At precisely a quarter past six every evening, rain or shine, Lord Ambrose Pennington went for a walk.
He had done so for fifty years. The people of Hartsbury, a small and agreeable market town tucked into a fold of the Cotswold hills, set their clocks by him. When the great front door of Pennington Hall swung open and his lordship appeared at the top of the steps, tall and thin and upright as a fire iron, in his black tailcoat and his white collar and his tall silk hat, with his gloves buttoned and his silver-handled cane in his hand, half the kitchens in town put the kettle on.
He was seventy-six years old. His knees had opinions about the hill. His physician had opinions about his knees. Lord Ambrose had opinions about his physician, which he shared freely. And none of them had ever once stopped him walking.
This particular evening was in late October, and it was, he decided as he reached the bottom of the steps, a very fine one. The air was crisp and smelled of woodsmoke and apples. The great oak at the end of the drive had gone every color of a hearth fire, crimson and amber and gold, and its leaves were drifting down onto the cobbles in the last of the light. Over the rooftops to the east, the sky was turning a deep and glowing orange.
“A moon tonight,” Lord Ambrose remarked to no one in particular. “A proper one.” He tapped his cane twice on the cobbles, a habit he could not have explained, and set off down the hill.
The first person he met was the lamplighter.
The lamplighter of Hartsbury was a boy of eleven named Tom Ruddle, whose father had been lamplighter before him until his back gave out. Tom carried a long brass pole with a little flame at the end, and he went from lamp to lamp along the High Street each evening, reaching up on tiptoe to light the gas. He was not quite tall enough for the job. He did it anyway.
“Evening, my lord,” said Tom, saluting with the pole and very nearly setting his own cap on fire.
“Good evening, Master Ruddle.” Lord Ambrose stopped, as he always did, and regarded the boy gravely. “I have a riddle for you tonight.”
Tom’s face lit up brighter than the lamp. This was the best part of his day.
“What,” said Lord Ambrose, “grows shorter the longer it lives?”
Tom frowned. He thought about it very hard, all the way up the ladder to the next lamp and all the way back down. Then he grinned.
“A candle!”
“Correct.” Lord Ambrose produced a shiny penny from his waistcoat pocket and flipped it into the air, and Tom caught it neatly. “And a lamplighter, I suspect, does the opposite. You’ve grown an inch since August, Master Ruddle. You’ll reach those lamps without your tiptoes by spring.”
He walked on, leaving behind him a boy standing a little taller than he had a moment before.
Outside the church, as she did every evening, stood Polly Marsh, the flower girl, with her basket. She was sixteen, freckled, and fiercely businesslike, and she had kept a single red rose aside for his lordship every evening for four years, regardless of the season, by means she declined to discuss.
“One red rose, my lord,” she said, holding it out. “Same as always.”
“Same as always,” Lord Ambrose agreed, and paid her a shilling, which was far too much for a rose, and which they had both long since agreed not to mention. He tucked the rose carefully into his buttonhole.
“Is she coming tonight, my lord?” Polly asked. She asked it every evening.
“She always does,” said Lord Ambrose. He said it every evening, too.
At the bakery, Mr. Dobbs was just pulling down his shutters. He saw his lordship coming and, without a word, reached back into the shop and came out with something wrapped in a paper twist. A Chelsea bun, still warm, sticky with honey and studded with currants. Lord Ambrose was not supposed to have sweets. His physician had been very clear on this point. Mr. Dobbs had been giving him a bun every evening for thirty years, and the physician had never been informed.
“A fine moon tonight, my lord,” said Mr. Dobbs.
“A magnificent one, Mr. Dobbs. I shall be watching it closely.”
He ate the bun as he walked, very neatly, in small bites, so as not to get honey on his gloves.
It was halfway down Market Lane, in the narrow, shadowy stretch between the ironmonger’s and the old coaching inn, that someone attempted to steal his watch.
It was very well done, in its way. A small, ragged figure came darting out of an alley, collided with his lordship’s elbow, mumbled an apology, and darted on. Lord Ambrose felt the faintest tug at his waistcoat. He looked down. His gold pocket watch, which had been his father’s, was gone.
He did not shout. He did not call for a constable. He simply turned, unhurried, and reached out with his long silver-handled cane, and with the crook of its handle, neatly hooked the collar of the fleeing boy before he had gone three steps.
The boy stopped with a jerk and a squawk, like a fish on a line.
He was perhaps twelve. Thin as a broom handle, with a dirty face and a coat three sizes too big and the gold watch clutched in one grubby fist. He looked up at the tall old gentleman in the top hat with the expression of someone who is fairly sure he is about to be hanged.
Lord Ambrose regarded him for a long moment.
“What is your name, young man?”
“…Jack, sir.”
“Well, Jack.” Lord Ambrose held out his gloved hand, and after a moment of very obvious internal struggle, Jack put the watch into it. “That was a remarkably deft piece of work. Fast hands. Good timing. Admirable nerve.” He tucked the watch back into his pocket. “You are wasting all three.”
Jack blinked. This was not how these conversations usually went.
“When did you last eat?” asked Lord Ambrose.
Jack did not answer, which was an answer.
Lord Ambrose looked at the half-eaten Chelsea bun in his other hand. He sighed, with the deep regret of a man parting with a treasure, and handed it over. It vanished in three bites.
“My head groom,” said Lord Ambrose, “is getting on in years and in need of a stable boy with fast hands and good timing. The position comes with a bed above the stables, three meals a day, and a coat that fits.” He let go of the boy’s collar. “Pennington Hall, at the top of the hill. Seven o’clock tomorrow morning. Ask for Mr. Barrow. Tell him I sent you.”
Jack stared at him, sticky-faced, mouth open.
