They halted at forty paces, which was a courtesy, and the lieutenant came the rest of the way alone, which was another.
Wystan had counted it from the bank.
Forty paces from the nearest tent, a hundred and ten from the plank, on the crown of the road, with the sun not yet clear of the church tower and every cuff in the column lit from behind like a stained window.
Ten stood easy in two ranks.
A broad man with a bulge in his coat pocket stood half a pace in front of them, and he was the sergeant.
Two of the ten carried between them a folded trestle and a roll of red baize.
The twelfth walked on.
By the time the lieutenant reached the cart the party had arranged itself, without being told, and Wystan thought it spoke well of a bad situation.
Pask stood before the big tent with his coat buttoned wrongly over his nightshirt and his hat on, holding a stack of books against his chest, in the posture of someone about to be asked to swear on them.
Tam stood beside him in one boot.
Pugh stood at the fire with the ladle, since Pugh was already awake and always had been, and it was hard to say whether the Rubric had arrived at his kitchen or he at theirs.
Hesper had come up from the plank without a word and stood a little forward of all of them, thumbs in her belt, fennel in her mouth, the whole width of her small body saying that this was her camp.
Wystan stood at her shoulder with his boots wet to the ankle.
He had decided not to look at the reeds.
It was easy not to look at them.
It took all of his attention.
“Chief of Party Quarrel?”
It was a light dry voice with a cold in it.
Lieutenant Jonas Pike was thirty or a little under, narrow as a ruler, clean-shaven, with sandy hair combed flat with water and a chin that looked to have been issued a size too small.
His nostrils had the permanent pink of a man who is always about to sneeze and has made a rule against it.
A cord of red silk looped his left shoulder.
His coat was the Rubric’s gray, with the cuffs turned back to the elbow and lined in red, and at his breast, where another man would have carried a watch, he carried a pen.
It was longer than a writing pen, and slimmer, of some dark wood, with a brass nib cut in a slit.
It rode in a loop of braid.
As he came, it caught the light, and Wystan looked at it, and did not look again.
“Lieutenant Jonas Pike, Lowmarch Company,” said Pike.
“I regret the hour.
I regret the occasion.
And I am afraid I must regret, in advance, that I shall be a great deal of trouble to you before breakfast.”
“Have you eaten?” said Hesper.
It was not what he had prepared for.
His eyebrows said so.
“We have not.”
“Pugh.
The lieutenant’s party will want porridge.”
“The Regulations forbid it,” said Pike, with real regret, and sniffed.
“No member of the Rubric may take refreshment from a party under Update.
It is a precaution against the appearance of obligation.
You are kind.”
“It says refreshment from the party, sir,” said the broad sergeant, from the road.
He did not raise his voice.
He had gentle brown eyes, the eyes of a cow, in a face like a shut door.
“It says nothing about the cook.”
“It does say the cook, Sergeant Garrow.”
“In so many words, sir?”
Pike took a tin from his pocket, opened it, and put a small brown lozenge into his mouth, and the tin went round.
It went to Hesper, who declined.
It went to Pask, who took one with a murmur of thanks and held it in his fist like evidence.
It went to Tam, who took one before he could stop himself and stood looking at it in his palm.
Horehound.
It smelled like a sickroom.
Wystan watched the whole small courteous motion, the tin and the click of the lid, and understood that it was the courtesy that frightened him.
A man could be afraid of a sneer.
It was harder to know where to put a lozenge.
“Eat, if you must,” said Pike, to the road, defeated.
“Nothing will be said in the report.”
Sergeant Garrow ate his porridge standing, in four spoons, with deliberate care, and then stood for the time it takes to say a short grace with his gentle face entirely empty.
Three Redpens followed him, on the principle that the sergeant had never yet been poisoned by anything he could name.
The rest looked at the road.
Pugh watched them eat with the quiet fulfilled air of a man at a long-awaited sacrament.
“Now,” said Pike, and the tin went away.
“You have the notice, Chief of Party, and I will not insult you by reading it.
The Update is general.
All field books, fair copies and reserve books of every kind, kept by any person attached to the party, to be conformed.
We begin with the lesser books, which my people will do at the table.
The field books I do myself.
It is a Regulation.
A field book is the first record, and is conformed by an officer.
What is private goes back to its owner when it is done.
Provincial issue goes to Tarnby.”
