The Ninth Step

Trewin had begun leaving things on the bench.

It had started with the drawknife, which had gone back on its nails wedged and honed and had come down off them four days later with a note tied to it that said ANOTHER. Since then there had been a bill-hook, a pair of shears belonging to the chandler, and a chisel so far gone that mending it was an insult to the man who had ground it last. Trewin never came up the stair. He put the thing on the bottom step in the morning and it was gone by evening, and nobody in the yard had ever once discussed it.

On the Saturday, the twenty-ninth, it was a scythe blade with a curl in it, and Aurel had it in the vice at six o’clock with the light going long and yellow across the yard, and the hen in the doorway supervising, when somebody came into the yard who did not walk like Dabrel.

Tamsin Brook stopped at the bottom of the stair with her shawl on and her hands empty.

“I’ll come up,” she said. “Not in. Up.”

She came up eight steps and stood on the ninth, which put her head about level with his chest and her back to the whole of the yard, and Aurel put the file down and wiped his hands and did not move towards the door, because a man who has been shouted at in a doorway learns what a doorway is for.

“Mistress Brook.”

“What did you say to her the day the pot went?”

“That is not mine to tell you.”

“That’s what she said.” Tamsin’s jaw set. “The pair of you. Word for word, three days apart. You’d think you’d rehearsed it.”

“If we had rehearsed it we would have made a better job of it.”

“Don’t.” She said it quietly and it stopped him dead. “Don’t be funny at me. I’ve had four years of her being funny at me when she doesn’t want to answer a thing, and I’m not having two of you at it.”

He shut his mouth.

“She’s not sleeping. She’s dropping things in the afternoon now, not the morning. She’s stopped writing herself lists, and she’s written herself lists since before I came.” Tamsin’s voice did not rise. “And on Wednesday she stood at that counter with a dry cloth in her hand for four minutes doing nothing. I counted it. Nothing’s happening to her that I can see, so something’s happening that I can’t, and you’re the only new thing in this village in eleven years.”

“Yes,” Aurel said.

“So I’ve come to ask you something else instead, because I can’t ask her, and I’ve been three days working out whether I’d rather not know.” She took a breath. “Did you give the order for the north valleys?”

The yard was very quiet. Below them the forge ticked as it cooled.

“No,” Aurel said. “And I would rather you had asked me a question I could answer with one word, because you are going to have to stand there for some minutes now, and I am sorry for it.”

“Then say it.”

“The raids on the north valleys ran four days. Crossing Fold was taken on the second day, which was the nineteenth. There was fog on the first two mornings and it burned off by ten.” He kept his eyes on the vice, because she had not asked to be looked at. “I have had those dates for eleven years. I was not told them by you and I did not need to be.”

Tamsin Brook stood on the ninth step and went white.

“Say the year.”

“The tenth year of the war.”

“And where were you?”

· · ·Scene break

“I was in a room eight feet by six, in a building I had twice inspected myself as a general, and I was in it for three hundred and forty-one days.

“In the winter of the ninth year I wrote an appreciation of our position for the king’s council. It ran to nine pages. Its conclusion was that Caldemoor could not win, that every further month would cost more than the month before, and that we should seek terms while we still had something to trade for them. I did not send it to your side. I want that understood, because it would have been treason and it would also have been the only useful thing I ever did, and I did not do it. I sent it to my own government.

“I was ordered to withdraw it. I declined. I was ordered to attend the council and explain myself, and I went, and I read the whole of it aloud standing up, which was vanity as much as anything, and when I had finished I was arrested in the corridor by men I had appointed.

“The charge was counsel tending to the discouragement of the war. There was no trial, because there did not need to be one.

“So I was not in the field for the tenth year. I was not in the field for the north valleys, and I did not sign the order that took Crossing Fold, and I never saw it until eighteen months afterwards.

“The plan it carried out was mine.

“I wrote it in the eighth year. Sixteen pages, with the valleys numbered. It was a plan for taking the water and the mills so that the line would starve and not have to be fought for, and I argued for it in front of men who wanted something bloodier, and I won the argument, and I was proud of it for two years. It was never withdrawn. It sat in a cabinet and it did not require me to be in the room. A man put his signature at the bottom of a page in the tenth year and what happened at the Fold that morning happened because of sixteen pages I wrote while I was a free man with all my wits about me.

“So the answer to your question is no, and the answer is worthless, and I will not have it doing work for me. I was in a cell. It does not make it not mine.”

