Somebody had taken forty paces out of the causeway and left the corners square.
Wystan saw it from the top of the willow, a mile off, through Hesper’s pocket glass.
It was a short brass three-draw telescope with a leather sleeve gone black at the thumb, and it had come out of the lining of her coat that morning with a speech about who was borrowing it.
Through it the causeway lay along the north edge of the Beds as a pale thread, dead straight, running west from the church tower at Fenwick, and in the thread, a mile short of the tower, there was a gap.
The gap was full of brown water.
The water stood level with the ditches on either side.
And the edges of the gap met at right angles, all four of them, as clean as the corners of a drawer.
Nothing in the Lowmarch made a right angle of its own accord.
He had been looking for one for two years.
“Well?” said Hesper, from the foot of the tree.
“Forty paces of road are gone.
Lowered.
The sides are square.” He moved the glass.
“There is a heron standing in it, and an eel cart on the near side, and a Redpen with his hands behind him.
The carter is explaining something about a bridge.”
“Leveler,” said Hesper.
“A Contour, lowering.
He had the sheet by heart and a good breakfast.
It is a small piece of work.”
“It is forty paces.”
“It is forty paces of clay that has wanted to go back down since the day it was piled up.
This whole country wants to be a fathom lower than the river, kid.
He asked it to do what it was already minded to, and it thanked him.” She stood in the willow’s shade with her thumbs in her belt, a short square shape with the fennel moving, and she had put her boots on that morning in two stages, one for each.
“And a road is believed.
A hundred carters a day swear to that road, and when the sheet and the ground and the carters agree, a Leveler may do what he likes.
Go on.
The ferries.”
“Sedge Ferry is hauled out on the bank, a mile and a half west.
They have put a chain through the ring of the boat, and a red lantern on a pole beside it, lit, in daylight.” He held the glass on the landing.
A Redpen stood on it, and a ferryman sat on the stern of his own boat with his hands between his knees, an old man, thick in the shoulders, with the look of a person at the wake of something he had not yet been told was dead.
Orla would not have sat.
Orla would have gone across with a Redpen in the bow and her pipe in her teeth and a remark about the fare.
He moved the glass on.
“Nettle Ferry is the same.
The rope is cut.
It is trailing in the current.”
“Road and water,” said Hesper.
“By the book.
Whoever has command has read every page of it and believes it.” She did not sound as if she admired it.
“What else?”
“There is something on the river, a long way down.
It is too straight for a log.” It was a low black line on the far shine of the Sloe, with a point of red at one end, and it had not moved since he found it.
“I think it is a barge.”
“I saw it at dawn.
It has not moved in four hours, which is not what a log does either.” She took the fennel out.
“Put the glass on the near water.
Tell me what is coming.”
He brought it down, and there it was.
It was a line.
Six flat skiffs were coming south across the Beds, abreast, a furlong apart, in the shallow lead and through the reed, with two Redpens in each, one poling and one in the bow.
They did not hurry.
He could see the poles go in and come out, in time, the length of the line.
They were not searching.
A searching man looks at the reeds.
These men looked at something in their laps, and then up, and then at the willow, and then down again, with the regularity of a pendulum, and he understood after the third skiff that they were not looking for anyone.
They were walking toward a point on a map.
“They have boards,” he said.
“Flat boards, across the knee.
They look at the board and then at us.”
“Then it is a Cross,” said Hesper.
“Come down.”
He came down.
It took the best part of a minute, because the bark was wet, and the fall was twenty feet, and he wished to leave the glass intact.
Obelus, who had spent the climb in a state of rigid silence in his left pocket, said as he reached the ground, “I should like to note that I am afraid of heights.”
“You are in my pocket.”
“I am aware of the pocket’s elevation.”
Hesper had sat down on the roots with her knees drawn up.
She looked older than she had in the hut, and she looked at him with a flat patience he had seen her give a doubtful instrument.
“Pike put one on me, going into the ditch,” she said.
“His hand went up, and you took it for a Line.
So did I, until it settled between my shoulders like a cold thumb.
It was nicely done, and I did not mention it, because you had enough to be going on with.” She chewed.
“A Cross is the first mark a Chainer learns after the Line.
It locks on a target.
It goes through the name, and it is held by the number, the Registry number, as a peg holds a chain.
Every Redpen in the company carries a field sheet with the ground printed on it and a slate behind, and the mark shows on the sheet where I am.
It is good to about two chains, and it moves when I move.”
“Can you take it off?”
“The hand that put it on can.
Or the number can be struck.” She looked at the water.
“Or I could walk into the Gutter, where the rules run thin, and the Salt is forty miles off.”
