Mr. H. Finch Regrets

There were three things Honora Finch was very good at, and only one of them was respectable. She was good at drawing maps. She was good at being mistaken for her own clerk. And she was good — privately, shamefully, expertly — at lying to the entire publishing trade of London, which had decided some years ago that a woman could not possibly understand the relation of a river to a contour, and had therefore never been given the chance to be proven wrong. Mr. H. Finch, cartographer, had a fine professional reputation. Mr. H. Finch had drawn the survey of three Sussex parishes, a much-praised map of the Bath approaches, and a chart of the Norfolk broads that a member of the Royal Society had called *uncommonly truthful*. Mr. H. Finch did not exist. Mr. H. Finch was a name, a flourish of a signature, and a fiction maintained by his sister Honora, who did every stroke of the work, and who collected the payments through a solicitor, and who had long ago stopped finding the arrangement amusing and had not yet found a way to end it that did not also end her income. So when the letter came from the Earl of Wexley, Honora read it twice, the way she read everything that mattered, and then she sat at her drawing-table among the half-rolled charts and considered the particular trap it represented. *Mr. H. Finch is requested,* the letter said, in the round confident hand of a secretary, *to attend personally upon the Earl of Wexley at Wexley Court, that he may walk the estate and undertake a complete and modern survey of its lands, the existing maps being some sixty years old and, his lordship is given to understand, no longer to be trusted.* Personally. There was the trap, in a single word. A map could be drawn by a fiction. A map could be posted by a fiction. But a fiction could not walk an earl's estate beside him, and answer his questions, and be addressed, for a fortnight, as Mr. H. Finch — because Mr. H. Finch, on inspection, would prove to be five feet and four inches of dark-haired woman with ink on her second finger and no brother at all. The sensible course was to decline. Honora knew the sensible course intimately; she and the sensible course were old companions. She would write back regretting that Mr. Finch's health, or Mr. Finch's prior commitments, prevented his attendance, and the commission would go to some genuine and inferior man, and the Earl of Wexley would have a worse map than he deserved, and Honora would have her secret and her dignity and a slightly emptier purse. She picked up her pen to write the regret. She did not write it. What stopped her was not the money, though the money was real. What stopped her was the line about the old maps no longer being trusted. Honora had, in fact, seen the old maps of Wexley Court — they were reproduced, badly, in a county history she owned — and she knew exactly what was wrong with them, and it was not age. It was that the man who had drawn them sixty years ago had never properly walked the northern water-meadows, had guessed at them from a hilltop, and had guessed wrong, and every map of that estate since had copied the guess. Honora had been quietly furious about those water-meadows for two years. She wanted, with a wholly unrespectable intensity, to be the one who finally got them right. She set down the pen. She would not decline. She would do something far more reckless, and she would do it because she was tired — tired of the fiction, tired of the solicitor, tired of being uncommonly truthful on paper and a careful liar in every room she stood up in. She would go to Wexley Court herself. And she would not go as Mr. H. Finch's clerk, sent ahead to make arrangements, which was the lie she had used a dozen times before. She would go, this once, and tell the Earl of Wexley the truth: that there was no Mr. H. Finch, that there had never been a Mr. H. Finch, and that the cartographer whose work he admired enough to summon was standing in front of him in a travelling dress with ink on her finger. He would, in all probability, send her away within the hour. Earls did not, as a rule, enjoy discovering they had been corresponding with a fiction. But Honora Finch had drawn maps her whole working life on a single principle — that the truth of the ground was worth more than the convenience of the guess — and she had begun, lately, to find it unbearable that she applied the principle to every river in England except the one running through the middle of her own life. She drew a fresh sheet toward her and wrote, in her own hand, unflourished: *Mr. H. Finch will attend his lordship as requested. There is, however, a particular concerning Mr. Finch which is better explained in person than in a letter, and which I trust his lordship will hear with patience before he forms a judgement of it.* It was, she thought, sealing it, the most honest sentence she had ever sent a client. It was also, very probably, the end of her career. Honora found, walking out to post it in the grey Grosvenor Square afternoon, that she minded a great deal less than she had expected to — and that some reckless cartographer's part of her was already, helplessly, looking forward to the water-meadows.