Nell's Choice

Nell asked Perrin for the trap at ten and was in the yard with her coat buttoned before Héloïse came out onto the step.

“You are going to Ambry. What for?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s done.” Nell took the reins off the boy, because she had driven a trap since she was eleven and it steadied her hands. “And before you ask again — if I tell you now you’ll either talk me out of it or go and do something to match it, and you’d manage either. Whatever you do this afternoon I want it to be yours. I’ll not spend my last day of holding the pen arranging your conscience as well.”

“That is an extremely high-handed way of being decent.”

“Aye. It’s the only sort I do.”

· · ·Scene break

The telegraph office at Ambry was a counter at the back of the post office, the clerk a young man with a green shade and a cold, and the rate a shilling for the first twenty words and a penny for every word after.

Nell’s first draft ran to two hundred and sixty words. She took it to the window and began cutting, and the cutting took forty minutes and taught her more about herself than the nine years had.

The reasons went first: a girl of eleven, a man from Bath with a case of instruments, thirteen years and a book in a kitchen drawer. All true, and none of it hers to put on a wire. Then a sentence about what a guild is for, which was the best in the draft and was pure vanity. Then the apology, which took longest, because an apology is a thing you send to a person and a wire like that goes to a file.

And last she took out the name. Proceeding from the householder was the truth, and anybody in the riding could work out in four seconds who the householder of Wexhall was, so leaving it out made no practical difference at all. She left it out anyway. It was the one piece of arranging she allowed herself all day: that if the words Héloïse Vantreux were to be said aloud today in front of witnesses, the mouth that said them first should be their owner’s.

What she handed over the counter was a hundred and thirty-seven words.

TO THE REGISTRY GUILD HOUSE FOR TEODOR SECOND CLERK — HARTIGAN OPERATOR AT WEXHALL PARISH OF AMBRY — MY PRELIMINARY OF THE FIFTH DAY IS FALSE — NO DEAD SIGNATURE ANYWHERE IN THAT HOUSE AT ANY POINT — THE WORKING IS LIVING AND PERIODIC AT SIXTY TWO — I KNEW IT ON THE FOURTH DAY — I LIED TWICE ON MINUTE TO INSPECTOR HALE ON THE EIGHTH DAY AND SIGNED IT READ OVER AND CONFIRMED — THE FULL FINDING GOES TO HALE IN PERSON AT TWO TODAY — ALSO ENTER ON THE FILE KETTLEBY JANUARY NINE YEARS PAST — AGNES SELBY AGED FORTY BURNED OUT LIVING ON A RESIDUAL CLASSIFICATION — I WAS SECOND OPERATOR CARRIED THE SALT AND FILED NO DISSENT — SHE DID NOT SPEAK FOR A YEAR — I CLAIM NO FEE AT WEXHALL AND HAVE REFUSED IT IN WRITING — ENTER ALL OF THIS TODAY — HARTIGAN

It cost ten shillings and ninepence out of eleven pounds and some shillings, which was everything Nell Hartigan had in the world.

“That’s a long one, miss,” the clerk said. “Bad news?”

“It’s nine years late. Send it.”

She watched him send it, which was the part she had not anticipated and would remember longest: a counter in a market town on a Monday morning, a boy with a cold tapping out she did not speak for a year in a rhythm that meant nothing to him at all, at a penny a word, while somebody outside argued about a horse.

Then she put the engagement on the counter, turned it to the last page, and wrote across the foot of it:

No fee is claimed under this engagement and none has been received, by me or on my account, at any time. The sum of sixty guineas is refused entire. N. Hartigan, fourteenth day.

“Your name under that as witness,” she said, “and the date, and the office stamp. I’ll pay for the stamp.”

The clerk read it upside down, because clerks do.

“Sixty guineas,” he said, and stamped it rather carefully, as though the paper might mind.

· · ·Scene break

Rennick Hale came up the drive at two in a hired gig with the hood up, and there were nine people in the hall of Wexhall to see him do it, which nobody had arranged.

