Twenty Minutes Unaccounted

Jane's letter had come up from Fornham by the carrier on Tuesday, and Isabella had read it four times since: three times for the courtship it asked her to watch, and once, the last, for the man who was being sent to watch it. She had it open on the dressing-table now, propped against the pin-tray, while Sarah stood behind her with a mouthful of hairpins and the patience of a woman engaged upon a cathedral.

You will give Mr Frank Tasburgh his fortnight, Jane wrote, in the hand that sloped more steeply the nearer she came to her lying-in, and you will write to me every day, Bell, every single day, and not merely that Emily looked well and the weather held. I want to know whether he sits by her or across from her, and whether he talks to her or to the room, and whether she laughs at what he says because it is amusing or because she is being kind. You are the only one of us who notices such things, and I cannot come. There followed half a page concerning the price of wax lights at the Fair, a sentence about Mr Mortlock's cough, and then, under the signature, as if it had occurred to her with the sand already on the ink: The family are sending the elder brother to keep an eye on him. A Fellow of some Cambridge college, very learned. You need not mind him.

Isabella looked at that sentence in the glass, reversed, where it was illegible, and found that she minded it a good deal. The family were sending the elder brother to keep an eye on him. It did not say on whom else the eye might fall, but a woman who had been married six years to Mr Joseph Garrod had no need to be told the direction of an eye; she had spent the whole of her twenties as its object.

"Your head a little forward, ma'am," said Sarah, round the pins.

She put her head a little forward. The Grecian knot was the work of forty minutes on an ordinary day and of nearer fifty when Sarah was in a mood to be perfect, which she was this morning, having heard from the cook that the whole county was come in. The hair went up from the nape in a long twist, honey-coloured and heavy, and was wound and wound again upon itself until it sat high at the back of the head like a thing carved, and then the short ringlets were teased loose at the temples, where the colour was paler and caught the light from the window as if somebody had gilded it on purpose. Mr Garrod had liked it dressed low and plain. He had said that a high knot made a tall woman look as though she thought herself taller, and Isabella, at twenty, had supposed that was a fact about knots.

She had worn black for a year and grey and lavender for a year after that, and had put off the last of the lavender in July with a feeling she had not examined and did not intend to. Now there were two pelisses laid out across the bed, because Sarah, who knew her own mind about most things, had not liked to know her mistress's: a dove-grey, quiet and becoming and entirely unexceptionable, and a midnight blue that Isabella had ordered in August from a mantua-maker in Abbeygate Street and had not yet worn out of the house.

"The grey, I suppose, ma'am," said Sarah, putting in the last pin and stepping back to judge it. "For the first day."

"No," said Isabella. "The blue."

It was the whole of the decision, and she was surprised by how little it cost to say aloud. Sarah's face did a small amount of work and then arranged itself, and she fetched the blue.

It was a very good pelisse. It was cut close, as the mantua-maker had been told it must be, so that it followed the line of her from the high waist to the shoulder without a crease and then fell long and straight to the instep; the cloth was a fine kerseymere so deep a blue that it went almost black in the folds, and the frogging down the front was black silk, and the narrow standing collar came up under her jaw and made her throat look whiter than it was. She was tall, and she was not slight, and all through her marriage she had been dressed by a man who thought both these things required apology. In the glass the blue apologised for nothing. It sat on the full curve of her breast and the round of her arm as though it had been invented for them, and she looked at it for a long moment, with her hands quite still at her sides, and then turned away before she could begin to think what Jane would say.

"Miss Emily is ready, ma'am," said Sarah, with her bonnet held out. "She has been ready this quarter of an hour."

