Chapter 4 The Nine Rules

She learned the house the way a prisoner learns a cell, by its distances and its drafts and the sounds it made at different hours, and within a week she knew it better than she had ever known the cottage. Withergrave was built on a plan no one had ever explained to her and that no one in it seemed able to explain. There was the long hall and the great room and the dining room with its table of black oak. There were the kitchens below, where a cook she rarely saw made food that appeared on trays and was eaten in silence. There was the east wing of bedrooms and the west wing of rooms that were shut. There was the chapel, which she had entered once and did not want to enter again. There was a staircase that went up to the east tower and stopped at a door that had no keyhole she could find. And there was, at the center of the house, on the second floor, a door at the end of a corridor with a plain frame and a plain handle and no lock at all, which was the Room of Years. She passed that door every day on her way to the great room, and every day she did not open it, and every day it took more of her to pass it than the day before, because it had no lock, and because a door without a lock is not a door that is shut; it is a door that is trusting you, and she had never in her life trusted anyone who trusted her that easily. The servants taught her the rest of what she knew, and all of it accidentally. She learned from Mrs. Pye that the household had once been larger. She learned from the cook, who spoke only when she was kneading, that there had been a child in the house some years ago and that no one spoke of the child. She learned from old Crispin, when he thought she was not listening, that he had walked these flats for forty years and that in forty years he had never once known the tide to come in as fast as the villagers said, which meant the villagers were wrong, which meant something else had drowned her father's boat. That last she did not know how to hold. She turned it over for a day and a night and could find no shape in it, and so she put it away, the way she had learned to put things away since she was fourteen. On the fourth day she met the Keeper in the library. He was at the long table with the estate books open before him, and he did not look up when she came in, and she stood at the shelves and pretended to read the spines while she studied him from under her lashes. Up close and in the day he was younger than the house made him look, and there was a thin pale line along his jaw, the kind of mark a blade leaves and time keeps, and his hands, resting on the ledgers, were the hands of a man who worked, though she had never seen him do a day's labor. She thought, unwillingly, that he was the most dangerous thing she had ever stood near, and also that he was the loneliest, and she did not know which of those two thoughts she trusted less. You are counting, he said, without looking up. I am reading, she said. You have turned no page, he said. You are counting the days until the year is out. It is the fourth. Do not waste your arithmetic on it. The year will pass whether you count it or not. She came and stood across the table from him. Then give me something better to count, she said. You keep the rules of this house and the accounts of this estate. My father's debt is in one of those books. Show it to me and I will count that, and we will both have quiet. Now he looked up, and for the first time she saw something in his face that was not weather, a flicker of interest, quickly banked. Your father's debt, he said, is a page in a book you will not read. But I will tell you what is written on it, since you are of this house now and the debt is paid. Your father borrowed two hundred pounds eleven years ago, in the winter, to buy a share in a boat that sank, and he never repaid it, and the estate never called it, and he never once in eleven years asked us why. She stared at him. He never asked why you did not call it. He never asked, Severin said, because he knew why. And then he closed the ledger, and the sound of it was like a door shutting, and he walked past her out of the room, and she stood in the library with the smell of old paper and cold ash and thought about a man who did not ask a question because he already knew the answer, and about a promise her father had made her mother keep, and about a house that had held a debt over a man's head for eleven years and never once asked to be repaid. That evening, before the light went, she walked the grounds. The rules said not to go down to the flats alone after dark, and the sun was still above the water, so she walked as far as the seawall and stood with her hands in her pockets and looked out at the stakes and the markers and the grey, ribbed plain of the ebbing tide. Somewhere out there was the place where the Nell had gone down, and somewhere out there was the reason a man who owed money had never once questioned the hand that held it. The wind came up cold and salt and pushed at her, and far across the flat she saw a figure standing at the edge of the water, still and black against the silver, watching her the way the house watched her, as though she had come to a door that had no lock. She turned and went back up the hill before the light failed. She was proud of that, later. It was the last time all week that going up the hill felt like a choice. She sat with the nine rules in her lap that afternoon and read them again, and this time she found the thing she had missed. Eight of the nine were rules a person could keep by staying still. The ninth was different. It did not tell her what she must not do; it told her that she could not go, and a house that tells you that has already thought about the day you will want to, and has already decided what it will do about it. She folded the paper and put it away and went to the window and watched the light leave the flats, and she understood that she had been given a year, and that a year is a thing a house can afford to wait out, and that she was the only one in Withergrave who could not. That night the frost came in earnest, and the house, which had held its cold all day like a held breath, began to make its evening sounds, the creak and settle and the tick of cooling stone, and above the stairs the hallway that led to the Room of Years was dark, and she did not go down it, and she lay awake and listened to the tide come in over the flats, and thought of a tenth rule torn into the page, which she had not obeyed and could not forget and did not understand. ---