“Then they will always know where you are.”
“They know where I am to two chains.
It is a surveyor’s tolerance, and I find it an insult.” She said it lightly.
It was not light.
“What I should like to know, and it is a point of method, is what they know about you.”
He had been waiting for it.
He had been waiting since the bead rolled off the paper.
“The pen would not take my name.”
“No.”
“A Cross is the same pen.”
“A Cross is the same pen,” said Hesper.
“I thought so.
I did not want to say so.
A supposition is a rumor with ambition.” She got up.
“I should like an observation.
Stay in the tree.
Count them.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Be followed.” She shook out her coat.
“I have been followed by clerks, by creditors, and once by a goat.
I may as well be followed by something useful.”
He climbed back up, and she took the punt.
It lay under the willow’s far bank, black and flat, the weirman’s, bought that morning under the board with the two smoked eels from the rack at four links, a price she had called extortion and paid, and she stepped into it with the care of a woman crossing a stream in a good skirt and put the pole into the mud and went, up the lead, away from him, to the east.
He did not call out.
He lay along a branch with the glass at his eye and watched her go, small and square at the stern, with the pole going in and out.
The skiffs changed.
It took them about a minute.
The near one had been coming straight at the willow, and now its bow swung, slowly, three points to the east, and the Redpen with the board looked at it, and said something to the man with the pole.
The second skiff swung.
The third.
All six, from end to end of the line, as a school of fish turns, moved their bows toward a small black boat that was being poled up a lead with a woman in it, and the line began to run.
None of them looked at the willow.
He lay in the fork with his chin on the bark and his heart going.
He was twenty feet up in a pollard willow, in a brown coat, in daylight, and the first skiff came by under him in the lead at a hundred paces, then at eighty, then at sixty, with a man at the pole who was blowing his nose, and the man at the bow looking at the board in his lap with a frown.
He could see the grain of the board.
It was a field sheet, and on it, as bright as a ladybird on a leaf, there was a small red cross.
It was crawling east.
He counted.
He did not move a finger.
The skiffs went by under him one after another, six, twelve men, and the last was so near that he saw a Redpen’s earring, and a dented tin of horehound on the thwart, green with duckweed, and he heard the man at the pole say, “She has gone for the Long Rhyne, Corporal,” and the Corporal say, “Then so shall we.”
Nobody looked up.
When the last of them was a quarter mile on, the whole line began to swing back, as a gate swings, and Hesper came with it.
She came round the willow’s far side by a long way that he had not known was there, with her face gray and the pole shaking, and the punt slid in under the roots as quietly as a cat, and she sat down in the stern and put her head on her fists.
“I did not like that,” she said.
“They did not see me.”
“No.
I saw.” She did not raise her head.
“I saw it from the lead.
I looked back at the willow, and I looked at them, and I thought, if he is wrong I have just left the boy up a tree.
It is the worst thing I have done this week, and I included the Isoline.” She raised her head.
“Come down, kid.
We are going to the river.”
“Why the river?”
“Because they have six skiffs on a line and the line goes south,” said Hesper.
“A man who drives a thing south has a place in mind to put it.
I should like to see it before it sees me.”
They went south.
It was the longest day of his life, and he remembered it afterward as a succession of choices.
He took the pole.
He was a ferrywoman’s nephew and had poled a punt since he was nine, and he was ashamed to find that he did it better than any other single thing in the world.
Hesper sat in the bow with the glass, and she read the Beds as she had read the lead the night before, by habit and not by sheet.
The new reed was a green thing, and it meant that the water had come late.
The old willows stood where the old banks had been.
A lead that bent east and had a pale shelf of silt on its west side was a lead that the river had used a long time.
She said Left and Right and once, tersely, Back.
They went down narrow ways where the reeds met overhead, and over a mud bar, in a hand’s breadth of water, with the punt dragging like a loaded sledge, and she had him get out and push.
He did.
He got a boot-full of cold mud, and she handed him a stalk of fennel from her sleeve for his trouble.
It was one of the last.
He put it in his mouth.
It was the first time he understood what it was for.
He heard the singing at noon.
It came across the Beds from the north, faint and cheerful and exactly in time, Red for the error, white for the mend, and she put up one hand and he stopped poling.
They lay in a cut so narrow that the punt scraped both banks.
There was a wall of old reed on the left, ten feet thick, as dense as thatch, and on the other side of it there was a skiff.
He heard the pole.
He heard the water tick off it.
He heard two men in no hurry.
“It says she is right here,” said a voice.
“Right where?”
“Here.
In the reed.
It is dead on her, Corporal, look.
It is in the middle of the Beds and it is not moving.”
