Chapter One

 

 

Charlotte Barnwell went down the Cawley drawing room with two shawls over her arm and a fan in her hand that belonged to nobody she could name, and not one person in four hundred looked up.

The shawls she could account for. Mrs Fairclough had put one into her hands at the top of the stairs and gone through to the card room. The second had come off a chair by the musicians, and its owner was standing near the fire in puce, fanning herself with a programme.

No explanation could account for the fan. Somebody had pressed it on her at the foot of the stairs and moved off before she could look up.

She delivered the puce lady’s shawl into a conversation that did not pause for it.

“Oh. Thank you.” The shawl went over an arm without a break in the sentence it had interrupted.

“Not at all.”

The lady turned back to her companion. Charlotte laid the second shawl over a chair where its owner would find it and kept the fan, because there was nothing else to be done with it.

Four hundred people had been asked into a house comfortably suited for a hundred and fifty, and all of it on credit. The green baize on the stairs had been down at Christmas with a different braid on it and three girls had been taken out to the landing to be revived, with Charlotte having walked two of them.

She was tall. In such a predicament, that was her sole advantage, and she now employed it to seek out her cousin.

Harriet was halfway down the second set with a fair young man who talked a great deal and danced rather worse for it. She had been laughing since nine o’clock.

“Miss Barnwell.” Mrs Cawley had come up on her left with a gentleman in tow and the pleased look of a woman disposing of a difficulty. “Mr Tapley, may I present Miss Barnwell? Mr Tapley has just come up from Kent.”

“Not just,” Mr Tapley said. “I have been here since March.”

He bowed and Charlotte curtseyed, and the two of them regarded one another with the mild goodwill of strangers.

It was the fourth time Mrs Cawley had performed this office for them. Twice in this house and twice at Lady Sedgwick’s.

“Miss Barnett, was it?” He had the pleasant unfocused look of a man being agreeable at a distance.

“Barnwell.”

“Of course.” He was already looking at the doorway over her shoulder. “Newly come to town?”

“Not newly, no.” He had turned to leave before the last word was out of her, and Mrs Cawley went with him, with the whole transaction occupying nine seconds.

Fourth time and he has been delighted on every one of them, Charlotte thought.

There was no profit in being offended by weather.

Charlotte settled herself once more in her usual spot, behind the pillar on the far side of the fireplace. The sconce’s glow did not reach that corner, and a woman could sit there for an hour without having to adjust her expression.

She had chosen that chair in her first Season, having realised early that if she did not choose it, somebody would walk her to it. Nobody else could have told the two apart but she could.

The fan she held was ivory and badly made, and one of the sticks had cracked. She laid it in her lap and watched the room.

Her portion was four hundred pounds. It brought her eighteen a year, half at Lady Day and half at Michaelmas. Every person present who mattered could have named the figure, and those who could not name it could feel it, the way a horse feels weather coming.

Four hundred pounds bought a girl a chair behind a pillar. There was no calculation anywhere in England that would suggest otherwise, and Charlotte had done the math more than once because she was good at arithmetic.

Her gown was the white one, made over in February and again last week. Harriet had run green ribbon through the sleeves on Tuesday and been very pleased with the effect, but nobody had said anything about it, and nobody would.

Nothing had ever been done to her hair. It was dark brown, never once curled, and long ago, she had given up asking for it to be styled differently. Her eyes were brown, warm and steady. Her face was long, longer than what fashion considered ideal, and she had made her peace with that at about nineteen.

A girl came through the doorway near the pillar. She was seventeen, in blue, and she moved with the small shuffle of somebody trying to stop a skirt from swinging. Her face had gone red, and two paces behind her a young man was looking at the ceiling with tremendous concentration.

“Come here.” Charlotte had her by the elbow before the girl had worked out who was speaking. “Behind the pillar. Come along.”

She came, got herself into the shadow, and then the tears started.

“It is torn.” She said it to the floor.

“I can see that it is torn.” Charlotte went down on the boards and took the flounce up in both hands. “Stand still.”

“Somebody trod on it.” The girl’s breath caught in the middle of it. “He did not mean to.”

“They never do.” Charlotte found the drawn thread with her thumb.

Six inches had come away from the skirt. Worse than the tear, one gathering thread had drawn, and a drawn thread would not lie flat, however carefully it was pinned. Any woman who had mended anything knew that, but no woman of seventeen ever had.

“You have pins in your gown.” The girl had stopped crying and was looking at them.

“I have four pins in my gown every evening of my life.”

“Why?”

“For this.”

Charlotte’s hands were not pretty, but she had given up minding some years ago. The knuckles stayed red from October to May, because the house in Hertfordshire had nine rooms and four fires. A stain of ink was on the second finger of her right hand that had arrived at Candlemas and would still be there at Michaelmas.

“What is your name?” The first pin went in.

“Lucy Fairclough.”

“Are you Mrs Fairclough’s girl?”

“Her niece.”

“Then she has your shawl, and I have carried it twice tonight.” Charlotte eased the drawn thread back along the gather. “Stop crying, Miss Fairclough. You will make your face worse, and there is nothing at all I can do about your face.”

Lucy Fairclough laughed, wetly.

