Prologue

The Duke of Lyneham burned the day’s letters one at a time, unopened. It was a practice he had kept every December for seven, and the servants did not dare to ask why. The last one went in face down, and the flame turned it over so that the direction came uppermost. He recognised the hand written across the direction.

He put his hand into the fire and took the letter out.

The coal seared two fingers of the right, and he did not feel it until afterwards. He laid the letter face down on the desk and set his burnt hand flat upon it, as though it might otherwise get up and go.

He had no need to open it. He had last seen that hand seven years ago.

He was a tall man, and the burn had made him move for once without grace. The black hair had fallen across his brow and he did not put it back. The long face the county read as pride was held very still, and there was nobody in the room to read it. There never was, in December.

The estate room held a lamp, a low fire, a locked box, and himself. It had wanted nothing more for seven years.

I know that hand. I would know it in the dark.

The other letters were ash on the grate. This one was not, and before morning he would have to do something about the difference. He stood over it a long while and did nothing at all.

Seven Christmases before that one, Lyneham Court had blazed from the gatehouse to the attics.

He had been seven and twenty. He had thought himself the luckiest man in Gloucestershire, and had said so aloud, to anyone who would stand and hear him.

The greenery came in on Christmas Eve. Holly and bay and ivy ran the length of the hall, laurel wound up the banister, and rosemary lay along the chimneypiece. The kissing bough hung in the centre of it, a double hoop of green with apples and a ring of small candles and the mistletoe beneath.

The Yule log had come down from the home wood on a sledge. They lit it with a saved black fragment of the year before, and it would burn on through to Twelfth Night. The waits came up from the village that evening and sang in the lane. He sent hot spiced ale out to them and stood at the door to listen.

In the long barn the tenants’ dinner was laid for ninety. The Court had fed its people at Christmas for two hundred years, and he had meant it to do the same for two hundred more.

He had stood in the barn doorway that afternoon, the smell of the roasting and the wet straw about him. He counted the trestles twice and sent down for two more.

A cousin had once called him a soft touch. He had laughed and not minded it. He had money enough to say yes to most things that were asked of him, and he liked saying it.

He had lent his name to a subscription for a new church roof. He had carried two tenants through a bad harvest and forgiven the arrears at the audit. Generosity had never yet cost him anything he could not spare.

That afternoon he had sent a cask of ale down to the Merrick cottage, where the eldest girl was newly wedded. He caught the carter at the door before he went out.

“See the little one has her orange,” he said. “The small one. Nan.”

“She’ll have it, Your Grace.”

“And the cask goes in at the back of the cottage.”

The carter took the reins up short. “He’ll not have it there. He’ll want the neighbours to see it come off the cart.”

“Do as he tells you, then.”

“There’s the step. It wants two men and there’s only me.”

“Take Hollis from the stable.” He had the child’s name. He had most of their names, all down the valley. “And do not let Merrick pay you for the carrying. He will try.”

Strang came at dusk on Christmas Eve, on a hired horse, with mud to the knee and a good coat spoiled. They had known one another a little in town.

“I would not have come to any other door,” Strang said.

“Sit down. You are wet through.”

“There was a ship. Or the promise of a cargo in one, which comes to the same money and rather less to show for it.”

“How far have you ridden?”

Strang turned his hat once in his hands and stopped turning it. “From Bath. I gave the horse up at Stroud. Your Grace, I had thought, if I could only get to Bristol before the quarter day. I have no right to ask what I have come to ask.”

“Eat first. We will talk when you are warm.”

“You have not heard the sum.”

The Duke went to the door and spoke down the passage to somebody Strang could not see. “Mutton. And the fire made up in the blue room.”

Strang told the story well at dinner, with the right amount left out, and the Duke had liked him. He sat longer at the table than he had meant to, and sent for a second bottle, and never once asked to see a paper.

He gave him money that night. It was easy, and he never afterwards regretted that part of it. Then, because it was Christmas, and because he could, he did the far more dangerous thing.

He wrote a letter of credit. He set the name of Lyneham behind Strang’s obligations, so that other men would lend where the Duke’s word stood behind them. He signed it at his own desk, by the light of the bough.

It is the most natural thing in the world, he had thought, and had gone in to his dinner.

Strang was gone by St Stephen’s Day. No word and no direction. The hired horse was sold on in Bristol, the room at the inn left owing. The man himself had stepped out of the county as cleanly as if he had never ridden into it at all.

