delivered and the empty wrapper under one arm, and his little book open on the coping, drawing.
Mr. Kinross had watched him do it for a fortnight from the second bench without thinking about him. He thought about him now, because the frost had come down harder in the night and the boy’s hands were blue, and because he had been standing at that wall for twenty minutes with his tongue between his teeth, as though the river would not keep. Mr. Kinross got up. He could not have said why. He had not spoken to anybody in that garden since the first of January except Figgis, who did not count, being weather; and he went down the walk with the uncomfortable sense of a man breaking a rule he had made for himself, and not knowing which rule it was.
The boy heard him on the gravel, and turned, and went white, and then red, and then stood very straight with his back to the wall and his book held against his coat.
“I beg your pardon, sir.”
“For what?”
The boy did not seem to know. He looked at the wrapper under his arm, and at the book, and at Mr. Kinross’s boots, which were the only part of Mr. Kinross that he appeared able to look at.
“I’m not to stop, sir. Only the gentleman in Paper Buildings sends an answer back by me, and it’s never ready till four, and his clerk sends me down to wait for it.”
“Then you are not stopping,” said Mr. Kinross. “You are waiting. It is a different thing; the whole of the law turns on it.” He looked at the book. “May I see?”
There was a pause, in which he could see the boy weighing it, as though a great deal hung on the answer, and perhaps it did. Then the book was held out to him, at arm’s length, as Mr. Ogle had held out the sale.
It was a dozen spoilt sheets sewn together, with somebody’s deed showing through each of them from the back; and Mr. Kinross turned them over standing at the river wall, with the frost on his hat, and forgot that it was cold. There was the round church; there were the old trees, bare; there was the gardener, scowling at his own walk, and Figgis in the door of the lodge, telling somebody the weather. There were two Benchers he knew, two of the old gentlemen who govern the Inn, going in to dinner, so exactly themselves that he laughed aloud, and the boy jumped. And there, on four leaves near the end, drawn so lately that the black-lead had not yet rubbed, was a gentleman on the second bench under the plane.
It was himself. He had not known that anybody in London had looked at him long enough to draw him. He was not flattered, for the boy had not flattered him; he was a long, dark, uncomfortable person, sitting very still in a coat that was too good for the weather, and reading as though the book owed him money. But he had been looked at, as he had looked at railings and boots and kitchens all that winter, by somebody who wanted to know what was there; and he stood at the wall and did not know what to say.
Near the end, as he turned a leaf, the boy’s hand came out quickly and turned two together, so that he should not see the one between. Then the boy went scarlet, because he knew that he had been seen to do it.
Mr. Kinross did not ask. He had kept a good many things himself that winter, and he knew what it looked like from the outside.
“Who taught you?”
“Nobody, sir.”
“Nobody draws like this whom nobody has taught.”
“The pictures did, sir. At the Hospital.” The boy said it to the boots. “I’m from the Foundling. We went past them every day.”
“Mr. Hogarth’s,” said Mr. Kinross, who had been taken to see them at twelve years old by his uncle, and had looked at the children more than at the pictures. “You chose your masters well. What is your name?”
“Tucker, sir. Tobias.”
“Then I am obliged to you, Mr. Tucker,” said Mr. Kinross, and gave him back the book. “You have made me look a great deal more patient than I am.”
The boy took the book and held it. He did not say anything at all. He had gone quite still, in the way of a small animal that has been touched where it did not expect to be; and Mr. Kinross, who had meant to ask him whom he was bound to, saw the face shut at the very beginning of the question, and did not ask it. He knew that face. It was the face of somebody who has been told all his life that he may be sent back, and believes that a gentleman who asks the name of your master is a gentleman who means to write to him.
“Do you go to any school of drawing?”
“No, sir.”
“Would you?”
The boy looked up, for the first time, into his face; and Mr. Kinross was sorry he had asked, because he saw that it was a question nobody had ever put to him, and that the answer was too large to come out.