Her hands were fast, though. Three pins along the seam and the fourth turned crosswise where the strain would come, and the whole business took ninety seconds. She had done it in less.

Charlotte sat back on her heels. “There. You may walk now.”

“Will it show?” She was twisting round to see her own hem.

“Only to women who have torn one.” Charlotte lifted her own skirt and showed her a seam mended twice.

“Everybody will know.”

“Nobody will know. They are not looking at your hem.”

“I cannot walk in it.” The girl had not moved a foot.

“You can walk in it perfectly well.” Charlotte got up off the boards and shook out her own skirt. “Short steps for one set and dance the second. It will hold for a dance, but it will not hold for standing about. Go on.”

Lucy Fairclough went two steps and turned round with her face full of something that wanted saying.

“Thank you so much.” She said it to a point about eight inches above Charlotte’s left shoulder, at the pillar, and then she was gone into the light.

Charlotte sat down again and put the hideous fan back in her lap.

She has no notion what I look like even though she was looking at me.

It was not a grievance. It belonged to the same order of fact as the four hundred pounds, and she had come to terms with that order of fact a long while ago. What she minded was the waste.

The remedy arrived at half past eleven in the person of Mrs Cawley, two short at the supper table and out of her depth for the first time that evening.

“Mr Grieve will not go in without Mrs Ottley, and Mrs Ottley has gone home.”

“How many at table?” Charlotte asked.

“A hundred and four.”

“Then put Mr Grieve beside Miss Fairclough,” Charlotte said, and went on watching Harriet.

“She is seventeen.” Mrs Cawley let the number do the work.

“He is deaf.” Charlotte did not look away from the room. “She will not have to say anything and he will think her charming.”

Mrs Cawley looked at her with faint surprise, as at a chair that had spoken.

“And the other place?”

“Give it to me. I am not going anywhere.”

“You are a good creature.” She was three steps away before the sentence had properly landed, and she did not look back to see it received.

Charlotte, having seated a supper for a hundred and four in under a minute, went back to watching Harriet dance.

Her cousin came off the floor, flushed and radiant, and dropped into the next chair without any regard for her skirts. Standing, Harriet came to about Charlotte’s ear but sitting they were nearly of a height, and Harriet had never once remarked on it either way.

“You are holding a fan.” She was fanning herself with her hand and looking, as she always did after a set.

“I am aware of it.”

“Whose fan?” Harriet had her hand out for it already.

“That has been the question of the evening.”

“You must give it to somebody, Charlotte.”

“I have offered it to four women.” Charlotte turned it over. “All four were extremely certain it was not theirs.”

“Then keep it.”

“I intend to. It is a hideous fan and I shall treasure it as long as I live.”

Harriet laughed, and Charlotte’s long plain face came alive in the way it did perhaps a dozen times in an evening, but nobody was looking at her when it happened.

“Mr Loder asked me who you were.” Harriet dropped it in as though it were nothing at all.

“Which one is Mr Loder?”

“The one in bottle green.” Harriet nodded down the room without any attempt at discretion. “He stood up with Miss Barham.”

“Then he did not ask because he wished to know.”

“Charlotte.” Her chin had gone up.

“He asked in order to have something to say to you.” Charlotte patted her cousin’s hand. “It is the oldest device there is, and I am delighted that it is working.”

Harriet went off to her mother, entirely unpersuaded and entirely happy.

At twenty minutes to one a set was forming, and half of it was already down. Mr Loder crossed the room with the air of a man doing a sum he disliked.

“Miss Barnwell.”

“Mr Loder.”

“Are you engaged for this?”

“It is half over.” Charlotte did not get up.

“Miss Barham has been taken home.” He looked at a point somewhere near her collarbone. “She was unwell.”

“I am sorry to hear it.”

“Will you stand up?” His chin had come up half an inch to get it out.

“You are not obliged, Mr Loder.”

“I am aware I am not.”

He was perfectly civil and perfectly wretched but had a good face, and would sooner have walked into the Serpentine.

“Yes.” She rose. “Thank you.”

There was a way to stand in a circle once you had entered at halfway point, and everybody understood why. The other four couples shifted to accommodate her. They were gentle about it, and it was that very kindness that did the damage.

Mr Loder danced well and produced three sentences, two of them concerning the heat. Charlotte danced the figures she had learned at fourteen. He bowed at the end, thanked her and was gone before she had straightened out of the curtsey.

It was worse than not being asked. She had established that in her second Season and here was the proof again, delivered on the same terms and at no charge.

She went back to the chair behind the pillar and stayed in it until supper.

Supper was called and on a table by the door lay the list, pairing such ladies as remained with such gentlemen as could be found. Charlotte read it on her way past because that was what she always did.

Miss Barnett. Mr Grieve.

She stood and looked at it. Then she took up the pencil lying beside the list, corrected the letters, put it down, and went in to supper.

Mr Grieve was seventy-one and deaf in the manner of seventy-one, and he had a bridge at Ipswich he had been waiting years to tell somebody about.

“They have put the new centre pier in the wrong place.” Mr Grieve had turned his good ear to her without being asked.

“Why the centre?”