Angel Hill, on the first day of the Fair, was not a place but a condition. The whole broad square between the long red front of the Angel and the grey bulk of the Abbey gate had been built over in a week with standings of canvas and deal, and every one of them was doing business at once, and the whole of Suffolk, so far as Isabella could judge, had come in to see it done. There were toy-stalls hung with tin trumpets and painted wooden horses and dolls in Spanish cloaks; there were the milliners' standings, three in a row, their ribbons fluttering on strings like the flags of small and rather vain nations; there was a man selling gingerbread kings with gilt on their crowns, and another selling Norwich shawls off a pole, and, at the corner nearest the Assembly Rooms, a waxwork with a great painted cloth across its front on which a lady in a red gown was being stabbed by a gentleman in a turban, in colours that did not occur in nature. The noise was continuous and impartial. A drum went somewhere behind the booths; a child was being sick near the shawls; a farmer's wife in a beaver bonnet was explaining to a farmer, at length, the difference between a thing being cheap and a thing being worth having.

Emily, at her side, was looking at none of it. Emily was eighteen and sensible and kind and had a neat brown head under a straw bonnet trimmed with primrose, and she was looking, with a composure that deceived nobody, at the steps of the Angel.

"I believe," said Isabella, "that is Mr Tasburgh."

"Is it?" said Emily. "I had not noticed."

He was coming down the steps and across through the crowd with his hat already off: fair-haired, open-faced, easy, a young man whom it would be very difficult to dislike and rather difficult to remember, which was not, in Isabella's experience, a bad quality in a husband. He made his bow to her first, as was correct, and then to Emily, as was more interesting to him, and said that it was the finest Fair he had ever seen and that he had been looking out for them this half-hour, both of which were plainly true. And then he turned, a little conscious, to the man who had come down the steps behind him at a slower pace, and said, "Mrs Garrod, may I present my brother? William, Mrs Garrod. Miss Mortlock."

The elder Mr Tasburgh was holding a printer's proof.

He had it folded lengthwise in one hand, a long strip of damp grey paper with the type standing up black on it and a correction inked down the margin, and he had evidently been reading it on the steps and had not finished, and he did not put it away quickly enough. It went into his coat a full second after it ought to have done, and the second was what she noticed; that, and the hand that put it there, which was broad across the back and long in the fingers, and the cuff above the hand, where there was a pale smear of something that she took at first for flour and then, as he bowed, recognised as chalk.

"Mrs Garrod," he said. "Miss Mortlock."

He was not so tall as his brother, but he was made more squarely and seemed to take up more of the air. He was in black, good black worn hard, with a plain white cravat that somebody had tied in a hurry, and he wanted the barber: his hair was black and thick and curled where it had grown too long over his collar and fell forward across his brow when he straightened. His face was pale, as though he lived a great deal indoors, and his brows were heavy and straight and very black, and under them his eyes, which were dark, went from Emily to her and stayed.

It was not a long look. It was not, in any sense the town would have recognised, an improper one. But it was entire. It went, without the least hurry, from the ringlets at her temple to the collar of the pelisse and down the line of the frogging to her gloves, and back to her face, and rested there, and she had the distinct impression of having been added up, and the sum carried, and the answer found to be very much what had been expected. Then it was gone, and he was looking at the waxwork.

"You are come to the Fair, Mr Tasburgh," she said, "at some sacrifice, I think. Your brother tells us you are a Fellow of Caius."

"My brother is generous with my history," said Mr Tasburgh. "Yes. Of Gonville and Caius. And yes, at some sacrifice; though I am told it is good for me."

"By whom?"

"By my mother, chiefly. She holds that a man who spends his whole year among undergraduates forgets how ordinary people conduct themselves, and should be sent periodically to a fair to be reminded."

"And are you reminded?"

He considered the waxwork, where the gentleman in the turban was still at his work. "I am instructed," he said. "I had not known that ordinary people conducted themselves quite so much with daggers."

Frank laughed. Emily laughed, kindly. Isabella did not, because she had heard beneath the dryness exactly what she was meant to hear beneath it, which was that the errand was a waste of a clever man's time, and that he would be obliged to everybody concerned if they would not make it a longer waste than it need be.

"Then you are here, I collect, on your brother's account," she said.

"I am here to see the Fair."

"Of course. As I am. I find that one sees a great deal of a fair, Mr Tasburgh, if one stands quite still and lets it go by. My sister writes that I am to see all of it, and give her an account of every booth."

