Hesper wanted the Peg, and the Peg, which was the only star in the Lowmarch sky that kept an appointment, was being coy.
It stood low and plain in the north, a point no brighter than a nail head, and every surveyor in the Province loved it for the one virtue the rest of the heavens lacked, which was that it did not move.
The others wheeled.
The Peg held still, and you could hang a bearing on it as you hung a coat on a hook.
Hesper had set the Alderman on its three legs at the crest of the rise, a few yards from the four driftwood pegs, with the dew already beading on its brass, and for an hour she had been bent over the eyepiece with a blanket over her head like a woman hiding from a creditor.
“Hold the lantern lower,” she said, from under the blanket.
“Lower.
You are lighting the whole parish.”
“There is no parish.”
“Then you are lighting the Registry’s idea of one.
Lower.”
He lowered it.
It was past eleven, by the little watch that Pask had left them and that Hesper insisted on calling an impertinence, and the night was as clear as ground glass.
The camp lay behind them: the ring of stones, the banked coals, the case and the plane table and the pot, a blanket apiece.
Before them the whole slope fell away to the river in a long dark swell, and the river lay under the stars like a strip of slate, with the lantern of the Hob chapel burning small and yellow on the far bank.
She was taking the Peg, she had explained, because she did not trust north.
“The Registry issues a table,” she had said, at supper, over a strip of salt eel that fought back.
“Declination for each sheet, every year, so that a surveyor may turn the needle’s north into the true one.
I have used the Fourteenth’s table for thirty years.
And this week someone has taken a village off that sheet in a night, and a village is a great deal heavier than a number in a table.
I do not trust anything the Registry has issued this month.
I do not trust north.
I am going to go and look at it myself.”
He had written that down, with the date, in the left margin of the field book.
It was the sort of thing he wished to be able to quote.
“Bearing on the Peg,” said Hesper, “is…” She read the circle, and said the figure, and he wrote it.
“Now the chapel lantern.
And do not speak, because I am about to be annoyed.”
She swung the telescope.
He held his breath, since it seemed to be wanted.
Out on the water the little yellow lantern on the Hob bank softened, and swelled, and seemed to lose its edges.
He thought for a moment that it was her eyepiece.
Then he saw that it was the whole bank.
A pale line was moving up the river from the south, low and even, a handbreadth above the water, as if someone were drawing a sheet across a table.
“Drift take it,” said Hesper.
“Fog.”
“I can see that it is fog.
I have eyes.
I am speaking to the fog.” She came out from under the blanket with her bun askew and a pencil sticking out at a new angle.
“It is not supposed to be fog.
It was clear at sunset.
There was no wind and no wet.
It has no business.”
The Peg went first.
It did not fade; it was there, and then a thin gray hand had been laid across it, and the sky above the north was empty.
Then the lantern across the water, which swelled into a fat yellow thumbprint and shrank to a faint stain on the white, a thing you could find only if you knew where it was.
The fog rose up the slope.
It filled the river, and then the reeds, and then the long swale of the lane, so that the whole lower field lay below them in a still, white, level pool, with the top of the rise standing out of it like a dry island.
It came on at the pace of a slow man walking.
It lapped up the slope, and the coals of their fire went from red to a smear, and then the Alderman’s brass legs vanished to the knee.
Wystan had seen fog on the Sloe all his life.
It was one of the things the river did, as the heron and the eel and the rot in the spring.
He had never seen it come up so evenly, or so quietly.
It did not smell of mud.
It did not smell of anything.
“The Gutter,” said Hesper, behind him.
“That is the Weir Gutter breathing.
It does tricks.”
“The Weir Gutter is a day’s walk down the river.”
“Fog does not read the sheet, kid.”
He was about to answer her, correctly, when he saw the first light.
It was nine paces to his left, inside the pegged rectangle.
A small spot of red-gold, steady, low to the ground, with the fog around it lit to the size of a plate.
A wick in a cup of red glass.
Father Dunstan had trimmed that lamp every dusk and sworn at it every dawn, and had told the children that it was the last of his mother’s dowry, and that if any of them knocked it over he would make them clean the shrine with a toothbrush.
‘One,’ thought Wystan.
He was counting seconds, because it was the only thing his mind would do.
The second came from far below him.
It hung at the foot of the slope, small and warm and flickering in the white, a lantern of horn hung on a hook above a door.
It swung a little.
