The glass had lived in one spare sock.
The compass, it turned out, lived in the other.
Hesper produced the second sock from the depths of her coat at the end of the following morning, with a certain ceremony, after a breakfast at which neither of them had mentioned the night.
She had retaken the Peg at five, from a sky so clear that it looked rinsed, in a temper Wystan could have charted, and the Registry’s declination table had been right to within a minute of arc.
North, it appeared, had not been touched.
Hesper took this as a personal slight.
She had been muttering about it into her tea for an hour.
They had slept three hours.
Wystan had spent most of a fourth washing the river out of his clothes, which had been a mistake, since it left him with wet clothes and no river.
His boots stood by the fire, stuffed with dry reed and steaming like two small dinners.
He had put new soles on them twice since Leaffall, and he suspected, watching them, that they would not survive a third resoling or another night of Hesper’s astronomy.
“We go to the Weir tomorrow, or the day after,” Hesper had said, over the oatmeal.
“I would like to tell you that it is because the rations are low.
It is because Pask has had four days to keep a secret.”
“You told him to keep it in his hat.”
“I did.
Pask is a conscientious man, and he has kept it in his hat for four days.
Men like Pask can keep a secret for about a day and a half before it begins to push at the brim.” She had poured the tea.
“There will be a letter.
After the letter, a squad.
I have never known it go in another order.”
“You say that as if you had seen it go.”
“I say it as a woman who has read the Survey Regulations twice, which is two times more than the Registry has.” She had not looked at him.
“Drink that.”
He had drunk it, and written the sentence down.
Now she shook the sock out onto the lid of the instrument case, and a small brass disc rolled free and lay in the sun.
It was a plain thing.
It was the size of a hen’s egg cut in half, with a hinged lid and a ring for a cord, and the lid had a dent in it that might have come from a flood or a mule.
The brass had worn to the soft yellow of an old coin at every place a thumb would rest.
When she flicked the catch open, the glass inside was crazed at one corner, and the card beneath it was a ring of paper gone the brown of strong tea, with the points marked in a small, neat, faded hand, and a needle blued with age that swung once, and shivered, and settled.
“Take it,” said Hesper.
“It is yours.”
“It is nobody’s.
That is the use of it.” She pushed it an inch across the lid with one finger, the way one pushes a pawn.
“The Survey inventories every instrument it issues.
The Alderman is Provincial Number Two Hundred and Eleven.
The plane table is Three Hundred and Forty.
Pask keeps a ledger with every pencil in it.
Last Leaffall he convened an inquiry over a missing one, and Tam was acquitted for want of evidence, and the pencil was found in Pask’s hat.
Drift help the chief of party who comes home one pencil short.
That compass is on no list.
I have carried it since before you were born.
It has been in a river twice and under a mule once, and nobody has ever written it down, so nobody can requisition it.
You can only take a thing from a man if the thing has been entered against his name.”
He looked at the compass.
It lay there with its lid open, small and dull and exact.
“You are giving me an instrument that is not in the Registry,” he said slowly, “because I am not in the Registry.”
“I am giving you a compass because you have a chain, a plumb bob, and a stub of graphite, and no way of finding north that belongs to you.
A surveyor who borrows his north is a tenant.” She scowled at the sun.
“And, yes.
Because.
Do not make a speech of it.”
“I was not going to.”
“You had the face of a man composing one.”
He picked it up.
It was heavier than it looked, warm from her pocket, and the lid fitted the hollow of his palm.
He closed it, and opened it again, and the needle went round once and found north and hung there, trembling a little, as an honest witness trembles before it speaks.
“I will bring it back,” said Wystan.
“You will not.
I am not lending it.
I am giving it to you with no date of return, which in this trade is the same as lending and gives me the right to complain.” She stood up with a creak of the knees.
“Come and prove it.
A compass that has not been checked is only a hope.”
They checked it.
That was the next hour, and he remembered it afterward with a clarity he could not account for.
