第9章 The Coach That Did Not Come

Trevose had the post and the coach office and the keys to the gate at Wintergate, and by the ninth of the month he had stopped going down to the village because there was no longer any point, and by the fourteenth he had stopped pretending he was going to. He sat by the fire in the common room with a book he was not reading. "My half of the valley's cut off," he said. "Post comes on Tuesday, if it comes. Coach is done till spring. There's a family over on the far side of the pass with stores for nine days and a woman after to have her baby. She's on my list." He turned a page he had not read. "I've been putting her off since November." "You could go across." "I could not go across and I would not go across, and if I did go across I would not get back for a fortnight, and I have a key to a gate that somebody will want to open in a bad week." Amberley, who had been listening to this with the particular stillness of a man who has spent his life in bars, got up. "Take four of the lamps," he said. Trevose looked at him. "Say that again." "Four lamps. Wrapped, in satchels, hung on a pole. Two men carry a pole easily and a man carrying four lamps in his coat is a man with a problem." Amberley was already counting on his fingers. "The seventh goes last and goes back first. You are a sworn person of the village and the addendum covers you. Page nine, rule four, and if the Thawkeeper says so it covers you twice." Pippa had come in from the passage with the seventh lamp in her hand and had stopped with it at the door. "That would be four," she said. "That would be four." "No." Amberley waited. He was the sort of man who waited well. "The lamps are lit and the lamps are the house," Pippa said. "That is not a matter of taste. Eleven nights running I have lit them and eleven nights the snow has not come past the posts, and I have not got the least idea which of the eleven matters and I am not going to find out by accident in February." "The snow has not come past the posts because the snow is not doing anything at present." "That is not an argument, that is a hope." "It's an argument. It's a small one. There's nothing else in this valley worth arguing with and I have been out on the Holbeck road twice in the last fortnight and I can tell you for nothing that the top of it is dry and hard and would carry a cart four days after a fall." He sat down again. "But it isn't my house, and I'll not argue a woman's house." Pippa stood in the doorway with a brass lamp in her hand and understood, with the clarity that comes in the last second rather than the first, that she had been doing this job for three weeks and was about to do the first thing that was actually the job. "Two," she said. Trevose put his book down. "Two?" "Two lamps, the fifth and the sixth. They are the ones that hold steady, and if the fifth or the sixth goes out in a house where nobody has done anything wrong, then this house has been keeping itself and not me, and I want to know that by Christmas." She set the seventh on the sill. "You take the fifth and the sixth. You write it in the book before you go. You bring them back before the sun, and if you are not back by the sun I will send Wilby." "Willy," said Trevose, going white. "Wilby is sixty-eight and a cabinet-maker and he has not been out after dark since 1987, and I will send him, and you may all make your own arrangements about that." * * * He wrote it in the book on the fourteenth, four lines and no more, and Pippa read it back to him before she signed it as witness. *Two lamps of the Hollowell, the fifth and the sixth, carried above the line by I. Trevose, post keeper of Fernhollow, to Bredon's cottage beyond the beck and the Holbeck farm. Brought home before sun.* There were four lamps in the house beyond that fifth and sixth, plus eleven in the passage, and Pippa walked the line twice that week and found nothing out of place at all, which she resented, and lit her lamps, and slept. Trevose came back at twenty past three on the Thursday with the woman in labour taken in at Bredon's and both lamps in his coat. "They held," he said, handing them over. "And I'll tell you something for nothing, miss. Up on the Holbeck there was snow past the knee at the ford, and past the shin at the wall, and it had not been there on Tuesday, and there was nobody's tracks on it going up." "Then somebody went up." "Somebody went up," Trevose agreed. "Or it came up by itself, which is what the old ones say about the Holbeck, and the old ones have been wrong before." * * * The house was full by the middle of December and had not expected to be. She counted them on the twelfth, in the bar, with a pencil on the back of her hand: Amberley. Quintin Marlowes. Margery Otterburn. Idony Otterburn. Dr Elverston, who had a room by the parlour because he was always here at six. Lissa Kerrith, who had been expected to die and had come up to the village shop instead, and who now sat in the window seat four hours a day giving the house an enormous run of opinions. And Nancarrow, who had a room and did not need one, and came in on the three nights a week he was not at the fold. That was eleven. Plus Sella, who slept on a settle in the kitchen because Tibb had not been able to make herself ask Pippa for a room, and slept there and then walked up and down the passage at midnight counting the treads. And the last two were on the stairs, in the snow, at half past three in the afternoon, when the post boy came up the lane with a parcel and a message and an expression Pippa did not like. "The coach was cancelled, miss. The ones at the gate never got down from the upper road. There's a young woman and her aunt, and they've been at the gate since noon." "They've been there since noon?" "Since Tuesday, near enough." Pippa went to the gate with Wilby and two blankets and the two spare rooms empty and dry, and found them there: a girl of twenty-two in a wedding dress that had been made for a different and much happier occasion, and a stout aunt in a bonnet, sitting on their cases, both of them blue to the lips. "You'll want the parlour," said Pippa. "My aunt can have—" "Your aunt can have the room over the scullery, which is the warmest in the house, and you can have the front room with the good chair, and there is a wedding dress in that bag which I would very much like you to put somewhere out of the wind." The girl laughed, and then could not stop, and then cried, and her aunt held her and said, into Pippa's shoulder, in the voice of a woman who has been sensible for sixty years and has had quite enough of it: "Your aunt wrote to me, you know. Nine years ago. And I've never been able to say thank you, and I have got a fortnight to say it in." * * * Bel Starveling was the young woman. Her name went into the register that night in a round, unhesitating hand: *I was to be married at Sedgewick Hall on the sixth and the pass closed and nobody has told the groom anything.* Pippa read it, and then read it again to be sure she had it right, and then went and found Wilby in the passage. "They'll have to be fed for four months," he said. "Yes." "And the room over the scullery's the one I sleep in." "I know." "Hm," said Wilby, and went off to move his bed, and did not say another word about it, which was the loudest thing he had said all month. ---