· · ·Scene break

Tamsin did not cry. He had thought she might, and had been preparing for it with the inadequacy of a man who has commanded eleven thousand people and never learned a single useful thing about grief, and she did not.

“So there was a year,” she said, “when somebody could have stopped it. And it was you. And you tried, and you lost.”

“Yes.”

“That’s worse.”

“Yes.”

“I could have done something with a monster.” Her hands had come out of the shawl and taken hold of the stair rail. “Eleven years I’ve had a monster. I’ve fed it and I’ve kept it warm and it’s got me out of bed some mornings. And you’ve stood there in a yard with a file in your hand and taken it off me, and put nothing in its place but a man who wrote sixteen pages and was proud of them.”

“I have nothing to offer you in its place,” Aurel said. “If there were a thing, I would have brought it three weeks ago.”

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry.”

“I was not going to.”

“Good.” She let go of the rail. “Because you’d only be sorry at me to get it off your own chest, and I’d have to stand here and take that as well.”

He went in, and came out with the stub of pencil and a leaf off Dabrel’s list, and wrote on it standing at the top of the stair: the date, the number of the order, the authority it was issued under, and the name of the man who put his hand to it, and where that man was now. He folded it once and held it out.

She read it. Her face did not change at all.

“He’s dead, then.”

“On the third day at Dunmoor. I am told it was quick. I do not know whether that helps and I suspect it does not.”

“It doesn’t.” She folded the paper small and put it inside her sleeve. “I’ll keep it. Not for anything. Just to have it be true somewhere that isn’t your mouth.”

She went down three steps and stopped.

“I’m not forgiving you.”

“No.”

“And I’m not telling her.” Tamsin turned round, and she was crying now, furiously, the way a person cries who has decided to go on talking regardless. “I told you at half five in the morning that I’d not carry another one and I meant it. You’ll tell her yourself or you won’t. That’s yours.”

“Understood.”

“And one more thing, and then I’m going home, and tomorrow I’ll serve the room and not you, same as every day, and you’ll say nothing to me about any of this ever again.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, once, like a child. “If it ever comes to it — if there’s ever a day when it’s got to be said in front of people — you’ll say the whole of it out loud, in the open, with everyone stood there. All of it. The nine pages and the sixteen pages and the cell and the man who signed. Not to a girl on a stair in a yard where nobody heard it.”

“Mistress Brook—“

“Say you will.”

“I will,” Aurel said.

She went out of the yard and up the lane, and he stood at the top of his own stair for some while with the light going off the roofs, and found that his hands were unsteady, which had not happened to him in eleven years and which he noted with the detached interest of a man watching somebody else’s weather.

· · ·Scene break

He went out at seven because the room had begun to ask him things again.

He got as far as the top of the lane, where the metalling gives out and the ruts start, and Hesper Quill came round the bend from the carter’s yard with an empty basket over her arm.

They both stopped. Sixty feet, which was the distance the whole of this had started at, and neither of them said anything for long enough that a bird went over.

“You’ve been at the carter’s.”

“Two sacks short and a man who thinks I can’t read a weight note.” She looked at him properly. “What’s happened to your face?”

“I have had a difficult conversation and I am not at my best.”

He watched her decide not to ask. It took her about a second and a half, and it cost her something, and he saw the cost go across her like the shadow of a cloud on a field.

“Tamsin went home at a quarter to five on Wednesday,” she said instead. “First time in four years. I’ve been telling myself it’s a young woman with a life of her own.”

“That will be it,” said Aurel, and it was the first thing he had ever said to her that was not true, and he knew it as it left him, and it sat in his chest like a swallowed stone.

“I’m going down,” Hesper said. “It’s the same way.”

So they went down.

Two hundred and twenty yards of lane at the pace of a woman with an empty basket, which is not fast. They talked about the sacks, and about whether the rain on Friday had done anything for the beck, and about a boy at the carter’s who had grown four inches since the spring, and none of it mattered in the least and he could have repeated every word of it at a hearing.

She went in at her own door and said good night and did not look back, and Aurel turned to go up the lane again, and Old Garrow was standing in his own doorway with his stick in his left hand, forty feet off, watching.

He did not move. He did not go in. He had been there, Aurel understood, for some part of the two hundred and twenty yards, and possibly for the whole of it.

Aurel inclined his head to him, because it was what he did when he did not know what else to do with himself, and went home.

He had counted ground he meant to cross in the dark for thirty-four years, from habit, whether it was of any use or not. He had walked that lane in the light, at a woman’s shoulder, in full view of the street, and it had not occurred to him once to count it until it was behind him.