St. Dunstan’s struck four in Fleet Street. The boy started, and said that the gentleman in Paper Buildings would have the answer ready, and went away up the walk at a run, with the wrapper under his arm and the book inside his coat; and at the corner of the walk he stopped, and turned round, and stood a moment, and then ran on.
Mr. Kinross went back to his chambers and wrote a letter to his attorney.
Mr. Merridew of Lincoln’s Inn had done Mr. Kinross’s business for nine years, and had never yet been asked to do anything he could not enter in a book under a heading. He read the letter twice, on the Saturday morning, with his client sitting opposite, and then looked up over it with the expression of a man who has been asked to convey an estate in the moon.
“A boy.”
“A boy who draws. He carries copies into the Temple for a law-stationer every afternoon, at about half past three, and waits at the river wall for an answer to carry back. You will find him without difficulty; he is the only person in the Inner Temple who is happy.” Mr. Kinross had his hat on his knee. “He is to go to a school of drawing. Mr. Sass’s, in Bloomsbury, is the best; they send boys on from it to the Academy Schools. You will pay the fees, by the quarter, in advance. You will pay his master for the afternoons the boy loses from the shop, at whatever the master says they are worth, and a little more, so that the master is glad of it. And you will see that the boy has paper.”
“In whose name?”
“In nobody’s.”
Mr. Merridew laid the letter down.
“Sir, I have been asked to do a good many things in nobody’s name. Most of them were not things a man would wish to put his name to. This is the first time I have been asked to do a kindness that way.”
“Then you will find it new. If anybody asks, the money comes from a gentleman who wishes to be nobody in particular.”
“And the master’s name? His direction? I shall need both.”
“You will need both,” said Mr. Kinross. “I do not.” He stood up. “I do not wish to be told the master’s name, or where the boy lives, or how he does, or whether he is grateful. Most particularly not that.”
Mr. Merridew looked at him for some time.
“Most gentlemen,” he said, “like to know what they are paying for.”
“I know exactly what I am paying for,” said Mr. Kinross, and went out.
He did know. He had looked at a dozen spoilt sheets of paper at a river wall and found in them a thing made carefully, for nobody, by somebody who did not know whether it was good, because nobody had ever told him. He had been doing the same thing himself for a year, in Albemarle Street, without a name; and the only difference between them, that he could see, was Ardoch, the land in Scotland that paid for everything he did, and an uncle who had taken him to look at the Hogarths. It had nothing to do with her. He would have said so; and he did not know where the boy lived.
The boy had said it on the stair on Tuesday the eighteenth, outside the door on the jar, while Kit read on into the second volume of Ivanhoe: that he meant to be hung at Somerset House.
He did not say it as a wish. He said it as Kit might have said that he meant to be called to the bar: as a thing that would happen, given the time, and the money, and the drawing from the antique, which he had heard you had to do first, from the casts. He had found out where the Academy hung its pictures in May, and how many there were, and that a boy of fourteen had been hung there last year; and he told Clemency these things on the dark stair, in a whisper, so as not to interrupt Kit, with the exactness of a clerk reading back a deed.
She went back to her chair by the door, and did not hear the next chapter at all.
Under her bed there was a portfolio of drawings that nobody had seen, and that she had told herself for a year that nobody would ever see; and below her on the stair was a boy who had never been told that he could not be seen, and so meant to be. She did not know which
of them was the fool. She suspected, as she sat in the draught with her hands in her lap, that it was not the boy.
On Monday the twenty-fourth she went to Bloomsbury with three of his drawings in her reticule.
She had asked him for them on the Saturday, and he had chosen them himself, slowly, at the turn of the stair, from the loose sheets he kept under his board, holding each up to the window and putting most of them back: the round church, the gardener with his broom, and two Benchers going in to dinner. He never asked what she wanted them for. He gave them to her as though he were giving her the book itself; and she noticed, without seeming to, that he did not offer her the book.
