第21章 Ninety-One Ways of Being Cold

Kerrith was ninety-one, sharp as a fillet knife, and had come up from the village shop on the fourth of February in a handcart with a neighbour's grandson because she had decided the shop was not going to see her through February. She had been in the Hollowell four days when she began to correct the register. "Your aunt wrote it wrong," she said, on the fifth morning, reaching across the lectern with a finger that was bent like a bird's claw. "*No guest may leave before the thaw.* That's the sentence that's got in the front. That's not the rule. That's the rule as it's been copied since 1902." "Then what is the rule?" "The rule's upstairs," said Kerrith. "Same page, top, in the old hand, and your great-aunt's aunt scratched it out in 1902 because she thought it was untidy. Read it." Pippa read it. The ink under the scratching had come up again with a soft pencil, the way old ink always comes up if you know where to lean. *No guest may leave before the ground is soft enough to take a cart.* "That's the rule," said Kerrith. "The other one is the copy. Everybody's grandmother's copy. Yours and mine and Bredon's and the man at Wintergate's. Nobody ever had a cart up this pass after Michaelmas, so somebody wrote the shorter one and then wrote it so often it started being the true one, and there's nobody alive who remembers it wasn't." * * * "And the second line," said Pippa. "*And no keeper either.*" "That's Cressida's aunt, 1902, same week she scratched the first one out. She wanted the shorter one because it was cleaner and she wanted the keeper kept in, because the keeper had gone up the hill one night in 1898 and hadn't come down and they'd had to send four men for her in the dark." Kerrith folded her hands. "She was fifty-one. She wanted somebody to have to stay." "She was frightened." "She was forty years old and she'd walked the whole line in a gale in February with a lamp and got back with frostbite in three fingers, and she never went up that hill again," said Kerrith. "And she put that line in a rule book on purpose, and she was the cleverest woman this valley has ever had, and nobody has thanked her because nobody has ever known." Pippa stood with her hand flat on the book. "I've been keeping a rule about a date," she said. "I've been keeping it for eleven weeks and I did not know." "You've been keeping a rule about a date because that is what the book says," said Kerrith, "and the book is the instrument, and instruments are allowed to be mistaken. Ask the instruments the question. Don't ask them anything else." * * * It became a reading. That was Elverston's doing and he owned it entirely. He had said the register was a book in a passage and nobody looked at it, and on the eighth of February he had said give me one evening, and what had happened in that hour and a half turned into a thing that happened on the ninth and the tenth and every night after until the end of March. Pippa read the day's entries at eight. Not the whole book, which was four hours, but the day's: the sentences, the accounts, the weather, whatever the Thawkeeper had entered. On the ninth of February she read the entry for the second of January, 1889. *Twenty-second of December, 1889. Eleven lamps. Frost three feet in the hollow and the stream carrying ice green all the way down. B. H. came about four with news that his brother is out on the top and we cannot go for him, and I have sent Kennard with the seventh and two men, and I have not sent Mrs H. because she is six months gone and cannot go in this, and if they bring him back tonight I shall put them all in the snug and never once say a word to her about it.* *Twenty-fourth. They have him. Nine frostbitten toes and he is nineteen and he will keep them. He has not asked after the state of his boots.* *Twenty-eighth. Took him the length of the room on his own feet yesterday. The cold comes. It comes at night and it does not ask. It comes and it is not angry, it is only thorough, and it will come every night of that winter, and the only thing that has ever answered it in this valley is somebody carrying something alight from one room to another without hurrying.* *Twenty-ninth. Nothing over the posts.* "Read it out again," said Kerrith. "The last line says *nothing over the posts*." "I heard it. Read the middle one." Kerrith leaned forward. "*It comes at night and it does not ask. It comes and it is not angry, it is only thorough.