A Lady Sworn

Letty Harbord was sent to the inquest to be seen, and it occurred to nobody, least of all to Letty, that she might look back.

Mr Harbord had his left foot upon a stool beneath the breakfast table, where it could not be seen and was not to be mentioned, and he carved his ham with the particular vigour of a man who wishes it understood that nothing whatever is the matter with him.

"It was an accident," he said. "A drunk man and a frozen leat, in the dark, a quarter of a mile from the only house that would have him. There is nothing in it. Every man in the parish knows there is nothing in it."

Letty, who had come down in her wrapper with her hair in a single plait over her shoulder, poured his coffee and said nothing, because he had not yet come to the part of it that concerned her, and she had learnt very young that a gentleman arrives at what he wants of you by way of everything he wants you to agree with first.

"Flatman must sit, of course. The law is the law and I should be the last man to say otherwise. But he will have it over in a morning, if he has any sense, and he has a little." He put a piece of ham into his mouth and considered her across it. "I am to be called. Did your aunt tell you? I saw the man lifted out, and so Flatman must have me say so to fourteen farmers who have known it since Thursday. Which means I cannot sit on the bench, and there must be somebody on the bench."

"And it is to be me," said Letty.

"It is to be you, and your aunt with you, at every sitting until it is done. You will go in the carriage and you will sit beneath the window where the Harbords have always sat, and you will look — " he made a small, satisfied gesture with his fork, which took in her face, her plait and the whole of her — "exactly as you look. Easy. Not solemn, mind; solemn is as bad as frightened. If the Harbords are seen to stay away the parish will say we have something to stay away from. If my daughter sits there in her best and takes no more notice of it than of a sermon, they will say what is true, which is that we have nothing to fear from a drowned drunkard and a Bury attorney."

She understood him perfectly. She had been understanding him perfectly for two-and-twenty years, and it was one of the comforts of her existence that what he required of her was so seldom difficult. He did not want her to follow the evidence; he did not suppose she could. He wanted her to be looked at, and to be seen, in being looked at, to be unconcerned, and there was no occupation in the world for which she had been more thoroughly prepared.

"Shall I wear the green?" she said.

Her father's face cleared. "Wear the green," he said, and went back to his ham, and Letty went up to be dressed.

There was, she thought, no pleasure quite like it, and she had never seen why she ought to be ashamed of one that harmed nobody.

The fire in her dressing room had been built up high against the frost, which had stood upon the windows since before Christmas and furred them so thick that the park beyond was only a whiteness with a grey light in it. Her maid laced her briskly into her stays, the long ones, which put her bosom where fashion wished it and made of her waist rather more than nature had troubled to, and Letty stood with her arms a little raised and watched herself come into shape in the glass. Then the muslin went over her head, white, sprigged very small with green, falling from beneath the breast in a soft straight column that did not so much hide the body under it as advise the room of its existence. The sleeves were long for the season and close at the wrist, and the muslin at the neck was filled in with a fine cambric frill, so that she was entirely proper and entirely aware of the skin beneath the proper things, which was, she privately considered, the whole art of dressing.

Her hair took longest. It came down past her waist when it was loosed, pale as new straw by daylight and something warmer by candles, and her maid brushed it out and divided it and plaited it and wound the plaits high at the back of her head into a crown, pinning each turn with a patience Letty could never have supplied herself. Then came the tongs, and three curls at each temple coaxed into softness, and a long look in the glass by the two of them together, conspirators.

"You will do, miss," said the maid, who was not given to flattery and therefore counted for more.

The pelisse was dark green velvet, very dark, almost the colour of holly in shadow, and it was cut close to the figure and fastened down the front with little covered buttons, of which there were a great many. It gave her a waist, and a line from shoulder to hem, and a gravity that the muslin alone would not have had; it was the right thing for a young woman who was to sit at an inquest, and it was also, she knew, extremely becoming. Over it went the swansdown tippet, soft as breath at her throat. She drew on her gloves — white kid, fitted close, buttoned at the wrist — and put on the bonnet and let the maid tie the ribbons, and turned from the glass with the satisfaction of an artist whose work is finished.

She knew what she was for. She had no quarrel with it. It seemed to her a great deal better to be for something than for nothing, and a great deal pleasanter to be for this than for most things.

Mrs Cantrell was in the carriage already, wrapped to the nose in furs and eager as a girl.

"They say the jury are not satisfied," she said, before the door was well shut. "Mrs Gowing at the Bell had it from the ostler, who had it from one of them in the tap-room on Saturday night. Not satisfied, and a surgeon come over from Bury who has cut the poor man open like a Christmas goose. I have never been to an inquest, Letty. Your father thinks it will be very dull."

"Then I dare say it will be," said Letty, and settled her skirts.

The road from Crowmere ran down between the hedges to the turnpike, and all Suffolk lay under the frost as though it had been cast in iron and then whitened. The ruts had frozen where the wheels left them in the last thaw, and the carriage went over them with a jolting that set her aunt's bonnet nodding and made the horses throw their heads. Every twig on every hedge was cased in rime. The ponds were white and the ditches were white and the ploughland lay in hard pale ridges under a sky the colour of pewter, and nothing moved in it but a flight of rooks going over very high, and the breath of the horses, and the smoke of a cottage chimney standing straight up in the windless air like a stroke of a pencil. Somewhere under all that whiteness a man had gone through the ice of the Crowmere leat and not come out of it until morning, and Letty looked out at the fields and found that she did not at all like to think of it, and so did not.