“Show me the warrant,” said Hesper.
“In due course.”
“A notice is not a warrant.
I will surrender no book of mine on a notice.”
“I have the Order,” said Pike, mildly.
“You shall see it before I touch your field book.
That is within the Regulations and, if I may say so, within civility.
Until then I will take what is offered.” He sniffed.
“And what is found.”
“Nothing is offered.”
“I offer mine, Lieutenant,” said Pask, in a high shaken voice, and stepped out in front of his tent.
“Under protest.
With a list.”
“A list is welcome.”
“Edwin,” said Hesper.
“It is the law, Mistress Quarrel.
And you said we would be correct.” He did not look at her.
He laid the books on the trestle, which the two Redpens had by then unfolded in the middle of the road and covered with the baize, since the Rubric, it seemed, did not read a page standing up, and set down beside them the Muster in its folder and a sheet in his best copperplate.
“Eleven volumes, in order of date.
Instrument ledger, three.
Weather book, two.
Field books, six.
I should like a receipt.”
“Of course,” said Pike, and wrote him one.
It was in black ink, with a flourish.
Pask took it in both hands, and folded it in four, and put it in his breast pocket, and looked, for the first time that morning, a little better.
They fetched the rest from the tents.
They did it with great tact, two at a time, and they were out again in two minutes with a pile that Wystan could have named from the road.
Hesper’s fair copy and reserve, in their patched oilcloth.
The third of her books they did not find, because it was in the breast of her coat and she was standing in front of it.
Tam’s field book, and his fair copy, and a cheap sixpenny reserve with pins drawn in the margins.
Pugh’s larder book, which Pike looked at, and sniffed at, and added to the pile without a word.
Garrow sorted it, with the tenderness of a man who has sorted a great many.
The field books, seven in all, Pask’s six and Tam’s one, went to the far end of the baize, to wait for the lieutenant.
The ten that remained, the ledgers and weather books, the fair copies and reserves and the larder book, he dealt out like cards along the trestle.
Ten Redpens sat down on ten camp stools, which Wystan had not seen them carry and which seemed to have come out of the baize, each with a book and each with a pen drawn from a braid loop, and on a word from the sergeant they began.
The first was Tam’s reserve.
The Redpen who had it was a woman of forty with forearms like Orla’s and a plain, patient, capable face, the kind of face that kneads bread.
She opened the book at the first page, and drew the pen once down the left-hand margin, unhurried.
The line it left was the red of an old brick.
For a moment it stood on the page, wet and plain.
Then it moved.
It ran sideways across the ruling and along each line of figures, and where it passed the figures went with it, drawn in like threads pulled through cloth, so that the writing seemed to retreat from the edges toward the middle, and then into the red, and then the red itself thinned and went out.
The page lay open and blank.
It was whiter than the page beside it, as if it had been peeled that morning from a fresh quire.
The ruling was gone, and every crease.
There was a small sound, an exhalation, such as a book makes when it is shut on a held breath, only longer.
She turned the page and drew the pen down it.
Sixty-one pages, thought Wystan.
Three seconds each.
Three minutes.
It steadied him, a little, to have the number.
He looked at the blank leaf and felt a slow prickle at the edge of his sight, the high pale tremble he had first met on the rise, as the ground had looked back at him.
It was here, smaller.
It was the smoothness of the grass, the finished hand of the bend in the river, the neatness of a thing done by someone who took care.
He had been wrong to think of the field as a ruin.
A ruin is untidy.
This was a house that had been swept.
“That is mine,” said Tam, not loud.
“I know it, lad,” said the Redpen, not unkindly.
She did not stop.
“There is a drawing in the back.”
“Of what?” said Pike.
Tam swallowed.
“A chain.”
“A chain is not on the schedule.” Pike stood at the end of the table with his hands clasped behind him and the lozenge clicking against his teeth.
“All pages, Redpen.”
“You do not read them,” said Hesper.
She had not moved.
She said it in the flat dry voice she used on the Registry’s clerks, and the ten pens did not pause.
Pike turned his head.
“No, Mistress.”
“Then how do you know what is wrong with them?”
“We have a schedule.” He drew a folded sheet from his case and held it so that she could see, a printed column of station numbers and places, every one with a red tick.
“Entries referring to the following.
Fourteen slash five, and cognates.
Everything else is housekeeping.” He put it away.
