Chapter 12 A Borrowed Name

"Amberley," said Pippa, "is a village forty miles south of here with a mill in it, and I have looked it up in the gazetteer, and I have looked at page thirty-one of this book." She put the book down open at the page. The entry was in a copperplate hand from 1861 and read, in full: *I am Ashton Prine, a miller of Amberley, and I have been four days on this road and this house has fed me without charging me, which nobody has done since my father died, and I shall send money when I am able.* "That's the first time the name's been used here," Pippa said. "In a hundred and sixty years. He was a miller. He spelled it *miller*. And he didn't pay, because he says he couldn't, in his own handwriting, in the next line." Amberley was looking at the page. He had the expression of a man watching a door close. "You've been in this house eleven weeks," Pippa said. "I've watched you get the register out on the twenty-third, the fortieth and the fifty-eighth night without appearing to think about it. I've watched you read every one of them. And then you came to me on the eighth and told me a true sentence that had no name in it, and I let you, because the rule says a true sentence and not a particular true sentence, and because I wanted very badly to be fair." "Yes," said Amberley. "So I'm going to ask you once, and you're going to tell me the truth, because that's the trade in this house, and if you lie to me I'll know in about eleven days and I'll think a great deal less of you for the rest of the winter." "I did not take it off a dead man." "I never said that." "You did look at the page for a long time." "I looked at the page because it had a name in it and you did not, and those are two different facts and I can hold them together." She sat down on the other side of the lectern. "Ask me the next question properly, Mr Whatever-You-Are, and I'll answer it." He put his hands flat on the table, which she noticed he did whenever he was about to say something exact. "There is a mill in the south country called Amberley," he said, "and it has been called Amberley for four hundred years, and I ran it for eleven, and I have not been called Amberley since I was thirty-one." He turned the pen over. "My name is Collis Ferrenby. I had a wife and a house and a trade and a brother in the next county who could not get work and could not be told, and in the winter of two years ago there was an evening at the mill when I was drunk and he was standing in the yard asking me for a job, and I said a sentence out of temper with a bottle in my hand and it was the sort of sentence a man cannot take back, and my brother has been Collis Ferrenby ever since." Pippa sat very still. "That's why you can't write a true sentence," she said. "Because every true sentence starts with a name and you have spent two years making sure the name has got to somebody else." "Yes." "Does he know you're here?" "He knows I'm not at the mill. He does not know where I am. He is a good man and he is a miller and he has the name now, and he'll keep it, and I would rather he kept it than that he got the house back and a brother he'd have to look at." "Did he want the house?" "He wanted bread," said Amberley — and then, hearing himself, put a hand over his mouth for a second and took it away again. "He wanted bread. He has his mother's cottage. He never wanted the mill. It was me that made it into a thing worth taking, and being the sort of man who makes a thing into a thing worth taking, I gave it away in a bad temper and I've been wearing somebody else's name ever since, and the name I gave it to doesn't make me feel a thing, which I think is the part I'm going to have to answer for." * * * She wrote him a new page at the lectern on the second of January, a ruled white leaf from the sheaf at the back, and she wrote the date at the top and nothing else. "Rule eleven," she said. "You cannot write on the page you were given, so you were given another. This page is yours. You may write what you like on it and nothing else for the rest of the winter." "I may write what I like?" "You may write that you are a man who took a name off a village because of a bad evening with a bottle in his hand, which is true and nobody here will read it, because nobody here reads the back." "That's not what I was going to write." "What were you going to write?" "I was going to write *I am Collis Ferrenby*," he said. "which is true. It's just that if I write it, it's in the book, and the book stays, and I've spent two years getting out of rooms." Pippa turned the page round and faced it to him and put the pen in his hand and said nothing at all, and went off down the passage to check the seventh lamp, which did not need checking. When she came back he had written: *I am Collis Ferrenby. My brother has my name and my work and I could go and take them and I have not, and I do not know yet why.* * * * "That is a very long sentence for a book with lines ruled on it," she said, looking at the crossing-out where he had started it twice. "The lines are a guide," said Ferrenby. "I've not said they're a law." * * * She was three days getting used to the name. It took her longer than she would have admitted. "You called him Amberley at the bar for eleven weeks," said Elverston, on the second evening, "and now you call him Ferrenby, and the whole house can hear the difference and every single one of them has an opinion about it." "They do, haven't they." "Marlowes says it's a stupid name. Sella says it isn't. Sella has been paid two shillings by the man and will defend him to anybody, including Tibb, including me." The doctor took his tea. "You know that you have done something quite unusual and that half the valley will hear about it by February. A man came up the mountain with a dead miller's name on him and you settled it in an afternoon." "I didn't settle it." "You gave him a page." "Yes." "And you read it." "I read every sentence in this book on the night I came," said Pippa, "including thirty-one years of what my aunt gave away. I do not think I read anybody's that day more carefully than I read that one." * * * The entry she made that night, in her own column, was short, because it had been a short afternoon. She wrote: *A man who came in as Amberley wrote in this book as Collis Ferrenby, which is his own, and I gave him a page to do it on. It is not my business why he came up the mountain and I have not asked a second time. The rule says one true sentence and it does not say the sentence has to be about you, and if it did we should all be writing about the weather.* * * * Underneath it, later, in the same night, in the small hours, in a hand that was not Pippa's and not her aunt's and did not belong to anybody who was in the house, a single line appeared in the margin of the ledger page of accounts: *Two names in one book is one name too many. Ask the Thawkeeper in the spring which of them is the miller.* Pippa saw it at half past five the next morning, on her way to light. Wilby found her standing over it with the register open. "Don't," he said. "I'm not going to do anything to it." "Leave it." "Wilby, somebody came into this house in the night and wrote in a book that is chained to a lectern in a corridor that is bolted at both ends." "No," said Wilby. "Nobody came into this house. Look at the ink." She looked at the ink. It was grey and very slightly damp, the way ink goes when a fire has been under a page for a while and then the page has been let cool. "Thirty-one years," said Wilby, "your aunt found two lines like that. Both times in the accounts. Both times they were true and both times she couldn't account for them, and both times she told me that the book was not hers and she would not have it printed because of it, and both times she said the one true thing to be done was to leave it for whoever came after, who would have a colder head." "That's a great deal of faith in a person she had never met." "That's exactly as much faith as it takes," said Wilby. "Are you going to be her?" Pippa looked at the line for a long while, at the way the ink had spread into the fibres of the paper, at the sentence, which was cool and precise and entirely unhelpful. "I'm going to be somebody who leaves the page," she said, "and I'm going to answer it in the spring, and I am going to ask him myself." * * * At the bottom of the page, a little lower, there was a second mark in the same damp grey ink, four words, in no sentence at all: *She does it too.* ---