The paper began to come back in the spring. The first note came from a wine merchant in Bath, for four hundred pounds, over a signature that was his own to the loop of the letter. He paid it and thought it an error. The second came a week after, and the third the week after that. By Lady Day he had stopped calling them errors.

There were notes he had never seen, raised in towns he could not have named. Every one of them carried his name, and he made every one of them good. He would not be the second man that winter to set a debt down and leave it for a smaller man to carry.

It took the better part of two years and a great deal of what his father had left him. He sold a house in town he never used. A string of horses he was fond of went the same way, and he signed the bill of sale for them standing up in the yard, with the groom holding the book.

The money was never the cost. The cost was the fourteen households that had lent to Strang because the Duke of Lyneham stood behind him. They had nothing behind them but the word of a man they had trusted on his signature, and when the thing came down it came down on them and not on him.

He had gone looking for them himself that summer, in a plain coat, and written down in a book what each of them had lost. He kept the book still.

Merrick was one of the fourteen. He had kept the Duke’s own cask of ale in his cottage that Christmas. He put in what he had, and put his name behind a cousin besides. He lost the both of it.

He did not recover. Two winters in that place proved fatal to him, before the last of the debt was cleared. His widow had been on the list from the first day to the last, and she had not once come up to the Court since.

The next Christmas Eve, the hall stood dark. The nails over the door were bare. Mrs Cardew had dressed that hall for thirty Decembers, and she came to him with the holly cut and the ivy trimmed and waiting in a trug.

“Is it to go up, Your Grace?” she asked.

“No,” he said, with the quill still in his hand.

She stayed where she was, the trug against her hip. “The bough wants only its candles put in. It is made up already, in the still room.”

“No.” He set the quill down across the page. “Not this year.”

“It was all cut this morning, Your Grace.”

“Take it away, Mrs Cardew.”

Her hands stayed on the trug. “Where am I to put it?”

“Anywhere out of the hall.”

She took the trug away and said nothing more. The holly she had cut went out to rot that year. The year after, she cut none. The year after that, the men went to the home wood at Christmas for firing and nothing else, and no one had to tell them.

She had not asked again. Seven years had gone, the nails were bare still, and she kept them wiped clear of dust.

The fire had burned low while he stood there. The lamp wanted oil and he did not ring for any.

The letter lay where he had put it, face down, with the ash of its own burnt corner beside it on the blotter. Seven years, and he could not for his life think what it wanted with him now. He did not lift it again. He sat down by it with the burnt hand open in his lap, and the lamp went out, and he was still there when the grate went cold.

Chapter One

The candle had burned down an inch before Hester found the figure that did not belong.

The clock on the stair had stopped in October and no one had wound it. She kept the hours by the candle, and by the grey that came up slow at the window. It was the eighteenth of December, seven days to Christmas, and the house had nothing laid in to keep it with. She had been at the estate books since five, with the door shut and the fire out.

Cook had asked about a goose twice and been told to ask again on the twenty third. There were no raisins in the house and no almonds. The kitchen garden had leeks in it, and the rest of Christmas would have to come out of the leeks.

The November quarter would not come right, however she took it. She had added the long column four times over and gone through the rents name by name, from the Coldwells at the mill to old Padget on the common, who paid his grazing late and always in eggs. Every tenant was where he ought to be, to the shilling. Each time the quarter fell short by eleven pounds and some odd shillings, and the shortfall answered to no name in the book.

Eleven pounds could not simply appear in a book she kept herself. Theft she would have found inside the hour. This was quieter, folded into the quarter where she could not yet see the fold, and she meant to have it out before Twelfth Night.

She set the quill down and turned her right hand over. Ink lay along the side of it, from the heel of the palm to the little finger. Her mother had called it a labourer’s stain and had had views on the square set of her jaw besides. She pinned her brown hair in the dark most mornings and it held well enough to noon.

Eleven pounds. She wrote the sum on a scrap of paper and drew one line beneath it. Not two.

She had gone back three quarters looking for the twin of it and found none. The rents were right, the tithe was right, and the poor-rate was right. The eleven pounds sat in the November quarter by itself.

There was coal enough for her father’s grate and no more, so she worked in her shawl. The maid came to the door at a quarter to nine, twisting her apron.