"Every booth," said Mr Tasburgh. "That is a great responsibility."

"It is a very small one. I have only to look." She turned a little, to watch Frank, who had found a stall of tin trumpets and was explaining something about them to Emily with great seriousness. "And I am told that I need not mind anybody else who may be looking. My sister was quite particular on the point."

There was a pause. It was not long, and the drum filled most of it, but she felt it land.

"Your sister is very good," said Mr Tasburgh. "My mother was particular also. She said that Mrs Garrod was a lady of great taste and would certainly see that everything was done properly, and that I was to make myself agreeable, and on no account to be in the way."

"And how will you contrive it, sir? To be out of the way, and yet at the Fair?"

"I thought," said Mr Tasburgh, with perfect gravity, "that I might stand quite still, and let it go by."

She looked at him then directly, and found that he was looking at her, and that the corner of his mouth had moved; not much; not enough to call a smile, if one were giving evidence. She had the sensation, which she had last had at fourteen at a game of spillikins, of having drawn a stick out of the heap very carefully and been obliged to watch somebody else draw out a better one.

"Then we shall have a great deal of standing still between us," she said, "and the Fair will go by twice."

"It is very long," said Mr Tasburgh. "It will bear it."

They walked, after that, the four of them, as people must at a fair: along the row of milliners, where Emily stopped to admire a bonnet with a curled ostrich feather the colour of a pigeon's breast and Frank, to his credit, did not offer to buy it; past the gingerbread kings; round the corner of the waxwork and back towards the Abbey gate, where the crowd was thickest and a man on a cart was reading out something about the Fair's ancient charter to nobody who was listening. Isabella kept a pace behind the young people, as she had kept a pace behind people all her life, and found that the elder Mr Tasburgh, without any sign of having arranged it, kept a pace behind them too, and on her right hand, and exactly as far from her as the crowd allowed, which was not always very far.

He did not talk. He was, she thought, the least talkative gentleman she had ever walked beside, and she had walked beside Mr Garrod. But his silence was not Mr Garrod's, which had been a kind of dining-room weather that one sat in and waited for to clear. This was attention. Once, when Frank stopped short before a stall of pocket-knives and Emily walked on two steps before she knew he had stopped, Isabella saw the elder brother's eyes go to the gap between them and measure it, and come back, and she knew — as she knew the depth of a curtsey and the cost of a feather — that he was making a note. And once, when a stout gentleman in a drab coat stood too long in front of her and she was obliged to turn sideways to go by him, she felt rather than saw Mr Tasburgh's hand come up, not touching her, not near enough to touch, but there, in the air an inch from her elbow, as if the arm had taken a precaution without consulting him; and then it went down again, and he was looking at the Abbey gate as though he had come to Bury expressly to admire its masonry.

From somewhere behind the shawls a voice she knew carried clear across the square, large and warm and pitched for the whole of the town: "Well, and there is Mrs Garrod in colour, and I am glad to see it, and so I shall tell her." Isabella did not turn her head. She had the satisfaction of knowing that by tea-time the blue pelisse would be known in Whiting Street, and the faint, less comfortable sense that the man at her elbow had heard it too, and had not turned his head either, out of what she could only suppose was tact.

At the steps of the Angel the brothers took their leave. Frank was to dine with his brother at the Angel and ride out to Thurston after, and would be in again tomorrow; he said so twice, to Emily, and once to Isabella as an afterthought. The elder Mr Tasburgh was lodging at the Angel for the fortnight, in the second-floor front, over the square. He said so once, to nobody in particular, and bowed — to Emily a degree more deeply, as one bowed to a charge, and to Isabella a degree less, as one bowed to a chaperone; and she saw that he had done it on purpose, and saw that he saw that she saw it, and returned it to the exact degree.

"He is very clever, Frank says," said Emily, as they turned up Churchgate Street. "Frank is a little afraid of him."

"I daresay," said Isabella.

"Did you like him, Aunt?"

"I hardly spoke to him, my love. He was attending to the waxwork."

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