Sela's Table

The Bridge sent a cart for its dead man at noon the next day, and a note with it, and the note was courteous.

Corin read it at Sela’s gate, because Sela handed it to him without opening it and went back to her wall. Captain Sellick presents his compliments to Mistress Brand and thanks her for the return of the garrison’s men. The man who ran has been found at the foot of the pass and is at the Bridge. The Captain regrets the trouble to her house. Two troopers loaded the long man under a blanket and sat the heavy one beside him with his arm in a sling Orla had made, and the cart went back down the valley at a walk, and nobody in the Brack came out to watch it go.

He gave the note to Orla. She read it twice and handed it back.

“He writes a good letter,” she said.

“He does.” He folded it on its folds. “He regrets the trouble. He’ll mean it. It’s the worst thing about him.”

· · ·Scene break

She drew at night, at Sela’s table, and he watched her do it.

That was new. Sela had come to the door on the second evening, where he was sitting against the wall with the mules, and had stood there with the light behind her and said, “You’ll sit on the bench by the door. Not at my table. Where she can see you if she looks up.” And then, because he had not moved: “Don’t get used to it.” He had gone in and sat on the bench by the door, and had not got used to it, and every night since he had come in when the lamp was lit and sat there with his stitched arm across his knees until she put the pen down.

She drew the water first. She had told him at the Wyre that everything sat on the water, and he watched it sit: seven miles of it from the moss to the Bridge, the bend at the third mile, the slow reach below Todholes, drawn in one line that did not shake anywhere. Then the ground. She put the contours in with a finer pen, one line through everything that was the same height, and he watched the Brack come up off the vellum in a way he had never seen it, not from the road and not from the ridge: the long lift of the south side where the grazing was, the steep fall under Blackshiel, the shelf on the north bank at the fourth mile where twelve men could stand in a line.

He had walked every yard of it. He had never known it had a shape. She had said at Hatch that it did.

On the fourth night she lettered the steadings.

She did the four with roofs first. She drew each as a square, closed, with a small mark at the gable for the hearth, and he saw that she had drawn the hearth at Todholes where he had set it, square to the gable, and had not asked him where it went. Cauldkeld. Blackshiel. Crossgill. Todholes. Her hand was small and upright and every letter stood on the line as if it had been told to.

Then the five that were footings. She drew those as squares with the lines broken, the way you drew a wall that was down, and she stopped with the pen over the vellum before she lettered the first of them.

“The paper,” she said. “In your coat.”

He had known she would ask. He had known it since the fire on the Wyre, and every day on the ridge, and he had thought that when she asked he would find it hard, and he found that it was not hard at all. He put his hand to the left side of his coat and took it out.

He had never unfolded it in front of anyone. It was a half-sheet of garrison paper folded in four, gone soft as cloth at the folds, and he had written on it in pencil at the Bridge the night of the third day and gone over the pencil in ink at the Sallow the next spring, when the pencil had started to go. Nine names in a column, in the order he had burned them. A line under. Three names under the line.

He gave it to her.

She did not read it at once. She laid it flat on the table beside the vellum, and smoothed it once with the side of her hand, the way she smoothed a field sheet that had been in the rain, and then she read it: the number, and then the number again.

“You wrote them in the order you burned them,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’ll letter them where they stand.”

“Yes.”

She lettered them where they stood. Nethergill, half a mile above the Bridge on the south bank. Stoneyford. Whinrigg, up its side burn. Sourhope, above the ford. Hare Law, on the old lawn. Each under its broken square, in the same small hand as the four that had roofs, no larger and no smaller. She did not look at his paper again while she did it. She had it by heart after the one reading, and he had known she would.

Then the ford.

She drew it as she had drawn it at Dunnock, a dashed line across the water. She drew the shelf on the north bank. On the south bank, at the foot of the slope, she drew a small mark he did not know, a stroke with a bar across it, and he understood that it was the stone; that she had been to it, in the eleven days she did not speak to him, and he had not known.

