An Advertisement in the Gazette

The advertisement was printed so small that Catherine Vane nearly missed it, tucked between a notice for a lost spaniel and a surgeon's promise to draw teeth without pain. GENTLEMAN OF BUSINESS requires a person of refined hand and discreet temper for confidential correspondence. Apply Tuesday, between ten and noon, to the offices of Ashworth & Crale, Lombard Street. She read it three times. Then she read the figure of remuneration, which was printed even smaller, as though the advertiser were ashamed of his own generosity, and she stopped pretending she would not go. It was not a difficult decision. There were eleven shillings in the cracked teapot on the mantel, and a quarter's rent due, and a younger sister in Hampshire who believed Catherine was managing splendidly because Catherine had taken great pains to make her believe it. A person of refined hand. Well. If there was one thing the world had left her, it was a refined hand. Her father had seen to that before the world took everything else. She arrived on Lombard Street at half past nine, which was indecently early, and stood across the road pretending to admire a draper's window until the clock struck ten. The offices of Ashworth & Crale were narrow and tall and very clean, the kind of clean that cost money to maintain and announced as much. A clerk with an ink-stained collar showed her up a staircase that did not creak, which she found unsettling. Catherine had lived for two years now in a house where every stair announced her like a herald. "You will wait," the clerk said, "until you are called. There are others." There were three others. A nervous young man who kept turning his hat in his hands as if winding a clock. A woman of perhaps fifty with the upright spine of a former governess. And a gentleman in a coat too fine for the company, who looked at Catherine once, dismissed her, and returned to the contemplation of his own gloves. One by one they went in. One by one they came out, and none of them looked pleased, and none of them were asked to stay. When the clerk said "Miss Vane," Catherine rose, smoothed a dress that had been turned twice and would not survive a third turning, and walked into the office of the gentleman of business. He did not look up. He was seated behind a desk with nothing on it but a single sheet of paper, an inkstand, and his own folded hands, and he was perhaps five-and-thirty, dark-haired, with a face that had decided some years ago that expression was an extravagance it could not afford. He let the silence sit for a moment longer than was civil. Catherine recognised the technique. Her father had used it on debtors. "You write a good hand?" he said at last. "You may judge for yourself, sir." She crossed to the desk and held out the sample she had prepared — a copied passage, chosen because it was neutral, a paragraph on the cultivation of pears. He took it. He read it properly, which surprised her; she had expected a glance. His eyes moved along each line as though he were checking a sum. "Pears," he said. "It was the dullest thing I could find. I did not wish my choice of passage to flatter me." For the first time he looked at her directly, and Catherine had the brief, disorienting sensation of being added up. "Sit down, Miss Vane," said Mr. Ashworth. "I will tell you what the work is, and then you will almost certainly refuse it, and we will both have wasted a morning. But sit down." She sat. Outside, the clock on the stair did not creak, and somewhere below a clerk turned a page, and Catherine Vane folded her refined hands in her lap and waited to hear how she was to be insulted. She would think, much later, that she ought to have been warned by how curious she already was.