Chapter 4 Flour in the Cellar

The first real snow came in on the night of the fifteenth, and the village came up to the Hollowell the next morning in a state Pippa had not expected. Gammon came first, the baker, with his sleeves powdered white and his hat brim running with melt. "Salt," he said. "Salt?" "Salt, flour, yeast. The mill at Selborne has shut for the winter, or it says it has, and I'll tell you why it has shut, because it's about your bread." He put his hands flat on the kitchen table. "The coach company has a standing order against my flour. Four hundredweight a month, all winter, on the understanding I hold back theirs out of my own stock. Your aunt cancelled it every year in November and told me to tell the clerk she was ill." Pippa put down the cloth she was folding. "She never told me any of this." "No, because she was dead and you were in a city with your hands in a sink." Gammon's voice was not unkind. "Miss Danby, I've fed this valley on that arrangement for nine years and your aunt covered every year of it out of the Hollowell's own bin. That's not theft, mind. That's hospitality, and I've watched her do it, and I said nothing." "How much is there in the cellar?" "Sixty pounds of flour in the bin, and a hundred and ten in sacks that the coach company does not know about, and about as much yeast as will keep a village in bread for six weeks." "And the coach company?" "Wants their four hundredweight in Selborne in three days and a note of thanks." * * * Pippa went down to the cellar with Wilby and a candle, and the cold down there was the good kind, the kind that gets into your wool and stays. The sacks were on the racks, and the bin was under the stair, and the stair had a tread at the bottom that had never rung under any foot she could remember. "Write it down," Wilby said. "If you're going to start a thing like this, write it down. People forget that a kindness given quietly for nine years is a debt, and a debt is easier to remember than a kindness." She wrote it down. She wrote, *Sixteen hundredweight of the coach company's flour, applied to the village bake, by order of the Thawkeeper. Held against the year.* "Trevose will be furious," Wilby said. "Trevose can come and be furious at me in person, which he hasn't done since Tuesday." "He'll do it by post." "He will." She had the sacks up the stair and across the yard and into Gammon's cart before noon, and the village had bread by four o'clock that smelled of every good thing she had eaten in six years of cities, and by suppertime somebody had left a loaf on the Hollowell step with a paper folded round it and no message. That pattern held. A loaf on the step. A basket of eggs in October's last week. A side of bacon in November from the Bredons' cottage, tied with red string, and one in the second week of December that came up from the sheepfold with a note in a hand Pippa did not know, saying only: *For the lamp oil. With thanks for the flour.* And under the house, on the night of the twenty-second, Pippa went down to check the cellar bins and found them eleven sacks heavier than she had left them, and no mark on the door. She told Wilby. He went very quiet. "That's Cressida's store," he said. "That's her own bin, behind the wainscot. It's not in the lease and it's not in the book. She fed the valley off that for thirty-one years, and there's nobody left in the world who knows about it but you and me and a man called Corven." "Corven who?" "Corven Pyle. He was a carter here before the turn of the century." Wilby wiped his hands on his coat. "He died in a workhouse in Selborne the winter after your Cressida did. If his mark is on a sack, you may as well burn the sack. There's nothing in it that isn't owed to somebody in this valley." * * * The bread stopped coming after the first week, the way debts stop being mentioned once they have been honoured. Pippa found she missed it more than she had expected to. She had come up the mountain to sell a house and she had spent her first fortnight emptying the cellar into a village she could not yet call hers, and she had not once thought of writing to the agent about the price. Gammon came up on the Tuesday and left, as he always did, with the sack of yesterday's loaves and no invoice, and stopped at the yard gate to say that the valley had not had white bread like that since the coach company started taking it in 'ninety-one. "You've put a price on it," Pippa said. "I've put a price on nothing. I've watched a hundredweight of flour go to a village that couldn't feed itself and I've watched it be eaten in two days instead of nine. That's not a price, miss, that's arithmetic." "Tell the company." "They'll bill me." He shouldered the sack. "And I'll take it, because the company's got a clerk in Selborne who eats a loaf a week off my cart, and one day that clerk is going to be somebody who matters, and that's how this valley has always worked. Never by arrangement. By loaf." She thought about that for a long time afterwards. She thought about it on the evening of the twenty-fourth, at the lectern, with the book open in front of her. Under the rule, in Cressida's hand, somebody had kept a column headed, in faded ink, *Given*. It ran for thirty-one years. Favour and household. Rent to the widow Bredon and then to her granddaughter. Four pounds to Bredon's school in the year of the fever. Split logs, forty-one in the deep of 'ninety-four, to the house at Bredon's cottage. Flour, flour, flour. Never a name, always a place. The last entry in the column was dated the ninth of September. It said: *Household. A doctor. He was cold.* Pippa read that three times, and then she got out her own book and wrote in it, in her own hand, a line she was not in the habit of writing. *Gammon's arrangement understood. The standing order with the coach company is cancelled as of the twenty-third. What the house cannot use it will give, and what it gives it will enter here, so that the next person standing where I am standing does not have to find the holes by putting her hand in them.* Wilby read it over her shoulder in the middle of the passage the next morning. "That's new," he said. "Yes." "Your aunt never entered a gift. She entered debts, because a debt is a thing you can be asked for back, and she thought that was safer, which it is, when the person is honest." "Was she honest?" "Your aunt," said Wilby, "could not tell a lie that would keep you out of the weather." ---