Chapter 64 The Set Table

Thornbeck announced itself by smell — woodsmoke, real and domestic, threading the wet fell-air a mile before the walls should have been able to make any — and Linnet's stomach dropped through the wet grey afternoon, because Thornbeck's hearth had been banked dead for months, and dead hearths do not smoke, and open doors frightened her more than shut ones ever had. The door stood open. The third open door of their journey, if you counted only houses; she had stopped counting. Inside, the parlor was warm. That was the second impossibility, delivered casually, like salt at table: peat settled in the grate and burning low, the wing chair drawn up facing the door with its leather arms gone dark and glossy where hands had polished them, and the table laid for three. Bread, cut, still steaming at the crumb. Butter in a dish. Three cups, filled, tea rising off them in ribbons. On the sideboard the hall clocks — which had disagreed by four hours on their last visit, both running, both wrong — ticked now in perfect, idiot unison. "Do not eat," said Calder, from the doorway, very quietly. "And do not refuse loudly. Refusal is a kind of answer. I told you we were visited here often. I did not guess the visits kept accounts." The kettle began to sing before anyone touched it. Not whistle — sing, a thin sweet thread of sound that gathered itself, over a dozen breaths, into vowels, and the vowels into the assembled courtesy they knew, the voice that needed no bells now, speaking through boiling water and chimney draught and the tick of reconciled clocks as through so many borrowed throats. "Sit," said the hand, warmly, from the steam. "You will want to refuse. I have watched your kind refuse for two hundred years; it is nearly always the proudest moment of their lives, and it costs them more than sitting would have. Sit, next voice. I have been courteous to your company. Be courteous to my table." They sat. Not to eat — because chairs at a laid table can be occupied as fortification as well as welcome, and Tomás placed himself with the window at his back and Calder took the seat farthest from the fire, and Linnet, after a heartbeat, took the wing chair, deliberately, staring straight into the parlour dark where the warmth of it still lived, because she was twelve and tired and it was the only act of contempt available to her. The hand laughed. It was not an unkind laugh. That was among the worst things in the room. "You divide beautifully and you sit beautifully," it said. "Your grandmother sat THERE also. In that chair, girl, at this table, younger than you are now. She ate what I offered, all of it, and thanked me for the bread with better manners than yours, and then she refused me with such grace that I have kept the grace on this shelf for thirty years, next to my other valuables." The kettle dropped a semitone; the draught leaned in at the window. "Ask me what she refused." Linnet's hands were steady on the chair-arms. She made them be steady; steadiness was a thing she could spend too. "What did she refuse?" "To give me the ending early." The fire shifted; a log settled with a sound like a knee. "The chain was tearing, the winter after Harrowfell emptied. I offered her the short road — one voice, freely given, the instrument complete, every debt cleared — the same offer I make you tonight, at the same table, with the same bread. And she bargained instead. She was the only one of your blood who ever bargained instead of refusing or kneeling, and I have missed her." The clocks ticked; the tea cooled by degrees nobody drank. "She bought her hills one quiet generation. Her price: I was to wait until the next voice came of an age to choose — truly choose, knowing the offer — before the asking resumed in earnest. She fixed the day herself. She was exact about it. She said twelve was when a Vance may answer for her own ears." The room went very slightly crooked, the way a picture hangs crooked and the whole wall feels it. Linnet counted — numbers, employment for the mouth — and found that she did not need to ask what today was. The journey had taken the weeks it had taken. The fells had taken their snow-time. Somewhere behind the hand's courtesy, arithmetic she had not been shown was arriving at its total, and the total was her. "She sent you to Tomás's hill the season before your twelfth birthday," the hand said, gently, "and you walked north on your own feet, and asked your own questions, and divided your own voice, and here you sit in her chair in your twelfth year with the offer warm in front of you. She was wise, your grandmother. She was also, in the end, only another woman arranging for the asking to be done properly. There is no door out of the keeping, next voice. There are only doors marked WAIT." Tomás moved then. Slowly, keeping his eyes on the middle distance, he reached out and took the three cups and carried them, one by one, to the hearth, and poured them steaming onto the coals, and set the empty cups upside down on the stone, and stood with his back to the table like a man closing a shop. An insult in any house. In this house it was testimony: nothing served here would be received. The temperature fell. Not gradually. The frost arrived mid-glance, blooming up the window glass in feathers, and the bread went hard, and the butter went white, and the fire sank to nothing with a sound like a long-held breath let go — the seasons catching up with the room all at once, called home from wherever they had been stored. In the sudden cold, the wing chair under Linnet held its warmth against her back like a living thing, loyal to somebody. They were at the gate in the first grey of morning when she saw it. Chalked small, low, on the gatepost — at the height of a child's hand, where only a child passing would ever read it — a tally. Twelve neat strokes, close-set, patient. And beneath the twelve, cut fresh into the wood itself, deep enough to outlast weather: room for more.