Mr. Sass’s was a tall plain house in Bloomsbury with a brass plate, and in the hall a smell of size and chalk, and through an open door a long room full of plaster gods and young men drawing them. The gods were very white and had no clothes on. The young men had a good many clothes on, and were all, as far as she could see, about nineteen, and all drawing the same foot.
The master was engaged, and was not to be seen. The young man who kept the door that morning took the three drawings in to him, holding them by the corners as though they might go off; and came out again in ten minutes, a good deal more respectful than he had gone in.
“He says, ma’am, who drew them?”
“A boy of fourteen,” said Clemency, “who has never been taught.”
“He says he can tell that, ma’am. He says the boy has never drawn a cast in his life and has an eye like a hawk, and he will see him, and if the boy can draw a foot by Lady Day he will take him.” The young man consulted a paper. “The terms are four guineas the quarter, paid in advance, and the boy finds his own chalk.”
Four guineas the quarter.
She thanked him, and took the drawings back, and went out and stood on the pavement and did the sum.
The Lady Day rent was in the drawer already, twelve pounds out of December’s money, and was not to be touched. Everything else until the tenth of February was the London’s twelve guineas: the coals and the candles, Kit’s boots, Lucy’s spring gown, and whatever broke. Four guineas was a third of it, to the shilling. It was everything that the Lydiards had learned since Bread Street to do without, put together and given to a law-stationer’s boy who was nothing to them, so that he could go and draw feet.
She stood on the pavement for a long time, with the plaster gods behind
her in the window, and made up her mind.
She had never in her life spent money that was already promised to something else. It was the whole of her art and the whole of her character, and she had been proud of both. Walking home down Holborn with the drawings in her reticule, she knew that she was going to do it, out of the London’s money, and tell nobody, and manage the rest as she had managed everything else; and she was not in the least afraid. She had given things unseen before, a ribbon for Lucy and a bonnet, and let Kit have the thanks; but those had been for the family, out of what the family could spare. This was for a boy who was nothing to them, out of what they could not.
Mr. Kinross took the south side of Fleet Street from the second week, as he had said he would.
He began at the Temple and went east: into Mitre Court and out of it, and down Bouverie Street, which was new and had nothing to hide, and into the old lanes of Whitefriars behind it, where a hundred years before the debtors of London had lived in sanctuary and the bailiffs could not come. They had remembered it. Within two days the whole of Whitefriars had decided that he was a bailiff after all, come to see whether the old privilege still held; and a man in Ram Alley stood in his doorway with his arms folded and watched him the whole length of it, without a word, as a farmer watches a fox go along a hedge.
It was slow work. Whitefriars was a warren of courts that opened into other courts, and passages that went under houses and came out in yards, so that a man who meant to see every door in it must go over the same ground three times; and he meant to see every door. It took him the rest of January. He did not see her. He looked at faces under bonnets and at boots and at the windows over shops, and asked nobody anything, and went down to the second bench at three; and every afternoon the boy came through with his copies, and came down again from Paper Buildings at half past three, and touched his hat to the second bench, scarlet, and stopped at the wall to wait for his answer, and drew; and every afternoon at four went away up the walk at a run, and turned at the corner, and ran on.
In the last week of January the news came up from Sidmouth that the Duke of Kent was dead, of a chill caught walking in the wet, at two-and-fifty, with a daughter eight months old; and Fleet Street put black in its windows.
By the last Saturday in January Mr. Kinross had come as far as Water Lane.
Toby told her on the last Thursday in January, at night, on the stair.
He did not whisper it. He came up the stair two at a time, which he had never done, and stood on the step below her with his face shining, and said it all at once and backwards, so that it took her some time to put it in order.
