第2章 Eleven Lamps in Order

The first snow came up the valley on the ninth day, thin and hard and sounding on the roof like somebody walking over gravel. Pippa came downstairs at half past six to find Wilby already at the lectern with his coat on and a list in his hand. "Third one first," he said without looking up. "Then the fifth. Then the first. Then the fourth, the second, the sixth, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, and the seventh last of all." "That's not in order." "It's the order it's written in. That's a different thing and it takes forty years to learn which one you meant." He held the list out. "Read it. From the book." She read it. It was on the inside of the front board, where a bookkeeper hides the things a reader may not see, written in four inks over four decades. "The third, the fifth, the first," she read aloud. "Why that order?" "Because in February of the year your great-aunt's aunt was alive, we found the passage full of smoke at half past six in the morning with the lamps burning in the wrong order, and nobody in the house would own to it." He took the list back. "She worked out the order over forty years by watching which lamp smoked. You light them where the draught wants to go, and the smoke goes up the chimney instead of into the ceiling." "Which lamp smokes?" "The seventh. Every time. It's on the wall that the north wind comes through, behind the stair." Pippa got the stool and stepped up to the sconce. The bracket was brass, black with age, and behind it the plaster was dark and faintly greasy, exactly as it had looked the night before. "It's been bent," she said. "Mowbray did that in 'ninety-one, trying to get at a nail, and the smith put it back crooked to make a point about his father." Wilby lifted the lamp out of the fourth sconce and set a fresh lamp beside it on the sill. "Put these in. Two dozen and a half of oil from Wrenfield's cart last week. Mind the wick. Burn it level or it smokes and then you'll have the seventh on your hands all day." On the second evening she got the order wrong. She did it out of good manners. There were eleven lamps in the passage and she lit them one to eleven, as a person would light candles at a table, and she was three-quarters of the way down the corridor before she noticed the ceiling going brown in front of her. It took her forty minutes and a bucket and a bucket and a half, and Wilby found her on her knees at the seventh lamp with her sleeve black to the elbow. "Gammon," he said. "Gammon can wait." "Gammon cannot wait, and you cannot either." He took the taper out of her hand. "Number order. Because that is how a body thinks. Number order sends the smoke forward and there is no chimney forward. The third is nearest the kitchen flue and it takes the kitchen's heat. Then the fifth, which is under the stair where the hall is coldest. Then the first, at the front door, which has been cold since the house was built and will be until it falls down, and you want it warm early because that's where the door is." "And after that?" "After that you follow the draught." He lit the three she had put out. "I'll tell you the order tonight and you'll still get it wrong twice. Everybody does. The mistake is only a mistake while there's nobody in the house asleep above your head." They worked down the passage together. Pippa found she liked the work more than she had expected to. It was the first thing since she left the city in eleven years that had a beginning and an end she could name, and a thing done wrong could be done right again in ninety seconds. At the seventh sconce she stopped. "The bracket's bent and I can't get the lamp in square." "You can get it in square. Turn it the other way." She turned it the other way. It went in with a scrape that made her wince and sat there crooked, and the lamp inside it stood at a slight angle, and she thought: fine. That evening she lit them herself, in the written order, carrying the taper from the first to the last. The house filled up as she went. In the kitchen the flames made Tibb's face look thirty years younger. On the stairs the small brass mirrors threw six weak suns onto the wallpaper. On the last one, the seventh, the light went into the corner and made a soft gold pool on the floor that nobody had asked for and everybody would miss. "You've a knack," Wilby said. "Your aunt had it too. She's the one who taught me, mind." "You were a Thawkeeper?" "I kept the lamps and the door and the register's clean pages." He began banking the kitchen fire. "Keeping's a trade. There's more to it and less than people imagine, both ways." She sat on the settle with her boots off and her feet against the warm brick and said, "Tell me about the line." Wilby put the poker down. "Walk out with me in the morning. Can't talk about a wall you've never leaned on." He slept in the room over the scullery and she heard him get up twice in the night, which she learned over the following weeks was the sound of the house being checked. That night she asked him what her aunt had been like, and he took so long over it that she thought he had decided not to answer. "She was not tall," he said. "She was exactly like you, which I hadn't expected, because I'd only ever seen her in a chair with a stick across her knees." "Did she like it? The office." "She was a bad innkeeper for fifteen years and then she was the best one anybody in this valley has ever had, and the whole of the difference between those two facts is the whole of how she was." He turned the last lamp up. "She argued with people. Everybody says she argued. What they mean is she made them finish their sentences. That's rare and it makes enemies of people who like to be liked, and it made me, because I am a coward about an argument." "And the register? What did she put in it?" "People's sentences, mostly, and weather, and who was here, and what was owed." He snapped his fingers at her from the doorway. "And the number of the stairs, which she did every night for thirty-one years, in the back of the page, under a line, like a schoolmistress. She never explained that. I asked her once and she said, *somebody has to know how many there are.* "I said, it's forty-four. "And she said, *yes, and I shall know by tomorrow night if it isn't.*" * * * The second evening she lit the lamps in the written order again. The third. The fourth. She learned that oil takes about nine minutes to catch properly if you don't trim the wick, and that a lamp with a wide flame will soot a ceiling in a season while a narrow one will last four days. She learned to carry the taper low so it wouldn't gutter. She learned which boards of the passage floor sounded hollow and which only did so in frost. On the seventh evening she came down at six with the taper in her hand, having fallen asleep over a cup of tea at half past four, and the third sconce was already burning. She stopped. The third lamp. The second one in the written order. Lit, and warm, and the wick trimmed. There was no taper in the passage. There was no draught. There was no one there. Pippa stood quite still in her stocking feet and listened to the house breathe, and then she went along the sconces with her hand shaking a little, counting. Three. Five. One. Four. Two. Six. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Seven. The seventh was burning too, steady and low and level, in its crooked bracket, with a flame that gave off no smoke at all. She looked for a length of time at the dark patch on the plaster above it, and the dark patch was, she would have sworn to anyone who asked, very slightly warm. ---