“Because that is where the water goes when it has nowhere else.”

“Then it is the scour.”

Mr Grieve set down his fork. “Say that again.”

“The scour.” Charlotte moved the salt across to stand for the pier. “It will take the bed out from under it and not the pier itself, and nobody will see that happen.”

“Nobody did see it happen.” He was leaning in over his plate now. “That is the whole difficulty.”

He gave her the rest of the history after that, and at the end of it told her she was a sensible young woman. Charlotte, who was twenty-three, took it in the spirit in which it had been offered and it was the most pleasant part of her evening.

The Ingram carriage was called at half past two.

 

***

 

Aunt Ingram did not begin until Portman Square was behind them.

“The gloves cost nine and six.” Her hands were folded, and her eyes were on the far window.

“I know what the gloves cost.”

“The pair Harriet tore last week were also nine and six.”

Charlotte looked out at the wet street going past. Harriet had fallen asleep against the far corner within a minute, as she had been able to do since she was four years old.

“The carriage is hired by the night. Two guineas.” Aunt Ingram pulled her cloak straighter across her knees. “Mrs Peale’s man will not go beyond three without another crown, and he has had his crown.”

“Aunt.”

“Madame Rousset’s account stands at forty-one pounds, and I have not paid it.” The words came out in the order she had put them in some days ago. “I shall pay it in June. There is no question of my not paying it.”

“I have not said there was.” Charlotte had added the Rousset account herself in February and made it rather more.

“Sixty-one pounds this Season. Sixty-one and eleven shillings.”

“You have the figures.”

“I have them written down. You may look at them tomorrow, because I know you will want to.”

“I shall want to.”

Aunt Ingram made a sound that in a less tired woman would have been a laugh.

She had taken her sister’s daughter for three Seasons because her sister was dead and somebody had to, and had said as much to Charlotte’s face in the first week of the first year. Charlotte liked her the better for it than she liked most people who had been kinder.

“Your uncle wrote from Bath on Tuesday.”

“How is he?”

“He is well, but he is not going to be well forever.” The carriage turned out of the square, and the lamps of the corner house went across the roof. “I am going to say this once and then not again, and I would rather say it in the dark.”

“Then say it.” Charlotte turned from the window.

“This is the last Season I shall pay for.” A link boy went past with his torch guttering, and the light swung across Harriet’s sleeping face and away.

“Very well,” Charlotte said.

“You are three and twenty.”

“I am aware of my age.”

“Harriet must have next year and the year after if she wants them, and she will want them. I cannot do two.” Her aunt’s hands were quite still in her lap. “I have never been able to do two, and I shall not try.”

“Aunt Ingram.”

“Do not thank me.” It came fast, ahead of whatever Charlotte had been going to say. “If you thank me, I shall be extremely rude to you.”

Charlotte shut her mouth.

“Settle it before the Season ends. That is all of it, and I am not particular about what settled looks like.” Aunt Ingram straightened a glove even that there was no need to. “If a decent man of two hundred a year asks you in July, I shall dance at the wedding.”

“And if nobody asks me?”

“Then you go home to Hertfordshire in August, and you stay there.” She said it without a grain of cruelty, and that was what made it possible to hear.

“With Papa?”

“With your father. Yes.” Aunt Ingram looked out of her own window. “He would be glad of you.”

“I know it.”

“Glad of you for years. You would keep his books, mend his shirts and bury him, and then you would be fifty.”

Charlotte turned the cracked fan over in her lap. She had been holding it for five hours, even though it was not hers, but nobody had come for it.

“You have done the arithmetic,” she said.

“You are not the only one in this family who can.” Her aunt did not answer anything.

They came into Wimpole Street a little before three. Aunt Ingram woke her daughter with a hand on her shoulder, and Harriet came up out of sleep already talking about the fair young man, and the two went into the house together.

Charlotte stood a moment on the step in the wet air, with the fan in her hand and nobody to give it to.

Twelve weeks to the end of the Season. She had worked it out somewhere between the bridge at Ipswich and the gloves at nine and six.

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“It will not balance.” Aunt Ingram put the housekeeper’s book down at Charlotte’s elbow at half past nine, in a house where nobody else would be stirring before one.

“By how much?” Charlotte moved her plate aside.

“Three pounds two and fourpence.” She sat down across the table and drew the coffee towards her without offering any.

“Since when?” Charlotte had the shawl gathered at her throat.

“It did not balance last month either.”

“By how much last month?”

“I have no idea.” Aunt Ingram put a good deal into the next word. “Mrs Tibbs undertook to look into it.”

“And did she?”

“She has been looking into it since Lady Day.” The coffee went down untouched.

The breakfast room in Wimpole Street faced north and got no sun until August, and in April it was cold enough that she had kept her shawl on. Three used cups stood on the sideboard from the night before, and nobody had come to take them. Somewhere above, a maid was doing a grate with more noise than the work required.

“You will find it before Thursday.” Her aunt was looking at the window.

“I shall find it before ten.” Charlotte turned the book round and opened it at March.

“Do not be clever at me before I have finished this.” Her aunt held the cup with both hands, savouring its warmth.

