Chapter 11 The Night the Pass Closed

The storm came in on the evening of the twenty-seventh and it did not stop for three days. By midnight the wind had come round to the north and taken the smoke straight back down the chimney, and the kitchen was filling with a grey haze that would not go anywhere, and the front of the house was shaking in a way Pippa had not known buildings could. "Sit down," said Tibb. "Sit down and let it happen. It's a mountain in the middle of an argument." "I'm not sitting down. There's eleven guests and a fourth lamp out." "There's a fourth lamp out because it went out and you want to relight it in a draught. Sit down." The front door went. Not opened — went, all at once, off its latch, and the wind came down the passage like water down a gully and put out three lamps and a candle and arrived at the kitchen at the same moment as everything else. Wilby had the door shut with his shoulder and a chair under it before Pippa had taken a second breath. "That's the last time that door's opened till March," he said. "Mrs Kerrith—" "Mrs Kerrith is in the parlour and the parlour window's shut and I have nailed it and I will not have it discussed." He was breathing hard. "Go up and count." * * * She went up. Eleven sconces, seven still burning, four out. She relit the four she could reach from the landing, working low with her sleeve over her hand, and the wind came up the stairwell behind her in long slow pushes that arrived like something breathing. And at the top, on the half landing, under the mat, the narrow tread that had been bricked up since her great-aunt's aunt put it there, was warm enough to frost the palm of her hand. She stood on it in the dark with four lamps out behind her and the house coming apart at the front, and the warmth came up through the stone in eleven slow beats, and she counted them without wanting to. At the fourth beat she went downstairs. "Right," she said. "Listen to me. The east wing is shut." Wilby looked up. He had not expected it and neither had Tibb. "It's a hundred and forty steps from the front door and the wind's coming straight down them," Pippa said. "Everyone in the west. Common room, the long table, the two fires. Beds in there tonight. Take your own bed if you can carry it, and if you can't, take a blanket." "That's eleven people in a room built for seven." "Yes." "You've made the common room into a dormitory." "Yes, and in the morning we'll take the beds out again and nobody will know it happened." She was already counting heads. "And we'll write it in the book. The whole thing. I want a line in the book about the night the pass closed, because in forty years somebody will want to know what this house was doing on the twenty-seventh of December, and the answer is not going to be *sitting tight*." * * * It took an hour and a half and it was done without one raised voice, which surprised her, because it took two to carry a bed up the back stairs and eleven people had eleven opinions. Amberley carried without being asked and put his bed down at the head of the long table where he could see the door, and nobody rearranged it. Marlowes came down from his room under his own arm for the first time in six weeks and stood in the middle of the common room with his coat on and his violin case in his hand and looked completely wretched. "You needn't." "I know I needn't." He moved to the far end and sat on the floor with his back to the wall. "I'll play." "You don't have to play." "I'm going to play," said Marlowes, "because there are eleven people in a room who cannot sleep and I have been in this house six weeks and this is the first thing I have found to be useful for." The Otterburns took the two ends of the table and put their chairs back to back, which was not warmth, and was a treaty. Sella slept under the table on a heap of blankets with her shoes on, and woke once, and found the whole of Fernhollow's winter population asleep in one room, and went back to sleep grinning into the cloth. * * * They got the fire up at ten, the hot food at eleven, and the tea at midnight, and somewhere in the middle of it Wilby put his head round the door and said, "There's a lamp on the far side of the beck." Pippa went out into a yard where the snow was going sideways in solid sheets, and found the whole of the west front of the Hollowell dark, and looked across four hundred yards of white to Bredon's cottage, where there was a light in the back window. "That'll be the doctor's mother," said Wilby at her shoulder. "The doctor's mother died in the autumn." "Then that's the doctor's mother's house and somebody's in it." "It blinks." "It does not." "It blinks," said Pippa, "three times, and then out, and it did that twice while you were talking. Go and get Elverston." The doctor came out into that weather in his shirtsleeves and stood and looked for a quarter of an hour, and the light did not come on again. "It's a fire," he said at last. "There's no fire in that house since September. I've swept it myself." "What is it?" "In my profession," said Elverston, "we call that an old woman who won't go to bed and a bad chimney and nothing else at all, and I've known for thirty years that the two explanations cover everything anybody is frightened of." He turned his collar up. "I'll go across in the morning, when it's light and there's a bridge. I'll not go tonight. I've a house with eleven people in it and I'm needed here, and that's the whole of why I'm not going." * * * At four in the morning the storm began to go slack, and Pippa came off the settle and went the length of the common room with a lamp, and looked at all of them. Nine sleeping. Marlowes sitting where he had sat, asleep upright with the fiddle across his knees. Elverston in the chair by the window with a book open on his chest. Tibb, who had not slept at all, at the range with a cloth over her head like a woman in a siege painting. And on the floor by the fire, wrapped in a blanket with the register open on his knees, a man who had come up the mountain with no name, writing by the light of somebody else's lamp. "You're not to write in the front," Pippa said. "This is the back. This is the accounts column. And I can't write in the front because I've had my true sentence, so I may write here or nowhere, and I would like to write here." He turned the page. "There's a column headed *Against the house*. Nobody has written in it since 1961." "I know. I read it." "You read it and you came up here intending to sell." "I came up here intending to sell." He dipped the pen. "May I?" And Pippa Danby, who had come four hundred miles up a mountain to empty a house, stood in the middle of her own common room at four in the morning and made a decision she had not known she was making until she had made it. "Write in the second column," she said. "The one that says *Given*. And write what it's for, and who it's for, and the day you gave it. If somebody comes after me and wants to know what this house was, they'll want to know that the flour was the flour and the flour went to a village and it was never once written down anywhere but that book." Amberley wrote for a while. She read it upside down, which is a thing she was not going to tell him she had done. "It says I want to put in the name of the coach company clerk in Selborne who eats my bread," he said. "Then you may put it in the name of God and put a line through it." ---