“There is nothing here but reed.”
“Then she is in the reed.”
“Then poke it.”
Something went through the wall.
It was a pole, a long grey ash pole with an iron shoe, and it came through the stems a yard in front of Hesper’s boots and stopped in the water with a small round sound.
Hesper lay on her back in the bottom of the punt with her eyes open.
The pole waggled.
It came out.
It went in again, and this time it went through a yard to the right of Wystan’s head, and he looked at the iron and the weed on it, and counted.
“Nothing,” said the Corporal.
“The board says she is here.”
“The board says she is within two chains of here.
It does not say which two.” The Corporal sounded tired.
“It is the Weir.
Anything near the Weir goes soft.
We are wet, Dunn, and I have a cold, and she is somewhere that is not this.”
They went on.
The voices thinned.
Hesper lay with her hands folded on her chest until the last of the song had gone, and then she began, softly, to laugh.
“Two chains,” said Wystan.
“A surveyor’s tolerance,” said Hesper, wiping her eyes.
“Whoever designed that Cross was a surveyor, and had to admit that he could not do better than two chains, and put it in the manual.
And it has just saved my life.” She looked at the sky.
“Do not tell the Registry.
They would tighten it.”
He turned it over a good deal in the hours after.
The Cross carried an error of closure of its own, and it was the one thing in the whole Rubric apparatus that had been merciful to them.
It was not a comfortable feeling, to be grateful for the very thing he would have corrected.
He went ahead alone, twice.
The first time was at two, when she sent him over a hummock to see what the lead did beyond it, and he stood on the top of the hummock, in the open, tall in a brown coat, for a count of sixty.
A skiff passed two furlongs off.
The man in the bow looked at his board.
The second time was at four, on a bank, and a Redpen came out of the reed within a hundred paces, wading to the thigh, with a pole across his shoulders, and looked straight at him.
Wystan did nothing.
It was what he did best.
The Redpen nodded, politely, as one nods to a man who is also wet, and waded on, and the board in his other hand carried a small red mark that sat a long way from the tall boy in front of him, and crawled on.
They had been sent after a woman of sixty-one.
Pike, Wystan suspected, had not known what to write about a boy.
That made three.
He wrote them down in the margin, with the hours.
A figure with one observation was a rumor.
A figure with three was a finding, and he was learning, to his disquiet, that a finding was not the same thing as a comfort.
They came out at dusk on a spit of mud at the river’s edge, where the Beds gave up and the Sloe began.
It was a flat gray place, ten paces wide, with a stand of reed behind it and the open water in front, broad and bright and quiet, the color of pewter.
Hesper had been steering for it for an hour.
She had run the punt up on the mud and sat in the bow with her knees up and the last of the fennel in her mouth, and when he came and sat beside her she held out the glass without a word.
He did not take it.
He had enough to think about.
They had herded her.
Six skiffs on a line had come south all day, and each time the line bent it had bent to leave her one way to go, which was south, to the water, where a thing could be waited for.
She had known it from the willow.
She had come anyway, because she would rather meet it on her own feet than have it arrive behind her, and he had not said that he disagreed.
“Give me the figure,” said Hesper.
“What figure?”
“You have been composing it since noon.
You have a face like a man at his own sums.”
“They cannot find me,” said Wystan.
“No.”
“They can find you to two chains, anywhere in the Beds.
They cannot find me to two miles.
There is no instrument in the whole of the Rubric that can say there he is.” He said it to the water.
“It is what the pen was telling us.
It will not take my name.
It will not take a Cross.
I am not in the sheet and I am not in the book, and a Redpen with a board in his lap looks at me and sees a boy who is wet.”
“Aye.”
“You knew.”
“I thought it likely, since the pen would not take.
I did not know it.
Now I know it.” She turned the fennel over.
“I should like to say, before you say the next thing, that I know what the next thing is, and that I should be obliged if you did not.”
“I was not going to say anything.”
“It is in your shoulders.
You were going to say that you could go and I could not.”
He did not answer.
It was not a lie.
He looked at the river.
He had spent ten years as an empty box on a form.
He had made his peace with it, and had never supposed it would be worth anything to anyone.
He had thought of the empty box as the shape of a shame.
Now he sat on a mud spit at the edge of the Province with the weight of the Rubric on one side of him, six skiffs and a barge, and the one instrument among them built to find a person was pointing at a woman of sixty-one with a bad knee and could not so much as turn its head toward him.
It was an advantage.
It was the first time in his life that being nothing had been worth anything, and Hesper had paid for it, with a mark between her shoulders.
He worked it three ways.
It closed every time.
He did not feel better.