The Stance House

On the second evening out of Stannock the factor’s lead man came to the fire and asked Corin which road they would take in the morning, and Corin told him before the man had finished asking.

“The coast. The hill road’s shorter and there’s a bog on it at the second mile that’ll have two horses to the girth after this weather. The coast’s half a day longer and nobody drowns on it.” He turned the stick in the fire. “You’ll get the rest of the reasons after.”

The lead man nodded and went back to the horses. He had not wanted the reasons. Nobody on a wool train ever wanted the reasons; they wanted to be told, and to be told by a man who had been across and been held.

Corin sat with the stick in his hand and heard what he had said.

He had said it to a hundred men on a hundred roads. He had said it to her at the bottom of a mill track on the fourth day out from the eastern gate, with the Sallow ahead of them, and she had said quicker for you, and he had said quicker. He had said it every day for six months, one way or another; he had picked the ground and told her after, and she had let him until Scarrow, and at Scarrow she had put him behind her and picked it herself. And on the col she had drawn the way down, and he had read it; and on the spur she had told him down, and he had gone.

She had never once, in six months, been asked which way. Not by him.

He put the stick in the fire.

He went back over the inn at Stannock the way she would have gone over a station, in order. He had asked her a thing. She had said she could not answer it. Not now, she had said. Not in a room, on a day like this. She had not said no. He had heard not now, and got up, and put forty packhorses and the coast road between himself and the answer, so that he would never have to hear what it was. He had called that leaving her free. It was not. It was deciding what she would have said, and saying it for her, and walking off with it.

He had told her on Sellick’s wall that he would not choose for her. He had chosen for her in an inn.

The fire ticked. The horses shifted on their pickets. Down the line a man was singing something about a girl in a town on the coast, badly.

He could go back. He saw that at once, and saw the shape of it, because it was the shape of every road he had walked for four years. He could be at the foot of the pass by the day after tomorrow and on the far side of the Brack two days after that, and behind her all the way home. A quarter-mile back. Off her line. She would never see him. He would see every station she took, and every man on every road who looked at her twice, and he would be there if anything came; and he would never have to hear her answer, because he would never have to stand where she could give it.

He had done that. He had stood a quarter-mile off once and heard everything.

He would not follow her home.

He sat with that until the fire was down. Then he did what she did: he laid it on the ground and looked at it for the other thing, the thing under it, and found it.

He did not want to keep her from harm. He had wanted that all his life, for everybody, and it had never once been the same as wanting them. He wanted to hear what she said. If it was no, he wanted to hear it in her voice and not in his own. If it was I still can’t answer, he wanted to hear that, and stand there while she couldn’t. He wanted to be asked, and he could not be asked from a quarter-mile off, or from the coast road.

So he would go to where she was going, and stand in the open, on the far side, where she could see him from a long way off and walk past him if she chose.

He knew where that was. She had told him at Hatch. A cartographer who forgets her mistakes repeats them. She would go home the long way, by every station she had taken, rechecking each one; she would not be able to do otherwise, with the guild’s summons in the lid and the guild’s hearing at the end of the road. The snow would go off the pass in two days, as early snow did. Cauldkeld, for the mules. The ridge. Scarrow. And then the Wyre, where she had drawn a ford eleven miles north of itself at nineteen, and where she had gone into the river after her father’s case, and where she had said his name.

He counted it at her pace. Ninety to the minute on the flat. Two stations a day, three if the light held. The tenth day.

He could be on the west bank of the Wyre at the true ford in eight, by the drove roads south of the Ashfall, on a bad knee and a good stick.

In the morning he gave the factor back the silver he had been paid in advance, every bit of it, and told the lead man the coast road was fine as far as the salt pans and that he was not going to walk it. The factor called him a number of things. Corin agreed with most of them.

Then he turned round.

· · ·Scene break

She had rechecked every station home, and every one had held.

The col, with the snow gone off it and the cairn standing up grey where she had built the top stone level. The spur, from above, with the broken lip of the cornice hanging off its north edge like a torn hem. Cauldkeld, where Sela had taken the third sheet off her without a word and cleared a nail on the kitchen wall for it and stood back; and had brought the mules round to the gate, both of them, Bishop sound on all four and pleased with himself, and had said, “You’ll be back for your mutton,” and gone in. The Long Ridge, every cairn with its triangle and her cross-in-a-ring. Scarrow, where Berta Innes had come out onto the green and looked at her and at the two mules and at nobody walking behind them, and had said, “Well,” and nothing else.

She took the light at every one. She wrote light good at all but two, and at those two she wrote cloud, could not see the far station; I have written that I could not see. She did not once write anything else.

On the tenth morning she stood across the water from the red bluff, where she had drawn the ford at nineteen. She looked at the run under the rock where eight men had gone in in the dark, and a boy had broken his leg, and she said aloud, “Eleven miles,” in her own voice, not her father’s; and she walked them.

