The Duplicate

by Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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My uncle Crowther kept the pledges of half Thornsgate in three rooms above his shop, and I kept his books.

The shop stood at the foot of Kirk Lane, where the street drops steeply to the beck and the beck runs brown with what the dyehouses give it. Behind the counter were the drawers for small goods: rings, spoons, spectacles, the little brass thimbles that fetch twopence and are redeemed for twopence-halfpenny. Above, up a stair so narrow that my skirts brushed both walls, were the rooms where the larger things waited. There hung the coats and gowns, each rolled and tied and ticketed; there stood the flat-irons in rows like a regiment of small black soldiers; there, on the shelves of the back room, were the clocks.

I did not love those rooms. I will say so plainly, though my uncle thought it a weakness and told me so more than once. On a Monday morning the women of the lane came in with their husbands' Sunday coats over their arms, and on a Saturday night, if the wages had held, they came back for them; and between Monday and Saturday the coats hung upstairs in the dark, smelling of tobacco and rain and the bodies that had worn them, as if a congregation had left its skins behind and gone off to the mill without them. I went up with the lamp at dusk to see that all was dry. Nothing up there ever moved. Yet I never went up without the feeling of having interrupted something.

I was four-and-twenty that winter, the winter of 1849. I had come to my uncle at nineteen, when my father's school at Cleckmoor failed and my father died, very nearly in the same week, and there was nowhere else for me to go. I had a good hand and could cast a column of figures without error, and my uncle, who was not a man to waste a good hand, set me at once to the pledge book. I wrote in it every entry of five years: the date, the article, the sum lent, the name and dwelling of the pledger, the number. And for every entry in the book I wrote the duplicate, the paper ticket the pledger carried away, which bore the same number and the same date, and without which, my uncle said, no article left that house.

"The book is the shop's memory," he told me on my first morning, "and the duplicate is theirs. When the two agree, all's well."

He said it as a man states a law of nature. I believed him. I have since learned that a law of nature is a law because nobody can alter it, and that the pledge book could be altered by anyone with a penknife and a steady hand.

---

Mrs. Sugden came into the shop on Candlemas Day of the year before, the second of February, 1848. I remember the date for three reasons, of which the third is the only one that matters to this history.

The first is that it was Candlemas, and the church bell at the top of the lane was ringing for the evening service as she came in, so that she stood at the counter and waited for it to stop before she spoke, as though she would not do her business under it.

The second is that the snow had come down that afternoon for the first time that year, after a mild January, and she had it on her shawl and on her eyebrows, and stood melting by our stove while I lit the second lamp.

The third reason I will come to.

She was a comber's widow. I knew her by sight, as one knows everybody in a lane like ours: a tall, bony, upright woman with a long jaw, who had buried her husband in the autumn of the fever and was said to be too proud to go on the parish. She took from under her shawl a silver watch wrapped in a handkerchief, and laid it on the counter, and did not take her hand from it at once.

"It were Thomas's," she said. "It were his father's before. I want nine shilling on it."

My uncle was at the back of the shop, and came forward and opened the case with his thumbnail, and looked at the works with his glass in his eye, and said seven.

"Nine," said Mrs. Sugden.

"Seven and six."

"It's worth thirty if it's worth a farthing, Mr. Crowther, and you know it. I'll have it back by Whitsun. Nine."

He gave her eight and six. I wrote the entry while they were still at it. No. 2214: A silver watch, verge, maker's name Lister, Halifax, with steel chain. 8s. 6d. Ann Sugden, widow, 4 Tenter Yard. 2nd February 1848. I wrote the duplicate, and gave it her, and she folded it very small and put it into the bosom of her dress, and went out into the snow.

She did not come back by Whitsun. She came in at midsummer and paid the interest, and again at Michaelmas, a few pence at a time, flushing darkly to the roots of her hair each time she laid the coppers down, as if the debt were a fault in her and not merely a fact. The watch went upstairs to the back room, to the shelf of clocks, where I wound it with the others every Saturday night. My uncle held that a watch kept going kept its value, and that a stopped one in a pawnshop is a thing people do not like to buy.