“It is quicker to conform the page than to read it.”
It was said with perfect simplicity.
Pike had said it a hundred times, Wystan understood, in a hundred camps, and had never once heard it.
Beside him Hesper’s jaw moved on the fennel, once, and stopped.
Down the table, pen after pen went down the margins.
It made a dry sound like a field of mice in straw.
Pask watched his five go, one by one, with the receipt held against his chest, and did not speak at all, which was worse than the other.
The weather books, two.
The instrument ledger, three, in which every pencil in the Province had once been accounted for.
Rain and wind and the opinions of the barometer, going white in order of date.
From his left pocket came a small dry tremor.
It started at the first stroke and went on, a shudder in the lining, like something that had put its back against a wall.
Wystan laid his palm over it.
The tremor stopped.
The pocket was still.
Garrow, who was walking down the line with his hands behind him, inspecting, turned his gentle head.
“Something in the coat, young sir?”
Wystan said nothing.
It was a question.
The honest answer was yes, and the next question would be what, and so he did what Hesper had told him to do, which was to look stupid.
He did it extremely well.
“He keeps a mouse,” said Hesper.
“Does he?” said Garrow.
“For company.
He is sensitive about it.”
“I should think so.” The sergeant considered the pocket with real interest.
“What is he called?”
There was a pause.
Wystan opened his mouth, and a number of facts stood in it, and none of them was a name.
“Lint,” said Tam.
Everyone looked at him.
He had gone as red as his hair, and his hand with the horehound lozenge in it was shaking.
“Her name is Lint,” he said.
“It is a she.
She is, er.
She is about so long.”
“Lint,” said the sergeant, slowly.
He nodded.
“That is a good name for a mouse.”
“Sergeant,” said Pike.
The pocket gave a single affronted heave, like a mouse in a fine coat who has just been introduced to the wrong company, and lay quiet.
Wystan did not look at Tam, because to have done so would have been to tell.
In the corner of his eye Tam looked at nothing, gravely and with great success.
Hesper’s face did not alter.
But for a half second the fennel stopped, and the lines at the corners of her mouth went in, and out, as if somebody had pulled and let go of a cord.
They were nearly done.
There was a sound in the camp that Wystan would remember for a long time, the sound of paper being forgotten.
It rose and fell without hurry.
The ten pens went on down their ten books, page after page, as steadily as an eel fence takes the tide, and at the end of it Pugh’s larder book lay open at the last page, blank, and Pugh stood by the fire with the ladle and looked at it.
“Thursday’s soup,” said Pugh, quietly.
“I had only the one recipe for it.”
“I regret it,” said Pike, and appeared to mean it.
“I shall have to do it from memory.
It will be worse.”
Wystan, who had eaten the soup, did not see how it could be, and kept the thought to himself.
The pens were put away.
A few of the Redpens stretched.
The ten books on the trestle were still ten books, each in its cover, each with its brass clasp and its spine, and every page in them blank.
They looked like a stack of anything.
They looked like a pile of someone’s new books.
Garrow squared the edges with the flat of his hand, and stepped back.
“The field books,” said Pike.
“Chief of Party.
Yours.”
She had not moved from where she stood.
She did not move now.
The sun had cleared the tower, and the whole road was gold, and it lay on her patched coat and her iron bun and the two pencils, or rather the one pencil, that stood in it.
“Warrant,” said Hesper.
“I told you, in due course.”
“This is due course, Lieutenant.”
There was a pause.
In the reeds behind Wystan, a long way off, a bittern gave its long note, and he heard it as he had heard it on the first night, a man blowing across the neck of a bottle.
Pike sniffed.
He looked at Hesper for some time, as at a column that did not add, and then, with a small ordinary sigh, he put out a hand.
“Sergeant.
The case.”
Garrow brought it.
It was a flat leather case, black, with brass corners, such as a surgeon carries, and Pike opened it on the baize and took from it a single sheet of heavy cream paper, folded in three.
He did not unfold it.
He held it up in the clear morning light between two fingers, as one holds a coin up for a customer, and turned it so that Hesper could see where it was sealed.
It was a disc of dark red wax about the size of a florin, pressed across the fold, with a perfect raised rim.
Inside the rim the wax was smooth.
There was no wheel and no pen.
There was no crest, no letter, no name.
Whoever had set it there had set it with a ring that had nothing on its face.