第30章 The Warm Covenant

She asked her at ten past five on the tenth of April, and it took four hours, and it went fourteen steps down and stayed in the warm room until the lamps were lit. "Will you come down," Pippa said, "at six, and light the sixth?" Tibb Bryce stood at the range with the cloth in her hands and looked at the door for a long time. "I've not been in that room in twenty-two years," she said. "No." "You'll want to hold the ninth." "I will hold the ninth." "And the sixth's mine," said Tibb, "and if it's cold down there I'll come up and say so, and you may write it down in that book and I shall read it at breakfast." "You may." * * * They went down at ten past five with the ninth lamp and a candle and Pippa under her arm, and Sella, who had asked and had been refused and had been permitted again after a two-minute conference. Sella went first and counted the fourteen and did not say anything at the bottom, which was a great deal. Tibb went down like a woman going into cold water, one hand on the wall, and at the bottom she stopped in the doorway and did not go in. "It's bigger," she said. "It's the same room you saw in March." "It is not the same room I saw in March and I'd be a liar to say it was." She put her hand up to her mouth and took it down again. "Twenty-two years and it is a hand's breadth bigger and warmer at this end." * * * The three lamps standing on the floor were lit and their wicks were trimmed and their glass was clean, and the slate was on the table, and the grey day-book was open at a page near the front. Pippa did not touch the book. She put the register down on the floor beside the hearth-stone and opened it, and she turned to page one, and she read the rule out loud in a warm room twenty feet under a mountain with a cook and a girl and a candle. "No guest may leave before the ground is soft enough to take a cart. And no keeper either." "That is not the way it used to be read," said Tibb. "It has not been read that way since 1902. There is a woman of ninety-one upstairs who can tell you about it and she has told me." Pippa put her finger on the second page. "And this is what I have come down to ask you about, and I've asked the book four months and it only writes at four in the morning. So I'm asking you." She looked at the slate. *Third of November. Below warm. Ninth lamp trimmed. Quarter of oil spent.* *Twelfth of December. Below cold this morning and I have lost the two hours of the middle and Tibb says I sat down. Nothing over the posts. Well.* *Sixteenth of January. Below warm. Someone has been in the books.* * * * "Nobody has ever read those," said Tibb. "Not in my time. I've seen the book on the table in 1971 and I looked at it and there was nothing on the slate but a date and a number and I thought it was a tally of wood." "It isn't. It's a temperature. Twice a day for sixty-one years." "Twice a day for sixty-one years by a person who never wrote a word about it." "By about nine people," said Pippa. "I've gone back through it. The hands change." * * * She asked at six o'clock. She said it standing on the floor of a warm room with the register open on the stone, and she said it out loud, with a cook and a girl present, because she had learned in the first week that anything asked alone in this house got an answer alone, and she wanted one that would hold. "What is it for?" The hearth-stone came up. It came up through the flag in the same slow wave it had been coming up in since the second of January, eleven times in nine minutes, and Pippa counted it without meaning to, because she had never once in four months stopped counting anything. And when it had done its eleven, it stopped. And did not do another one for eleven minutes. "It's waiting," said Sella. * * * "It is not waiting," said Tibb Bryce, in the kitchen doorway of the room under the floor of her own kitchen, with her hand on the frame, and she had gone the colour of the cloth. "It's answering. They've been answering you since January and you've been counting them like a woman counting loaves, and it stopped because you asked it a question instead of a number." * * * "It cannot answer." "It has just stopped," said Tibb. "I have never in my life seen it stop. I used to come down here in the winter of seventy-three when the girl had the scarlet fever and the main house was shut and I sat on that step for three hours, and it went and it went and it went, and it never stopped, and I have never told anybody that because there was nobody to tell and because I did not want to be a woman who talks about a floor." * * * Pippa stood still. "Then what do I do," she said. "I've spent four months finding out what to do." "You keep it fed," said Tibb. "How?" And Tibb Bryce said, "The same way you've been feeding it since the first of December, you daft girl, and you'll not have noticed, because you were busy." She put her hand out and turned it over, palm up, in the lamplight. "The lamps in a written order, every night, third and five and one and four and two and six and eight and nine and ten and eleven and seven, and nobody is left in the dark, and a true sentence out of everybody who comes in, and the line walked and the boundary kept and the road marked where a man can't find it in a whiteout, and the doctor got to Bredon's with a lamp in his coat and a shepherd got to his supper and a sister got home off a mountain at half past one in the morning." She shut her hand. "You've done nothing else. You've done it every single night for a hundred and nineteen days and you have not once missed and you did not know you were doing it, and it is the only thing this room has ever eaten." * * * Pippa looked at the register open on the floor of the warm room, at the rule on the first page, at the date at the top of the new leaf. "Nobody's true sentences for four months," she said. "There's a hundred and nineteen days of nobody. I didn't know. I didn't think anybody wanted to write one, and I didn't chase it, and I let it go." "That's why it's cold at this end," said Tibb. "It's cold at this end?" "Gilm," said Tibb. "Gil it's been cold at this end since the third of February and I have not said one word about it, and I have thought about it every day, and I have been ashamed, because I have been every night in this room for twenty-two years and I have never once come down with a written thing in my hand." * * * Sella said, "Are we not going to do it now?" * * * They came up the fourteen steps at a quarter past seven and lit the lamps in the written order, third and five and one and four and two and six and eight and nine and ten and eleven and seven, and the seventh was still burning at four inches and blue and leaning at nothing, and Pippa trimmed it and it did not change. Then she said, "Tibb. Will you write a sentence?" * * * The first sentence of the cook of the Hollowell, written in her own hand, on a ruled white leaf from the sheaf at the back of the register, in a hand like a man driving nails: *I have cooked in this kitchen for twenty-two years and I have never once been asked what my name was and tonight I was asked what my name was, and I am called Tibb Bryce and I am fifty-three and I have a sister in Selborne whom I have not spoken to since 1979 and I did not know until I was writing it that I still think about her every Michaelmas.* Then Sella, who had to be helped with the long word *beautiful* and who could not be got to write it, and wrote this instead: *I am eleven and I count the stairs and there are forty-four and I have not missed one night since the sixth of December and nobody in this house has ever once told me I got it right except about four times.* And then Pippa, at the lectern, in the keeper's room, with the register open and the house quiet and the lamps doing what lamps do: *Four months. I have kept this house for a hundred and nineteen days and I have understood, this evening, downstairs, in a warm room, from a cook, that the whole of it was already true on the first night and I was the only person in the room who did not know it. There are nine true sentences in that book today. On the twentieth of April I mean to have every one of the eleven filled and I mean to hold to that as I held to the lamp order, and I do not know what happens if I do not, and I am going to find out on the twentieth of April.* * * * She wrote it, and put the pen down, and stayed where she was. At eleven minutes past midnight, four floors down and twenty feet under a kitchen, something she had not felt since the first night came up through a floor of a mountain and leaned against the palm of her hand. It came eleven times in nine minutes. Then it stopped. Then, after a while, it did one more. ---