Mrs Tibbs kept an honest book and a bad one. Everything was in it, but nothing was in order, and the whole of March had been written up in a larder in the dark with cold hands. The letters leaned. Tails of the g’s ran into the line beneath. Twice a figure had begun in one column and finished in another.

A clean page would have told her much less. A woman writing up a household book at the end of a fifteen-hour day was not thinking how the page would look to anybody else, and it showed on every line, and that was the whole value of the situation.

She went down the coal column with the dry tip of the pen.

Coals were the largest single article the house bought and the easiest in the world to get wrong. Two chaldrons in February. Three in March, and three was too many for March by any reckoning, and the March deliveries stood on the eighth, the fourteenth and the twenty-second.

The fourteenth was wrong.

Not the figure. The figure was two pounds twelve and ten, the same as the eighth, and two deliveries of the same weight at the same price within one month is nothing remarkable at all.

It was the handwriting.

Every other line in March had gone down in a hurry under a tired hand. The entry for the fourteenth sat in the middle of them like a printed thing. Its letters stood upright, and the shillings and the pence were evenly spaced. Nobody had rested a wrist on the page and smudged it, because nobody had been in any hurry when they wrote it.

Charlotte set the pen down in the rest.

“Aunt.” Charlotte held the place with her thumb.

“You have not had ten minutes.” Aunt Ingram had not looked up from the cup.

“I have had eleven.” She turned the book and put her finger under the line. “Did Meakin send up a second ticket for the delivery on the eighth?”

Aunt Ingram looked at the page, and then at her.

“How should I know?” Her aunt spread both hands.

“Because somebody wrote this one out fair and sent it round.” Charlotte kept her thumb on the line. “Mrs Tibbs entered what she was given, and this house has paid for coal that never came through the door.”

“How much?”

“Two pounds twelve and ten.” She ran the rest of it again under her breath. “With the sweep at seven and six, and the two shillings you queried in February, that makes three pounds two and fourpence.”

Her aunt was quiet.

“Three pounds two and fourpence.” She said the figure back to herself.

“And fourpence.” Charlotte let her have the moment.

“How did you see it?” That one came out slower than the others.

“It was the tidiest line on the page.” Charlotte tapped it twice with the back of the pen.

“That is not an answer.” Aunt Ingram had put the cup down.

“It is the only one I have. Everything Mrs Tibbs writes is a mess.”

“That is not an answer either.”

“She writes standing up in the cold with her arms full.” Charlotte pushed the book back across the table. “That line was made at a table by a man with the whole afternoon in front of him.”

“And?”

“It is a fair copy of a bill you have already paid.”

Aunt Ingram read the line again for herself. It took her a good deal longer than eleven minutes to get to the end, but she got there, and Charlotte let her do it without any help.

“I shall write to Meakin.” Her aunt was already on her feet.

“I think you should write to Meakin.” Charlotte turned back a page to be certain of February. “Do not send for Mrs Tibbs.”

“I had not intended to send for Mrs Tibbs.” Her aunt had gone slightly pink.

“You had intended to be cool with her at dinner.” Charlotte did not look up from February.

“I had.” Her aunt gathered the book up under one arm. “I shall be cool with Meakin instead. It will keep.”

“Indeed. He has had it twice already.”

“Twice?” Aunt Ingram had come back two steps.

“He has been paid twice. Whether his man sent it twice on purpose is Meakin’s affair.”

“It is entirely mine. The Season figures are on my writing table.”

“You said last night that I might look at them.”

“You may look at them at noon. I want Meakin first.”

She went out with the book, and Charlotte was left with the cold coffee.

The rule, she remembered, had come from her mother, in the still-room at Ledwell, over a bill for candles.

Look at the tidiest, Lottie. All the rest of it is only people being busy.

It had held up for a decade and against everything she had put it to. A neat figure in a rough book has been considered beforehand. A round figure at the foot of a long column has been arrived at by somebody who wanted it to come out that way. Mess is honest. Mess is what happens when a real person writes down a real thing at the moment it occurs to her. The smooth line, sitting quietly among the smudges, has been put there afterwards by somebody with a reason.

Mrs Tibbs came up at ten, before the fires had been done.

“Mrs Ingram has taken the March book, miss.” She had the day book held flat against her chest.

“She has.” Charlotte held her hand out for the day book. “There was a coal ticket in it twice.”

The housekeeper’s face did a great deal in a very short space of time.

“I entered what was sent up to me.” Her chin had come up and stayed there.

“You did. I have said so downstairs and she has heard me say it.”

“Twice, miss?” The day book came down off her chest.

“Meakin’s man sent the eighth round again on the fourteenth, and made a fair copy of it to do it.” Charlotte turned the day book to the light. “I should not have caught it at all if the page had been tidy. Will you do one thing for me?”

“Miss.” Mrs Tibbs stood where she was and waited.

“Go on writing them exactly as badly as you do now.”

“Shall I say anything to the Cook?”

“Say nothing at all to the Cook. It is Meakin’s affair and not this house’s.”

Mrs Tibbs looked at her for rather a long time.

“Very good, miss,” she said, and went out, and could be heard on the back stairs telling somebody to mind the tray.

