Chapter 38 The Line in Spring

The ground came back on the eighth of May and the whole of the valley turned out for it. It had to be walked. That was not a rule, because there was no rule anywhere in four hundred pages about walking a line in April; it was simply what everybody in Fernhollow did, in ones and twos, all day, on the twenty-eighth of April, on the sixth of May, and on the twenty-third. They went up from the beck in a line of about forty people: Nancarrow and eleven of his men, Gammon with his barrow, Trevose with the key to the Wintergate gate in his pocket because he would not go anywhere without it, Wrenfield, Bredon with eleven children out of Selborne who had walked two miles and were the loudest people in the valley, Elverston with his bag, Tibb, Pelyn, and eleven days of not being at the back of the queue. Mrs Valebrook came, and walked with Kerrith, and had a hand on the old woman's arm for the whole of the way up. * * * At the top there was nothing. The ring was under a foot of snow at the best of it and the green lamp was nine inches under, and the nine ridges had gone flat into the ground where they had been, and there was no bare earth anywhere and no crust and no iron standing up. Nancarrow took the spade from Gammon and dug. He dug down through a foot of snow and eight inches of frozen ground and then he hit something hard and went round it and took another two spadefuls out, and Kerrith got down on her knees on the frozen ground at ninety-one and put her hand into the hole and said, "There's iron." And the iron came up. "Fourteen," said Sella Quillets, from the side, and everybody turned round and looked at her, and Pippa said, "Say it again." "Fourteen," said Sella. "Fourteen lumps. Three, four, five — no. Wait." She got down on her knees beside the hole and counted properly, twice, with the sun on it, and then she sat back on her heels and said, "There's fourteen and one of them's got a stamp on it." * * * They cut a stamp out of frozen ground with a cold chisel and a hammer on the eighth of May at half past eleven in the morning at the top of the shoulder above Fernhollow, and it was a bakehouse seal with a bird on it whose wings were half up, and it had two points. "That's Gammon's," said Wrenfield. "That's Wrenlow's," said Gammon. "Two points is Wrenlow. Three points is Sandsgate. And that," he said, holding the thing out flat in his palm, "is nine inches under the top of a mountain, on a boundary that a shepherd's family set in 1829, and it has been in the ground since before the flood, and there is no way at all on this earth that it got there except by hand." * * * The deep room. They went down in the evening, all of them who could get down the fourteen steps, and they found the hearth-stone cold. It had been cold since the twenty-ninth of April and there was no ash on it and no warmth in it at all, and Pippa put her hand flat on the stone and left it there, and it was like the flagstones anywhere in the world. "She's gone quiet," said Sella. "She's not gone quiet," said Pippa. "She's done. That's what the third of April is." And then she sat down on the step of it and said the words out loud, into a cold room, with nineteen people standing in it, which she had never once done in four months of asking questions into warm stone. "Thank you," said Pippa Danby. "That's the winter. I'll be back in October and I'll bring the register, and I'll light them in the order, and I won't let anybody out in a whiteout." * * * The door at the top of the steps was shut when they came up, and nobody had gone near it, and it was bolted on the inside, and the bolt had been shot back. "I shot that bolt," said Sella. "I know you did. On the fourth of May. You told me you were checking the door and I told you to go and check the door and you went down and bolted it and came up again and I did not think about it again." Pippa put her hand on the girl's head. "That's the right thing to do and I want it in the book that it was done properly and on purpose by a person of eleven who had thought about it." * * * And then Mr Lanrick came up. He came up on the eleventh of May, on foot, from the far side, a thin man of about sixty with a greatcoat over one arm and a canvas bag with a book in it, and he stood in the yard at four o'clock in the afternoon and looked at the inn with his mouth slightly open, and said: "Is this the Hollowell?" "It is." "You're the Thawkeeper?" "I am," said Pippa. * * * He put the bag down on the step and took out a book, which was not as old as hers, and opened it on the step, and the wind took the pages and Marlowes — no, Pelyn — held them down. "It's the same," he said. "Is what the same?" "The book. Eleven lamps, an order, a true sentence, a line, a rule about the thaw." He turned back thirty pages and showed her an entry in a hand she had never seen. "Valebrook. Twenty-ninth of January. *Fourteenth of February, the third went out with Kennard and was brought home by a person of the village and the book was not signed.* That's not Fernhollow. That's the Mill at Valebrook, and there has been a Thawkeeper there since 1841, and I've kept it for twenty-two years." * * * "Is there snow on your line?" "There was snow on my line on the third of February," said Lanrick, "and it stood up in seven places on the shoulder, and it has stood up every winter I have been keeper, and I got it down on the twenty-second of February with a lamp and four men and it took four days and it took me never sleep." He shut the book. "And it came back up on the second of April. And I am seventy-one in July and I have not been able to get out of that house since the eleventh of January, and my half of the valley has been shut since the first of December, and I have had no word from anywhere." * * * Pippa sat down on the step of her own inn. "Send your half down to the valley and tell them what you told me," she said. "On the eighth of May they walked a line in the sun with forty people on it, and there is a bakery on that coast at Wrenlow that has been dead since 1954 and a seal in the ground at the top of our hill that has been there since before the flood, and Mr Ferrenby has just walked from there with a letter." "Who's Ferrenby?" "A man who had the same coat on as you do." * * * Lanrick went down the lane on the nineteenth of May with a coil of rope and a spade and Gammon's barrow and twenty-six people, and they took two days over the line at the Mill at Valebrook, on the far side of the pass, and got it down on the second of June, and Lanrick wrote four lines about it in his own book and gave them to Pelyn to bring up the hill, and Pippa put them in her register in a page of her own with somebody else's four lines on it, which is the first time in one hundred and twenty-one years that a foreign sentence has been entered in the Hollowell register. * * * And on the fourteenth of May, at half past nine in the morning, with the kitchen range going and Tibb at the door and Sella at the seventh lamp, the deep room came back. It came back while a woman of ninety-one was sitting in the window seat and a doctor was holding a plate of toast and Pippa Danby was standing in the middle of a kitchen arguing with a shepherd about hay. Tibb felt it through the flags and went out into the passage and said, "It wants the ninth." And Pelyn went down the fourteen steps and brought the lamp up and Pippa carried it, because it was hers, and lit it at the stair head at ten o'clock in the morning on the fourteenth of May, in daylight, with the door open and the whole village in the kitchen. It caught. * * * "When did it come back?" "It came back," said Pippa, "because somebody from a valley four hundred miles away stood in this yard on the eleventh of May and read four lines out of his own book in my wind." "That's not it." "That's a thing that happened," she said, "and I don't know what that thing was, and I have said so in a book four times in five months, and I have said so out loud to the cook in a warm room in April and it is in the register in my own handwriting and anybody may read it: I do not know. I count it. I keep the order. I put the light on and I walk the line and I do not know why any of it works, and I have stopped apologising for that, and if a day comes when somebody makes me apologise for it again I'll hand the book to whoever wants it and go and cook in a city." "Aye," said Nancarrow. "Well. That's the truest thing you've said all year." ---