第27章 Mr Sablewood's Trunk

Mr Sablewood arrived at the Hollowell on the ninth of December and sat in the corner of the common room for eleven weeks with a travelling trunk he did not open. He had arrived in the storm of the twenty-seventh, along with Mrs Valebrook and a dog, and had said almost nothing to anybody for a fortnight, and then in the second week of January he had asked Tibb, in a tone of great formality, whether a locked trunk might be stored in the dry cellar, and Tibb had said that there was nothing in the cellar that was anybody's business and he could put it wherever he liked. He put it under the window in the common room. He was about fifty-five. Grey, clean, with soft hands and a way of holding a glass that suggested he had not drunk for years and was not going to start. He paid for his room on the first night in coin that was not the money of this valley, and Pippa stopped asking about it in January because she understood that it was the price of a man who did not wish to discuss himself. * * * What brought him out was the flour. It was the twenty-fourth of March and the whole of it was over in a fortnight: the pass had begun to break, the sun had come round far enough to put a stripe on the Selborne side of the ridge, and Gammon had sent word up from the far side that there was a road. Sablewood came in from the yard on the twenty-fourth, wet to the shoulder, and put a white sack of flour on the kitchen table, and Tibb said, "Now where have you been." "I've been to Sandsgate." * * * "The coach has not been down since the eighth of January." "I've walked," said Sablewood. "Six days there and I've had four days back and there's snow in the passes that they have not told you about, and I am fifty-five and I ought to know better, and I have done it, and here is the flour, and there is a seal on it, and the seal is not the same as the one Gammon has brought out of his loft in nineteen twenty-nine." * * * They compared the two seals in the kitchen and they were not the same, and they were from the same die, and Pippa understood about a third of it and Kerrith understood all of it. "Two bakehouses," said Kerrith. "Sandsgate and Wrenlow, and Wrenlow's gone under the sea in ninety-one. Look at the wing. Gammon's has two points. That has three. They were cut by the same man because he cut both and they were neighbours and he was a man who did one thing properly." "So the flour came from Wrenlow." "Or the seal did," said Sablewood. "I have a letter. I have had it in the trunk under the window for eleven weeks." * * * The trunk was under the window. It was a good trunk, black, with brass corners gone green, and it had a hasp and a padlock on it and a lock that had been oiled, because somebody had been oiling it. "I have been oiling that lock every week for eleven weeks," said Pippa. "I found the tin under the range on the second of January." "Yes." "And I have never once said a word to you." "You never once said a word to me," Sablewood agreed. "That is why you are going to be the Thawkeeper in this house for another thirty years." * * * He opened it on the long table, and there were four things in it. There was a man's suit in a wrapper, good cloth, made about 1962 and never worn since. There was a tin of paper, the kind that ink used to come in. There was a stack of letters tied with tape, and a photograph in a frame, and the photograph had been out of its frame and back in more than once, because the corners were soft and white. And there was a small copper pan with a bit of char in it. "He cooked in it," said Kerrith. "That's the first thing. Look at it. A man has lived in this house and cooked in a pan like that and it's the only thing in here nobody can explain." "It is a fire," said Sablewood. "He could not do it any other way. He had a room with a chimney that smoked and he would not light it, so he cooked in the yard on a little fire of shavings and he had this pan and he kept it under the bed and he used it for eleven years, and I have had it forty years, and I have never once used it." * * * The photograph was a man of about thirty on a beach, in shirtsleeves, holding a bucket, squinting. "That's him." "And who are you?" "His brother." Pippa sat down. "You've been in this house since the twenty-seventh of December," she said, "with a photograph of your brother in a trunk, through the whole of the worst winter this valley has had in forty years, and you have paid for your room and eaten your dinners and read the register and sat by that window every evening, and you have not said one word to anybody about the man in the photograph." "There was no reason for anybody to have one." "That's not an answer, that's a rule you made up for yourself, and I've had four of them off people in this house this winter and I'm not having a fifth." * * * The letter was from 1962. It was written by a woman and it was addressed to a man, and it said that she had sent flour in the winters of 1961 and 1962 and had sent nothing in 1963 because the wall had gone in, and that she was sorry about the wall and sorry about the flour and sorry about eleven other things, and it ended: *And if your housekeeper asks you what became of the seal, you may tell him it went back where it came from, and you may not tell him anything else, because he is a good man and there is nothing he could do with it.