第10章 Forty-Four Steps

She had made a name for herself before Pippa had made one for her, which is a thing that happens to children in big houses, and it happened to Sella Quillets in nine days. Sella was eleven. Her mother worked in a city two hundred miles away and had sent her up the mountain in October to learn a trade, in the care of her mother's brother, who was Gammon the baker, and Gammon had discovered within a fortnight that he had neither the room nor the temperament for an eleven-year-old and had brought her down the lane to the Hollowell with a bag of bread and the instruction to put her somewhere useful. Tibb had put her on a stool with a knife and a turnip and within two days discovered she could not be got rid of. The girl washed. The girl learned the bread. The girl sat up at half past four in the morning in the dark with her feet hanging, watching the fire, saying nothing at all for hours. And every night the girl counted the stairs. There are forty-four treads from the kitchen floor to the keeper's door. Pippa had counted them the week she came, as a way of feeling she knew the shape of her inheritance. "Forty-four," said Sella, on the ninth night, standing at the bottom in her stockings. "That's right." "Forty-five tonight." "Count them again." Sella counted them again, on her own, slowly, with one hand on the rail, and she came to the top and turned round with her face gone the colour of the linen. "There's one more," she said. "Under the mat at the half landing. There wasn't one there yesterday. I know there wasn't, I've counted it every night since I came, and Aunt Tibb's told me off for it twice for being slow." Pippa went down and pulled up the mat at the half landing. There was a second tread there, narrow, at right angles to the rest, set into the wall under the window, so that you would walk into it with your shoulder if you were in a hurry. It was not new. She could see where the plaster had been cut for it and filled again badly, decades ago, by somebody who had thought better of it. "Old," Pippa said. "Your aunt's aunt had that bricked up, I'd wager, after somebody put their foot through the ceiling." "Can we take it out?" "We'll see what Wilby says." * * * Wilby said: leave it. "Leave it?" "Leave it. I'll tell you why in about six weeks, and you'll not sleep a night till then, and that's a price I'm not going to charge you twice." He was on a ladder with a lamp in his teeth. "In the meantime it's a step. Sella's counted it. She's right about the count, and a child who can count the whole of a thing exactly is worth a good deal more than one who can't, and I'd sooner she did it every night of her life." "Wilby—" "Sit down, Pippa, and eat that before it goes cold." * * * So she began to let it be a step. She made a game of it, which came naturally to her, because a girl of eleven will turn anything into a game within nine seconds of being asked to stop crying about it. Now the count had a night for it. Now the count had a time for it: after the lamps, after the bread, after Tibb had kissed the top of her head and gone up. "And if it goes back to forty-four?" "Then it's forty-four, and we shall note the evening in the book." "You'd really write it in the book?" "In the book there's every night of this winter written in," Pippa said, "and there will be forty more nights after this one, and one day somebody's going to want to know what this house did in the twelfth of December, and I'd like there to be an answer." Sella thought about that with the enormous seriousness that eleven-year-olds bring to a proposition. "Do it in pencil," she said. "Then if it's wrong you can rub it out." "Pencils are for people who aren't sure," Pippa told her. "Ink. We'll use ink and we'll get it right." * * * The night of the twenty-second Sella came up the stairs, all the way to the keeper's door, and knocked, which she had never done. "It was forty-five," she said. "Only I counted one of the others wrong and it's forty-four and I've been counting a bit of the mat, and I'm sorry." Pippa looked at the child for a moment: the little cold hands, the shoulders in a too-big shirt, the absolute readiness to be told she had done it wrong. "Forty-four," she said. "You did it right the first time. That's the whole lesson and it's taken you three weeks and I'd sooner have it late than not at all." "I've got to tell you something else." She came the last step and stood in the doorway. "There's a draught." "There's always a draught. This house is four hundred years old and it was built on a slope." "It's not coming in at the window." She was quite certain of herself, and Pippa believed her, which was new. "It's coming up. Out of the step. The one under the mat. When I put my hand flat on it there's cold coming up through my hand, and it smells." "Smells of what?" Sella screwed her eyes shut and found it. "Hot iron," she said. "Like the gridiron when Tibb's had it in the fire all day." Pippa went down with a candle and knelt at the half landing and put her own hand flat on the narrow tread under the mat, and the stone was cold at the edges and warm, definitely warm, in the middle, and it was the twenty-second of December and there was no fire of any kind in that wall. "Go to bed," she said. "Are you going to—" "I am going to sit here for a minute. That's all. Go to bed, and don't tell Tibb, because Tibb will be in the cellar within the hour with a bar of iron and a bad temper." Sella went. Pippa sat on the step above with her back to the wall and the candle in her hand and felt, coming up through the stone under her palm, at intervals, a warmth with a rhythm in it. It was a slow warmth. It came, and it went, and it came. She counted it, because she could not help it, and found that over a period of about nine minutes it beat eleven times. Eleven. Somewhere under her feet, four hundred years down and twenty feet below the kitchen floor, something enormous and patient and quite warm was doing the same thing it had done every night for a hundred and twenty years. * * * She wrote nothing that night. That was the last entry she ever made in the register as a woman who had not yet understood what she was writing, and in later years she was glad of it, because on the first page of the new volume, in a hand nobody in the house had ever seen, somebody had already entered the date for the following winter. ---