She set up the Alderman at the pegs and sighted the chapel on the far bank, and he stood beside her and took the same line with the compass, flat on his palm with the lid raised and the sighting slit lined up on the lantern pole.
It read thirty-one degrees and twenty-one minutes.
The Alderman said thirty-one and twelve.
“Nine minutes out,” said Wystan.
“Aye.
It has character.” She wrote it in her book.
“Try the alder.
Try the willow’s place.
Try the Hob bridge, where there is no bridge.”
He tried them.
Every time the compass was nine minutes out, in the same direction, give or take a hair, whichever line he took.
Hesper listened to the figures with her eyes shut and nodded at each, like a priest taking confession from a particularly honest man.
“There,” she said.
“Add nine minutes to anything it says, and it will never lie to you.
A compass that lies the same amount every time is the most honest instrument in the world.
It is the ones that lie a different amount whenever you are in a hurry that you throw in the river.” She gave the Alderman a pat.
It was the nearest she came to a prize-giving.
“Write it in your book.
Index error, plus nine minutes.
And write where you got it, so that the next fool who opens the lid will know whom to blame.”
He wrote it.
He wrote: Compass, brass, hinged.
Given by H.
Quarrel, the second of Greenmonth.
Index error plus nine minutes, constant.
She went off with the kettle to the stream that ran down the east side of the rise, and he stayed where he was for a time with the book on his knee, and then, without deciding to, he walked down the slope alone with the compass in his hand.
He knew where the Ferry Stone should have been.
He could have found it blindfold.
He crouched on the spot, in the wet grass, with the river sliding by on his left, and opened the lid, and set the compass flat on the ground, and watched the needle swing and settle.
North.
It pointed at north, with perfect and tactful honesty, and had nothing else to offer.
An honest instrument could say only what it knew.
He had half hoped, in some part of himself that he was not proud of, that it would do something else, that it would drift a hair toward the place where a brass cap ought to be, and quiver, and tell him which way home was.
It did not.
It did what it had done for thirty years in a river and under a mule.
He crouched there for some time, with his knees wet, and then he said “Thank you” to it, because it had not claimed to know more than it did, and put it into the third pocket on the right, the one that had held the egg.
Hesper was waiting at the top with the kettle.
She did not ask where he had been.
She looked at his knees, and at the careful way he shut the lid, and she poured the tea.
“Now,” she said, lowering herself to the grass in two stages.
The second stage had got worse since the night.
She had run a hundred and forty paces down a hill at the age of sixty-one, and she did not mention it.
“There are two things I want from you, and I want your word on both.
Do not say yes before I have finished.
You have a habit of saying yes to things in order to have them done with.”
“I do not.”
“You said yes to a second bowl of Pugh’s porridge on the first day, and you did not mean it.”
This was true.
He said nothing.
“The first is simple.
Record.
Everything.
Every measurement, every day, every observation, with the hour and the place and who was present.
Not what you think, kid.
What you saw.
In the field book, and again in the reserve, and when we have an hour with a table, in the fair copy.
Do not trust the book to sit still.
If it is taken from you, if I am taken, if every soul in the Lowmarch goes to bed tonight with a different childhood, a notebook is the one thing that argues back.” She was looking at the river.
“You are doing it already.
I would like it to be a vow.”
“I will record it.
I vow it.”
“Good.
The second is harder.
Tell no one what you have seen.”
“No one.”
“Not the plan under the grass.
Not the lights.
Not the glass, or what the glass said.
Not that you saw a thing nobody else can see, and not that I could not.” She counted them off on blunt fingers.
“Not Pask, who would put it in a report.
Not Tam, who would put it in a song.
Not Pugh, who would put it in the stew.”
“I cannot promise that.”
Her eyes came round to him.
They were flat.
“Explain.”
“I can promise to volunteer nothing.” He turned the cup in his hands.
It was easier to speak to the tea than to her, and he spoke to the tea.
“I can promise not to begin the conversation.