 

***

 

The post came a little before noon, and there were four sides of it from Hertfordshire.

 

 

 

My dear Charlotte,

 

You will observe that this is four sides, and I beg your pardon. I sat down meaning to write six lines even though I have never in my life managed six lines to you. Your aunt will say the frank is wasted on me, and your aunt will be right.

Selby has written again. I do not enclose his letter, because it would only irritate you, but I can give you the whole of it in a sentence. The account stands at four hundred and twelve pounds, and he would be glad to know my intentions before midsummer. I have no intentions. I have never had an intention that survived a day. You will tell me to write to him, and I shall write to him, and I daresay you will be able to tell from the letter that I did not wish to.

The low meadow has stood under water since the thaw and Rooke will not put the sheep on it. Hollis came again about the pipe, and I sent him away again. I am perfectly aware of what you will say to that, and you may say it.

I have done a foolish thing, and would rather tell you than have you find it in the book at Michaelmas. Wrenn had a denarius of Domitian, poor enough, but with the reverse quite clear, and I gave him one pound seven for it. I shall not defend the transaction. Your mother would have said what you are saying now, and she would have said it in the same voice you are saying it.

Will you cast your eye over the Ledwell figures when you have an hour? Nothing in them has moved since February except in the wrong direction. You see the shape of a thing so much faster than I do. I read a column, and it is a column. You read it, and it tells you something.

I hope you are dancing.

 

Your affectionate father, R. Barnwell

 

 

 

Charlotte read it through twice, and then she got out paper and pen.

She thanked him for the letter and told him four sides were better than six lines. The meadow would not drain itself, and she would look at the figures and send a fair copy down by Friday. She asked after the Domitian, and whether the reverse depicted Minerva or the eagle, because he would want to be asked and because she wanted to know.

There was no word anywhere in it about the one pound seven.

The nib went through the paper on the word affectionate. She took a fresh sheet and began again, and the second came out warm and civil. She sealed it and carried it down to the hall table herself.

Her mother had been dead four years. Maria Barnwell had played the pianoforte badly, read Italian well, and had kept the Ledwell books for nineteen years, and in the whole of that time the estate had not owed a shilling to anybody. The library went in the autumn after the funeral. Eleven hundred volumes, and Lord Norbury took the greater part of them. Her father stood in the empty room afterwards and said that it looked larger and that he had always supposed it would.

The Ledwell figures came out of her workbox and went across the table in three sheets.

She did the meadow first, because the meadow was the only thing in the whole account that could be made to move.

Eleven acres of it, under water from November to May, carrying nothing. Drained, it would take twenty ewes and their lambs, and Rooke would have it at thirty shillings the acre, because Rooke had been asking for it at that price for four years. Sixteen pounds ten a year, against nine pounds for the pipe and eighty-three for the cutting and the laying.

Six seasons and it had paid for itself. After that it went on paying, every year, for as long as there was a Ledwell.

Papa, the meadow will pay for itself in six years.

Your mother used to say so.

She was right as well.

Hollis wants nine pounds for the pipe.

Hollis wants nine pounds because you have refused him twice.

That had been March, in the cold parlour, three days before she came up to town. He had agreed with her about everything, but it altered nothing whatsoever. She had got into the coach at Hatfield with a clear enough idea of how much of the year the conversation had bought, and it had bought none of it.

Harriet came down a little after one in a wrapper, with her hair still in last night’s pins.

“Say something kind to me.” Harriet came in sideways through the door with her eyes half shut.

“You are the most beautiful woman in Wimpole Street.” Charlotte kept her eyes on the sheets.

“There are three houses in this street with nobody in them at all.”

“Then it was an easy contest and you should be glad of the victory.” Charlotte moved the inkstand along so her cousin could put an elbow down. “Sit. You appear quite out of place, as if you have just stepped out of the depths of a forgotten attic.”

Harriet sat and put her chin in both hands.

“Mr Loder or Mr Pargeter?” She said it into her own palms.

“For what purpose?” Charlotte went on ruling her column.

“Charlotte.” Her cousin got two syllables of reproach into it.

“It is a serious question.” Charlotte squared the three sheets together and set them aside. “For a Season, take whichever dances better.”

“And for a life?” Harriet had stopped playing at it.

“Neither.” Charlotte capped the ink. “You have known both of them a fortnight.”

“Mama says Mr Pargeter has eight hundred a year.” She said it without much conviction.

“Mr Pargeter has eight hundred a year and a mother.”

Harriet laughed into her hands and went on laughing for a while.

“You are so much cleverer than everybody.” Harriet had gone back in the chair and was addressing the ceiling.

“I am not.”

“You are.” She said it as simply as she said everything else. “You always know exactly what a person is. I do wish you would tell people. You never tell anybody anything and then none of them knows.”

Nothing whatever was to be gained by answering that, and Charlotte had never once been tempted to try. Harriet was nineteen, beautiful and adored her, and had no more notion of what it was to be Charlotte than of what it was to be a horse. She would have been horrified to be told.

“What became of the fan?”

“It is on my washstand.” Charlotte went on with the column.

“You cannot keep a stranger’s fan on your washstand.”