* That is a hundred and eleven years old and it is the coldest sentence anybody in this valley has ever written, and it is the only one in that book that anybody ever quotes." * * * Marlowes read it out on the tenth, standing, with a hand on the back of a chair, in a voice that had gone somewhere else entirely. And on the twelfth Bredon read it out with her schoolmistress's flat delivery, twice, because she wanted the second reading, and said afterwards that if eleven children in her valley had known that sentence existed in the year of the big frost they would have behaved differently at school in January, and that was a sentence for eleven children in January and she was going to write it on the wall of the schoolroom when the pass opened. Which she did. And it was there for thirty years, and Pippa never saw it and did not know for a decade. * * * On the fourteenth the reading reached a page that nobody had read in eleven years, and Amberley read it, and Pippa noticed that his voice changed about half way down. *— and the old one is still in the barn above the slate quarry and I have left it because I cannot bring it and cannot sell it and cannot burn it, and I am fifty-eight and I shall be dead before anybody wants it, and the next one will have to find it for themselves, because that is what I did not do, and I have had thirty-one winters to decide that I will do it this year and I have not decided it yet, and if the next one finds it early it will save him eleven days in the cold, and if the next one does not find it then he will do as I did and be no worse off than me.* "He didn't," said Amberley. "He didn't?" "He never went back for it. There is no entry after that one and there are three hundred and one pages after that one and the account for 1971 is unbroken." He shut the book. "He had it in his barn for thirty-one years and he never went and got it." "Then we don't need to know where it is." "No," said Amberley. "We need to know where it isn't. That's a different thing and it's cheaper." * * * Kerrith got her own back up in front of everybody on the nineteenth, which she had clearly been working on since 1894. "There was a Thawkeeper's son," she said, "in 1881, called Kennard, and he is in the book forty-one times, and every one of the forty-one says the same thing in a slightly different hand." "What thing?" "*The lamp was carried by a person of the village, which is not a guest, and the book was not signed.*" She put her finger on it. "Nine times out of ten a lamp went out of this house without a name against it. Your great-aunt's aunt did it eleven times and her mother did it four and the man before them did it six, and there's not one name on any of it, and there is a column in the back of that book headed *Not written against*, and it is four pages long." "What does the column say?" "It says the place," said Kerrith. "It says *a person of the village*. Every time. Never a name. Never a house. Never a trade." She folded her hands again. "Which means either that a great many unnamed people carried lamps out of this house for sixty years, or that whoever kept the column did not think it was any of their business who went. I've always thought the second. Nobody in a mountain valley is going to write down that Bill Sedgewick carried a lamp up to the crags in 1881. They'd be at him for it." Pippa turned the book round to look at the passage herself, and found it: four pages, in four hands, going back to 1861, of places without people. *Twenty-second of January, 1889. The seventh to the top, with Kennard.* *Eleventh of February, 1894. The third to the crags, a person of the village, by the master's order.* *Second of March, 1931. The ninth out. Nothing over the posts.* *Nineteenth of December, 1961. The seventh, the whole of it, all night, a person of the village. My fault. C.* 1961. The winter the snow came up out of the ground and a Thawkeeper went to pieces and a village emptied out by spring. "C," said Pippa. "That's Cressida's aunt. Wilby said a man kept it in sixty-one and nobody in the house would speak to him after." "C is Cressida's aunt and that is the only entry in four pages that is signed with an initial," said Kerrith, "and it is signed with an initial because there was nobody else in the house to sign it. She did the whole of it herself, all night, with a lamp, for four days, and she did it alone because there was nobody in the house to help her, because she had gone to bed and stayed there and had told everybody to go to bed." * * * That night the reading went on until nearly ten, and when it was over Kerrith stopped everybody at the door with a hand on the frame. "Sixty-one years I've heard the pass was shut," she said. "Sixty-one years and four people have ever come up this hill in a January like that one. This is the first one." "Would you like another?" "I'd like the one before," said Kerrith. "The second one, out of the four, and I should like to know when it came, and I should like somebody in this house to go and look at it, because I am ninety-one and I have run out of winter." * * * Pippa went up and got the little book off the shelf and found the page. *Second of February. The line walked from the beck to the stones, twice, with the ninth and the seventh, at dusk. Nine standing up on the shoulder. Crust down where the light went. Lighted the eleventh last and the seventh after it, which is not the order, and I would do it again.* The seventh lamp on its crooked bracket had been lit after the eleventh, once, by a woman, ninety-one years ago, in the worst winter this valley had ever had. "Do you want to know why?" Pippa said. "Yes," said Kerrith. "I have wanted to know that since I was nine years old." ---