“Effie showed me,” she said, without looking up. “The day we chained Sourhope. She was sitting on the bank above it. She got up and walked me to it and stood there while I read it, and walked back.”

Under the mark, in her hand, she lettered the three names off his paper. Ewan Brand. Amos Rennie. Tobin Rennie. One under the other, in his order, which was the order on the stone.

He sat on the bench and watched his list go onto the Crown’s vellum in a hand that was not his, and did not look away from it.

· · ·Scene break

The legend took her two nights.

She wrote it on a sheet of the field paper first and read it back and struck lines out and wrote them again, and he watched her do it without asking to see, because she had not offered. On the second night she drew a box in the lower right corner of the vellum and wrote it fair inside the box, and when it was dry she turned the sheet round on the table so that it faced the bench.

“Read it,” she said.

He got up. He came to the table, which Sela had told him not to, and Sela at the hearth looked up and said nothing, and he stood over the vellum with his hands behind his back, because he did not trust them near the ink.

The Brack, from the moss at its head to Brack Bridge, seven miles. Chained and cairned on foot by Orla Tallis, master surveyor of the Ostmere Guild of Cartographers, from midsummer to the end of summer this year. Stations on the Long Ridge taken from the cairns of the Hallam survey. Nine steadings on the water. Four roofed and lived in: Cauldkeld, Sela Brand and Effie Rennie; Blackshiel, Halket; Crossgill, Annot Weir and her sons; Todholes, Isbel and Davey Rook. Five footings with fire-blackened stone and no roof: Nethergill, Stoneyford, Whinrigg, Sourhope, Hare Law. On the south bank at the ford at the fourth mile, a stone cut with three names. Light at the ford taken from the north bank, where a section of the garrison stood, at the second hour after dawn, midsummer: good, from the east, clear across the ford. What is drawn here was seen. Where a thing was not seen, it is not drawn.

He read it twice.

It did not say who had burned the steadings. It did not say who had fired, or on what order, or off what map. It said what she had seen, and when, and in what light, and it said nothing she had not seen. There was no unsettled in it. There was no upland. There was no poor anywhere, and no appeared, and no phrase like either.

And it said the light at the ford was good, from the east, from the place where the section stood; and somewhere in the Chancellery’s rooms, in a box with the Bridge’s reports for that summer, there was a copy in Sellick’s fair hand with Corin’s name at the foot, and it said the light was poor. Anyone who put the two side by side would have to decide which one was lying. There was only one of them who could say.

“It says what you saw,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And when.”

“Yes.” She was watching his face, and he let her. “You’ll know what it sits beside.”

“I know what it sits beside.” He looked at good, from the east, in her upright hand. “It was good. I told you in the shrine. Leave it.”

“I wasn’t asking you whether to.”

“No,” he said. “I know you weren’t.”

· · ·Scene break

She signed it on the eleventh night. Her name, and master, and her years, and the date, at the foot of the legend box, and she sat back and looked at it with her hands flat on the table either side of it, the way she had sat at Sellick’s table with the other map under the candle.

“That’s three,” she said.

He did not understand for a moment. Then he did. There were two in the bottom of the case, rolled with grey tape, one eleven miles wrong and one two hundred and six feet. This was the third in the case. It was the first of the three she had drawn off her own boots.

“There’s no third sheet,” he said. “You told me that on the wall.”

“There wasn’t.” She did not look up. “I was looking for a sheet that would stop him going out. There isn’t one. He’ll go out whatever I draw; he told us at his own table and he doesn’t lie. So I stopped looking for that one and drew this one.”

“And what does this one do?”

“I don’t know yet.” She said it the way she had said it to Isbel Rook, plain. “It makes them here. It makes them a list. Both. I can’t make it only one of those.” She put her finger on the edge of the sheet, not on the ink. “But I can put it on both crowns’ tables in the same hour. Not the Chancellery’s first, so a clerk can correct it and send it on. Both. At Stannock, in front of each other, the day before the talks. Then there’s no quiet way to draw the Brack empty again, because Hallam will have it with the names on, and Hallam will want to know where they went.”

He looked at her across the table.

