Chapter 2 The Board

The board came down in the afternoon, which was a small thing and took most of the morning. Kessin had done almost nothing since she had been twenty-eight and standing in a kitchen in the city with a letter telling her that her great-aunt's house had been left to her and no one else. She had been a cook's assistant and then a cook and then head of a pass for four months in a place where the bread arrived at five in the morning and left at eleven at night, with no lane and no mist and no donkey and nothing to inherit. She had wanted to come back. She had wanted to come back for nine years, and she had come back because she was tired of cooking for people who did not know the names of the things they were eating, and she had come back because the letter said so, and now that she was here she had to do something with it, and doing something meant starting with the smallest true thing there was, which was the board. She took it down by hand and by the point of the key, and she took it apart and laid it on the grass in the yard in the low light of the afternoon, and she went through it, card by card, because the old woman had not thrown the jobs away. She had filed them. There were forty-nine of them. Small cards of stiff paper, some with the names of people she did not know and some with names she did, written in a hand that grew smaller and less careful as the years went on, which was, she thought, the way all true ledgers end. At the top was a card with no date, the first of the season, left unfinished. It read: *Hobb's knife. To be fetched from the smithy in Gillanwick and returned. Small fare. No one has taken it. Reason: the knife is a small thing and no one wanted to go.* Kessin sat on the wheel and read it twice, and then she said aloud, "I'll take it." "You'll take it," said a voice from the yard. She looked up. A man was standing in the gate, thin, about thirty, with a coat mended at the elbow and a basket on his arm, and he had the look of a person who had walked a long way to be where he was and would have walked further if the job were worth it. "The smithy is two miles," said the man. "It is a knife. There is no horse and there is no cart." "There is a donkey," said Kessin. "Clack does not go to Gillanwick." "Then I'll walk." The man laughed, which was not unkind, and he came in and set the basket on the wheel and sat down on the other side of it, and the donkey came over and put his muzzle in the basket and found, to his evident satisfaction, two loaves of bread and a wedge of cheese and a cup of cold buttermilk, and he ate. "Brin," said the man. "I'm Brin." "You know my name," said Kessin. "Everyone on this road knows the Hall. Few of them come in." "You came in." "I came to the gate. I was not invited in." He looked at her with the careful plain attention of a man who is not easily pleased and does not like to be hurried. "You have been here a day." "An hour." "Then an hour is long enough to know there is nothing to inherit." "There is a ledger," said Kessin. "There is a board. There is bread in the yard and a donkey who will not come in through a door and a woman who has kept the kitchen longer than I have been alive." "You know all that." "She told me." "Turrel tells a great deal. She tells it to the wall as often as to a person." He nodded at the cards on the grass. "You have taken them out." "I have." "You have read them." "I am reading them." "The old woman kept them to keep them. Not to send anyone out." He put his hand flat on his knee. "That is the problem with the Hall, and it is a problem the size of the yard." Kessin picked up Hobb's card and held it between them. "Tell me about Hobb," she said. "He is the smith. He has been the smith for thirty years and he has one knife that was his mother's and he cannot bring himself to part with it, and he would rather pay a fare than give it to a man he does not know, so he has had it on the bench in the shop since his wife died and no one has fetched it, because the fare is small and the road is long and the knife is one knife." "That is a job," said Kessin. "It is a nothing." "That is a job," Kessin said, and she folded the card and put it in her pocket, and she stood up and went to the gate and took the coin from her pocket and held it out. Brin looked at it. "That is a fare," said Kessin. "Half a crown. I will go to Gillanwick and bring back a knife, and I will pay you in bread." "The bread is not mine." "Then I will pay you in coin I do not have, and I will ask Turrel to give it to me back, and I will write it down." He looked at her for a long moment, then at the coin in her hand, and he took it, and he gave it back. "I will not work for you," he said. "Neither I will work for you," said Kessin. "I will go." "Tomorrow," he said. "Go tomorrow." "I'll go today." He stood in the gate with the light going out behind him and the mist coming up off the grass in the first low sheets of the season, and he looked at her the way a man looks at a person he is not sure whether to laugh at or warn, and then he walked out of the yard and did not look back. Kessin went in and washed her hands and ate the bread that was on the board, which was dry and good and made by Turrel, and she sat at the table with the ledger and wrote, under the line where the old woman had written pay Turrel first, this: Brin Lowmarstrand, smithy, two miles, Hobb's knife, one fare, to be paid in bread. Turrel came in at six with a lamp and a cloth and a look that said the night would be long, and Kessin put the coin on the table and pushed it toward her. "For the bread," said Kessin. Turrel looked at it and then at her and then at the door, and she took it and put it in her apron, and she did not say anything, and she went to the stove and put the bread back on the shelf and lit the lamp, and the light went up the whitewashed wall and found the hole in the stone and went out the hole and onto the donkey. "There's a card," said Kessin. "The second one. It is for a lane." Turrel did not turn. "How many," she said. Kessin looked at the board and counted, slowly, with her finger on the chalk marks. "Three," she said. "Then you have work." "Yes," said Kessin. "I have work." "Then find someone." "Then find someone," said Kessin. She wrote three cards that evening, the three of them, and put the seal on them, a small brass thing she had found in the chest of drawers, and set them on the board by the door, and she sat with the lamp and the ledger and the bread, and she thought about the first thing she had done wrong, which had been coming back alone. She had no team. She had a woman who had kept a house for fourteen years, a donkey who would not come through a door, a man who had not taken her fare, a yard that was half a ruin, and a board that had not been cleared in four years. She had three cards. She looked at the board one last time and said to no one at all, "That is a beginning." ---