第19章 The Ruled-Out Line

Mistress Bredon came up from Selborne on the twenty-sixth of January, on foot, with a satchel of books and a schoolroom's worth of nerve. She was fifty-eight, grey, square, and had taught in the valley for thirty-four years, and she was the only person Pippa had ever met who could enter a room and appear to be doing her an honour. "I have come for the month," she said. "Nobody is to leave before the thaw." "I know your rule, and I have read your book in your aunt's hand, which took me nine years to be able to do, and I have come for the month because the school has eleven children in it and eleven children and one stove is a thing I have thought about too much this winter, and also because the pass is shut and I am a practical woman." She set the satchel down. "There is another reason and I shall tell you it now so that you cannot think I concealed it. I wanted to see the lamps." * * * She saw the lamps at six that evening and stood in the passage and watched all eleven of them go in, in the written order, third, fifth, first, fourth, second, sixth, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, seventh. "The seventh," she said, when it was done. "The seventh." "Last of all." "Last of all, and crooked, and it never smokes, and I have given up expecting it to." Mistress Bredon stood in front of it for a good while with her hands behind her back, and then she said, "Will you let me take it down?" "No." "Will you let me put it out?" "No." "Will you let me break it?" "No, and you'd have to be a considerably stronger woman, and I'd have to be a considerably worse one." * * * She came to Pippa's door on the third night. "I've been in this house sixty-one hours and I've done three things and I should like you to know what they are, because I'm going to do them anyway and I'd rather we both understood the arrangement." "Go on." "One. I have read the register from end to end, which took eleven nights, including the sewn leaves at the back, which nobody is supposed to know are a different colour." Bredon held up a slip of paper. "Two. I have been into your cellars, and I have found two hundredweight of meal in the cartshed that nobody has claimed, and I have not told anyone, and I would like it to stay that way for another four days. Three. I have done a thing I am going to tell you about, and if you want to send me down the hill tonight I will go without a word, and you should understand before I tell you that I am not sorry." * * * She put the slip of paper on the table. It was a rubbing. Pippa had seen the technique in a book on her aunt's shelf — a sheet of paper laid over the page and rubbed with the side of a pencil until the ink came up in reverse. Somebody had taken a rubbing of the register and cut it out with a knife. "I did not take the page out," said Bredon. "I could have. There is a way and I know it and I could have done it and put it back at an angle and nobody would have found it for thirty years, and I want you to understand that I thought about doing it, because I am not a fool and I don't want to be praised for not being a fool." "Why didn't you?" "Because I have thirty-four years of children," said Bredon, "and I have never once in thirty-four years found a way to teach a child that a thing is true which I had proved to be a story." She turned the rubbing round. It showed four lines in the copperplate of 1861. *I am Ashton Prine, a miller of Amberley, and I have been four days on this road and this house has fed me without charging me, which nobody has done since my father died, and I shall send money when I am able.* And across the four lines, rubbed nearly through the paper, in a hard blunt pencil, in capitals: *A LIE.* * * * "There it is," said Bredon. "A hundred and sixty years of this book, and a rule, and eleven lamps, and a covenant, and a war with the weather, and the whole of it rests on a man named in a village called Amberley who said in this room that nobody had fed him without charging him since his father died, and I have found eleven other entries like it. I have found eleven men and women who came up this mountain to be fed for nothing and said so. Eleven. In a hundred and sixty years." "Yes." "And not one of them sent the money." "Not one." "Then it is a covenant between nobody and nothing," said Bredon, "and this house has spent a hundred and sixty years defending a village against weather on the strength of eleven unverified statements made by hungry people who were being polite." She put her hands flat on the table. "And I have been a schoolmistress in this valley for thirty-four years, and I have taught eleven hundred children that what you can check is what you should believe in, and I have come up a mountain in a snowstorm to tell a woman with a register in front of her that her office is a piece of folk-magic with a nice rule in it." * * * Pippa did not sit down for a long time. "Where did you put the rubbing?" "In my book, in my own room, where you may take it off me." "And the pencil?" "In the fire in the back kitchen an hour ago," said Bredon, "and you may look, and you will find the grate has not been lit since the eleventh and Tibb will tell you so." "Then you have broken the only evidence that you came in here to do