Hatch

The rain came in on the second night at Hatch and closed the moss like a door, and Corin stood in what was left of the byre and listened to the road.

Two hundred yards below the steading, the drove road ran along the foot of the slope, and in rain like this a horse on it would be heard before it was seen. He had put the mule in the house end, where the roof held, and the fire on the old hearth, and the surveyor on the far side of the fire with her field sheets spread on every dry stone she could find. Then he had come out here, to the end with no roof, to be where the sound was.

Hatch had been a good steading once. Four rooms and a byre under one long roof, a wall round the infield, a spring that still ran. Somebody had left it twenty years ago in the ordinary way, without burning anything, and taken the door with them. He had slept in it three times in his life and never in the rain.

Three days, by the look of the sky. Maybe four. The Wyre would be up after this, and that was the next thing on her sheet, and he had not decided what to say about it.

He went back in.

· · ·Scene break

“How many men did you have?”

She did not look up from the sheet she was drying. She had asked it the way she asked about the ground: a bearing, taken, written down whatever it came to.

“When?”

“When you had them.”

“Sixty, on paper. Fewer by the end.” He put a piece of the old door on the fire. “I’m not a man people follow far.”

“Hob followed you across a river with his eyes.”

“Hob followed the silver.”

“Men followed you out of the garrison.” She turned the sheet. “You said once or twice on the boat, and you’ve said my sergeant and my lieutenant and you’ve never said my men, and I thought that was because you didn’t have any. But it’s because you had a few and don’t say the number. So. How many?”

The fire took the wood. He watched it do that.

“Three,” he said.

“Where are they?”

“South. Two of them. Brothers called Coyle, on a wool road, escorting fleeces to the coast for a man who pays badly and on time. They’re fine.” He heard the word come out and let it stand. “They were good men in the garrison and they’re good men on the wool road and the second’s better for them.”

“And the third?”

“Drowned.”

She stopped turning the sheet.

“Piran Lusk. Two years back. A crossing on the Crake, which is a Sallow water you’ve not got to yet, on a job for a wool factor with a mule train and a deadline. The Crake was up. Not like this. Up an inch, maybe two. I went across first and came back and told him it was fine.”

He had said it in a level voice, in order, the way he said everything, and it had come out in order, and it did not help.

“It was fine for me. I’m heavier and I’d crossed it before and I went where I’d gone before. He went four feet to the left of that, because a mule pulled him, and there’s a hole four feet to the left that I’d never stood in, and he was in it. I had him by the coat. The coat came off.”

The rain came down on what was left of the roof.

“So when I say fine,” Corin said, “that’s what I mean by it. That I’ve been across, and it held me. It’s not a promise. I don’t make those.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she reached across the fire, not to him; to the case, which was lashed to nothing tonight and stood open against the wall with its brass corners to the light. She took the field sheets out of the lid. She took Quennell’s letter out from under them. Under that, at the bottom, rolled tight and tied with tape gone grey, were two sheets of vellum, and she took those out too and laid them on the hearthstone between them.

“Wyre Ford,” she said, and put her finger on the first without unrolling it. “Drawn at nineteen, from other people’s notes. Eleven miles wrong. This one’s the Long Ridge, at twenty-two, from a surveyor’s book I trusted because he was a master and I wasn’t, and the elevation’s out by two hundred feet.” She did not unroll that one either. “I carry them. Every survey. They go in the bottom and they come out at the end and I check the new work against what I got wrong in the old.”

“Why?”

“Because a cartographer who forgets her mistakes repeats them.” She said it as if it were an instruction from a book, and it was, he thought; it was in her father’s voice, the one she used for corrections. “And because someone should have to carry them. It might as well be the person who made them.”

He found his hand had gone to the left side of his coat, where the paper was.

He took it away. He had not decided to put it there, and he had not decided to take it away, and she was looking at his hand, because she looked at everything; and then she looked back at the two rolled maps on the hearth, and did not ask, and he did not say.

· · ·Scene break

On the second day she taught him a contour.

She did it with a burnt stick on the hearthstone, because the sheets were too wet and too valuable, and she did it the way he would have taught a recruit a picket: one thing, then the next.

“A line,” she said, “through every point that’s the same height. This is the tor.” A circle. “This is a hundred feet down.” A bigger circle round it. “This is two hundred.”

“So where they’re close together it’s steep.”

“Yes.”

“And where they’re wide it’s flat. And where one goes up into another like a finger, that’s a gully, and where it goes out, that’s a spur.” He took the stick from her and drew Dunnock Tor from memory, as he had seen it from the road: the shoulder, the gully the mill track had run down, the steep face on the river side. She watched him do it and said nothing until he had finished, and then took the stick back and corrected the gully, and said, “You’ve walked it,” which was as near to praise as she came.

“I’ve walked all of it. Nobody told me it had a shape you could write down.”

“It has a shape. Everything has. Most people can’t see it.”

“Most people don’t need to.” He looked at the hearthstone, at the tor in charcoal, that he had known for fifteen years and never seen. “I know where I can stand and not be seen, and how long it takes a man to get from there to here, and where the water is. That’s not a shape. That’s a list.”

