Chapter 3 The Man Who Could Not Sign

He came in out of the weather at noon on the eleventh day, carrying a bag with one handle missing and a coat that had been good in a town. He was perhaps forty. Clean-shaven, dark-haired, with the sunburn line of a man who has spent a winter indoors and a summer out of doors, which does not make sense until you think about it. "Are you the Thawkeeper?" he asked, and Pippa said, "I am." "Amberley." She took him to the lectern and opened the register and told him the rule, and told him that every guest wrote one true sentence in the book on the night of arrival, in their own hand, and that the sentence had to be true, and that there was no other condition on it whatever. "That's all?" he said. "That's all." He read the rule on the first page twice. Then he took up Wilby's pen, which was a bad pen, and held it above the line for a long while, and Pippa watched a man decide four or five separate things at once. "I can't," he said. "You can write anything you like. It doesn't have to be about your name." "It's the only true thing about me." He put the pen down and squared it to the edge of the desk, and she noticed that his hands were perfectly steady, which was somehow the most alarming thing about the whole morning. "I gave it away. Two years ago, on purpose, to keep a promise, and the promise is paid and the name is gone and I have been two years of a man with a hole where his name was. Every sentence I write will be a lie until I write that one." Wilby, who had come in with the bar cloth and stayed, wiped his hands slowly on it. "There's a page rule," he said. "Rule eleven in Cressida's hand. A guest who cannot write on the page they've been given is given another page." "Where's the page?" "Behind you." There were forty-one pages in the register and Pippa had not looked past the twentieth. She turned back through them, past the midwinter suppers and the sleet storms and a run of entries in a copperplate she did not know, and found, at the back, a sheaf of clean ruled leaves in a different paper, slightly whiter, sewn into the binding with a linen thread. She ruled him a line on the first of them. "Write it there," she said. "One true sentence. Anything you like." The man looked at the clean page for a long moment. Then he picked up the pen and wrote, in a small steady hand: *I gave it away on purpose.* "That's true," he said. "That's true," Pippa agreed, and felt the hair lift on her forearms, because the sentence did not mention a name, and Pippa had been waiting for the whole conversation to turn on one. She asked him, as she was entitled to, where he had come from. "I came from the low country," he said. "I had a business. There is no business now." "And you'll be up here till the thaw." "I will." "The room at the end of the guest wing has a bed in it and no carpet and a window that shuts. It's not a good room." "I have had worse rooms with worse company and I have paid for them." He looked at the fire. "I'll want to help. I'll want to do something in this house. I am not able to sit in a chair for eleven weeks while somebody else works, and I'd rather you knew that now than found out in March." Pippa thought about the week she had had. "There's a bar," she said. "The old man keeps it and he's sixty-eight and will not be told anything. There's a dining room that needs laying and clearing and there's a boy from the post who can't be trusted with a tray. You'd have to speak to Tibb about the hours, and I'd want you to know that Tibb runs this kitchen and not me." "I'll speak to Tibb." * * * That night she made up the bed in the small room over the scullery, which Wilby had vacated for himself with a speed she suspected of being rehearsed, and came down at six to light, and he was already at the lectern with his coat on. "Don't," she said. "I've got it." "It's a small thing to let a man carry a lamp for four minutes." "It's a big thing to let a man find out whether he can." But she let him, after a moment, carry the fourth, which was the first, which was the door lamp, and she noticed that he carried it differently from how she carried it: low, at knee height, tilted very slightly away from his body, so that if it went the oil would go along the boards and away from him. He had done this before. That was the whole of it. He stayed. He took the small room at the end of the guest wing and he was in the house for the rest of the winter, and in the days that followed he turned out to be the best hand at the bar the Hollowell had ever housed. He could mix a glass of something that a tired shepherd would drink two of, and he could do it without spilling, and he read the papers that came up the road and knew which ones mattered. Wilby, who spoke to nobody more than twice a day for preference, began consulting him about the malt. That night Pippa lit the lamps in the written order with him watching, and he asked what she did and she told him, and at the seventh lamp he said, "You light that one last." "Last of all." "I'd have put it first." He considered the crooked bracket. "It's the one that matters." "Wilby says it matters because it smokes." "Wilby says a great many things because of smoke." On the fourth night of his stay, Amberley took a chair by the fire in the common room with a cup he did not drink from and a folded newspaper he did not read, and Pippa went out to the lectern and found him already there, turning the pages at the back. "That's not yours to look at," she said, without much edge in it. "I know." He shut the book. "Then you'll think less of me than I deserve, so I'll tell you. I know whose seal this is." On the table lay a thing she had taken for a lump of metal since the day she came. Two halves of a small brass seal, cut clean through the middle, lying on the cloth like two commas. "That came out of the coach," he said. "It was in the lining of the bag when I took it. I've carried it eleven miles and I have not known what to do with it, and now I know." Pippa turned the halves over with the flat of her nail. On the face of one half, worn almost smooth, there was a bird with its wings half up, struck into the brass. On the face of the other, the other half of the same bird. "The Thawkeeper's seal," he said. "Your aunt's. Cut in two." "Then how did it come to be in your bag?" "That," said Amberley, "is the part I would rather we talked about at breakfast, if you can bear it." ---