The Loophole Runs Out

Colm Ferris was standing in the lane outside the tea-house at ten to seven on the Monday morning with his hat already in his hands.

Hesper saw him through the glass while she was tying her apron, and knew the whole of it before she had got the bow done. A warden who wants his breakfast comes in at half past and talks about the mill. A warden who waits outside a shut door in the wet at ten to seven has something in his coat.

She unbarred the door and stood back.

“Not in the room,” Colm said. “In the kitchen, if you’ll have me, with the door to.”

“Sit down, then. Don’t stand there turning that hat, I’ve watched you do it since you were twelve and it’s never yet made a thing better.”

He sat. He put the hat on the table, flat, which he did not do, and then took it up again and held it.

“A complaint’s been made under Article Twelve,” Colm said. “It came to me at the mill yesterday, three o’clock, and I’ve had all night with it and I’ve not slept either, for what that’s worth, which is nothing.”

“Read it to me.”

“Hesper—“

“You’ll read it to me, Colm Ferris, because in two hours this village will be saying it in its own words and I’d like the real ones first.”

He took the paper out and unfolded it. It was in his own hand, which she had known it would be.

“On the twenty-ninth, about seven in the evening, I saw Hesper Quill of this village and the man Donnacha walking together down the lane, from the top of it to her own door, above two hundred yards, no third person with them and no business being done that I could see. I make no charge of anything worse and I’ll have nothing worse said in my name. I ask the warden to do what his paper says he must.”

He turned the sheet round so that she could see the bottom of it.

“He couldn’t sign it. Two fingers off the right and he never learned the left.” Colm’s voice had gone very flat. “He made his mark and I wrote his name beside it and he watched me do it, and then he asked me to read the whole thing back twice to be sure I’d not softened it, and I had softened it, in one place, and he made me put it back.”

“Which place.”

“I’d written no business apparent. He said that’s your word, not mine, and had me put that I could see, because he said he’d not swear to what he couldn’t see from a doorway at forty feet.” Colm folded the paper. “He’s eighty. He stood in my weighing room for an hour and a half and he was not angry once.”

“No,” Hesper said. “He wouldn’t be.”

“He told me you’d said on the green that nothing had happened behind your counter but a pot. He said he’d taken your word and told the village to leave it, and there’s four men at the mill who’ll say he did. He said he’d asked one thing of you and you’d not given it him.” Colm looked up. “He wasn’t complaining of you. He was reporting himself, as near as makes no difference. He thinks he’s the one that got it wrong.”

The kettle came up. Hesper took it off and set it on the trivet and did not pour anything.

Prue Haddon’s shape went past the window at seven, and stopped, and considered the shut door and the two figures in the back, and went on up the street. Eleven years, and she was not served at seven, and she did not knock, and Hesper stood in her own kitchen and added it to the account.

· · ·Scene break

“Right,” she said. “The article. Say it in order and don’t spare me the numbers, I helped write the numbers.”

Colm put his hands flat on the table.

“On a complaint made in proper form, the warden shall record it; shall suspend forthwith any dealing authorised between the parties; shall take a statement from each party separately; and shall forward the file to the treaty office, which shall determine the matter or appoint a hearing.” He did not read it off anything. “That’s the whole of my part. There’s no may in any of it. There’s no place in it where a warden thinks about it.”

“There’s discretion on the complaint’s form.”

“Its form is perfect. He’s given a date, a time, a place, a distance and two names, and he’s said what he saw and nothing else, and I’d defy a clerk in the capital to find a hole in it.” He almost smiled. “The old devil’s never written a letter in his life and he’s given me the cleanest complaint I’ll ever handle.”

“So the provisioning order goes.”

“Suspended from this morning. He doesn’t come here. Not at half past eight, not at six, not for a reconciliation, not for a cup of water on a hot day.” Colm’s jaw worked. “The township still has to feed him. I’ve spoken to the miller’s wife and she’ll do it, from today, at her own kitchen.”

“At the mill.”

“At the mill.”

“Where Garrow takes his tea,” Hesper said. “Where nine men sit down at noon.”

“I know where it is. I’ve no other kitchen in this village and you’re not allowed to be one.” He put his hat down again. “He’ll be fed in front of the men who lost people at Dunmoor, twice a day, for as long as this takes. I thought about it for two hours at four this morning and I could not find a way round it, and if you can, say it now, because I’d take it.”

She could not.

· · ·Scene break

“Statement,” Colm said. “Yours. Separately, which is why I came before your girl. I’ll write it down and you’ll sign it and it goes to the office with his.”

“Ask, then.”

“Did you and Aurel Donnacha walk together down the lane on the evening of the twenty-ninth, from the top of it to your door, alone?”

“We did. Two hundred and twenty yards, as near as I can judge it. He was coming up and I was coming down off the carter’s with an empty basket and we talked about a short weight and the beck and a boy who’s grown four inches. There wasn’t one word said in it that I’d mind you reading out on the green.”

“Was it arranged beforehand?”

“No. Not by a note, not by a word, not by a look. I’d not have known where he was.”

Colm wrote. The pen was loud in the kitchen.

Then he stopped writing and did not look up, and she knew what was coming, because she had sat on the other side of enough tables to know when a man has left his real question until his hand is already moving.

“Has there been any other dealing between you outside the order? Any at all, at any time since the fourteenth.”