* "It came back to Wrenlow," said Sablewood. "The wall of the Wrenlow bakehouse came down in the flood of fifty-four and she picked the seal out of the rubble and kept it, and she had it for eight years, and in 1962 she sent it back to this valley with a sack of flour because there was a woman in this house who had asked her for it in a letter that was posted from Sandsgate and never came." "Never came?" "She posted it on the third of February 1961," said Sablewood. "And in this valley, on the third of February 1961, there is an entry in a book in which a person of the village sent nine sacks of flour and a seal with it, and asked Cressida's aunt to put it in the deep room, and was told it was not a thing you may put under a hearth-stone." * * * Nobody said anything for a while. "Then she did get it," said Ferrenby. "It got here. She posted it and it got here and somebody took it in and did not tell her and did not write to say thank you, and she wrote anyway, in 1962, and she did not know." "She did not know for thirty years," said Sablewood. "She died in 1981 in a house with a wall and four families in it and a bad chest. And this letter has been in a trunk under a window in a mountain village for eleven weeks because I have been standing in a common room all winter being a man with a locked trunk, and I have not once in my life been able to make the first move in anything." * * * He had come up the mountain on the twenty-seventh of December because he had been given the trunk by his solicitor in October and told that the contents were to go to a person called Danby at the Hollowell, Fernhollow, and that he might as well take them himself because the solicitor had never been to Fernhollow and did not believe in Fernhollow. "I didn't want to give them," he said. "I've had that trunk since 1976 and I have never opened it in this house. I don't know why I'm telling you that. I have opened it four times in fifty weeks and I have not taken a single thing out of it and I have not burned a single thing in it." "Will you say why?" "No," said Sablewood. "No. Not tonight. I'll say it in a month, and if the pass closes again before then I'll say it in the spring, and if I say it at all you'll be the only person in England who hears it." * * * Pippa looked at the nine lines in the register, and the name that had never been written, and the flour that arrived on the step with a mark on it that had been thirty years old. "I'm not going to put your name to it," she said. Sablewood's head came up. "You did not come up here on the twenty-seventh of December," said Pippa. "You came up on purpose with a trunk you were told to bring. There is no entry in this book that says you were in a storm, and I put those entries in, and I have checked, and you are not in one of them. And if I write *a person of the village, and she is not to be asked*, I am writing it for a dead woman in 1961 who asked to not be asked, and that is a different thing entirely, and I won't do it." "I don't want you to." "I know you don't. I'm telling you that I'm not going to, so that you can go on not asking." * * * He stayed three more days and then the coach came up on the twenty-eighth of March and he went down on it with the copper pan in his case and the letter in his pocket and the photograph in his coat, and at the top of the lane he turned round. "Miss Danby. You put the passage into the books as a person of the village." "I did." "So it went into the books and stayed in the books and was never asked again, and the flour kept coming up for thirty years and nobody knew and it didn't stop." He shouldered his case. "I've been sitting in a room for eleven weeks doing that to my own brother and I have been calling it a nervous complaint." * * * The copper pan went into the register's column, in the damp grey hand, on the first of April, along with a suit, a tin of ink and a stack of letters. *He gave it back in the end. Sixty-three years late, in a letter he wrote to a woman who had been dead twenty years, and it came in a trunk that he carried up a mountain because a solicitor in Selborne would not go.* *Ask the woman at Wrenlow what she sent.* ---