Sibyl’s boxes stood roped along the wainscot with the cards on them. Mrs Pardoe had come up with her sleeves down. Bess and Joan were on the bottom two steps, sent for the coats and not gone back. Perrin had his hand on the latch. Sibyl was at the turn of the stairs and no further.

Nell stood by the hall table with the ledger under her arm, watching him take his gloves off finger by finger on the step the way he had on the eighth day, and knew she had about ninety seconds to speak first if she was going to.

Héloïse Vantreux came out of the morning room and went past her.

“Inspector Hale.”

“Your grace.”

“Before you take off your coat.” She had two papers in her hand and gave him both. “The first determines the engagement between this house and your guild, at noon today, under a clause I wrote into the form myself on the day I signed it. Your operator’s fortnight had two hours to run and it is over. The second is a statement in my hand, signed, which I shall be obliged if you will read in full and enter. I have kept a copy.”

Hale stood in the middle of the hall with rain on his shoulders and read it, and Nell watched the household watch him do it: Mrs Pardoe’s hands going into her apron, Bess’s face, and up at the turn of the stairs a woman in grey with her mouth already open on a sentence she was not going to get to use.

“Say it aloud, please,” Héloïse said. “There are people in this hall who have been lied to for eighteen months, two of them hurt by it, and I would rather they had it from me than from Ambry on Thursday.”

“Ma’am, I’d advise —“

“I am aware of what you would advise. Say it aloud, or I shall.”

He read it out, flat, in the Midland voice that came through when he stopped performing the guild house.

“The working at Wexhall proceeds from me. It shut the drawing-room door on Miss Hartigan on the first day; it shut my sister-in-law in the linen room for four hours in November; it took a ladder out from under a servant in August. I am not going to call any of those a haunting again. I will not have the ritual. I do not consent today and I shall not consent in November, and if your guild applies to the magistrate at Ambry I shall attend in person and say all of this again with the county in the room, at whatever cost to my name. Héloïse Vantreux.”

Nobody in the hall said anything at all.

Then Mrs Pardoe, to nobody, in the voice she used for a delivery boy at the wrong door: “Well.”

“Thank you,” said Héloïse.

“Your grace.” Hale folded the paper along its own crease. “I’ll not pretend to you. Your consent was worth a great deal on the eighth day, when I had discretion. It is worth nothing in November. You have not refused a procedure. You have given me, in your own hand, the finding that makes it certain.”

“I know what I have given you. I have been reading your second schedule since six this morning, paragraph by paragraph, with a woman who did not once tell me it would be all right.” Héloïse did not move. “I am not refusing it to escape it. I am refusing it out loud so that nobody can say afterwards it was done to a confused widow who did not know what was in her own house. If it is done, it will be done to a woman who said no first, in front of her servants, in writing.”

At the turn of the stairs, Sibyl came down four steps.

“Inspector. I said on Saturday I should tell you this whether or not I was asked.” She had her hands folded. “I have known since the twentieth of November. The linen-room door opened when she was six feet from it, which I gave you at the time; what I did not give you was that I looked at her face in that passage and she was not surprised. I am not going to tell you what ought to be done about it. I have spent eleven months certain that I knew, and I have just watched her say it herself in this hall, and I find I am no longer certain of anything but the dates.”

Hale wrote it down in the hall, standing, on his knee.

“Thank you, Miss Vantreux.”

“I find most true things come in pairs,” Sibyl said, “and I have not liked either of these.”

· · ·Scene break

“Inspector,” Nell said. “A minute, and you’ll want it in writing.”

“Miss Hartigan.”

“My preliminary of the fifth day is false. There is no dead signature anywhere in this house and there never was, and I knew it at half past one on the morning of the fourth day. On the eighth you asked me on minute whether any person was awake within thirty feet of my instrument, and I said no, and she was inside twenty feet with a candle and the needle went up the scale after her. And you asked whether I had formed any opinion that the working proceeds from a living person under this roof, and I said none, sir. Both are lies and I knew it when I told them.”