“Miss, there’s Mr Sowerby at the front. I said I’d go and see.”

“Then I am at home. I am always at home to the people we owe. Is my father down?”

“No, miss. There’s hot water gone up, though.”

“Then say nothing to him upstairs. I will go out.”

She knew the knock before she reached it, because Mr Sowerby never sent a boy. He came himself, in a good coat gone thin at the cuff. He had supplied Ansty with corn since her grandfather’s time, nineteen years of it. He stood on the step, because the step was as far as the Anstys let a creditor come now.

She went out and pulled the door to behind her, and came down off the step so as not to have the advantage of him. It put the top of her head level with his shoulder.

“Miss Ansty.” He touched his hat. His breath stood white between them. “I had hoped to see your father this morning.”

“He is not down. You have me, and I answer quicker.”

“Michaelmas was the day for clearing that account.”

“It was to be, and it was not.” She kept her hands still at her sides, where he could see them. “You have carried this house eight months. I ask three weeks more, to the New Year.”

“Ninety one pounds and some shillings.” He had had the figure by heart since the summer. “And what changes by then?”

“Half the account, in coin, from my own hand. Not my father’s. On the second of January.”

He turned that over. A cart went by on the lane behind him and he waited for it to pass. “You have no money of your own, miss.”

“I shall have it by the second.” She let that stand. “You have never had a promise from me that failed. Name one.”

He could not do it, and she stood and watched him try. The cold came up through her thin house shoes while she waited. She did not shift her feet. A woman who shifts her feet is asking for pity, and she was offering him better terms than the law would.

“No,” he said at last. “There is none.”

She came back up onto the step and stood level with him. “Half by the second. The remainder by Lady Day. You will reach Lady Day sooner with me on the account than without.”

“And if it does not come?” He asked it without heat, as a man asks after weather he means to go out into.

“Then you stand where you stood at Michaelmas, and you shall have this in writing before you go.”

He shifted the satchel round on his shoulder. It stayed buckled. “That is a hard way to put it.”

“It is the honest one, and you are too old a hand to want it dressed up.”

“We have a lean Christmas of our own this year.” He said it to the gatepost rather than to her, and let it lie.

“The more reason to take a promise that holds.”

He looked at the gate longer than he needed to. “I took his word once, and went home content.”

“You may take mine and do the same.” She put her hands behind her. “Think of me as the quick part of him.”

“The second of January,” he said. “Morning, or afternoon?”

“Before noon. At your own door, not mine.”

He almost smiled, caught the thing before it arrived, touched his hat, and went. She watched him to the gate and past it before she let herself feel her feet again. He will tell his wife the Ansty girl was cold with him. I was not cold. I was correct, and there is no coin in the difference.

The hall had two chairs in it and a table, and above the table a square of wall paler than the rest, where a picture had hung until April. Hester had sold the picture, and the nail was still in the plaster. She had entered the sale in the book and never told her father which wall it came off.

She stood a while with her back to the shut door. A floorboard went overhead, and stopped. Her father, crossing from the window to the chair and back again, wearing a line in the carpet she could have drawn with her eyes shut.

He had been awake and dressed an hour and had not come down, so she went up.

Lord Ansty stood at the window with a book open in his hand that he was not reading. He would be sixty in the spring, and the book had been open at that same page since Advent.

“Sowerby was here,” she said.

“At Christmas, of all times?” He said it as though the fault were Sowerby’s.

“To the step. I have him to the New Year. He takes half by the second of January.”

“Well. There. You see it was not so pressing as you feared.”

“I have moved it. I have not paid it.” She stayed on her feet by the door, where she could see the stairs.

“Half from where, then?”

“That is the question I came up to put to you.”

He shifted the book to his other hand. “And you have an answer of your own ready.”

“I have half of one.”

He turned a page he had not read, and then another. “After Christmas, then,” he said. “I shall look at all of it. There is no sense in doing accounts through Advent.”

“You said the same before Michaelmas.”

“Did I say so?” The book stayed open at its page.

She crossed to the grate and put two lumps on his fire out of his own scuttle. “And at the audit. And before Lady Day. In that voice, at that window.”

“You have a great memory for a girl who might use it more kindly.”

“The books gave it to me. Somebody in this house has to keep it.” She did not raise her voice at him. He does not lie to me. He lies to himself and lets me stand and watch him do it.