---

In the second week of January, 1849, Mr. Firth came into the shop.

He was the overlooker at Holdsworth's lower mill, a big soft-spoken man with a gold ring on his little finger, much respected in the chapel, and he had a way of resting both his hands flat upon our counter as though it were a pulpit cushion. He had known Thomas Sugden. He had seen the watch, he said, many a time across the combing shed; he had always fancied it; it was a good old Halifax piece, and he would give my uncle two pounds for it when it came out of pledge.

"It's not out," said my uncle. "The year runs to Candlemas."

"Ah," said Mr. Firth. "Well. A man can wait three weeks." He smiled at me over my uncle's shoulder. "And she's not so likely to redeem it, I think, as you might suppose. She's been put off at Holdsworth's. Did you hear? Short time in the combing sheds; they've let the widows go first. It's hard. It's very hard." He shook his head, and went out, and the bell over the door rang after him.

I said nothing then. But I went up that night with the lamp to see that all was dry, and I stood a long time in the back room, before the shelf of clocks.

There were nineteen of them that winter: a tall case without its weights, a pair of carriage clocks, a Dutch clock with a painted face, and the rest small things, watches and travelling clocks, each with its ticket hanging from it on a string. All of them were going, for I had wound them two nights before; and in the cold the sound of them was very loud, each one beating its own time a little out of step with all the others, so that the room seemed full of small hurrying footsteps that never arrived anywhere. I had stood among them a hundred times and thought nothing of it. That night I could not rid myself of the fancy that one of them was listening to me.

It was Thomas Sugden's watch. I knew it by the ticket, No. 2214, and by its voice, which was lower than the others, a heavy deliberate tick, like a man walking up a hill. I took it down and held it to the lamp. The case was worn smooth where a thumb had opened it, morning after morning, for forty years, at the same place, and the silver there was brighter than elsewhere. I do not know why that brightness should have troubled me so much. I put the watch back. I told myself that the year ran to Candlemas, as my uncle said, and that three weeks is a long time for a woman who means to keep a thing.

Outside the frost was setting in. The beck below the window had gone quiet under its skin of ice, and I could hear it no longer; only the clocks.

---

Mrs. Sugden came on the last day of January, a Wednesday, a little before dusk.

I was alone at the counter. My uncle was in the parlour behind, at his tea. She came in very slowly and closed the door behind her with great care, as people do who have walked a long way and are afraid of spending, on a door, the strength they will need for what they have come to say. Her face was grey; her lips were grey. She had nine shillings and fourpence in a twist of paper, which she laid on the counter and opened: it was in coppers mostly, and a sixpence, and one shilling worn so thin that the old king's head was nearly gone off it.

"I've come for Thomas's watch," she said.

"Have you your duplicate, Mrs. Sugden?"

She had not. She told me how it was before I could ask, and she told it as one tells a thing she has rehearsed all the way down the lane, and is ashamed of. She had moved at Martinmas from Tenter Yard to a single room in Paradise Row, to save the rent, and in the moving a box had been set down in the wet, and the papers in it had stuck together into a pulp: her lines, her husband's burial ticket, and my duplicate. She had dried what she could on the hob. What was left she drew out of her pocket now and laid by the coppers: a brown lump of paper, folded upon itself, with the ghost of a number on it which might have been 22, and nothing else legible at all.

"You'll know me," she said. "You wrote it. You'll know."

"I know you," I said.

My uncle had come to the parlour door with his cup in his hand. He had heard the whole of it. He set the cup down upon the edge of the dresser and came forward to the counter, wiping his mouth, and said to me pleasantly, "Fetch me the book, Hester."

I fetched him the book. He licked his thumb and turned back through the year, page by page, to the beginning of February, and I watched his thumb go down the column of numbers and stop.

