第20章 Where the Snow Stands

They went up the hill at half past eight in the evening of the thirtieth of January, with the ninth lamp and the seventh, because Pippa would not go up there with one and Wilby would not go up there at all. "You've not been up since your hip." "I've been up in my day." "You've not been up in the day since 1987, and we both know it, and it took a boy of seventeen to put you in a cartshed to mend a doorframe." She put the seventh lamp into his hand. "Hold it." "Miss Danby—" "Hold it, Wilby." He held it. It was the first time in a hundred and twenty years that a person other than a Danby had carried the seventh lamp up past the posts, and Pippa found she had to walk on ahead of him so that he would not see her face. * * * The snow was wrong. It was wrong the way a thing is wrong that you have been looking at every day for eleven weeks. It came up over the shoulder in a long white curve, and it came up cleanly, and where it met the line of the posts it stopped. Except in seven places. "There," said Pippa. "There, and there, and up by the stones." Seven places where the snow stood up past the posts and did not come down, in low blue ridges, three feet high at the highest, with the iron running away through the middle of them like wire through a sausage. "That's the wind." "That is not the wind," said Wilby. "Look at it. The wind comes out of the north-west and it comes down. That is coming up." * * * They walked the two hundred paces. At the fourth ridge Pippa put her hand into it and it was not snow at all. It was a packed, half-frozen crust with grit in it, and inside the crust was iron, filings and small pieces, a great deal of it, all of it cold, and when she took her hand out she was holding grey dust that smelled of the kitchen step. "It's the bound," said Wilby. "It's come up off the ground and set." "Wilby, the ground does not come up." "The ground's got a line in it and the line's got iron in it and iron comes up in a hard winter, and that's the one thing nobody in this valley will say out loud because the alternative is to say that this house has been standing on a lid." * * * At the seventh ridge she stopped and put her hand flat on the crust and felt it answer. It was nothing like the hearth-stone. It was colder and slower and it came in twos, not elevens, and it came from a direction, which was to say that the thing under it had a shape. "Warder," she said. "Pippa." "Warder. It's a warder. It's a thing that has been put under a line to hold it, and it is not holding it any more, and it has come up in seven places along two hundred paces because it is old." "Then we go down." "We go along," said Pippa. * * * They walked the rest of it. At the top, where the line turned onto the shoulder above the old byre, there were nine. Nine ridges, standing a foot and more above the posts, in a rough ring, seven paces across, with the bare ground inside the ring and the crust outside it. And in the middle of the ring there was a lamp. It was not one of theirs. It was a railway lamp, a shunter's lamp with a green glass lens, and it had been there so long that a third of a hand's depth of snow had built up on the uphill side of it and had not melted and had not blown away. Wilby made a sound. "That's Prine's," he said. "Who's Prine's?" "The miller. Ashton Prine, of Amberley, the one in the book." He went very slowly round it, not touching. "In 1861. He said in that book that nobody had fed him without charging him since his father died, and the lady of this house at the time was my great-aunt's grandmother, and there is not a word after the entry, and there should have been an entry, because there is an entry for every guest and she wrote one for every guest for forty years, including the ones who paid and the ones who didn't and one for a man who stayed nine years and died in the snug." * * * Pippa crouched down in the ring with the lamp in her hand. There was iron in the crust the whole way round, packed hard, and where her hand had gone in on the way up she had left a hole about the size of a fist, and out of the hole came warm air. Not heat. Air that was a degree or two warmer than the air of the night and that smelled, very faintly, of hot iron and of bread. "That's the room," she said. "That's about four hundred yards that way and twenty feet down." "I know where the room is. I mean that's what's under this as well." * * * They stood in the ring for a long while. Then Pippa got out the register's pencil and the little book she kept in her apron for the day's counting, and she wrote the date, and then she wrote two lines: *Nine standing up on the top, seven along the wall, one green lamp in the ring, and the crust warm.* *Fourteen in all. There are eleven lamps in the house and I have counted them every night since the first of December and there have never been any others.* * * * Then she did the thing she had come up to do, which she had not told Wilby about, because Wilby would have told her not to. She went to the top of the ring where the snow stood highest and she put the seventh lamp down on the crust, and she shut the wick, and she said the words of the office, which she had to invent, because no one had ever told her what they were, and she had made them up out of the entry in the margin on the first page. "I don't know the words," she said. "Then don't say them," said Wilby. "Say what you have to say." So she said, out loud, on a frozen hill at nine o'clock at night with a man of sixty-eight standing beside her: "There are eleven people in my house and there are nine of them who cannot leave, and I do not know how to keep you, and I am keeping you anyway, and I will bring a lamp every night until the spring. If you want the line, you may have the line. If you want the houses, you may ask me, and I shall say no, and that will be the whole of my answer." * * * The crust under the lamp went down about two inches. Not collapsed. Went down, all round the ring, evenly, the way a floor gives when a weight is taken off it, and the green lamp stood up out of it on its little iron foot, and the packed snow in the ring took the shape of the ring and stayed there. "Well," said Wilby. Pippa picked up the seventh lamp and looked at it. It was burning. She had shut the wick an inch ago and the wick was shut and there was a flame in the lamp about the size of a pea, low and blue and steady, and she carried it down the hill in her hand and it did not go out. * * * They were in the yard at ten when the seventh lamp at the top of the stair began to talk. Not speak. It went from steady to unsteady in a slow beat, up and down, up and down, in time, and Pippa stood in the passage and counted it, and it was eleven in nine minutes, and then it stopped. Then, from below, from under the floor, from a long way under the floor and about four yards away, somebody began to play the fiddle. It was not a good player. It played the same eight bars over and over, and it played them very slowly, and it got the notes in a way that made her think of somebody reading aloud out of a book with only one page in it. "That'll be Marlowes," said Wilby. "It will not." The tune ran for about four minutes and stopped in the middle of a bar, the way a man stops when he is interrupted, and there was a silence of perhaps two seconds, and then somebody knocked twice on the floor. Twice. From under the kitchen. Nobody in the house was playing anything and nobody in the house was down there. * * * Pippa went down and put her hand on the hearth-stone and it was the warmest it had ever been, and she stayed on it until it was clear, and she took out her little book and wrote the date and the hour and what had happened, and then she sat on the floor of a warm room with her back against a cold wall for about ten minutes and did not do anything at all, which was the first time she had done nothing at all since she had come up the mountain. Then she went up and lit the lamps in the written order for the night, third and fifth and first and fourth and second and six and eight and nine and ten and eleven and seven, and she checked the oil in each and trimmed each, and the seventh she did last and trimmed last, and she found when she came to it that the wick was black with a scorch on the glass that had not been there that morning. * * * In the morning the register had four lines in it in the damp grey hand, and Pippa read them standing at the lectern with the broom in her hand and the whole of the rest of the house asleep above her. *She has finally asked.* *It is the first question asked since 1861 that was not asked for a favour.* *Tell the miller his lamp is still alight, or do not tell him, and either way go and look at it, because it has been standing in a ring of iron in the snow for a hundred and sixty years and nobody has ever walked to the top of that hill and asked it anything at all.* *And tell the green one: the song is wrong. She will want to hear the right one soon, and it will have to be played by somebody who cannot hear the room.* *Ask him which of them he meant.* ---