damage, and you have done it on purpose, and you have told me on purpose. Say what you actually want to say." "I want you to tell me the truth," said Bredon. "Not the register's truth. Yours." * * * Pippa got up and went to the door and opened it and stood in the passage, where the lamps were burning behind her in the written order, third and fifth and first and fourth and second and six and eight and nine and ten and eleven and seven. Bredon came and stood beside her. "What do you mean," said Pippa, "by the truth?" "The rule is real. The lamps are real. The lamps do what you say they do, and they do it in that order, and the order has been the same for a hundred and sixty years, and there is a reason for the order that a man could not have invented." She turned to her. "But the eleven sentences in the book are not why this house holds. I've watched you this week. You hold it. You hold it the way a woman holds a beam in. And I have read the whole of that book and the only thing in the whole of it that is doing any work is you." "That is not—" "Ask your own questions," said Bredon. "Go and ask the lamps why the order is what it is. I dare you to ask and see whether it answers. I have sat in this passage for two nights waiting for one lamp to explain itself to me and not one of them has, and they would have if they could, and they can't, because they are brass and oil and a woman's attention. That's all right. That's allowed. Brass and oil is what a kitchen is." She held out her hand. "I apologise. I came up here to be clever at you and I have been, and you have let me, and you ought not to have, because in another house I would have taken the page." * * * "I didn't let you," said Pippa. "No," said Bredon. "You did not. You went downstairs at half past six and lit eleven lamps in an order and you came back up and you stood in the doorway and you did not tell me to go. And I have thought about that for two days and I have concluded that the reason you did not is that you have been here seven weeks and you are still frightened of exactly the thing I am accusing you of being. You are frightened that you are the whole of it. You are frightened that when you are gone this place is a big cold house with a rule in it." Pippa had not thought that. She found, when she looked for it, that she had thought it, probably eleven times, and had not once admitted it, and that being told by a schoolmistress in a borrowed coat was roughly the most annoying and the most useful thing that had happened to her all winter. "Go to bed," she said. "I shall say one more thing first, because I am that sort of woman and I shall say it badly." "Say it." "I was wrong about one thing," said Bredon. "I said eleven unverified statements. There is a twelfth." She went back into her room and came out again with a piece of paper, and gave it to Pippa, and it was a rubbing of the very first page, done very carefully, and it showed the rule in her great-aunt's aunt's hand: *No guest may leave before the thaw.* And beneath it, in the same hand, in a firmer line, as though it had been added at a later date by the same person with more to lose: *And no keeper either, and none of us has ever been sure why the second line is in the same hand as the first.* * * * Pippa read it by her own lamp in the keeper's room at one in the morning with the register open on her knees and the fire dead and the house making the noises it made all night. She got out the sheet of paper and the pencil and she made a rubbing of it herself, and then she took the India rubber out of the drawer and she rubbed the word *stays* out of her great-aunt's unfinished line in the margin of the first page, the one that said *and the keeper, who is not a guest, stays also.* She did it carefully. She did it until the page was clean. * * * On the twenty-ninth she wrote, in the accounts column, in her own hand: *Mistress Bredon of the Selborne school came up on the twenty-sixth and put a pencil word across an entry of 1861 in this book and showed it to me and then burned the pencil. She was wrong about the eleven and she is right about one thing and I have written it down here because it is a debt and I would rather be held to it than keep it. The debt is this: I do not know that this office is anything but a woman in a corridor who is frightened. I intend to find out. If I find out that it is only me, then that is what it is, and I shall say so in this book, and the lamps will go on burning because that is the arrangement, and the reason they burn will be written down in plain words so that whoever comes next knows it was never more than a woman turning up.* *And I have rubbed out a word in the rule with a rubber, having spent nine evenings learning that there is a page in this book for things that cannot be unsaid, and there is no page in this book for what I have just done, and I have looked.* *Nobody will know. That is the exact size of what I did.* * * * Underneath, in the small hours, in the damp grey ink, the answer came, and it was four words long, and Pippa Danby read it in the keeper's room at Fernhollow at twenty past four in the morning of the thirtieth of January, and put the book down, and sat with her hands flat on the table. *She has finally asked.* ---