“I can keep it where I like. Nobody wants it.” Charlotte laid a hand flat on the sheets. “It has a cracked stick and it is the ugliest object in this house.”

“Nobody at all?”

“Nobody at all.”

“Then why keep it?”

“Because somebody must. Eat something.” Charlotte added. “There is a rout on Tuesday and you will be on your feet until three.”

“Is there? Whose?”

Harriet ate nothing.

The answer came in from the hall, because Aunt Ingram had the card in her hand and had stopped in the doorway to read it.

“Norbury House.” Aunt Ingram had not come all the way into the room.

“We are asked to Norbury House?” Harriet had both hands flat on the table.

“I accepted in February and thought nothing of it at the time.” Her aunt turned the card over, as though the back of it might have more on it than the front. “Mrs Peale writes that Halstead is expected.”

“The Duke?” Harriet took her chin off her hands.

“There is one duke of that name.” Aunt Ingram said it to the card.

“He never goes anywhere.” She stated it as an undisputed fact.

“He goes everywhere.” Aunt Ingram set the card up against the clock on the mantel. “He has not been inside that house in four years.”

“Why not?”

“Eat your breakfast.” Aunt Ingram did not turn round.

“Who else is expected?”

“Everybody. That is what a rout is.” Her aunt was still holding the card.

“And Halstead?”

“And Halstead.”

Nobody in the room asked why. Anyone could have, because everybody in London might have, yet no one did. The Dowager Duchess of Halstead had passed away in the spring four years ago, and Lady Norbury had spoken of it at the time. But now, no one could recall what she had said. Four years of cards had gone from St James’s Square to Grosvenor Square and four years of civil refusals had come back the other way.

“Well.” Aunt Ingram straightened the card against the clock. “He will not look at either of you, as it will be a great crush, and Mrs Peale must be taken up at half past nine.”

“Half past nine?”

“She will not be ready at half past nine, but we shall go at half past nine notwithstanding.”

“She will talk the whole way.”

“She will do so, and you will answer her, because I shall not.”

Aunt Ingram went out, and Harriet after her, already asking about the blue.

The card stayed against the clock.

Charlotte drew the Ledwell sheets back towards her and found her place in the column of arrears. She read three lines of it, and then read the same four lines again, having arrived at the bottom without any of it having gone in.

She started the column a third time.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

Charlotte lost Harriet on the stairs at Norbury House and did not get her back for two hours.

Lady Norbury had asked three hundred, and a good many more had come. The stairs were the worst of it. Nobody could go up, nobody could go down, and the whole of St James’s Square appeared to be attempting both at once on the same flight.

“Go on,” Harriet said over her shoulder. “I shall find you.”

“You will not.” Charlotte had a hand on the baluster.

“At supper, then.”

She went up and away in a press of blue and white, and that was the end of her until one.

The rooms above were more beautiful than the Cawleys’ but worse arranged. Two doorways did the work of four, and the crush moved through them the way water moves through a gate, in shoves, with stillnesses in between. Charlotte was carried twelve feet sideways in one of them and set down beside a card table with nobody at it.

A house of that kind had a temperature by half past ten and kept it until three. The windows had been opened at the top but had made no difference except to the candles, which guttered along one wall and burned straight along the other.

She got to the far side of the second room, where a pier glass gave her both doors at once, and stood against the wall with her hands where she could keep them still.

Mr Tapley went past at three feet and did not see her, and that was a mercy for them both.

She was tall enough to see over most of the room, and what she saw was a Season doing what a Season did. Girls in white being moved about by women in colours. Four men at the card room door working out how soon they might decently go in. Lady Norbury at the head of the second room in claret-coloured silk, sixty years old and perfectly stationary, with the evening arranging itself around her.

“Bath road,” a man beside her was saying, “nine hours, and I have done it in eight.”

“Not in April.”

“In April.”

“The bridge at Sandy Lane is down,” Charlotte said to the man who had asked, because he had turned half towards her in the asking. “Everything is going round by Chippenham.”

“Eight hours,” the first man said. “Five guineas on it.”

They shook on the wager and moved off towards the card room. The exchange had cost her three seconds but cost them nothing whatsoever.

The second time was worse, because she was right about something that mattered to her.

“Lady Norbury has had the Rowlandson three years,” a woman in yellow said.

“Two.”

“Three. She had it at the sale.”

“She had it from her brother in the autumn.” Charlotte had been at that sale, at the back of the room, in a bonnet she had trimmed herself. “The sale was the November before.”

“Well, I say three,” the woman in yellow said, to her friend.

Half a minute later the friend observed that Mrs Ferrers believed it had come from the brother, in the autumn.

“Did she? Then that is what I shall say.”

Charlotte let it go.

A tray went by and she took a lemonade off it, and had drunk about a third when the lady in grey found her.

“Be a good creature and get me one of those.” The hand was already out, and the face was still turned back over the shoulder towards a conversation that was taking place.

The tray had gone. Charlotte went after it through the second doorway and round two sides of the room, and the lady in grey took the glass out of her hand in the middle of a sentence about a curate.

“Thank you,” she said without looking at her.