“You might have been wedded out of all this,” he said, to the window. “There were offers, once.”

“Two of them. Both wanted the west slope and neither wanted me.” She set the scuttle straight with her foot as she said it. “You had them to dinner regardless.”

“You need not have said it like that.”

“It is the accurate way. I gave up keeping the two apart years ago, and I am the better bookkeeper for it.”

He shut the book on his finger, keeping the unread page. “You were not always so hard, Hester.”

“One of us has to stand on that step.”

She stood in his good room, the one room left in the house with coal in the grate, and let the warmth of it reach her for the first time that day. There was a tray by his chair with yesterday’s cup on it and the ring it had left.

“There is a way through the quarter,” she said. “You will not care for it.”

“Then I would rather not have it in December.”

“You will have it when it is done and not before. I came up so that you are not surprised by the answer.”

His eyes came round to her, and went back to the window and the unread page. She picked the cup up and carried it out with her, and shut the door.

She came down to the small parlour, where the fire was laid and not lit, and lit it herself with the last of the kindling, and took out paper. The parlour was cold enough that the ink dragged at the nib, so she warmed the bottle in her two hands between paragraphs. She ruled a margin down the sheet and put the date at the head of it, as she did on everything she wrote. She had written every letter of consequence this house had sent for four years.

She had thought of the Duke of Lyneham for a fortnight and not written. He was the nearest great fortune to Ansty and the least likely to answer. The county said he was a cold man who had turned his back on his own people.

But cold men keep their money. A warm one would have given his away years since to somebody louder in her need. Ansty wanted money with weight behind it. The Duke ran his own accounts and kept no agent, which the county named coldness and Hester named sense.

Begging was her father’s instrument, three pages of it, and it failed inside the first page, so she offered instead.

The Ansty timber on the west slope was worth the debt twice over, in oak that had stood since her grandfather’s time. It was hers to describe if not to sell, and she described it well. She had the acreage off the estate map and the age of the stands out of her grandfather’s planting book. The price oak had fetched at Gloucester in the autumn she had from the sale list. The cost of the carting she took off the total before she wrote the figure at the foot. Four paragraphs, and not a figure in them she had not checked twice.

She wrote I appeal to Your Grace and looked at it and drew a line through the word appeal. A cold man would not answer an appeal. He might answer an argument, if the argument were sound and cost him nothing to read. She wrote I put to Your Grace in its place, and went on. To be sure of the direction she took the green copybook from her writing box and put it back.

She wrote the direction. To His Grace the Duke of Lyneham, Lyneham Court. She sanded the sheet and folded it, and because the good wax had gone the way of the coal she closed it with the Ansty wafer.

The carrier went by the lane end at noon and would not come again before the week was out. She held the letter with her thumb on the seal. The parlour fire was the one flame alight in the house.

She set the letter out in the hall and went, at last, to change the shoes she should have changed an hour before. The maid was coming down with an armful of linen and stood aside for her.

“Is he to have his dinner up, miss?”

“He is.” Hester stopped on the turn with one hand on the rail. “The letter on the hall table goes with the carrier at noon. Into his hand, not into the bag.”

“Yes, miss.” She went on down with the linen.

A cold man would answer, or he would not. If he answered he would want something for his trouble. She stood on the stair with the wet shoes in her hand and tried to think what a Duke could want from Ansty that Ansty had not already lost. She could not think of one thing.

Chapter Two

The letter had lain face down on the desk for a night and a morning, and the Duke had not turned it over.

He had set it there himself the evening before and weighted it with the inkstand. His hand still carried the mark of the fire he had taken it out of. A blister ran across two fingers of the right and he had not dressed it. The estate room was his own and he kept it bare, and he balanced the ledgers there with no clerk standing between himself and the figures. He had not slept. He had sat up through the small hours with the letter in front of him. The direction was no trouble to him. The hand that had written it was.

There was a thread of grey at his temple now that had not been there at seven and twenty. He wore no ornament but a plain gold signet, and a plain dark coat. Servants who did not know him took him for the steward until they were told. He preferred it so. The hand is the same. Seven years, and it has not lost a stroke.