It always had.
Orla would not have the hook mended, because she said a swinging lamp showed up better to a boat on the water.
‘Two.’
And above the lantern, picked out in the glow of it, a pale wall, whitewash gone gray, and in the wall, a dark pane.
It was the loft window.
He could not have mistaken it.
It was the one window of the Ferry House that was never lit, because Orla would not allow a candle above the settle on account of the thatch, and because the pane in the corner had been broken since the winter before last and stuffed with a sock, and Brea had been promised a replacement every month since then and had never been refused or given it.
It showed dark, a hand’s breadth of dark inside the lantern’s light, and it was exactly the right distance above the door.
‘Three.’
The lights had come in on the first three counts, and he had gone on counting without knowing it, in the old rhythm, the tongue against the teeth.
He was at six.
The lights did not look real, and they did not look like a dream.
They looked like what they were, which was lights in the fog, and the fog showed no house under them and no shape of a roof.
It showed only the lamps, each in its small pearl of glow, hung in the air like things painted on a pane, trembling faintly, as a flame trembles in a draft.
At seven he took the lamp of the Ferry House against the stain where the chapel’s lantern had been, from habit, with his fist and thumb at arm’s length, and the lamp stood exactly where the door stood.
At eight he heard himself make a sound.
Hesper had not moved.
She stood beside the Alderman with her hands at her sides and her face turned down the slope.
The fennel had fallen out of her mouth.
It lay on the grass at her feet, pale in the lantern light, and he had never in two years seen her let it go.
Nine.
“Brea,” said Wystan.
He had meant to say it quietly.
It came out of him like the cough of a man who has taken a blow, and then he was running.
He did not decide it.
His legs had decided it for him, and in the part of his mind that went on counting he heard Hesper say his name once, sharply, and then not again.
The grass was wet and long and it ripped at his knees.
The lamp below was a small warm coin in the white and he ran at it, down the fall of the slope, with the plumb bob thudding against his hip.
Ten.
The fog came up in his face and lit from within.
Eleven.
He could see the loft window.
He could see, or thought he could see, the sock in the corner pane, a gray tuft, and the edge of the lantern’s glow along the whitewashed sill, and he was shouting a name he had no breath for.
Twelve.
The lights did not fade.
They went out.
They went out together, like a hand being closed, and the dark that was left was entire.
He did not stop.
His legs did not know yet.
He ran on through the place where the door should have been, and through the place where the hearth should have been, with his arms out in front of him, on grass that was smooth and wet and level under his boots and had no step in it, no threshold, no flagstone, and the ground sloped away and he went on after it, down and down, to the place where the lane met the landing.
He ran into the reeds at the edge of the water and the reeds took him, rattling, to the waist.
Then the bank went from under him.
He went down on one knee, and then on both, in cold mud, with the river against his shins.
He knelt there with his hands out in front of him, in the dark, among the wet stalks.
They were reeds.
They were just reeds.
They bent and sprang and ran their wet edges over his palms, and beyond them the river slid by, black and level and without interest.
He put his hands down in the mud and felt for a ferry slip, and a post, and a rope.
He felt for the boat.
There was a root, and a stone the size of a loaf, and then more mud.
“Orla,” he said.
The fog took it.
“Brea.” He had no voice left.
“It is Wys.”
There was a sound behind him, on the slope, a scrabbling and a long wheeze and a stream of language that would have made a drover blush.
A beam of yellow light came swinging down through the fog, shaded and wavering, and he did not turn.
It stopped near him.
A pair of boots came down into the reeds and stopped.
He watched the light ripple on the water, and over it, small and straight and out of breath, stood Hesper Quarrel with the shaded lantern in one hand and the Alderman’s lens-cap, for some reason, in the other.
“Sixty-one years of age,” she said, between breaths, “and I have just run a hundred and forty paces downhill in the dark after a boy who ought to know better.
I have a knee.
I had a knee.
It is somewhere on the slope.
You will fetch it in the morning.”
He looked up at her.
He tried to speak and could not.
“Out,” said Hesper, and took him by the collar, and hauled.
She had a surprising grip.
He came up out of the mud with a long sucking noise and both boots full of river.
She dragged him up the bank, stopped on the level, and held the lantern up between them, and in the yellow light he saw her face.
She was not looking at him.
She was looking past his shoulder at the bank.
He turned his head and found what she was looking at.