“It’s a shape,” she said. “You’ve just never drawn it.”

In the afternoon, when the rain thinned, he took her to the door and showed her the mud.

Bishop had been in and out to the spring, and there were his prints, and there were Corin’s, and there were hers. He showed her which was which and how he knew: the mule toed in on the near fore; his own left boot had a patched heel; hers were the smallest and the shallowest and turned a little out. He showed her what an hour of rain did to an edge, and what four hours did, and how you could tell a print made in rain from one made before it by whether the water had run into it or been thrown out.

“The two horses at the Sallow,” she said. “A day old, you said. One lame.”

“Shod one dragging the near hind. You could see the toe-drag in the peat.”

“You said that on the road without stopping, and then you stopped for me at a wall for ten minutes.”

“Yes.”

“You could have said you were bored.”

“I don’t get bored,” he said. “I’ve told you. It’s the one thing the garrison taught me that I’d have paid for.”

She looked at the mud for a long moment, at her own prints going out to the spring and back, turned a little out.

“Show me again,” she said. “The rain edge.”

He showed her again.

· · ·Scene break

The patrol came on the third morning, with the rain going to mist and the road below just visible through it, and he heard them before the mule did.

Six horses. Not hurrying. He was at the door with his shoulder to the jamb, and he did not move, and he put his left hand behind him, flat, palm down, and pushed it once toward the floor.

She was at the window. The window had no glass and never had, and she was standing in the frame of it with the Sallow sheet held up to the light, the way she had been standing for a quarter of an hour, and he had told her, on the first night, that a shape in a window was a thing a rider saw.

She did not go down.

He felt her not go down. He did not turn to look at her, because turning was movement and the road was two hundred yards off and the mist was thinning. But he felt it, the way you felt a man in the line beside you decide something, and he understood what she had decided about a half-second after she had decided it. A shape in a window that had been there when the riders came round the bend was part of the house. A shape that dropped was a person. She had been standing still, and she went on standing still, with the sheet up in front of her face and her breath, he would have bet the silver in his coat, stopped.

Hallam grey. Six of them, and the sixth with a led horse. They came along the road at a walk, and the lead rider looked up at the steading the way every rider looked up at every steading, and saw a ruin with a shape in the window that did not move, and looked at the road again.

They went by. It took a long time. Then the mist had them.

He let a slow count of a hundred go past before he took his shoulder off the jamb.

“Hallam,” she said. Her voice was quite steady. “Six.”

“And a remount. They’re a long way from where they should be, and they’re not in a hurry about it.” He came in from the door. “You didn’t go down.”

“If I’d gone down, the window would have changed. They’d been looking at it since the bend. It’s the change you see, not the thing.”

“Yes.”

“You told me down.”

“I did.” He crouched and put wood on the fire that had nearly gone out, because the smoke had to be nothing while they passed. “It was the better call. I’d have told you down anyway. That’s the term.”

She lowered the sheet at last. Her hands were not steady; he saw that; she saw him see it and did not hide them.

“You’d have killed them,” she said. “If they’d come up.”

“Two.” He said it to the fire. “Then you’d have run, because I’d have told you to.”

“And the other four?”

“Would have had two dead men and a burning steading to think about, and a surveyor on the moss with a mule who’s faster than she looks.” He stood. “I’m not what’s between you and a patrol, Tallis. I’m what makes a patrol stop and count. Sometimes the count is enough.”

She did not answer that. She rolled the Sallow sheet, slowly, and put it in the case, and he watched her put the two wrong maps back in the bottom, under everything, and close the lid on them.

· · ·Scene break

By the evening the sky had opened in the west and she had her field book out and was working something through it in figures. He knew what it was before she said it. He had seen the way she looked at the light over the ridge.

“The Brack’s four days east of the ridge foot,” she said. “Five with the mule. If we go now, while this holds, I can have the valley cairned and chained before midsummer and take the ridge after, on the way back to the pass. The order on the commission’s the Chancellery’s, not mine. Reasons of season. This is the season. I’ve been counting the light since Dunnock and it’s going to be dry for a fortnight and then it isn’t.”

“No.”

“I can do it in fourteen days.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He put his back to the wall, the way he did at night, where he could see the door and the window and her.

There was a good answer. There was a true answer about the ridge and the cairns and a Hallam woman working them from the other side; there was a sound answer about six grey riders a long way from where they should be, going east. There was the case, and the ford, and the fact that he had not yet found the way to tell her the thing about the ford. He had all of those and any one of them would have done.

He gave her none of them. He found that he could not, and did not look too hard at why.

“Not yet,” he said.

“That’s not a reason.”

“No.”

She waited. He let her. She was very good at waiting; he had watched her do it to a level bubble for a quarter of an hour in a wind. She could do it to him for a week, and he would still be sitting here with his back to the wall, and she knew that, and closed the book.

“Then it’s the Wyre,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

“The Wyre’s up.”

“I know where the ford is.”

He looked at her across the fire, at the case behind her with its brass corners and its two rolled mistakes in the bottom, and at the thing he had not yet said, that had been waiting since the eastern gate for the right ground to say it on.

“You know where you put it,” he said.