The Same Hands

Seven years ago this morning, at about seven o’clock, Lieutenant Stuart walked out across the armoury yard at Harpers Ferry with a white handkerchief tied to a stick, and stood in front of the engine house door, and I stood a little behind the Colonel on the rise by the gate, forty feet off, and watched him do it. I have been thinking about that this morning, Sir, because it is the eighteenth of October; and because I am writing this in pencil, on my knee, in a small room at St James’s, waiting to give it into the hands of a gentleman of Your Majesty’s household; and because an account that began at the engine house door has to end somewhere, and I find that it is going to end here.

I ask the pardon of the gentleman who reads it to you for these last pages, which are in pencil, and in a worse hand than the rest. I said at the beginning that I might not have finished by the time this was sent, and I very nearly had not. I wrote the end of the chapter before this one at the widow’s below Charter Hill, on the night before I left the capital, and I have written this one on the ship, and in the train, and in my old room off the Strand, and the last of it here. When I have finished the page I am writing, I shall have finished.

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I asked the department in August for leave for the autumn, and it was given me without any question, as leave generally is to an officer whom nobody especially needs. Anne did not come. Her father has not been well since the spring of 1861, and she would not leave him for a winter crossing; and she said besides, when I asked her, that it was mine to carry. I told the Colonel on the terrace that I was going to London, and did not tell him why. He did not ask. He said that the Atlantic would be rough in October, and that I should take a berth amidships, where the motion is least; which is an engineer’s advice, and good, and I took it.

I went out to Fort Warren before I sailed, as I did five years ago.

It was the same casemate, on the landward side, with the stove and the bed and the table and the shelf of books, and the slit in the wall where the light comes in grey from the sea. It was damper than I remembered, or I was older. He was at the table, writing, when the sergeant opened the door, and he finished the line before he looked up, as he had before. He is sixty-six. His beard is quite white now, and longer, and he is thinner, and he stood up more slowly than he had; but he stood, and looked at me, and knew me, and said, “The Rappahannock,” as he had said it five years before, and this time nothing else, and waited.

I had not known what I would say to him, any more than I had known the first time. I told him that I was going to London. He did not ask me why. Then he asked me the question he had asked me at the door five years before, and I had known all the way out on the boat that he would.

He said, “Do you own them still?”

I said that I did not. I said that the Parliament had freed them, on the first day of last year, with all the others, by statute, without condition. And then, because he was looking at me, and because I had made up my mind on the boat that if he asked me I would tell him all of it, I said that the Crown had paid me for them.

He said, “Paid you.” It was not a question.

I said yes.

He said, “And them?”

I did not answer him.

He did not say anything either, for some time. Then he nodded, once, slowly, as a surveyor nods when the water stands where he said it would; and he sat down again at his table, and took up his pen, and went on with what he had been writing. I stood at the door for a while. He did not look up again. After a time the sergeant shut the door, and I went back to Boston on the afternoon boat, as I had before, and did not speak to anybody on it.

I set that down because I told Your Majesty at the beginning that I would tell you what the keeping of my oath was like, and that is part of it. I do not think he meant to be cruel. He had asked me only one question in his life, and he had asked it three times now, at Harpers Ferry and in that room, and he wished to know how it had come out. He told me five years ago, in that room, that I was young enough to see what came of it, and that he was not. He was wrong about himself. He has seen it too.

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I sailed on the Wednesday, the third, on the packet for Liverpool by way of Halifax, as I did five years ago, with this account in a leather case under my bunk, where the charts had been. I took a berth amidships, and the Atlantic was rough, as the Colonel had said it would be, and I wrote every day that the table would stand still. I saw Ireland on the eleventh day, very green, with the rain going across it in grey sheets, as before. On the Monday we came into Liverpool, and I took the train to London, and went to my old lodging off the Strand, where the widow did not remember me and gave me the room above the one I had had.

The London papers were still full of the summer’s war in Germany, and of Hanover, which had fought on the losing side and had not been swallowed by the winner. I read them in the train and understood very little of them, and I will not pretend to Your Majesty that I understood more, since it is your kingdom and not mine, and you will have been told it better.

On the Tuesday I went to the legation, in the square west of Piccadilly, and the Minister saw me after his breakfast, as he had before. He is older, and drier, and the baronet’s ancestors on the walls looked at me as though they had not expected to see me again. He asked me what I wanted. I told him that I had written an account for His Majesty, and wished to put it into the hands of somebody who would put it into his, and that I did not know how such a thing was done by a private man.