Charlotte set her own glass down on the nearest ledge, having lost the taste for it, and went out through the door behind her.

The passage was cold, unlit at the far end, and smelled of a house shut all winter and opened in a hurry that morning. There were four doors along it. The first was a closet and the second was locked. The third opened on a room with one candle burning and no person in it.

She went in and shut the door and stood in the dark end of it with her eyes closed.

The library at Norbury House ran the whole depth of the building. Shelves went to the ceiling on three walls, and a ladder had been left standing on its rail halfway along the second. The fourth wall was a window, uncurtained, with the square outside going blue and a lamp already lit at the corner. The grate was cold and swept. One candle stood on the long table and every other light had been taken away, and the noise of four rooms came through the wall as a low sound with no words in it.

Charlotte gave herself ten minutes.

She reached the second bay and paused because the third shelf above was filled with music. In a library, music always suggested that someone had bought an entire house full of books all at once and never bothered to go through them.

Corelli, a great deal of Corelli. Then Arne. Then a bound thing with nothing on the spine.

She heard a voice.

“There is a chair, if you want one.”

She did not scream. It was the single most creditable thing she did all evening.

A man was standing in the window bay with his back to the glass, and he had been standing there the entire time. He was large, and not elegantly large, built through the shoulders like somebody who had done real work once and never lost the shape of it. Sandy hair, going back at the temples and not troubling to disguise it. A nose broken once and set by somebody in a hurry. Light hazel eyes, and a face doing rather more than he probably supposed.

He was very well dressed, but Charlotte could not have picked him out of the room she had just come from.

“I did not see you.” Her hand was still flat on the book.

“No.” He stayed where he was. “That was the object.”

“Then I am sorry to have spoilt it.” She had not come further into the room.

“You have spoilt nothing. You came in and shut your eyes.” He had a folded sheet of paper in one hand, and turned it over as he spoke. “I took it for a good sign.”

“It is a good room for it.”

“It is the only room in the house with nobody talking in it.” He said without bitterness.

Charlotte took the chair. It was less absurd than standing in a doorway and a good deal less absurd than going back out.

Neither of them offered a name.

She was conscious of not revealing her name. After three or four exchanges, it became apparent that he had not offered his either, and from that point on, both of them seemed reluctant to be the first to break the silence. The entire situation was so absurd and strangely comforting that she nearly burst into laughter in a stranger’s library.

“You are not dancing.” He had not come out of the bay.

“No, I am not.”

“Nor am I.”

“You are a great deal safer than I am.” She put her hands together in her lap. “Nobody comes looking for a man who is not dancing.”

“Somebody will.” He turned the paper over again. “She has two rooms to get through first.”

“Then you have twenty minutes.” Charlotte looked at the door and back.

“I had hoped for forty.”

He looked down at the folded sheet and then across at her, and something in his face gave way by about half an inch. “May I ask you an impertinent question?”

“You may ask.”

“Can you add?” The paper stopped moving.

“I can add.”

“Everybody says that.” He came away from the window and held the sheet out to her, half in jest, in the manner of a man expecting it handed straight back. “Four men have looked at that.”

“Then those men were in a hurry.”

“They are paid to be careful.”

“They are paid to agree with you.”

He put the paper into her hand. “That is nearer the truth than I should like.”

It was a quarterly abstract from a large estate. Wages one side, outgoings the other, fairly copied in a clerk’s round hand and badly totalled at the foot.

Charlotte turned it towards the candle and read the foot of it first, because the foot of a page was where a man said what he wished were true.

“It is out by four pounds ten.” Her eyes stayed at the foot of the page.

“It is out by four pounds ten every quarter.” He had gone back towards the window. “The roll says one thing and the vouchers say another, and every man I show it to tells me it is a rounding on the tithe.”

“It is not a rounding on the tithe.” Charlotte turned the sheet to the light.

“It is remarkably regular for an error.”

“Errors are not regular.” She turned the sheet over to see the back of it. “That is how you tell them from the other sort.”

Charlotte went down the wages column with her thumbnail held just under the line, the way she had been taught at eleven and had never once done differently since.

A steward. A bailiff. Two keepers and three carters. A smith, paid at Michaelmas and Lady Day and not otherwise.

Then the joiners, who were four, and the fourth was Chettle.

Chettle drew four pounds ten a quarter, and had drawn it on every line of the sheet.

Everything else on the page had moved. Wages went up a shilling in a good year and came down again in a bad one. A run of quarters was in every column where a man had been ill, or had died, or had had a boy come in under him at half the money. One of the carters had gone from three pounds to three pounds five in the middle of the run and stayed there. Somebody had been made head carter without any information given.

Chettle had not moved once.

“Who is Chettle?”

He was in the middle of a remark about the weather at Michaelmas, but he stopped.

“Chettle is a joiner.”

“Is he at the house?”

“He has a cottage by the mill.” He came two steps out of the bay and stopped again. “Say the rest of it.”

“I would rather you told me where he is.” She kept her eyes on the column.

The pause ran to about two seconds, and she watched a man go through eight years within it.

“Chettle went to Ipswich.” His voice had gone very flat. “His wife’s people are there. It was the year my father died.”

“Which was?” Her thumbnail had not left the column.