“Why?” he finally managed.
Lord Ambrose considered the question seriously.
“Because someone once did the same for me,” he said. “A very long time ago.” He tapped his cane twice on the cobbles. “Seven o’clock, Jack. Don’t be late. Mr. Barrow is terrifying.”
And he walked on toward the hill, leaving a very small thief standing in the lamplight, quite unable to move.
At the bottom of Church Lane, Lord Ambrose observed a problem.
The problem was walking along the churchyard wall in two halves, about ten paces apart. The first half was the new curate, Mr. Ellis, a gangly young man with spectacles and ink on his fingers, who blushed if you so much as said good morning to him. The second half was Miss Hartley, the village schoolmistress, small and neat and sensible, with a stack of copybooks under her arm. They had been walking home along this same wall, ten paces apart, every evening since the curate arrived in the spring. Every evening, each of them pretended very hard not to notice the other. The entire town had been watching this for six months with mounting despair.
Lord Ambrose sighed. Somebody, clearly, was going to have to do something.
“Miss Hartley!” he called. “Mr. Ellis! What luck.”
They both stopped, startled, and turned.
“Miss Hartley,” said Lord Ambrose, with an expression of deep concern, “it is growing dark, and those copybooks look dreadfully heavy, and I would of course see you home myself, but my physician has absolutely forbidden me to carry anything heavier than a Chelsea bun.” He turned to the curate. “Mr. Ellis. I wonder if I might impose on you to escort Miss Hartley to her door. As a personal favor to me.”
Mr. Ellis went the color of a ripe tomato. Miss Hartley went the color of a slightly less ripe one.
“I… of course, my lord,” stammered the curate. “If… if Miss Hartley would…”
“That would be… very kind,” said Miss Hartley to her shoes.
The curate took the copybooks. Their fingers touched. They both jumped as though stung.
“Splendid,” said Lord Ambrose, and tipped his hat, and walked away up the hill, listening with great satisfaction to the sound behind him of two people beginning, very haltingly, to talk about the weather.
The path up Beacon Rise was steep and winding, and his knees made their opinions known on every step. But he had climbed it every evening for fifty years, and he would climb it tonight. At the top, the path came out onto a little cobbled overlook at the edge of the hill, where the town spread out below in a jumble of slate roofs and crooked chimneys, all glowing amber in the dusk. A great old oak tree leaned over it, its branches heavy with leaves in every shade of flame. And beneath the oak, on its iron post, stood a single old gas lamp. It had been put there by Lord Ambrose’s grandfather, so that walkers on the hill could find their way home in the dark. It was the only lamp in Hartsbury that Tom Ruddle did not have to light. Lord Ambrose lit it himself.
He did so now, carefully, with a match from his waistcoat. The little flame caught and bloomed behind the glass, warm and gold.
Then he stood beside it, leaning on his cane, and looked out over the town, and waited.
The moon came up slowly. It rose out of the hills to the east, enormous and golden, bigger than he had seen it in years, so close it looked as if you could reach out from the overlook and touch it. Its light poured across the rooftops and the chimneys, and the falling leaves drifted down through it in the wind, red and orange and gold, like sparks from a fire.
Lord Ambrose took the red rose carefully out of his buttonhole and held it in his gloved hand.
He had stood in this exact spot fifty years ago tonight. Under this same lamp, in this same moonlight, a nervous young man of twenty-six with a rose in his hand and a ring in his pocket and absolutely no idea what he was going to say. He had prepared a speech. He had practiced it for three weeks. When the moment came, he forgot every single word of it and simply said, “Will you?” And she had laughed at him, and said yes.
The wind moved through the old oak. The leaves fell. The moon climbed.
And behind him, on the cobbles of the other path, the one that wound up the far side of the hill from the vicarage, he heard footsteps. Slow, uneven footsteps, and the soft tap of a second cane.
Lord Ambrose smiled, and did not turn around.
“You’re late, my dear,” he said.
“I am seventy-four years old, Ambrose,” said a tart voice behind him. “I’m entitled to be late. Besides, the vicar’s wife would not stop talking about her marrows. I believe I now know more about marrows than any woman living.”
Lady Margaret Pennington came out of the shadows into the circle of lamplight, small and silver-haired and wrapped in a dark blue cloak, leaning on a cane with a carved handle shaped like a bird. She came and stood beside him at the edge of the overlook. She was a little out of breath.
He held out the rose. She took it, and smelled it, and smiled the same smile that had made him forget his speech fifty years ago.
Then she sniffed again. Not at the rose. At him.
“Ambrose,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You’ve had a bun.”
“I have not.”
“There is honey on your collar.”
“I gave most of it to a pickpocket,” said Lord Ambrose with dignity.
“He’s coming to work in the stables tomorrow. Also, I believe the curate and Miss Hartley will be engaged by spring.”
Lady Margaret looked at him for a long moment. Then she laughed. It was the same laugh. Exactly the same laugh she had laughed under this lamp, in this moonlight, fifty years ago tonight.
“You impossible old man,” she said, and slipped her arm through his.
They stood there together for a long time, two old people with two canes, beneath the lamp and the old oak tree and the great golden moon, while the leaves drifted down around them and the lights of Hartsbury twinkled in the valley below. They did not say very much. After fifty years, they did not need to.
At last, when the moon had risen high and white above the hills, Lord Ambrose reached up and turned down the lamp. The little flame flickered and went out. And the two of them started down the hill toward home, arm in arm, slowly, matching their steps, their two canes tapping together on the cobbles.
Down in the town, Polly Marsh was packing up her flower basket outside the church. She looked up and saw them coming down Beacon Rise in the moonlight, two small dark figures leaning on each other.
She smiled to herself.
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