Hale did not move.

“Second thing, and it isn’t about this house. Nine years ago this January, at Kettleby, I was second operator on a clearance classified as a residual haunting on a dead mother. It was a living working and it belonged to the householder, a woman of forty named Agnes Selby, and it was the only thing between her and a brother who had broken her arm. We took it out entire in forty minutes and she did not speak for a year. I said once that it was wrong and I did not file the dissent, because I was three months licensed with two hundred pounds on my name.”

“You are telling me this now.”

“I’m telling you at twenty past two,” Nell said, “and the registry had it at half eleven.”

“By wire,” Hale said.

“By wire. Direct to the registry, for Teodor, second clerk. A hundred and thirty-seven words, ten and ninepence, and here’s the office receipt with the time on it.” She put it on the hall table. “It’s on the file before your report, and before anybody could decide what to do about it, and that was the point and I’ll not pretend otherwise.”

“You went over my head to a clerk.”

“I did.”

“I stood on that step in the rain and told you write it down early.” And it came, at last: the temper, low and entirely flat, the anger of a careful man who had been careful nineteen years. “Early meant the ninth day. Early meant a letter to me. It did not mean the last afternoon of an engagement, by telegraph, to a boy in a basement, where no man in the building could look at it first and think.”

“No,” Nell said. “It meant exactly that. Anything else and it goes into a room with men in it, and I’ve had nine years of finding out what comes out of those rooms.”

She put the ledger on the table beside the receipt.

“Pages all there, numbered. Every reading in it is true, including the ones I wrote at half past one in the morning knowing what they’d cost me. The licence ticket’s in my case if you want it.”

“I have no authority to take that off you. A clerk will write to you; it will be a printed form and it will not mention Kettleby.” Hale picked up the ledger and looked at the spine. “The bond is called in on the day the finding is entered, in full, and there is no board and no hearing, because a breach found on the operator’s own written admission does not get one.”

“I know the clause.”

“Yes,” he said. “You always did.”

He put his gloves on.

“Your grace. The report goes up tonight. The application will be made within the month and heard at Ambry when Verel has the list. I cannot prevent it and I would rather it did not come to that, and those are still two separate facts.” He stopped in the doorway. “Miss Hartigan. For what it is worth, and I want you to understand that it is worth nothing at all: that will be the best report I read this year, and I shall never forgive you for the clerk.”

The gig went down the drive. Perrin shut the door. The hall was a hall again, with nine people in it and nothing to do.

· · ·Scene break

Nell found her in the morning room twenty minutes later, standing at the writing table with the lamp not lit.

“Two things, and then I’ll see to my case.” She put the endorsed contract on the blotter with the office stamp uppermost. “That’s the fee. Refused entire, in writing, witnessed and stamped at Ambry at twenty to twelve this morning. You determined the engagement at noon and the terms still owe me for the work done, and I’m not having it. Not a guinea, not for the fortnight and not for the post-chaise, and if you send it after me I’ll send it back, and if you send it twice I’ll be rude about it.”

Héloïse did not touch the paper.

“And the second?”

“Second.” Nell stood where she was, six feet off, which was the distance she had kept since a gallery on the ninth day. “Nothing has happened between us. I want that said out loud while there are still witnesses in the house, because in a week somebody in Ambry will say the guild woman was got at, and I want the order of it plain. On Friday in that cupboard I stopped, and you know I stopped, and I’ve had three days to change my mind and I didn’t. Not because I didn’t want to. Because until half past eleven this morning I held the pen over you, and a woman who holds the pen doesn’t get the other thing.

“It’s gone now. No licence, no bond, no fee, no report to write, no claim on you of any kind. I’ve made myself the one person in England who cannot do you a ha’porth of good.” She picked her case up. “So whatever you think about me from here, you’ll think it with nothing owing either way. I’m not asking you for anything. I’m telling you where the accounts stand.”

Héloïse stood by the cold lamp with the stamped paper in front of her and her hands at her sides.

She did not answer her either.