December was the month he liked least and hid best. He kept to the estate room and the accounts, and let the county think what it liked of a Duke who did not dine out between Advent and the New Year. The ledgers on the table went back nine years and he had ruled every column in them. The current one lay open at the Michaelmas audit, and down the margin in pencil stood fourteen figures that were entered under no heading a stranger could read. At seven and twenty he had kept the season entire, the barn full and the tenants fed and the bough in the hall.

***

Lady Sabine came in at ten without knocking, as was her right and her habit. She saw the letter at once, because she saw everything that lay on that desk.

“You have left a letter unopened,” she said. “That has not happened in my sight before.”

“It is nothing. An old account.”

“Show it to me, then.”

“It is not worth your morning.”

She came no nearer the desk. “No account of any age keeps a man from his bed. You have not slept.”

“I seldom sleep in December. You know that.”

“The reason for it is on the desk under your hand.”

He moved the inkstand two inches and set it back where it had been.

“You do not burn accounts and then reach in after them,” she said. “Your hand is blistered, Rowland.”

“I caught it at the grate.”

“How badly?” She came a step nearer the desk and stopped there.

“Leave it, Sabine.”

“Have Mrs Cardew look at it.”

“It will do well enough.”

“You have given that woman nothing to do in December for seven years. Let her dress a burn.” She put her hand on the bell rope and left it there.

She looked at the grate, where the fire was low and even and had swallowed nothing at all.

“You have never once been dishonest with me and made it hold,” she said. “Do not begin this morning.”

He kept his eyes on the desk and she did not help him. She was one and sixty, straight in the back, and dressed in the grey she had worn since her husband’s demise. She had a house of her own in Cheltenham and had not slept a week in it since the bad year. She had sat with him through that year, hour upon hour, and had earned the right to stand in his room, go unanswered, and stay.

“Whatever it is,” she said, “you will show it to me before you act on it.”

“There is nothing to act on.”

“Your hand, Rowland.”

He turned his hand over so the blister showed, and turned it back. “A blister is not a confession.”

“It is, when you put the hand in yourself.”

“I have promised you nothing this morning.”

“Eat something, at least.” She went to the window and put the shutter back on its hook.

“Presently.” A coal settled in the low fire.

“You said as much at eight.” She did not leave the window. “And you gave me your word seven years ago. A thing of that kind does not lapse because the year has turned.”

“You make much of a blister.”

“I have watched you burn a hundred letters without a flicker. You went into the flame for this one.” She put her hand on the back of the chair she never sat in. “That is not nothing, whatever you choose to call it.”

She went, and she did not slam the door. Lady Sabine had no use for a door to make her meaning felt. She is right. She is nearly always right, and that is the difficulty of her.

He opened the letter. He had expected a plea, three pages of it, with the deceased wife brought in by the second. This was a single sheet, close-written, and it did not ask him for a thing. It offered. The wafer was the cheap Ansty kind, and one corner of the sheet had gone to ash where the flame reached it before he had. He smoothed it flat with his burnt hand and read it through twice, the second time with a pencil, and made no mark.

The timber on the west slope was set against a stay of execution on the December note. The acreage was given, and the age of the stands, and the price oak had fetched at Gloucester in the autumn. The cost of carting it to the river had been taken off the total, so the figure at the foot was the true one and not the flattering one. Four paragraphs, and every one of them sound. He checked the Gloucester price against his own memory of the autumn sales and it was right to the shilling. He checked the carting, and that was right as well. Whoever had drawn the thing had not guessed at a single figure in it, and had made it easy for a busy man to say yes.

The December note was to a corn factor, by the wording of it, and the writer had not troubled to name the man. The timber would carry that debt twice over and leave the barony a hedge against the spring. The writer had not said so, but had left him the arithmetic.

He came last, and slowly, to the thing he had reached into the fire for. Then he looked at the hand, and it was the hand. He had a folder of it upstairs in a locked box, in letters that had cost fourteen households everything they owned. He went up for the box himself and brought it down and set it open on the table.

He laid two papers side by side under the lamp. Ansty on the left, in ink not a day old. Bath on the right, seven years faded and worn thin along the folds with handling. The same upright letters in both, the same long tail on the y, and the same trick of closing the letter a, until it might be taken for an o. He had read the old ones so often in the bad year that he could have formed the alphabet in that hand himself. Not a stroke of it altered.

He put the old letter back and turned the key on it, and the key went into his waistcoat pocket, where it had lived since the year he first locked them up.

