“I really must protest,” said Edwin Pask.
It was past noon.
The sun stood high and white over the Sloe, and the long grass had dried to a pale silver, and the party had been arguing for the better part of an hour.
It was, Wystan thought, a remarkably one-sided argument, in the sense that only one side of it was making any noise.
Pask stood beside the cart with his arms folded and his spectacles flashing, and Hesper sat on the tailboard with her boots swinging and a fresh stalk of fennel in her mouth, and listened to him with every appearance of deep attention.
“The boy is unwell,” said Pask.
“I do not say it unkindly.
I say it as a matter of observation.
He has had a shock.
He has not slept.
He has been sitting on a hillside in the damp, and has evidently imagined a quantity of things that are demonstrably not the case.
It is a recognized condition.
It is called heat sickness, and there is a physician at Tarnby who is very good with it.
I propose that we place him in the cart, and convey him to the Weir tonight, and to Tarnby by the next post.
I think that is the only responsible course.”
“It is not Highsun, Edwin,” said Hesper.
“It is the end of Sowmonth.
There is no heat.”
“Then it is exposure.”
“It is an interesting word.
Go on.”
“Mistress Quarrel,” said Pask, with a visible effort at patience, “he believes that a village has disappeared.
A village of nearly two hundred souls.
He believes that it has been removed from the sheet, the Registry, and the minds of everyone who ever knew it, without anyone noticing, and that he alone is aware of it.
I do not wish to be unkind.
But you will agree that this is not, on the face of it, the sort of claim that one accepts without a physician.”
“I agree,” said Hesper.
Pask paused, thrown.
“You do?”
“I agree that it is not the sort of claim that one accepts.
I do not accept it.
I am looking into it.” She took the fennel out of her mouth and pointed it at him.
“That is the difference between a surveyor and a priest, Edwin.
A priest accepts.
A surveyor reobserves.”
“But the register…”
“The register has a gap in it.
Yes.
It is a very odd gap.
It may be a clerical error of unusual neatness.
It may be something I do not yet have a word for.
In either case, I wish to look at it, with an instrument, in daylight, on the ground.
And I will not do that with a physician poking at my chainboy’s tongue.” She put the fennel back.
“You will take the party to the Weir.
Four miles, Edwin, do not make a pilgrimage of it.
You will make camp.
You will tell Pugh to catch fish.
You will leave me the Alderman and the small plane table and a week’s rations, and you will give the Cadaster no cause to feel interested in this matter until I have a better idea what the matter is.”
“The Cadaster?” Pask looked wildly uneasy.
“I had not thought of reporting to the Cadaster.”
“Then you are a better man than I took you for.
Do not start.”
“But it is an anomaly in the Registry.
It is my duty to…”
“To whom, Edwin?
To the Registry?”
There was a pause.
It lasted just a little too long.
Wystan, who had been sitting on a bucket with his hands between his knees pretending to be invisible, saw something cross Pask’s thin face that was not quite an idea.
It was the delayed flicker of a man stepping off a curb that was not there.
“I had assumed,” said Pask, slowly, “that one would report to the Registry.”
“Aye.
So had I.”
“But if the Registry has made an error, and I report the error to the Registry…”
“Then the Registry will correct it.
Yes.
By tidying away the evidence.” Hesper nodded gravely.
“I have been thinking the same thing for an hour.
I do not like it either.
It is why I would like to keep it under my hat for a few days.”
“In pencil,” said Pask, with a sudden vicious dryness, “I suppose.”
“In pencil, Edwin,” said Hesper, “and in your hat.”
It was perhaps the most generous thing that she could have said.
Pask took it, with a stiff small bow, and turned away, and began to fuss with the harness of the pony in short irritated movements.
Wystan saw him stop, once, with the strap in his hand, and look back across the field at the place where the village was not.
It was a very long look.
It was not the look of a man who believes.
It was the look of a man afraid that he might.
They struck camp in half an hour, which was an hour sooner than they ever did on a normal day.
It was a measure of how disturbed everyone was.
No one shouted.
No one dropped a pole.