A letter had come for Mr. Dunning that morning, from an attorney in Lincoln’s Inn. Mr. Dunning had read it in the shop, and then read it again, and then called Toby in from the yard with the letter in his hand; and for one dreadful minute, though he did not tell Miss Lydiard this part, Toby had thought that it was the gentleman from the garden, writing to send him back. Then Mr. Dunning called Mrs. Dunning down from the kitchen, and she read it, and sat down on the stool behind the counter and cried, which frightened Toby more, until he understood that it was the good kind. There was a gentleman who would pay for Toby to go to Mr. Sass’s in Bloomsbury, to learn to draw from the casts, four afternoons in the week; and would pay Mr. Dunning for the afternoons, more than they were worth; and would pay for paper. The attorney had been very particular that it was not to be asked who the gentleman was. Mr. Dunning had asked anyway, being Mr. Dunning, and the attorney had written back by the afternoon post that the gentleman wished to be nobody in particular.
“Nobody in particular,” said Toby, as though it were a title. “That’s what it says, miss. Mr. Dunning showed me.”
Clemency stood on the stair with the candle, and could not speak.
She was glad. She was so glad that it hurt, somewhere under her ribs, like running. And under the gladness, small and shameful and perfectly distinct, was something else: the sense of a hand that had gone into her purse ahead of her and taken out the only thing in it she had wanted to give away. She had been forestalled all her life by people with money. She had not expected to mind it in this, and she minded it so much that she was ashamed, and was ashamed again of minding.
“Who would do such a thing?” she said at last.
“Nobody knows, miss.” Toby considered it. “Mr. Dunning says it’s some old gentleman of the Inn that’s seen me drawing in the garden. He says the Benchers are all mad, and that’s the best kind.”
It was the obvious answer, and she did not take it at once. She thought, for the length of a breath, of another gentleman in the Inner Temple: one rich enough to own a magazine, who put
his name to nothing, and had written in the Warden that a thing might be done for nothing at all; and who sat every afternoon on the second bench, a few yards from where this boy drew. Then she remembered what Toby had said to her on Twelfth Night: He’s never looked at me. A man does not pay for a boy he has never looked at. She put the thought away, and took the old gentleman of the Inn instead; and she liked the old gentleman very much.
Toby had something else to say. She saw it come up into his face and stop there.
He had meant to tell her about the gentleman on the second bench. He had meant to tell her all the way up the stair: that the gentleman had come down to the wall, and looked at his book, and laughed at the Benchers, and called him Mr. Tucker. Nobody had ever called him Mr. Tucker. He had said it to himself all the way to Paper Buildings, and all the way home, and under his blanket in the little room at the back that Mrs. Dunning had meant for one of hers; and he had meant to give it to Miss Lydiard on the stair, because she was the only person in the world he gave things to. And now that he stood on the step below her, with the candle between them, he found that he could not. It was the only thing he had ever had that was entirely his own. He kept it. And he thought he knew who nobody in particular was, because only one person in the world had ever asked him Would you?; and he kept that too. He did not know that it was the first lie he had ever told her, because he had not said anything; and neither of them knew that it was the one thing she needed to be told.
“I’m to go on Tuesday,” he said instead. “If I can draw a foot by Lady Day, he’ll keep me. That’s the twenty-fifth of March, Mrs. Dunning says.”
They were the terms she had been given herself, on the Monday, in the hall in Bloomsbury, word for word. The master had remembered the three drawings. She had won the boy his place; and somebody she would never know had paid for it.
“You will draw a foot by Lady Day,” said Clemency, “if I have to take off my boot.”
She had four guineas that nobody now wanted, and she did not want them back.
She took some of them to Ackermann’s in the Strand on the Friday. She had stood at that window in October, wanting a cake of carmine, and had gone away with a ribbon for Lucy instead; and the carmine had come to her afterwards all the same, in an Ackermann’s paper on her desk, from her mother, who never went to the Strand and had never said a word
about it. This time she went in, and stood at the counter for a quarter of an hour, and bought, after a great deal of thought and in the teeth of the young man’s advice, a japanned box with eight cakes of colour in it, and two brushes, and a saucer.