He had spent that bad year certain the writer was Strang’s clerk, or Strang’s creature, or Strang himself in another coat. He had kept himself from thinking the hand might be a woman’s. Now it was offering him oak from Ansty. A clerk he could have hunted down.

Somebody at Ansty writes in the hand that ruined me, and is offering me oak.

He sat with it until the light went off the window, and then he wrote three lines to Quillan and sent them by a man on a fast horse.

Quillan kept chambers in Gloucester and owed the better part of his practice to the Lyneham accounts. He came the same afternoon, on his own horse, and left it standing in the yard. He was a dry, small man who stated things without dressing them.

“You put two questions in your note and no greeting before them,” Quillan said.

“Who at Ansty writes this hand?”

He laid the letter on the desk, face up, and turned it so that Quillan saw the direction and not the burnt corner.

“I cannot tell you offhand.” Quillan bent over it with his hat still in his hand. “Lord Ansty has a daughter who keeps his books and writes his letters, or so the county says. It may be her work.”

“Find out for certain.”

“It can be done in a day.”

“Take less,” the Duke said.

“I shall want the name of the man who carries their post.” Quillan set the hat down at last. “Another man would ask you for a week.”

“You shall have it before you leave.”

“And if the daughter proves to be the hand?”

“Then bring me her name, and how old she is.”

Quillan wrote that on the back of an envelope and put the envelope away. “You will want to know whether I think it wise.”

“No,” the Duke said.

Quillan looked at the burnt corner of the letter. It had been turned away from him all afternoon and he had read it anyway.

“And the second. What became of Nevil Strang?”

Quillan’s face did the small thing it did when a name he had hoped not to hear was spoken aloud in a room. “Nothing became of him that any man has paid to discover. He was in Bristol, and then he was not. There is no warrant standing out against him.”

“Swear one,” the Duke said.

“You will not, and no other man he emptied has the money to.”

“I did not ask if he was taken. I asked what became of him.”

“Then the honest answer is that nobody knows, and that one or two have stopped asking.” He looked at the Duke levelly. “I had counted you among them until this note.”

The Duke did not take it up, and Quillan did not press it. Between them they let the name go back into the ground it had come out of.

The solicitor gathered his papers and stood up. “If you mean to treat with Ansty, you should know it is not so far under as the county would have you believe.”

“The land is mortgaged past all sense.”

“It is. And the father is good for nothing.” Quillan pulled a glove on. “But the parish rates there have been paid to the day these two winters running.”

“Who pays them?”

“I marked it when the parish assessment crossed my desk at Michaelmas. Two winters, on the nail, and the corn factor has had nothing out of that house since April.”

The Duke set the letter square with the edge of the desk. “A legacy.”

“It may be anything. It is no affair of mine.” Quillan pulled the second glove on. “Is there a paper you want drawn?”

“Not yet,” the Duke said.

“I shall have something ready notwithstanding.” Quillan took his hat up off the desk and went.

The house around him kept no Christmas and had not since the year the hall went dark. Mrs Cardew had asked him once, that first December, whether the greenery was to go up. He had said no, and she had not asked again. She still had the list of the tenants’ dinner in the still-room drawer, in her own hand, ninety names on it and the years ruled through one under another. He had seen it once and had not asked her to take it down. The nails were still there above the hall door, bare and wiped clean of dust. He thought of them now, with the letter under his hand.

The Duke sat on into the dark without calling for candles. He had paid the fourteen households out of his own income every year since, quietly, so that no man could call it penance. He had every sum by heart, and which of them had passed on still owed, and the Widow Merrick’s husband was one of those. Her cottage stood four miles down the valley and he had not been past the door of it in six years. The money went by Quillan’s clerk twice a year, and the clerk brought back a receipt with a cross on it for a signature. The receipts were in the same box as the letters. The sane course now was to send an agent to Ansty.

He was going to go himself. There was a woman at Ansty who wrote in the hand that had ruined him, and he wanted to stand in a room and watch her face before she had arranged it for a duke. An agent would come back with a name and a valuation.

He rang, at last, and told the man who came that the greys were to be put to at nine and that he would take his own man and nobody else. Then he wrote three sentences to Ansty that said nothing of his coming, and sent them down with the late bag.

He put the letter into the breast of his coat, where it would travel with him, and went up through a house with no green thing hung anywhere in it, six days before Christmas.