IX.
The next evening there was whist.
It was Mr. Ackroyd's idea. He had been four days without a rubber, and his foot was better, and he wished, he said, to see whether a lord could play cards as well as he spent money. Lady Anne and Mr. Oglethorpe made up the table against Mr. Ackroyd and the Earl, and Dorothea, who did not play cards for pleasure because she could count every card in the pack and found it dull, sat by the fire with her work.
"Miss Bramley will keep the score," said Mr. Ackroyd, settling himself. "She always does at home. A fine clear hand, Miss Bramley. Better than a clerk's."
"I've a cut on my finger, sir."
"Then you'll hold the pencil in the other ones. Come, come, I want it done properly. His lordship's sister will be keeping it in her head otherwise and cheating me in my own favour to be polite."
There was nothing to be done. Dorothea's needle stopped for a moment and went on. Thomasin sat down at the little table beside the players with the card and the pencil, and for two hours, in the clear upright hand that had written every letter to Carrowby since June, she wrote down the names of the players—Ld. C. and Mr. A., Lady A. and Mr. O.—and the points of every game, and the rubbers, and drew a line under each, and added them.
She tried to disguise it. She made her figures rounder than her own; she made the capitals small and plain. But a hand is a hand. It is as much a part of a person as a walk, and on the third rubber she forgot, because Mr. Ackroyd was arguing with the vicar about the honours, and wrote "Lady Anne" in full where she should have put the initial, with the long looped y-tail she had made at the end of "Ackroyd" on two hundred pages of letter paper.
At the end of the evening Mr. Ackroyd had won eleven shillings and was in high good humour. The vicar went home. The Earl stood up from the table and stretched, and looked down at the score card where it lay, and then went to the fire to speak to Dorothea, and Thomasin let her breath out.
When she looked back at the table, the card was gone.
Lady Anne was standing at the window with her back to the room, drawing the curtain. Her hand, as she turned away from it, went into the pocket of her gown and came out again empty. She came back to the fire and said good night to them all, pleasantly, and to Thomasin last, and did not look at her any longer than at anyone else.
Thomasin did not sleep that night. At breakfast the next morning she could eat nothing. The Earl was not at breakfast; he had gone out early, the footman said, to the hill farms. Lady Anne was not at breakfast either. Mr. Ackroyd ate enough for four and talked of settlements.