She chose the colours herself. White, because he drew on brown paper and spoilt sheets, where there was no white to leave. Yellow ochre, and umber, and light red, for faces and the walls of the Temple; vermilion, for the sails of barges; Prussian blue, for the river and the sky; a green, for the trees in summer, which he had seen only turning; and black. The young man said that there should be a crimson, and offered her carmine. She said that there should not, and paid, and went home with the box under her cloak, and found that it had cost her very nearly what her own black would have cost, if she had followed the town into black for the Duke of Kent, which Salisbury Square had not. Bombazine had gone up fourpence a yard since the news from Sidmouth; she had noticed it, and been glad that she need not buy any.
Her mother saw the Ackermann’s paper under her cloak when she came in, and looked at it, and at her, and said nothing, as she had said nothing in October; and Clemency understood that in all her life she had never once given anything unseen without being seen by one person.
The King died that Saturday night, the twenty-ninth of January.
Nobody in London heard it until the Sunday. The old King had been mad and blind for nine years, shut up at Windsor in a purple gown with a long white beard, playing the harpsichord and talking to people who had died; and it was a long time since anybody but his doctors had thought of him as a man who could die at all. Then on the Sunday morning the great bell of St. Paul’s began to toll, slowly, over the whole of the City; and Salisbury Square, a quarter of a mile below it, heard every stroke.
There was no question of anybody’s not going into black. Mrs. Lydiard had a black gown laid by in the press, and took it out. Kit was to have a crape band for his hat, which Mr. Pelham required of his clerk and which Mr. Pelham would not pay for. Lucy, who had a new bonnet from Ludgate Hill and had been looking forward to the spring in it, put black ribbons on it and cried, and said that it was not for the King. And Clemency, who had spent her black at Ackermann’s two days before, took her grey gown down to the wash-house in the yard and dyed it herself with logwood and copperas. It had to be done on the Sunday, which
her mother said was wrong and allowed, because the King was dead and Monday was Mrs. Dunning’s washing-day, when the copper would not be free; so she stirred it with a stick for the whole of a Sunday afternoon, while the bell went on overhead.
It came out the colour of a wet slate. It was not black. It was the best that could be done, and she wore it.
She gave Toby the box that night, on the stair, with the bell still going over the roofs.
He did not take it at first. He looked at it in her hands, and then at her, and then at the box again, as though it might be meant for somebody on the stair behind him; and when she put it into his hands he held it against his coat, shut, the way he held his book. Then he sat down on the step and opened it, and counted the cakes with one finger, touching each, and said nothing for so long that she began to be afraid she had chosen wrong.
“There isn’t a red,” he said at last. “Not a proper red. For mouths.”
“You can make a mouth without it,” said Clemency. “Light red and white, and not too much of either. Faces are mostly not the colour people think they are.”
It was not quite true, and she knew it. Carmine was the colour faces were made of. There was a cake of it in her desk upstairs, in her mother’s paper, and she had not put it in the box; and she did not ask herself whose face she was keeping it for.
He considered this, and looked up at her face in the candlelight, as though to see whether it were true; and then nodded, and shut the box, very gently, as if it were asleep.
“Is it from him too, miss? From nobody in particular?”
“No,” said Clemency. “This one is from somebody in particular.”
He was so happy that for a moment he very nearly told her about the gentleman on the second bench, and Mr. Tucker, and all of it, because she had given him something and he had nothing else in the world to give her back. He opened his mouth to do it. Then he remembered that the gentleman wished to be nobody in particular, and that it was not his to give; and he shut it again, and said thank you, miss, twice, and went down the stair in the dark with the box held in both hands, carefully, as Mrs. Dunning carried eggs.
They proclaimed the new King on the Monday, because the Sunday was the thirtieth of January, when another king had once lost his head, and nobody liked to begin a reign on it.