The Bell's yard was full. She had seen it full on a market day and on the day of the Bury races, but never like this: carts drawn up against the wall with their shafts in the air, farmers' gigs, a donkey tethered to the pump, and men everywhere, in drab greatcoats and gaiters, stamping their boots on the frozen cobbles and beating their hands together and talking in the low, companionable, relishing way of people who have a great deal to say and all morning to say it in. The talk dropped as the Harbord carriage came under the arch. It did not stop — nothing so marked as that — but it lowered, as a room lowers when a door opens, and a number of hats came off, and a number of faces turned towards the carriage with an expression she had seen before on the faces of people waiting to be told something.

She let the ostler hand her down. She smiled at him, and at nobody in particular, and at the yard in general, with exactly that degree of pleasant composure which says that one has come to a place where one has every right to be. She felt the looks settle upon her pelisse and her bonnet and her face, and she carried them in through the door and up the stairs as she would have carried a train.

The long room ran the length of the house over the yard, and it was warmer than she had expected and smelled of tallow, wet wool, and a great many people. A fire was burning at one end. The jury sat on two forms along the wall — fourteen men, some she knew by sight and a few by name: Mr Frewer the miller, broad and slow; a thin grazier from the Elmswell side; the saddler, whose shop she passed every Sunday. They had their hats on their knees. At a table in the middle, with papers laid square in front of him and a pen he was not using, sat Mr Flatman, the coroner, a narrow grey man with a Bury attorney's careful face, who rose at once when he saw her.

The bench beneath the window was the gentlefolks' bench because it had always been the gentlefolks' bench. It was old oak, dark with handling, set crosswise under the long window so that whoever sat there had the light behind them and the whole room in front, and it was long enough for three people who liked one another, or two who did not. There was a man upon it already. He rose as she crossed the room.

He was very tall — so tall that he stooped a little as he straightened, as if the ceiling had been built for other men — and lean, and wide across the shoulders, and dressed in a black coat and a buff waistcoat that were well enough and no more. His hair was dark brown and cut short, and nobody had troubled to arrange it. His face was pale, with the cold standing in two red marks along the cheekbones, and he had a pair of steel spectacles in his hand, which he had evidently just taken off. He bowed. It was a perfectly correct bow, neither too deep nor too shallow, and it told her nothing whatever.

"Miss Harbord," said Mr Flatman, a trifle hurriedly, as though the introduction were a thing to be got over before anybody could object to it. "Mrs Cantrell. May I — Mr Brame, of Bury. Mr Brame is the surgeon who — who opened the body, on my warrant, on Saturday. He is to give his opinion to the jury."

Everybody in the room knew what Mr Brame's opinion was going to be. Letty knew it, though nobody had told her; she had known it the moment the talk in the yard had dropped, and she knew it again now, from the way Mr Flatman's eyes went from her to the surgeon and back and then very quickly to his papers. She knew it from the silence on the jury's forms, which was of the attentive kind.

"Mr Brame," she said, and inclined her head, and smiled the smile her father had ordered.

"Miss Harbord." His voice was low and level and rather dry. He looked at her — straight, without either the admiration she was used to or the embarrassment she had half expected — and she had the odd sensation of being looked at by someone who was not in the least concerned with whether she was pretty, but was simply noting her, as a man might note the state of the weather. Then he stood aside to let her pass to the bench.

Mrs Cantrell went in first, to the far end, by the wall, where she could see the jury and the table and the door and had no intention of missing any of them. That left Letty the middle. It left Mr Brame the end nearest the room. There was nothing to be done about it without a fuss, and she was here expressly not to make one; she sat, and arranged her pelisse, and he sat also, and the bench, which had seemed long enough when she came in, was at once a good deal shorter.

There were perhaps eighteen inches between them. She could not have said how she knew it so exactly, only that she did. There was the green velvet of her pelisse, lying in its folds upon the oak, and then there was a space of old dark wood, and then there was the black cloth of his coat, and his hand resting upon his knee with the spectacles in it. It was a large hand, clean — very clean, scrubbed pink across the knuckles as though it had been washed in cold water and more than once — and it was perfectly still. She did not think she had ever seen a man hold his hand so still.

She looked away from it at once, at the jury, and smiled at Mr Frewer, who reddened and looked at his hat.

Mr Flatman was shuffling his papers. The fire cracked. Down in the yard somebody was laughing and was shushed. Her aunt leaned forward with her hands folded, all eagerness, looking at everything in the room except her niece. And Letty sat very upright in the grey light of the window, easy, unconcerned, exactly as she had been sent to sit, and was aware — in her shoulder, in her left side under the velvet, in the gloved hand she had laid upon her lap nearest to him — of each one of the eighteen inches, as distinctly as if they had been drawn upon the air in chalk.

It was the most extraordinary thing. He had not moved. He was not looking at her. He had put his spectacles back on, and taken a folded paper from his coat, and was reading it with a small crease between his brows, entirely occupied, as though she were not there at all.

She found that she minded that very much more than she ought, and that she did not in the least know why, and that she was curious to find out.

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