“Eight years ago.”

Charlotte laid the sheet down flat and turned it so that it faced him.

“Then somebody has paid a joiner four pounds ten a quarter for eight years to do no joinery.” She kept her finger on the line. “It comes to a hundred and forty-four pounds.”

“It cannot have.” He had gone quite still at the shutter.

“It is the only figure on this page that has not altered, and nothing alive stays the same for eight years.”

The silence ran on long enough that she looked up from the paper.

He was not looking at the paper. His eyes were fixed on her, and there was no hint in his expression of a man who had exposed someone, only the subtlety of a man who had just been handed something significant.

“Four minutes,” he said.

“It is more than three.”

“I was watching the clock over your head.” His hands were spread on the back of the chair opposite. “It took four minutes, and you spent two of them being polite about the tithe.”

“You will want to know whether he is drawing anywhere else.” Charlotte squared the sheet.

“There are three other names on that roll I could not put a face to.” He was addressing the window.

“Then look at those. Look at anything that has never altered, and begin there.”

He took a pencil out of his coat and held it out to her.

Charlotte did not take it at once. Writing on a stranger’s estate paper, in another woman’s library, was not a small thing. She knew how it would look to anybody coming through that door.

She took the pencil and wrote four words in the margin against Chettle’s line.

Look at the tidiest.

“That is the whole of it?” He had come round the table to read it.

“That is the whole of it.”

She gave the pencil back.

He read the four words twice. Then he folded the sheet along the crease it already had and put it away inside his coat.

They talked for an hour.

It went from the joiners to the estate, and from the estate to drainage. Charlotte heard herself explaining the low meadow at Ledwell to a man whose name she did not know, in more detail than the subject warranted, but did not stop.

“Eleven acres.” She had the figures without having to look for them. “Under water from November to May.”

“What is the tile?”

“Nine pounds for the pipe. Eighty-three to cut it and lay it.”

“And it returns?”

“Sixteen ten.” She had made the sum too often for it to cost her anything. “The tenant has wanted it four years.”

“Then it is done in six seasons.”

“It is done in six seasons.” She moved the candle an inch. “But my father has refused the nine pounds twice.”

“Why?” The question had no edge on it at all.

“Because the nine pounds is real and the sixteen ten is a promise, and he has had a bad twenty years of promises.” That came out flatter than she had intended.

She went on quickly instead about the coins. Roman, chiefly, and none of them good. A denarius of Domitian bought in March for one pound seven, with the reverse quite clear, and four sides of a letter about it.

“Is he happy?” He had turned round for it.

Nobody had ever asked her that, and the answer took a moment to find.

“Yes,” she said. “That is rather the difficulty.”

He laughed, but not at her, and she found she had been expecting it.

“You loathe this,” she said. “The rooms.”

“I loathe the rooms.”

“You are very good at standing in them.”

“I have been standing in them since I was four and twenty, and I have never got the trick of it.” He put a shoulder against the shutter. “There is a way of holding a glass that means a man is enjoying himself. I have watched it done a thousand times, but I cannot do it.”

“Nobody in that room is enjoying himself.” She said it without looking at him.

“Somebody must be. The matter proceeds apace.”

“It does because three hundred people are each waiting for one particular person to look at them.” She realised what she had said after she had let go of it. “That was not a complaint.”

“It did not sound like one.”

The candle had burned an inch.

Sitting still had begun to feel like a decision, so she got up, went along to the second bay and took down the bound thing with nothing on the spine.

She had known what it was from the doorway, and the knowledge had been sitting in her for an hour.

The flyleaf said Maria Godden in a young hand, and beneath it, in a hand that had got older and steadier, Maria Barnwell, Ledwell.

“Airs,” Charlotte said. “Italian. Four and twenty of them, and most of them are dreadful.”

“Whose is the name?”

“My mother’s.”

She turned to the fourth page of the second air and held it under the candle. The fingering had been pencilled in above the treble line, and then pencilled in again above that, smaller, with the first not rubbed out.

“That is my mother’s hand.” She put a finger beside the pencil without touching it.

“On the fourth page?” He had come to stand at her shoulder.

“She wrote the fingering twice. She could not decide which was easier.”

“And which was?” He was looking at the page and not at her.

“Neither. That was rather the way with her.” She closed the book and put it back into the gap it had come out of, level with the others.

“Papa sold the library. Lord Norbury bought most of it.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be.” She put her hand flat on the closed board. “I did not expect to see it again, but I have seen it. That will do.”

“You could ask for it.”

“It is on that shelf.” She took her hand off the spine. “It has been on that shelf four years, and it will be on it a long while after I have stopped being asked into this house.”

He looked at the shelf but did not argue with her, and she was obscurely grateful for that.

The door at the far end of the room opened suddenly.

“Your Grace.” A footman, with the light of the passage behind him. “Lady Beckwith is asking for you.”

“Thank you. I shall come,” he replied and left.

He said it perfectly easily, but it crossed the room and reached Charlotte a full second later.

She was at the door before he had finished turning round.

“Wait.” He did not say it loudly. “I have talked to you for an hour, and I do not know your name. I should like to know it.”