All Fleet Street came out to see the heralds come to Temple Bar. They came from Charing Cross in the middle
of the day, in their tabards, with the trumpeters before them and the Horse Guards behind; and the City shut its gates in their faces, as it always did, so that a herald might knock and be asked who was there, and be let in by the Lord Mayor, and proclaim King George the Fourth on the City side of the Bar as he had already proclaimed him on the other. Every window was let. Every post had a boy on it. London, which had been governed by the new King for nine years under another name, and had not liked it, cheered him with the greatest goodwill in the world.
Toby had a post. It was the best post in Fleet Street, at the corner of Chancery Lane, and he had held it since ten against two printers’ devils and a sweep; and from the top of it, over all the hats, he could see the whole street.
He saw the heralds, and the gates swing open. He saw the Lord Mayor’s coach, and the trumpets go up. And then, because he was who he was, he stopped looking at any of it, and looked at faces.
The gentleman from the second bench was standing in the gateway of the Inner Temple, in black, a little apart from everybody, with his hat in his hand, not cheering. Twenty yards east of him, on the step of a hatter’s, a little above the crowd, stood Miss Lydiard, between her brother and her sister, in a gown the colour of a wet slate; and she was not cheering either. Neither of them was looking at the heralds. The gentleman was looking at the faces in the crowd, slowly, one by one, as Toby did, with his back to the hatter’s. Miss Lydiard was looking at the gentleman.
Toby sat on his post and held on, and looked from one to the other. They were the only two faces in Fleet Street that he had ever drawn more than once; and there they were, in one look, with the proclamation going over them. She could see the gentleman. The gentleman, who was looking for somebody, was looking the other way. Toby could not have said why that should matter, or why it made him want, very much, to have his board.
Then the gentleman began to turn round; and Toby saw Miss Lydiard see it. She did not move her head. She put her hand on her brother’s arm, and stepped down off the hatter’s step into the crowd, behind him, as the trumpets went; and the crowd took her east with the heralds towards the City. When it had gone by, the gateway was empty, and so was the step.
The Albemarle and the London came into Salisbury Square together on the Tuesday, the first of February, with black rules round their title-pages, put in at the last moment by printers who had been up all night.
Kit had bought the London himself, at half a crown, out of his own forty pounds; since the Ludgate had stopped, he said, a man had to follow the Mortimers somewhere, and Pelham would not. He read the tenth number aloud with his back to the fire, as he had read every number since the summer, and said at the end of it that the London printed them on better paper than Baldock ever had, and that it had not done them any harm.
When they had gone to bed she took the Albemarle into the back room and read the fifteenth number of the Warden.
She had counted the days to it. She had known since the first of January that whatever he had to say to a sentence about a gentleman by the water could not be in print before the first of February; and she had told herself, all through January, that he would say nothing, because there was nothing a gentleman could say to it. She was wrong. It was on the third page.
The Warden went down into the town that evening from the castle, alone and on foot, and went through it street by street to the river, and asked no man anything; and those who saw him said afterwards that he looked into every door like one who has lost a thing whose name he does not know, and means to find it by the shape.
She read it three times. Then she sat with the candle and tried to decide what it meant, and found, for the first time in her life, that she could not make the sum come out.
He was looking for somebody. That much was plain. She had seen him do it on the Monday, in the gateway of the Temple, looking at the faces in the crowd one by one; and he was looking, as she had looked for his kitchen, by going and seeing, asking nobody. But for whom? In January, on the stair, she had priced the notion that he sat on his bench in the frost waiting for a young woman who had come about a place, and marked it down. She took it out again now, and looked at it. If the Author of the Warden was looking for the Author of the Mortimers, then he was looking for a writer, as the whole of the Row was looking; and he would find a woman in a dyed gown two pair of stairs up over a law-stationer’s, who had come down his area steps under false pretences, and taken his paragraph in August, and sent him the housekeeper’s account, and put him by the water in a sentence. If he was looking for the young person from his pavement, he did not know that she was the Author; and he was looking for something else altogether, which she did not let herself name.
She did not know which it was. She sat in the back room in her slate-coloured gown until the candle was out,
and found that she did not know which she would mind more.