“The Chancellery won’t hear of it till it’s done,” he said.

“The Chancellery will hear of it when everybody does. That’s the whole of it.” She rolled her shoulders; she had been bent over the table for eleven nights and it showed. “I’ll need two fair copies. Four nights. Then the pass, before the snow.”

“The snow’s early.”

“I know. I’ve been logging the tops.”

· · ·Scene break

Sela looked at it in the morning, in the window light, standing.

Orla had laid it on the table and stepped back from it, and said nothing, and Sela stood over it with her arms folded for a long time. She found Cauldkeld. She found her own name under it. She followed the water down, the way anyone would, the way he had watched Orla teach Davey Rook to read the field sheet in the Rooks’ yard, and she stopped at the ford.

She did not touch it. She stood with her arms folded and looked at the three names in the surveyor’s small hand under a mark that was a stone, and Corin, on the bench by the door, looked at the floor.

“It’s your name,” Orla said. “On a sheet that’s going to both crowns. If you want it off, I’ll draw the house and leave the name out. The Rooks said leave theirs. Annot said leave hers. It’s yours to say.”

Sela was quiet so long that the fire needed turf and nobody gave it any.

“The last map of this valley,” she said at last, “had nobody’s name on it. And they came up the valley with it anyway.” She unfolded her arms. “Leave it. If they come again, they’ll come knowing who they’re coming to. I’d sooner that.” She looked across the kitchen at him then, on the bench, and it was not the look from the ford and not the other one; he did not have a name for it. “You gave her the paper.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Sela Brand said, and went and put turf on the fire.

· · ·Scene break

The snow came on the tops on the third night of the copies. He saw it at first light, white along the line of the pass where there had been grey, and he stood at the wall and read it the way he read a track. Early. A week early, maybe two. It would go off again, and come back, and the second time it would stay.

He told her at the table what he saw. Then he told her what he would do, because she had asked him, and she had asked it as a question with an answer.

“Mules on the pass in snow are a mule going off the edge with your case on it. I’d leave them. I’d carry the case and what we need, and leave the chain and the level and the rest, and come down the far side light.” He stopped. “That’s what I’d do. It’s yours.”

She looked at Sela.

“Leave them,” Sela said, from the hearth. “They’ll eat my grass till you come back for them.”

“I might not come back.”

“Then they’ll eat it longer.”

· · ·Scene break

She finished the second copy at the fourth hour after midnight on the fourth night and signed it, and put all three in the lid of the case between sheets of the field paper, the signed sheet on top, the two copies under, and his paper with them, folded on its folds. She did not give it back and he did not ask for it.

They went up the sheep track behind the byre at first light, past the wall where Bishop and Marigold stood side by side and watched them with the interest of animals who had been left out of something and did not mind. He had the case on his back, on its strap, and he had it on the hill side, and she had seen him put it there and said nothing.

The rider was at the head of the valley, where the water came out of the moss. Sellick had said he would be. A young man on a grey, the one who had brought the first letter, with a courteous face and another.

Captain Sellick is instructed by the Chancellery that the Crown’s survey of the Brack be delivered at Brack Bridge, for carriage to Stannock under the garrison’s escort, and would be glad to receive it.

Orla read it twice. Then she took Quennell’s letter out of the lid of the case and read the trooper the one line in it that mattered, in her father’s voice, the one for corrections: fair copies on vellum to be delivered at Stannock on the day before the talks. “By the Crown’s surveyor,” she said. “That’s me. Tell the Captain I have his letter.”

“The Captain said you’d say that.” The trooper put his cap on. “He said to tell you he’d not expected otherwise. I’m to see you to the snow.”

They went up. The sheep track climbed out of the moss onto the long shoulder under the pass, and the valley went down behind them, green, seven miles, four roofs, a thread of smoke from Cauldkeld; and when Corin looked back from the first rise the trooper was following on the grey, at a walk, a quarter-mile behind.

A quarter-mile. He knew the distance. He had stood at it once, and heard everything, and done nothing.

He turned round and walked on after her, and did not look back again.