第1章 The Rule in the Register

The last coach of the season set Pippa Danby down on the Fernhollow green at ten past four, when the light had already begun to go out of the sky and the hills stood behind the village like the walls of a room with the roof taken off. "Will you want the trunk brought up, miss?" "Yes, please." "Then I'd not wait past dark for it. There's ice on the high road already." He took her fare, glanced at the long low house on the slope above the green with its louvred windows and its chimney pulling a good honest smoke, and tipped his cap in a manner that suggested he was glad to be rid of her. Pippa stood in the lane with her case in one hand and her great-aunt's key in her pocket and discovered she had not known what she expected to feel. She had thought the drive up the mountain would feel like a decision. It felt like the day after one. The porch lamp was lit. Somebody had put it out early, while there was still daylight to walk home by. The door opened before her knuckles finished the second knock. "You'll be the doctor's niece," said the old man. Short, broad, buttoned to the throat in a waistcoat that had been mended at both elbows, with the hands of a man who has spent forty years holding on to things. "Wilby. Come in out of it. The wind's got an edge tonight." "Pippa Danby," she said. "The Thawkeeper's niece." Wilby's face did not change by a single hair, which she understood much later to have been the compliment. Inside, the house smelled of woodsmoke, tallow, and something sweeter underneath both, like bread cooling on a rack in another room. A passage ran the length of the ground floor, lined on one side with sconces and on the other with doors. Eleven sconces. Pippa counted them without meaning to, because counting was the first thing she had ever done well. "You'll want the kitchen," Wilby said. "Supper's bread and broth. There's a fire laid in the small room at the back, since the front one's cold this time of year." "I thought there'd be a solicitor's letter waiting. Or an agent." "There is an agent. He's been three times. I've sent him down to the road with his nose in the air both times and a cup of broth in his hand, which I call progress." Pippa laughed, and the laugh came out rusty, and Wilby nodded at it as though a piece of machinery had turned over nicely on the first try. The kitchen was low and whitewashed and warm. A woman in her fifties stood at a range with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she turned round and said, "You're the one who's come to shut us up," in a tone that suggested she was asking about the weather. "Tibb," Wilby said. "Tibb Bryce. This is Miss Danby." "I'm not here to shut it up," Pippa said. "No," Tibb said, turning back to the pot. "Nobody's here to shut anything up. That's how it goes on being shut." Later, after the broth, after the bread that was somehow better than bread had any right to be, Wilby took her along the passage with a lamp and stopped in front of a lectern of dark oak. "This is it," he said. "This is the office." On the lectern lay a book. It was bound in brown leather gone the colour of a chestnut, and it had been repaired so many times that the spine had the ridged look of a boot that has walked a great distance. Pippa put out her hand and stopped a finger's width from the cover. "Can I?" "You'll be doing worse than touching it." She opened it. The first page held nine words in a copperplate hand, black ink faded to brown: **No guest may leave before the thaw.** Beneath that, in the same hand, four lines had been added in a shakier version of the same letters, the last of them only half finished: *and the keeper, who is not a guest, stays also* Pippa read it twice. "That's the rule," Wilby said. "That's one rule. Where's the rest?" "The rest is what you'd do about it." The room was very quiet. Outside, somewhere up the hill, a door banged and a dog answered it, and then nothing. "My aunt never told me any of this," Pippa said. "She told me the inn made a hundred and forty pounds a year and that I'd be welcome for a fortnight." "Your aunt told you what would get you on the coach." "She died in September." "Yes." "And left me a house I can't sell because of a sentence in a book." "You could sell it," Wilby said. "It'd take a buyer and a lawyer and a long enough winter, and by spring the road's open and the buyer would see the lamps lit in order and ask who keeps them, and you'd have to answer." He moved the lamp along the passage so the light ran over the sconces one by one, eleven of them, warm on the old plaster. "The office came with the house. Your Cressida had it thirty-one years. Her aunt before her. The family that built this place had it before that, and the family before them." "What does it do?" Wilby considered the question for a while, the way a man considers a question he has been asked badly and knows the answer will not help. "You keep it," he said at last. "That's the whole of it. You keep it and it keeps the rest." "Keeps what?" "The snow off the line." He said it lightly, the way a man says the price of eggs. Pippa shut the book. She put her palm flat on the cover and found it warm, though the passage was cold and the book had lain there all evening untouched. "My room," she said. "Which one?" "Not the guest wing." "Why not?" "Because the Thawkeeper keeps the register, and you don't sleep two hundred feet from a book you haven't finished reading." He walked her up to a room over the lectern, small, plain, with a washstand and a chair and a window that looked down the valley toward the black shoulder of the pass. He set the lamp on the sill, then stood with his hand on the door frame and did not leave. "You'll want to sell," he said. "Everyone wants to sell. That's all right. Sell in the spring. Sell in the summer, when the coaches come. Only do it after the thaw, and only when you've read to the end of the page." "Which page?" He went out. She heard his boots on the boards, unhurried, and then the sound of the passage door closing, and then nothing but the fire ticking and the wind finding the sconces one at a time. Pippa sat on the edge of the bed with her boots still on. Downstairs the eleven sconces held their eleven small flames, and she counted them again because she could not help it, and this time she noticed that the seventh of them had no bracket — only an old nail bent sideways in the plaster, and a cold dark patch on the wall the size of a hand. At one in the morning she came down for a glass of water and took the book with her, and opened it on the lectern where the lamp's light lay across the page. Below the rule, in the margin beside the first entry of the old hand, her great-aunt had written in a shaky copperplate four words she had never in her life said out loud to anybody: *The keeper comes home.* ---