第32章 The Coach at the Bottom

The coach came up on the twenty-sixth of April and it was full, and it brought a letter, and the letter was for her. * * * She read it at the table in the kitchen because that was where everything in this house happened that mattered, and she read it twice and then she went and stood at the kitchen window with her back to the room for a while. "Worse than a bill?" said Elverston. "No." "Worse than your aunt dying?" "No." "Then you'll read it out, because you will not be able to help yourself, and there's fourteen people in this room." * * * It was from a firm of solicitors in Selborne, and it was four paragraphs long, and the second paragraph said: *The freehold of the Hollowell and the appurtenances was vested in the late Cressida Danby by her aunt and passed to you by her will on the ninth of September, the estate having been settled in 1963 for the purpose of enabling the property to be held by whoever should for the time being keep the inn. The property is therefore yours outright and unencumbered. Our client has been instructed to enquire whether you wish to sell.* "We have no client," said Elverston. "We had a client until the tenth of April, when he wrote to say he had been instructed by a solicitor's clerk in Selborne not to pursue the matter, and we have not been able to establish any authority for that instruction, and we have written twice to the firm named in it and had no reply." "You don't know who to write to." "We know the name of the clerk," said the letter. "He signs himself J. Sablewood." * * * Nobody said anything for a moment. "His trunk went by post on the fourth of April," said Amberley. "Three days after he left. A trunk with a suit in it and a letter and a tin of ink." "He posted it to himself," said Pippa. "He went down the mountain on the twenty-eighth of March and he posted a trunk to this house from a post office in Selborne and he told a solicitor in September that he had been instructed by a clerk who is dead, or pretending to be a clerk who is dead." "Or pretending," said Bredon, "to have been instructed. He's been having that trunk since 1976 and he has never once in eleven weeks let anybody help him open it, and he opens it on the last night and tells it to a cook and a shoemaker's apprentice and a woman of twenty-nine in a village kitchen, and he does not go and open it in front of his own brother." * * * "Write to him," said Nancarrow. "Write to him what?" "Write to him that the housekeeper is going to take it," said Nancarrow, "because he's had four months of four people not chasing him about his own grief, and if you write to him and tell him the inn is sold he'll be sitting in a house in Selborne tonight reading about eleven people being kind to him, and he has never in his life been able to stand being kind to." Pippa looked at him. "You have known him four months." "A shepherd knows a man who's carrying something he's not going to put down," said Nancarrow. "It's the only trade qualification there is." * * * She wrote it that afternoon, and she wrote it in nine lines, and she posted it down the lane with Pelyn at two o'clock because Pelyn had offered and because she had noticed in the spring that he was beginning to do things without being asked and had decided to stop noticing. And then she went and did the thing that was going to be harder than the letter. * * * There were eleven people in the Hollowell on the twenty-sixth of April who had arrived between the first of December and the first of January, and eleven more who had come in the storm, and a register with a hundred and nineteen nights of entries in her own hand, and four pages at the back headed *Not written against* that went back to 1861, and a column headed *Given* with sixty-one years of flour and rent and split logs in it, and a sheaf of clean ruled white leaves sewn into the back of the binding. She went through it in the afternoon with the register open on the lectern and a list on a piece of paper, and by the time she had done the front of it she had to stop and make a pot of tea, and when she came back it had gone four o'clock and she did the back. * * * The register had forty-one pages of entries in it and thirty of them were weather. And in thirty of them she had written nothing about herself. * * * She read it all again that evening, from the first page to the last, in the passage, with the lamps lit behind her and the wind still in the eaves, and she counted as she went. One hundred and nineteen nights of lights in an order. Eleven nights of a lamp already burning that she had not put there. A man with no name and a seal in a bag. Eleven sacks of flour into a village. A shepherd's two white fingers. A doctor's lamp carried to a cottage past the crags past the crags. Two sisters and a chair. A wedding that did not happen and a wedding that did. Forty-four stairs and forty-five. A fiddle played to a flame in a corridor. A coachman going out with two lamps and coming back with a child. A housekeeper standing at an oven door. A cook who had not sat down since 1979. A green lamp in a ring on the top of a hill, and a seal in a book, and a woman on a coast who sent flour and never gave her name. And four lines in a damp grey hand, four months of them, asking her questions, and a rule rubbed out with a rubber, and a schoolmistress who had come up a mountain to call her a fraud and then apologised. * * * She came to the last page and stopped. It was the first page of the current volume, the one that had come after the leather binding that had been broken and repaired so many times it looked like a boot, and it was the page the book had opened on when she came in December, with the rule in her great-aunt's hand and the unfinished line beneath it. And at the bottom of it, in the space under the rule where a margin ought to be, there were two lines, and they were not in her aunt's hand, and they were not in the damp grey hand, and they were not in any hand in the register at all. *Sixteenth of April. Someone has been asking the right questions all winter and has not yet asked this one.* *Ask her what she is afraid of.* * * * Pippa read it twice and sat down on the bottom step of her own stair, on the night of the twenty-sixth of April, in the house her great-aunt had kept for thirty-one years, in a valley that had been standing still since 1961, with fourteen people upstairs who had eaten at her table and written in her book and argued with her and been fed by her, and the first snow of the last winter melting off the south wall in the dark. *What am I afraid of,* she thought. *Of what.* * * * And then, on the passage wall, at the foot of the stair, low down, where somebody had put it in the dark for want of a nail, a small oil lamp was burning that she had not lit, that was not in the order, that was not on the list of eleven, and that had a green glass to it. ---