"Twenty-two fourteen," he said. "Silver watch. Ann Sugden." He looked at it for a moment, turned the book round on the counter so that she could see it, and laid his finger beside the date. "Twentieth of January, eighteen forty-eight. Year's out. It's forfeit, missis, these eleven days."

I looked at the book. I looked at the page in my own hand: my own figures, the turn I give my sevens, the slight backward lean of all my hand when I am writing fast. And in the date column, against No. 2214, in ink a shade too black, someone had scraped away the second of February and written in the twentieth of January, in a hand so like mine that, if I had been shown it in a court of law, I could not have sworn upon my oath that it was not.

You will ask what I felt. I will tell you, because I did not know myself until long after, and it is not what I should have expected. I did not feel indignation, not then. I felt cold, as I had felt it that night in the back room: a cold that began in the fingers and went inward, quietly, as frost goes into the ground, until it seemed to me there was not a soft or yielding place left anywhere in me. And in that cold my mind was perfectly clear. I saw the whole of it at once, as one sees a frozen landscape on a still morning, every twig distinct for miles. I saw Mr. Firth's hands flat upon our counter. I saw my uncle at the book, after I had gone up to bed, with his penknife and the black ink. I saw that he had done it not on that day but some days before, against the chance that she might come with her money; that he had gambled, coolly, that her duplicate would be lost or that she would not have the money in time; and that the only witness against that page in all the world was the hand that had written it.

Mrs. Sugden had seen the date. She could read figures, if not much else. She put one hand flat on the counter to hold herself up, and said, "It were Candlemas."

"The book says the twentieth," said my uncle.

"It were Candlemas. The bell was going. I stood there," and she pointed at the floor before the stove, "while it stopped."

"Have you your duplicate?" said my uncle, very gently.

She looked down at the brown pulp lying on the counter by her coppers. And then she looked at me.

---

Here is the third reason I remember the date.

On the second of February, 1848, after Mrs. Sugden had gone out into the snow, I made up the day's columns, and closed the book, and went upstairs to my room under the roof, and sat down to write a letter to my brother William, who was then a clerk at Leeds; and I began it as I begin all my letters, with the date. And having written February 2nd, I sat and looked at it, and remembered that it was my father's birthday, who had been dead four years; and that I had forgotten it until that moment. I had passed the whole of that day at the counter, weighing spoons and haggling over flat-irons, and I had not once thought of him. I put my head down upon the letter, and I am not ashamed to say that I cried over it, for him and for the school at Cleckmoor, and the pear tree in the yard there, and for my own forgetting, which seemed to me then the worst of it. William has the letter still. He keeps everything I send him in a japanned box. I have seen it there, with the blot at the date where my tears ran into the ink.

All this passed through my mind in less time than it has taken you to read it, and when it had passed I knew what I was going to do, though I did not know how I was going to say it. I have observed that it is often so. The will comes first, entire, like the sun over the edge of the moor, and the words come straggling after it like late sheep.

"The book is wrong," I said.

My uncle did not look at me. "The book is in your hand, Hester."

"That entry is in my hand. That date is not. I wrote No. 2214 on Candlemas Day. I wrote the duplicate. I gave it into Mrs. Sugden's hand and I watched her put it in her dress, and the snow was on her shawl, and the bell was ringing. That is the truth. The book has been scraped. Hold it to the lamp, and you will see where the knife went."

He did not hold it to the lamp. He closed it, gently, with both hands, as a man closes a Bible after the lesson. Then he looked at me, and I saw that he was not angry yet; he was astonished, as a man might be astonished if a chair he had sat in for five years were to speak to him.

"You'll swear to that, will you?" he said. "To a date, a twelvemonth gone, against the book? With nowt to show but your say-so?"

"I'll show more than my say-so," I said. "I wrote to my brother that night, and dated the letter, and it lies in his box at Leeds; and I will have it fetched, and lay it before any magistrate in the Riding, if you make me. But I had rather not make it a matter for magistrates. I had rather you gave Mrs. Sugden her husband's watch."

"And if I won't?"