If I am asked directly, by someone who has a right to the answer, I cannot say that it did not happen.
I cannot say it is not so.
I will decline.
I will say that I will not answer, or I will say nothing at all.
But I cannot say a false thing, Hesper.
It does not come out.
You know it does not.
I have tried.”
“When?”
“When I was nine.
I told Orla I had not eaten the last of the honey.
I spent four hours being sick in the reeds.”
“Because of the honey?”
“Because of the sentence.”
She considered this for some time.
A bee went past, laden, and a lark started up somewhere to the east and gave it up.
“That is a lawyer’s promise,” said Hesper.
“It is the only kind I make.”
“It is a good deal better than the one I wanted, Drift help me.” She rubbed her face with both hands, hard enough to leave marks.
“Very well.
Silence.
You will be silent.
You will not volunteer, you will not lie, and you will not feel obliged to explain yourself to anybody who is holding a pen.
A man who says nothing is a man nobody can strike a line through.” She paused.
“Now, a third thing.
It is not a request, it is advice.
If anyone with a red pen asks, you have never been here.”
He had been about to put the cup down.
His hand stopped.
Red pens.
In the Lowmarch they were a thing mothers said to children who would not come in at dusk.
He had seen two Redpens in his life, both at Tarnby fair, in their red-cuffed coats, eating gingerbread, and they had looked to him like a pair of clerks on a holiday.
He had been fourteen.
He had thought that they looked tired.
“Never been here,” said Wystan.
“At Ashmere.
You were raised by the Sisters at the Weir.
You came to the survey at fourteen.
You have never in your life set foot on this ground, and the first you heard of a ferry village on the Sloe was when Pask unrolled a map.
You can say it, or you can look as if you could say it.
That will do.”
“It is false.”
“It is advice.”
“I will not say it.”
“Then say nothing, and look stupid.” She said it kindly.
“You do it beautifully.”
“Thank you,” said Wystan, and meant it, since it was the only compliment on the subject that he had ever been paid.
The wind moved in the grass.
Down on the river a barge was going up slowly under a patched sail, and he watched it for a while, and the thing that had been standing at the back of his mind all morning stepped quietly forward.
“I do not understand the advice,” he said.
“You need not.”
“I do.
I have worked for you for two years, and in that time you have said to me, on the subject of what to do when a man in authority asks a question, one thing.
You have said, the ground is the ground and the book is the book.
You said it to the Registrar’s clerk at Tarnby, who wanted a figure changed, and he went away with a face the color of a boiled ham.
You said it to the Provincial Surveyor himself.
You have never in your life told me to hide a measurement from the people who pay for it.” He held up the compass.
“You are giving me an instrument that is not on any list.
You are giving me a vow of silence.
And you are telling me to deny that I have ever been to the one place in the world I have always been.
A surveyor does not say that.
Why would a surveyor say that?”
Hesper did not answer at once.
She had taken the fennel out again.
She turned it between her fingers, round and round, and he watched it, as he had watched it before, to see whether it would break.
It did not.
She was holding it with great care.
Out on the river the barge came round the bend, and the sail went slack, and swelled again.
A heron stood in the shallows below the landing, exactly where the ferry slip should have been, and he could not look away from it.
“Because I have been here before,” said Hesper.
She said it to the river.
She did not say what she meant by here.
She got up, in two stages, and went to the Alderman, and bent over the eyepiece with her small square back to him, and after a while he understood that she was not going to say anything more, and that if he asked, he would be told that it was time to chain the lane.
Here was a word with a wide bore.
It could mean the field, or the Lowmarch, or the particular smoothness of a place that has been scraped.
He did not ask which.
He opened the field book on his knee, and under the line that said Little Wend and the line that said She did not finish, he wrote: H.
Quarrel, the second of Greenmonth, to the river: I have been here before.
Then he drew a line between the two entries, from one to the other, in pencil, faint enough to rub out, and did not rub it out.