第7章 The Doctor's Round

Elverston came up to the Hollowell on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, having walked six miles in the dark to do it, and he was angry about having to. He was a small man of about sixty with a grey beard trimmed square and a bag that had a buckle worn shiny. He put it down on the kitchen table, opened it, and said, "I need a lamp." "That is not generally how this ends," said Pippa. "It is generally how this ends. I need to get to Bredon's cottage by nine, past the beck, on the broken-down path, in a wind, with a patient who has a fever and a house with one dry stick in it. There is no moon. And I have decided I am not doing that on memory alone." He looked at her. "I am aware of what I am asking. I've had a glass of the kitchen's best and I'm asking anyway." Wilby put down the cloth he was polishing. "You know the rule." "I wrote the addendum to the rule, in nineteen ninety-four, at the Thawkeeper's request, because your Thawkeeper could not light a lamp and hold it at the same time and would not ask a guest to carry one. The addendum says the Thawkeeper may send a lamp out with a guest where the guest is a sworn person of the village and has business above the line." "There is no such addendum in the book," Pippa said. "There is such an addendum in the book," Wilby said. "You have not read to page nine." Elverston went up with her and looked at page nine while she lit the lamps, and when she came to the seventh he stopped her. "Wait. Let me do that one." He lit it. He did it in a single movement, without hesitation, in the correct order in the middle of a sequence, the way a man who has done a thing a thousand times puts down a cup. "You have done this before," Pippa said. "I was a Thawkeeper's boy in the valley when I was your age. Nineteen sixty-one to sixty-four, for old Cressida's aunt. It is not an office that requires blood. It requires that you are the sort of person who, when handed a lamp in a storm, goes out in it." He set the seventh lamp on the sill and wrapped it in a coat and put the coat in his bag. "I shall be back by three in the morning," he said. "If the lamp is out, do not come out after me. If the lamp is out, put another coat on it." * * * He came back at four with his collar up to his ears and frost in his beard. ""That was the first time in eleven years I have carried that lamp above the line," he said, "and I would like it noted that I did not think about it once, which I had expected to find interesting, and found unsettling." "How's the patient?" "Old Lissa Kerrith. She's ninety-one and she has the fever and she is furious about the fever." He unwrapped the lamp. Its glass was white with frost on the outside and the flame inside was perfectly level and blue. "She would not let me leave until she'd told me she'd known your great-aunt since before you were thought of, and that your great-aunt used to carry that very lamp up to her, and that in nineteen sixty-two she had sat with her all of one night when the chimney was out." "You'd never told me that." "Nobody has ever told you anything, miss. That is not a criticism. It's a job description." He closed his bag. "A Thawkeeper is told. That's the whole difference between her and everybody else in this house, and she was very careful never to be unkind about it, and I was very careful never to point it out." Pippa found she had to put her hand on the table. "Warm yourself," said Elverston, not unkindly. "You have gone the colour of the wall." Upstairs, the register had a page for the night, and there was one guest in the house who had not yet written, and by long custom it fell to the Thawkeeper to write it. She wrote it in her own hand, and it was the first entry she had ever put in the book that was not an account of something that had happened. She wrote: *Old Lissa Kerrith is ninety-one and is unwell and I have never met her, and tonight the doctor carried the seventh lamp to her cottage and brought it home, and I am the Thawkeeper and it was the first thing I did this month that I will remember when I am old.* Elverston read it over her shoulder in the morning and made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Cushioning," he said. "What?" "You've written the cushioning. *I am the Thawkeeper*, like a signature under a drawing." He took his bag. "Cressida did it for thirty-one years. You'll get over it." * * * He was halfway down the lane that afternoon when Pippa caught up with him, and she walked at his side for a hundred yards without saying anything, which he permitted, and which told her most of what she needed to know about a man of sixty who had walked out of a cold night at four in the morning to be useful. "My aunt sat with her," Pippa said at last. "In sixty-two." "She did. All night. The chimney had gone out at ten and a cottage does not get warm again until the fire's laid at seven." Elverston shifted his bag to his other hand. "I was there for the last hour of it because I was fifteen and I was the one sent for her, and I remember standing in that doorway thinking, there is a thing here a person of ninety-one can do that nobody can help with, and then I watched a woman sit down and stay sat." "Did it help?" "It helped her," he said. "That's not the same as helping the fever. I'd not want you thinking it was." "Is the lamp permitted back? I want to be sure I read page nine right." "You read it right. A lamp out of the house above the line, carried by a sworn person of the village, brought home before dawn, and one line in the book about it." He shifted his bag to the other hand. "That's the whole covenant, miss. That's all of it. Eleven lamps in a written order, a true sentence from every guest, and nobody out in the dark carrying a flame they shouldn't have." "That sounds very small." "It is very small. Everything worth the trouble is." He started walking again. "In sixty-one it wasn't small, and after that there was never a big one again, and Fernhollow has had a hundred and twenty years of never a big one. You may go and be disappointed somewhere else." Pippa watched him down the lane, and the wind came round the corner of the house and moved all eleven of the sconces very slightly on their brackets, which they had no business doing. ---