第17章 What the Stairs Said

Sella Quillets had not slept properly since the second of January, and Pippa knew it, and let it run its own course until the eleventh, because she had learned in six weeks that most of what needed doing in this house would wait four days for her if she let it. On the eleventh she came down for the bread at five in the morning and found the child sitting on the bottom step in the dark with a candle. "Forty-five," said Sella. "Forty-five." "I've had forty-five since the second of January and I've counted it every night and I'm not frightened of it any more. That's the part I wanted you to know. I used to be frightened of it and now I'm not." She blew on the candle. "What I'd like is to go and look at it. Not at night. In the day. With you." "And your aunt?" "My aunt's the baker and he's asleep and he snores like a horse in a field and if I go and tell him he'll say no and go back to bed and be right to." She pulled her knees up. "Miss Danby, I've counted those stairs since the sixth of December and I've had forty-four and forty-five and now I've had forty-five nine nights and I want to know what's under it. I'd go myself but I'm not to go on my own, you said, on the first night, and I've not forgotten, and I'm asking you to come and not asking Tibb because Tibb would cry." * * * They went up at eleven in the morning with a lamp and a cold chisel and Pippa's husband's — no, with Wilby's own chisel, which he handed over without comment and which was very old and very sharp. The narrow tread came up out of the mat in four pieces. Beneath it there were fourteen steps going down into the wall. The first four were ordinary. The fifth was worn in the middle like the step outside the door, by a foot. The sixth had a nail in it. The seventh had two, and the wall beside the eighth had a handhold cut into the plaster, and the plaster was black where the hand had been. "Those aren't stairs," said Sella. "Those are a way down." "That's a way down." "Miss Danby." The girl had gone very quiet. "Those nails are the same as the nails in the stair above us. Look at them. Same head, same angle, same man." * * * At the bottom there was a door, and the door had no keyhole, and it was not locked, and it had not been opened in thirty years judging by the dust on its upper edge which had a clean band across it where somebody had leaned. Inside was a room about as big as the scullery. The floor was stone slabs. There were three brass lamps on brackets standing on the floor, not on the wall, with their wicks trimmed and their glass clean, and there was a table with a slate on it, and on the slate there were two books. And in the middle of the floor there was a hearth-stone: a single slab of grey stone, four feet across, round, and set flush, with a ring of iron in the middle of it. Pippa carried the lamp over it. "Do not kneel on it," said Sella. "Why?" "Because Tibb said the floor's hot under it in the night and you've not got anything between you and it." The girl crouched at the edge of the stone and put her hand out and stopped an inch above it. "It's warm. In the middle. Warmer than the lamps." * * * Pippa put her own hand an inch above the stone and felt it come up through the air, in slow waves, and counted, because she could not stop herself, and found that it came eleven times in about nine minutes. She took the lamp and looked at the table. The first book was the register. It was the same book, and the same leather, and the same broken spine, and it was open at a page in the middle, and the middle of the book was where she had never got to. The second book was smaller, bound in something grey, and it had no title on it, and it was a day-book, and it had been left open, and the entries in it were in her great-aunt's aunt's hand and they were in a column headed *Below*, and the column ran for sixty years. *Third of November. Below warm. Ninth lamp trimmed. Quarter of oil spent.* *Twelfth of December. Below cold this morning and I have lost the two hours of the middle and Tibb says I sat down. Nothing over the posts. Well.* *Second of January. Nothing over the posts. Snow at the shoulder and it is quiet about it.* Pippa read every line of the page and then read the page before it, and the page before that, going back through the winter, and she saw that it was not a diary. It was a temperature. Somebody had been taking a temperature of the bottom of this house for sixty years, twice a day, in ink, and had never once written a word about how they felt about it. * * * "How does a fire burn under a cold stone for sixty years?" said Sella. "It doesn't." "Then what's doing it?" Pippa sat back on her heels. "Somebody lights eleven lamps in an order every night," she said, "and somebody writes down what people say when they're not being careful, and somebody takes this temperature twice a day for sixty years." She put her hand flat on the stone, and the warmth went through her palm and up her arm and settled somewhere behind her ribs. "And that's all anybody's ever done. That's the entire job. There's no secret. There's just sixty years of somebody turning up." Sella said nothing for a while. "Is it enough?" she asked at last. "If it's just somebody turning up." "It'd have stopped," said Pippa, "if it wasn't." * * * They came up the fourteen steps and put the tread back and the mat over it, and Pippa said they would tell Wilby, and Sella said she would like to be the one to do the lamps at the half landing from now on, and Pippa said yes, and then said again, more carefully, "You may do the lamp. You'll not do it alone. And you'll not go down those steps at all, and I'll not have anybody in this house thinking there's a girl of eleven on her own down there in the dark. Those are the terms." "Ma'am." "Agreed?" "Agreed," said Sella. "Can I still count?" "You may count. I want you to count." * * * Wilby was at the foot of the stair when they came down, with his lamp out, waiting. "Sixty-one years I have worked in this house," he said. "You want to know the first thing I ever did here." "Tell me." "I swept that floor," said Wilby, "on my first morning, and I asked Cressida's aunt what it was for, and she said it was a cellar and it didn't want sweeping, and I said a floor has to want something or else why are you sweeping it." He took the chisel from her. "And she said: *because a floor that has never been swept is a floor nobody's standing on, and the first thing a warm thing wants, Wilby, is somebody's weight.*" * * * That night Pippa wrote the entry in the book, and she read it back three times before she put the pen down, because she had discovered that was what the book was for: that you wrote it, and then you had to sit there and look at what you had actually said. *Took the child down the fourteen steps under the half landing at eleven in the morning at her asking and with my hand on the wall the whole way. There is a room under this house that has a slate in it and a hearth-stone in the floor and three lamps standing on the floor with their wicks trimmed, and somebody has taken the temperature of it twice a day for sixty-one years, and the temperature is good.* *She asked me if that was enough. I told her that it would have stopped if it wasn't, and I believe that, and I have noticed that I have started saying things in this book that I have not yet proved, which I think is what the book is for.* *And I did not tell her the other thing, because she is eleven and it can wait until she is old enough to be told it without being frightened. The other thing is that I stood on the stone and put my hand flat on it and it was warm, and it came up eleven times in nine minutes, and every one of those eleven times something in the floor of this house leaned towards the hand of whoever put it there. That is not a temperature. That is an answer. And it has been answering sixty-one years to people who came in out of the cold and were not in the habit of counting.* *We are going to have to count.* ---