The Wyre was at its summer low. It had been low since midsummer and nobody had told it about the snow. It went over the shingle bar at the true ford in a sheet a hand deep, clear, so that she could see every stone on the bottom, and the sound of it was nothing like the sound of gravel being poured into a cart; it was the sound of a kettle beginning.

He was on the far bank.

She saw him from the last bend, a quarter of a mile off, and stopped, and the mules stopped behind her.

He was sitting on the shingle with his back to a rock, the way he had sat on the night of the crossing, with his coat over his knees and his stick beside him and his hands on his knees, where she could see them. He was not watching the road, or the river, or the ways into the camp. He was watching her come.

He did not get up. He did not come across.

She understood that at once, and it went through her the way the Wyre had in spate. He was on the far side. He had put the whole river between them, low as it was, and sat down on the other side of it, so that she would have to be the one who crossed, or not; so that there was nothing he could do from where he sat to decide it.

She walked to the edge of the bar. She had the case on her hip, on the hill side, and the mules on their ropes behind her, and her boots were dry.

There was no instrument. She had known that since the tower. She had carried it along a ridge and down into a valley and over a pass and back, and taken the light at a hundred and forty stations, and there was still no instrument, and there never would be, and she was standing at the edge of a ford she had once put in the wrong place with her whole body saying yes and nothing in her hands to take it with.

She went across.

The water came over her boots at the third pace and she did not stop for it. The mules came after her, Marigold without an opinion and Bishop with several. She kept on the line; not his line, her own; she could see every stone. Fourteen paces. Nothing turned under anybody.

She came up onto the shingle on the far side and stood in front of him with the river running off her boots.

He looked up at her. His face was the one from the byre, and the gully, and it did not guard anything.

“You went south,” she said.

“Two days. Then I turned round.” He did not get up. “Not to follow you. I’d have been a quarter-mile back all the way from Stannock. I’ve done that. I came here to hear the answer, if you had one. If you haven’t, I’ll hear that.”

“And then?”

“Then I’ll go.” He said it plainly. “You’ll not have to walk past me twice.”

She put the case down on the shingle, on its side, with the brass corners to the rock. She stood up without it.

“I can’t measure it,” Orla said. “I’ve tried for six months. There’s nothing to take it with and I’ve stopped looking. I’m asking anyway.” Her voice did not stop dead. She had thought it would. “Walk beside me. Not in front. Not behind. No pay, no warrant, nobody’s charge. No route decided before we set out. Beside me.”

He was quiet for the length of a bearing. She let him have it.

“Yes,” Corin said.

Then he looked up at her, from the shingle, with the Wyre going past behind her low and clear, and asked it.

“Which way?”

There was a stance house on the west bank above the ford, where the drove road came down to the water: four walls of dry stone and a turf roof, a pen for beasts, a stack of peat under the eaves, and a door. She had seen it in the spring from the far side and not thought about it. The drovers had gone south with the last of the beasts a week since; the peat was theirs, left for whoever came.

“They leave it,” he said, at the door, “for whoever the river’s stopped.”

“The river hasn’t stopped anybody. It’s a hand deep.”

“No,” Corin said. “It hasn’t.”

He made the fire. She put the mules in the pen and brought the case in, and set it by the wall, and stood a moment with her hand on the lid. Then she took her hand away and left it there.

He was on his knees at the hearth with his bad leg out straight and the peat catching, and she came and knelt on the other side of it, and the fire was between them for the length of a breath, the way it had been on the Wyre, with the pen held out across it. She reached across. Not with a pen. She put her hand flat on the left side of his coat, over the pocket, where the paper had been.

It was empty. She could feel that it was empty.

“I want you to stay,” she said. “Tonight. With me. Not sitting up on the far side of the fire with your eyes shut.”

He did not move under her hand.

“I want to stay,” he said. “Tonight, and after it. I want you to ask me things, and me to ask you, and neither of us to know the answer first.” The fire was on the side of his face. “And I want you to tell me if it changes. Any time. Tonight or after. I’ll hear it.”

“It won’t.”

“Tell me anyway, if it does.”

“And you,” she said. “The same.”

“The same.” He put his hand over hers, on his coat, and held it there. Then he turned it over under his own and bent his head and put his mouth to the inside of her wrist, where the beat was, and kept it there, and she felt her pulse go against him and did not count it. She did not want to count anything. She wanted the door shut and the fire between nobody.

He lifted his head. “Say it once more. When I’ve shut the door. So I’ve heard it where nobody’s paying me to be.”

She took her hand from under his and stood up. She was not shaking. She noticed that, the way she would have noticed the wind: a fact about the station.

“Shut it, then,” Orla said.

He got up. It took him a moment, with the knee, and she did not help him, because he had not asked. He went to the door and stood in it, and looked out once, at the river going over the bar in the last of the light and the two mules in the pen and the drove road going west into the dusk; and then he turned round and looked at her, by the fire, and waited, and gave her the whole of the pause.

“Yes,” she said.

He shut the door.