It was the long smooth sweep of the shore, where the ferry slip had been, and the notch cut in the bank, and the post for the rope.
Her hand was on his collar.
It was not steady.
“You saw them,” said Wystan.
“I saw lights in the fog.” She said it carefully, and each word came out as clean as a pegged line.
“Fog does tricks near the Gutter.”
“Three lights.”
“Fog does tricks.”
“It was the lamp over the Ferry House door.
It was the shrine lamp.
It was…” His teeth were beginning to chatter, which interfered with the figures, and he stopped and began again.
“I took the Ferry House lamp against the chapel’s.
What was left of it.
It stood where the door stood.
To the width of my thumb.”
“You took a bearing on a hallucination at a run.”
“I took a bearing on a lamp, Hesper.”
“Aye.
And I took one on a star, and the fog has eaten my star, and tomorrow I will have to do the whole thing again, and I am not going to forgive the Gutter for it.” She let go of his collar.
She did not look at him.
She bent, slowly, and put the lantern down in the mud, and straightened with her hand pressed to the small of her back.
“Come up to the fire.
You are blue, and I will not have you take a chill and die in the middle of an investigation.
It would be bad form.”
They climbed.
It took a long time.
The fog had begun to thin, and the stars were coming back in patches, one and then three and then a handful, and the Hob lantern bloomed on the far bank like something that had never been away.
At the top the fire was a few coals and a smear of ash.
Wystan sat down beside it, and she put a blanket over his shoulders without comment, and a tin mug into his hands, and he drank the black tea, which tasted of smoke and fennel and, faintly, of the kettle.
“Write it down,” said Hesper.
“You said it was a hallucination.”
“I said you took a bearing on one.
That is not the same as saying it did not happen.” She sat, with a grunt, on the other side of the fire, and took out her own book and her own pencil, and licked the pencil.
“Write what you saw.
Write it in order.
Do not tell me.
I will write mine, and we shall see where they differ.”
“That is the rule for two witnesses.”
“It is.”
“You have never made me do that before.”
“I have never had a reason,” said Hesper.
So he wrote.
He wrote with the book on his knee, and his fingers stiff with cold, and the mud drying gray to the elbows.
He wrote the time, which was a quarter past midnight by Pask’s impertinent watch, and the state of the sky, which was clear, and the fog, which was not.
He wrote what he had seen.
It took him a long time, and when he had it, he sat looking at it.
Lights: three.
Two lit, one not.
Time: midnight, give or take five minutes.
Duration: twelve seconds, counted.
Position, from the crest: first, nine paces left of the Alderman, inside the pegs.
Second, about a hundred paces down the slope, at the position of the Ferry House door, a lantern of horn.
Third, above the second, a pane in a pale wall, unlit, visible by the lantern’s glow.
He read it again.
It was a neat list.
It had the dreadful composure of a thing that has been recorded by someone who is shaking.
Then he took the lights one at a time, as he would have taken a doubtful angle, and fitted each to what he knew.
The shrine lamp, the red cup of glass: Father Dunstan’s.
The lantern of horn, on its hook, swinging: Orla’s.
And the pane.
The pane was the loft window, and it was dark because it was always dark at that hour: the child who slept behind it had been told to blow out her candle, and had blown it out.
He had counted three lights, and he had been right to count them.
Two had been burning, as they burned every night of his life.
The third was a window that was not lit, because a girl of nine was asleep behind it, as she should have been.
The pencil had stopped.
He did not know for how long.
He picked it up again and wrote, in the smaller hand, the one he used for things he was ashamed of: Not fog.
I do not know what.
When he had finished he looked up.
Hesper was watching him across the dead fire.
She had a new stalk of fennel in her mouth, and her book lay shut on her knee, and he had not seen her write a word.
“Let me see,” she said.
He passed it across.
She read it slowly, as she read everything, with her lips moving on the figures.
When she came to the end she held the page a little away from her, and then turned it to the light, and her face did something he could not read.
“I would add one line,” she said, “if you will allow it.”
“What?”
She handed it back.
“Witness.”
He wrote, under the list, in the small hand: Witnessed by H.
Quarrel.
Then he looked up, and she raised an eyebrow, and he considered the page for a while, and wrote after it, because it was true and the book would not close without it: Disputes cause.
Hesper read it upside down.
She grunted, and took the fennel out of her mouth, and put it back.
“That will do,” she said.