I had been holding the edge of the counter. I let it go.

"Then you must keep your book yourself, uncle, from this night, for I will not keep it for you. I have kept it five years. I have kept it honestly, every line. I have written in it things that shamed the people who brought them, and I have never written one word that was not true, nor one figure. I have not much in this world: I have no money but what you pay me, and no friends in this town but those who come to this counter; I have a box and a brother and a good hand. But my hand is my own. You have taken it and made it say a lie. You did not ask my leave because you knew I would not give it, and you had not the right to ask. You may turn me out for this; I dare say you will. But you cannot make me put my name under that page, nor swear to it, nor sit silent while it is shown, for I am not a book, uncle. I am not a thing you write in. I was in this shop on Candlemas, and I know what I saw."

It is a strange thing to hear one's own voice, in a small room, say what it has never said before. My voice was not loud. I think, if it had been loud, he could have borne it better. The stove ticked. Upstairs, through the boards of the ceiling, very faint, I could hear the clocks.

My uncle stood a long while. He was not a cruel man. I wish to be just to him: he was a hard one, which is a different thing, and he had let the lane's poverty teach him that justice was a luxury of the rich, as wax candles are. I saw him weigh it all. I saw him weigh Mr. Firth's two pounds against William's letter, and a magistrate, and the chapel, and his name in the lane; and I saw, too, a little to my surprise, that he weighed me, and that I had not known until then what I weighed with him.

"Fetch it down," he said at last, and turned his back.

---

I took the lamp and went up.

The coats hung in the dark, rolled and ticketed, and I went past them as one goes past sleepers. In the back room the clocks were all going. I had wound them on the Saturday. I lifted the lamp to the shelf where No. 2214 had lain these twelve months, and put out my hand for it.

It had stopped.

I have thought about that a great deal since, and I do not know what to make of it, and I have resolved at last to make nothing of it at all. The other eighteen were going. It had been wound with them. The works were sound, my uncle said afterwards, when he had them out upon the counter with his glass in his eye; there was no fault in the spring, nothing broken, nothing he could find. The hands stood at twenty minutes to six. I do not know at what hour of what day it stopped. I only know that I stood there with the lamp and held it in my palm, and it lay there cold and silent, like a thing that has been waiting and has heard its name.

I carried it down. Mrs. Sugden had not moved from the counter. My uncle took her nine shillings and fourpence, and counted it, and gave her back a penny, without a word, and I put the watch into her hand. She did not look at it. She shut her fingers upon it and held it against her breast, where the duplicate had been, and stood so a moment with her eyes closed; and then she opened the case with her thumb, at the bright place on the silver, and looked at the stopped face, and said only, "He'll want winding."

She went out. The bell rang over the door. Through the window I watched her go up Kirk Lane in the dusk, very upright, past the chapel with its lit windows, until she turned the corner into Paradise Row and was gone.

---

I did not stay long after that. My uncle did not turn me out; I will say that for him. He did not speak of the matter again, and for a week the shop went on as before, and I wrote the book, and he did not look over my shoulder. But a thing had been broken between us that no glass in the eye would find, and I knew that I could not live out my life writing in a book which another hand had once written in for me. I wrote to William. In March I took a place as under-mistress at a dame school in Leeds, at eighteen pounds a year, which is less than my uncle paid me, and I have not been sorry.

Mr. Firth came into the shop at Candlemas for his watch, and was told it had been redeemed, and went away again. I was in the back, and heard him go.

The last night before I left Thornsgate I went upstairs with the lamp, from habit, to see that all was dry. The rooms were as they had always been. The coats hung there in their rows, waiting for Saturday; the irons stood to attention on the floor. In the back room the clocks were going, eighteen of them, each in its own time; and on the shelf among them was a gap, no wider than my hand, where nothing ticked. I stood before it a while. Then I put out the lamp and went down, and out into the lane, where a thaw had begun, and below me in the dark I could hear the beck running again under its broken ice, loud, the whole of the night.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ā Carolā Brontë per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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