第8章 Two Sisters, One Chair

They came up on the last coach that ran before the pass closed, and they came up quarrelling, and they did not stop. Pippa heard them from the top of the stairs: two women's voices, perfectly matched in pitch and entirely opposed in everything else. "—after thirty-one years of her keeping it warm for the pair of you—" "That is not what happened and you know it is not what happened." "Then say what did happen, Marguerite, go on, you've never been short of the—" "Margery." * * * Pippa went down to find them standing in the middle of the common room in their outdoor coats, hats still on, arguing over the good chair. They were perhaps sixty. One of them was broad through the shoulders with grey hair pinned back in a flat bun; the other was narrow, dark-eyed, and holding a travelling case by a strap that her sister had clearly refused to take. "I'll take that one," the narrow one said. "It's the only one with a good back." "It's the one by the door. You'll want to be by the door." "And why should I want to be by the door?" "Because you'll want to be first out, as usual." Wilby was at the bar with a cloth, entirely unwilling to intervene. Amberley had found a reason to polish the same glass for a very long time. "Right," said Pippa. "Both of you. Stop." They stopped, with the particular alertness of people who have been fighting since their teens. "My name is Pippa Danby. This is an inn and I keep it. There's two fires and one bad stair and you'll both be sleeping in this house until the thaw, because the pass closed behind you at noon and it won't open again till spring, and there is nothing anybody can do about that." She picked up the broad one's case, which was heavier than it looked, and carried it to the passage. "You're in the two rooms at the end of the guest wing. And you may both have the good chair, because there are two of them, and I have had them up from the attic myself." "You cannot put two women in two rooms and expect—" "I expect you to be civil," said Pippa. "That's all I expect. House rule number four is no quarrelling in the common room after the fire is lit at six. Before six you're free. After six you can take it up in the garden, and the garden's four feet deep in snow." They stared at her. "The rule page," said the broad one. "Page eleven, rule four. You'll find it when you look." Pippa set the case down. "There's work as well. This is an inn. I have a cook who cannot be everywhere and a housekeeper old enough to be rude to you. One of you will do the breakfast trays. The other will keep the bar cloth and the register's dust off. You may swap every week if you hate it." "I have never done housework in my life," said the narrow one. "Then you'll be excellent at it. I've met a great many people who never have, and they turn out fine." * * * They were Margery and Idony Otterburn, sisters, from a house called Marlowes End over on the Selborne side, and the quarrel turned out to be older than the register. "You were the one who left," said Idony, on the third morning. "And you were the one who let me." "There was a difference and you know the difference perfectly well. You had your own money. You were the one who could go. I had the house, and the dogs, and Mother, and I stayed." "You stayed because you were needed." "I stayed because I promised." "You stayed because you were the sensible one, and you have been punishing me for twenty years for having the misfortune to be the other kind." The words came out so fast and so old that Pippa put her tea down and let them run. Then Idony said, "And you have not once, in twenty years, come to the house." "I've had no reason to." "You have a sister." "You have a letter from me every Michaelmas." "That's not the same as coming." "No," Margery said. "It isn't." And Idony, who had been holding her face quite still, put her hand over her mouth and laughed once, horribly, and went out. * * * They sat on either side of the fire that evening and did not speak, and Pippa let them be, and lit the lamps, and came back to find that somebody had scrubbed the brass on the stair rail until the whole passage shone. The two of them did the breakfast trays for a week and did not swap. On the ninth night, when Pippa came in from doing the seven o'clock round, she found Idony at the lectern with the register open, not writing in it — reading, which is allowed, and which she had not expected. "You may read it," Pippa said. "You may not write in it except your own page." "I know. I've read every one of your rules twice." Idony turned a page and laid a finger on it. "There's a Thawkeeper's entry for the eleventh of December, eighteen seventy-one. *Mrs M. Otterburn, of Marlowes End, has taken the east room for the winter and has been most useful about the wood.*" She looked up. "We were nine years old." "There were Otterburns before you." "There were Otterburns who could afford a winter in a mountain inn, which we could not, and I did not know there were any at all." She closed the book carefully. "My mother used to say the Danbys were the family that never asked anybody anything. She said it kindly." "It sounds like an inheritance," Pippa said, "in the good sense." "It sounds like a debt." Idony stood and squared her chair. "She said another thing too, and I've been turning it over since Tuesday. She said, *we were the family that kept the fire and you are the family that keeps the line*, and that between the two of you the valley never froze." Margery said nothing about it that night, or the next. But at supper on the following day she moved her chair, without any announcement at all, to the other side of the fire from her sister, and set it at an angle, so that they could both see the door. * * * Pippa's own page that week was short, because the week had been short. She wrote: *Two sisters came up on the last coach and have been quarrelling since they got off it. On Thursday they stopped. I did nothing to make them stop and I am not sure I know what did.* And under it, in the margin, in her own hand and smaller: *They will want to go and look at the east room tomorrow. Let them. There is nothing in the east room but eleven winters of other people having been looked after, and that is a thing you may as well let two tired women go and look at.* ---