He said that it was done at a door. He said that there was a door at St James’s at which papers addressed to the King were received by a gentleman of the household, and that he would write me a line to say who I was, which was all that the legation could properly do; and that what became of papers after they had gone in at that door was not a thing the legation was told, and that in five years he had never asked. Then he looked at me over his spectacles and asked me whether it was a petition. I said that it was not. He said, “Good,” as he had said it in the carriage after the levee, and wrote his line, and I came away.

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They told me at the door to come on the Thursday, at eleven. I came at half past ten. The porter read the Minister’s line, and took my name, and showed me up a stair to this room, and said that the gentleman would come when he was free; and that was an hour ago.

It is a small room, with a coal fire, and two chairs, and a table with nothing on it, and a picture of a horse over the chimney-piece, and a window that looks down into a courtyard. I paced it when I came in, before I sat down; I could not help it. It is nine paces by seven. Then I sat down by the window, and took out this account and my pencil, and began to write the end of it.

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Your Majesty’s carriage came into the courtyard a little while ago.

I heard it before I saw it: the gate, and the horses on the stones, and men’s voices stopping. I got up and went to the window. It was an open carriage, though it is October, and you were in it, on the side nearest me, in a dark coat, very upright, with your head a little raised and turned a little towards the way you were going, as it was at the levee. The Queen was beside you, with her hand on your arm. Opposite you there was a tall boy, who I think was the Prince of Wales, whom I last saw at eleven years old, looking down into the Chapel Royal over the edge of the pew until a lady touched his shoulder. The carriage crossed the courtyard below my window at a walk, and stopped at a door on the far side, and you got down, with a gentleman at your elbow who did not appear to be helping you, and went in; and the door was shut, and the carriage went away round the court and out under the arch, and the courtyard was empty.

I have seen Your Majesty four times now: at the levee, and in the chapel, and in the Park, and this morning. You have spoken to me once. You did not speak this morning, and there was no reason why you should, and no means; you could not have known that I was there. You knew me once by my step. I came twenty-two paces from the door to where you stood, counting them, and you heard me count them. There was nothing for you to know me by this morning. I was behind glass, and above you, and I was not walking; I was standing still at a window, and I made no sound. I do not think I could have made one. And I found, standing there, that I was glad you did not know, and that I would not have called out to you if I could; and I do not know whether that was the last of my silence or the best of it.

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The gentleman has come.

He came in while I was writing the last of that, and said my name, and I stood up. He is a man of fifty or so, in a black coat, with a quiet voice and very clean hands. He does not wear the uniform of the Household, and I do not know whether he is the gentleman who stood at Your Majesty’s left hand at the levee; I did not look at that gentleman’s face, because I was looking at yours. And I do not know whether he is the man who wrote, or who ordered to be written, the line on the half-sheet that came back to my lodging five years ago, under the lamp, on a cover whose seals were whole. I have looked at his hands while he waited. They could have written it. So could the hands of any clerk in this city. I am not going to ask him. If he is the man, he will not tell me; and if he is not, he will not know what I mean. I find that I have learned, in five years, to live inside a silence, and that I can live inside one more.

He asked me whether I had a paper for His Majesty. I said that I had, and that I was finishing it, and asked him to forgive me. He said that there was no hurry. He did not say what would be done with it, or whether it would be read, or by whom, or when; and he did not say that it would not be. He is standing by the fire now, with his hands behind his back, looking at the picture of the horse, so as not to look at me while I write; which is a kindness, and I think a practised one.

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I said at the beginning of this account that I was not asking for anything, and I am not. This is an account and not a petition. I have told Your Majesty what your silence was like in the places where it was felt, as I said that I would. I have told you what mine was like, which I did not say that I would, and did not know, when I began, that I should have to. And I said at the beginning, too, that I had not finished thinking about which silences were honest, and that I might not have finished by the time this was sent. I have not finished. I know now which of them was mine.

There is a man in a casemate in Boston harbour who finishes the line he is writing before he looks up. I have found, at the end, that I mean to do the same. I have signed a good many papers in this account, Sir, and set them down here, every one, with what came of them. This is the last of them. It is in pencil, in the worst hand I have, and it is the only one of them that I am sure of.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Majesty’s faithful subject and servant,

Henry Ashton