Mr. Kinross had conducted the February Albemarle himself, with Mr. Ogle, having found nobody else to do it; and he had read every word of his own magazine in proof for the first time, down to the advertisements for trusses. On the first he bought the London at a bookseller’s in Piccadilly, and found the Mortimers in it.
She had taken Radcliffe’s terms, then. She had gone up Baldwin’s stairs on the tenth, where he had refused to wait for her; and Radcliffe had seen her face, and paid her, and would keep it, as he kept everything. It was Kinross who had sent Radcliffe to her. Now Radcliffe would keep her from him too.
He read the tenth number through, looking for a sentence that was his. It was Christmas in Mount Street: the family’s dinner, and then the servants’ hall’s, and what each of them cost, to the farthing. There was not a railing in it, nor a pencil, nor anybody by the water; and he was more disappointed than he would have liked anybody to know.
At half past three he went down to the garden. The boy did not come. It was the first of the four afternoons at Mr. Sass’s; and Mr. Kinross sat on the second bench in the frost and understood that he had paid, among other things, to lose the only person in the Temple who was glad to see him.
Lady Ardoch came south on the Wednesday, in black from her bonnet to her boots, having heard of the King at Doncaster and bought her mourning at Stamford in a single afternoon, which she said was the only good thing she had ever known come out of Stamford. She had Miss Lauder with her, in black also, and Miss Lauder’s father, who had business before the Lords and did not see why the King’s dying should stop it.
Mr. Kinross went home to Grosvenor Square in the afternoon to receive them, because there was nobody else to do it, and stood in his own drawing-room while his aunt told him that the Season was ruined, that there would be no balls before Easter and very likely none after it, that a girl could not be brought out in bombazine, and that he looked as though he had been sitting out of doors in a frost, which she supposed was the Temple. Miss Lauder said that black became nobody, and looked at him to see whether he would contradict her; and he did not, because he had not heard.
He was thinking of Water Lane.
The next turning east of it was Salisbury Court. He had meant to take it on the Monday; and on the Monday they had proclaimed the King.
(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 Young Gentleman of the Temple, who still ought to know, asks what a Bencher is. The Benchers are the senior members of an Inn of Court, who govern it, dine at the high table, and are generally supposed by the junior members to be mad.
A Parent asks what is meant by drawing from the antique. It is drawing from plaster casts of the old statues, which a young man must do well before the Royal Academy will let him draw from the life. Mr Sass’s academy, in Bloomsbury, prepares young men for it, and charges for the privilege.
Several Readers ask what it is to be hung at Somerset House. The Royal Academy shows the year’s pictures every spring in its rooms at Somerset House, in the Strand. To be hung is to have a picture accepted, and put on the wall, where the town may look at it and say what it pleases.
A Lady in Mourning asks what bombazine is. It is a stuff of silk and worsted, dull black, the proper wear for deep mourning; and its price, we observe, goes up whenever anybody of consequence dies.
A Correspondent at Kingston asks how a gown is dyed black at home. With logwood and copperas, in the copper, stirred a long while; and if it comes out the colour of a wet slate, it is the best that can be done.
A Visitor from the Country asks why the heralds knocked at Temple Bar. The City of London shuts its gate when the King’s heralds come to proclaim a new reign, so that they may knock, and be asked who is there, and be let in by the Lord Mayor. It is very old, and the City enjoys it.
Several Correspondents ask why the new King was not proclaimed on the Sunday. The thirtieth of January is the day on which King Charles the First was beheaded, and the Church keeps it as a fast. Nobody liked to begin a reign on it.
A Young Lady who draws asks what japanned means. It is lacquered black and polished, in imitation of the work of Japan. A japanned colour-box is the best kind, and lasts a lifetime.
A Young Gentleman of fourteen asks how long it takes to learn to draw a foot. Until Lady Day, he is told.
A Correspondent asks who Nobody in Particular may be. We do not know; and we suspect that he would rather we did not.