If Ferris asks either of us a direct question, we answer it truthfully. They had settled it standing by a cold stove at six in the morning, both of them knowing exactly what it might cost, because the one thing neither of them could survive was a lie laid on top of the other one.

“Yes,” Hesper said.

Colm’s hand stopped.

“On the twenty-fifth of last month I sent Tamsin Brook up the smithy stair before six with a folded paper in my own hand that said, The tea-house opens at seven. Come at six. She didn’t read it and she’s carried nothing since and I’d have her name kept out of the file if the form allows it, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. He came at six. I barred the door and tied the bell back and we were alone in this shop for something under an hour.”

“Hesper.”

“Write it down, Colm.”

“Tell me what was said.”

“No.” She put both hands flat on the table. “I’ll give you the fact and I’ll sign it and I’ll give it you again in front of anybody you like. I’ll not give you what was said in that hour, because it isn’t only mine, and there are people in it who are still alive, and I’m not laying them on your table to save my licence.”

He sat there with the pen in his hand for a long moment.

“You understand what you’ve just done.”

“I’ve turned a man’s honest complaint about a walk into a breach with a date and a time and a witness, and handed you the witness, who is my own apprentice.” Her voice came out level and enormous, the field voice, and she had not chosen it. “Yes. I understand it.”

“Why in God’s name—“

“Because I wrote the article,” Hesper said. “I sat in a room for two years and argued that this border only holds if the treaty means the same thing on both sides of it, and you have quoted that back at me in this shop, and you were right to. If I’ll lie to a warden the first time the thing costs me something, then I never meant a word of it, and every man who said our peace wouldn’t survive contact with a grievance was right, and I handed him the proof myself.”

Colm Ferris put his pen down and rubbed his face with both hands.

“You’ve no idea,” he said, “how much easier my life would be if you were a worse woman.”

· · ·Scene break

He wrote it. She read it through twice and signed it at the bottom, and her hand went as she came to the Q and the tail of it went wrong across the paper, and she did not apologise for it and he did not look.

Then he took out a second sheet, printed, with a line for her name.

“This is the part I’ve to say out loud.” He read it in the voice he had used on the green, without performance, which she understood was the only kindness available to him. “The licence under which this house trades is held at the pleasure of the treaty office. A finding of breach under Article Twelve is grounds for its withdrawal. Withdrawal is not appealable within the township. You are advised to make no further contact of any kind with the other party while the matter is before the office.”

He turned it round.

“And I’m to write down that I told you, and you’re to sign that I did.”

She signed it.

“Hesper.” He was at the door with his hat on. “That last line isn’t the treaty. That last line’s the office’s standard advice and it’s got no force at all until they determine. I’m required to read it to you. I’m not required to want it obeyed, and I’ll not be asking you on Thursday whether it was.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t give me a door and then stand in the lane hoping I’ll go through it.” She got up and took his cup, which he had not touched. “You’ve been straight as a rule all morning. Stay straight. It’s the only thing in this that’s going to hold.”

· · ·Scene break

Tamsin came in at eight and was told in eleven words.

She stood in the middle of the shop floor with her shawl still on. Then she went behind the counter, took down the docket book, turned to the last page, ruled a line under the eighty-eighth entry with the back of the knife, and wrote the date in the margin, because that was what you did when a book was closed, and neither of them had said anything about closing it.

“He’ll be at the mill at noon,” she said. “With Garrow and the carters.”

“Yes.”

“That’s your doing and mine and the warden’s and nobody else’s, and he’ll stand there and eat it and say thank you.” Tamsin’s hands were flat on the book. Her mouth was working. “Mistress. There’s a thing I know that I can’t tell you, and I want you to hear me say that I know it, so that when you find out you’ll not think I sat here and watched you.”

“Tamsin—“

“That’s all of it. Don’t ask me.”

She took her shawl off and hung it up and opened the shop, and Prue came in at three minutes past eight and sat down at her window and said nothing whatsoever about not having been let in at seven.

· · ·Scene break

At ten that night Hesper sat in the dark at the end of her own counter with the small pot on the shelf above her and did the sum.

He had come off a coach in front of forty people and been made small, and had stood on the green and said understood. He had cleared her floor and never looked at her hands. He had carried the only true account of the end of the war for eleven years and never spent a penny of it, and then had put it across her counter for nothing and walked out into the cold before she could answer.

And she had given him back exactly this: a lie stood on the green every spring with three hundred cups up, a village that would eat its dinner around him at the mill, and a hand she would not let him see shake.

Everything she had that was worth anything was the truth, and she could not put it on the green yet, because it had Idony Vance’s name in it and the treaty’s and Prue Haddon’s dead boy’s, and she had not worked out what saying it would do to any of them.

But she could give it to him. All of it, in order, the way he had given her the tent: the nine seconds, the wall it stood against, what she had said in the tent at eleven o’clock to a marshal with clean hands, and why the Marchland had signed.

There was no lawful way to do it. There was no note she could send, no hour she could book, no room in this village with a door that did not have a village behind it. If she went up that outside stair she would be handing the treaty office the thing it needed, and it would be a cell for him under sanction and the licence for her, and Tamsin would lose four years, and Prue would lose her chair.

Hesper Quill sat in the dark until the stove went out, and then she got up and washed her hands and went to bed, having decided to do it anyway.