Pugh packed his black pot in silence, and wrapped the cold porridge in a cloth, and tucked it in the cart as though it were a casualty.
Tam went about with a grave and purposeful face, tying knots that were already tied.
Wystan helped as best he could.
He was not much use.
He kept putting things down and finding that he had picked them up again, and at last Hesper said, “Sit,” in the voice she used on the pony, and he sat on the grass with the chain in his lap and watched them pack his world into a cart.
At the end it was Tam who came over.
The boy stood in front of him with his hands in his pockets and his red hair standing up in tufts.
He looked as he had looked on the day he first joined the party, four months before, when he had been brought to the Weir by his father with a letter of recommendation and a pair of boots too big for him.
He had been terrified then, and had hidden it behind a great deal of talk.
Wystan had spent a week teaching him how to hold the far end of a chain without letting it sag, and Tam had never once complained about the correction, and had afterward followed him around at a polite distance with a doglike, unspoken hero-worship that Wystan had found extremely embarrassing and had never mentioned.
“I’m not saying I believe you,” said Tam.
“I know.”
“I want to say it plain.
I don’t recall it.
I don’t recall any of it.
It’s not fair to you if I tell you I do.” He scuffed a boot in the turf.
“But I’ll tell you what I do recall, Wys.”
“What?”
“I recall that you chain too slow.” He said it with immense solemnity.
“Every blessed morning.
I recall standing at the far end of a hundred links, with the wind in my teeth, thinking, he’s going to make us do it again.
And you did.
Every time.
And then it’d close to a finger and Mistress Quarrel would go all soft in the face and say, well, that’s better than I do.” He looked up.
His eyes were very bright.
“And I recall thinking that anybody who cared that much about a finger’s breadth couldn’t be a liar.
It’s not much.
It’s all I’ve got.”
Wystan could not speak.
“That’s not nothing,” said Tam, a little gruffly.
“Is it?”
“No,” said Wystan.
His voice came out cracked.
“It is not nothing.”
“Right then.” Tam nodded, quickly, and then pulled something out of his pocket and thrust it at him.
It was a boiled egg, still warm, a little grubby, wrapped in a twist of cloth.
“Pugh’s.
For after.
Don’t tell him.”
He went off at a run before Wystan could answer.
The pony, being finished with its dignity, gave a sigh and began to walk, and the cart groaned, and the party moved off down the lane in the same ragged file in which it had come, the sun on the backs of their necks, the instruments rattling in their cases.
Pask walked at the head with his chin down.
Pugh’s pot clanked.
At the bend in the lane, where it dipped toward the reeds, Tam turned, and lifted one arm in a short stiff wave, and then ducked his head and was gone.
Then there was the field again, and the wind, and the two of them.
They stood for a time without speaking.
The great flat landscape lay all about them, with its reeds and its water and its enormous sky, and the sound of the cart faded, and faded, and was gone.
Hesper lifted her chin and sniffed at the air, deciding whether it was going to rain.
“Well,” she said.
“That is that.”
“You did not tell them what you think.”
“I did not tell them because I do not know what I think.” She said it with something close to relish.
“It is a great and underrated pleasure, kid.
I recommend it.
There is nothing in the world so restful as to be quite certain that you know nothing at all.” She stooped, with a grunt, and picked up the Alderman, which Pask had left standing in its case on the grass.
It was the big brass theodolite that the party called by that name, on account of its weight and its opinions, and it was a splendid instrument, with a telescope and a graduated circle and a bubble in a glass tube, worth, he reckoned, about as much as the whole of Ashmere would have fetched at auction.
She slung the case on her back and tucked the tripod under her arm like a folded umbrella.
“Come on.”
“Where?”
“To the beginning,” said Hesper.
“To the control.
I do not trust a number I have not taken myself.”
They went down the slope together, in the full afternoon light.
It was warm now.
The larks had given up, and the sky was a blank bright blue.
A swan came sailing up the river like a ship, with a furrow behind it, and turned its long white neck to look at them.
Wystan walked beside her, a little behind, as he always did, and noticed that he was matching his steps to hers, and then that he was counting them again, quietly, under his breath.
He did not stop.
It seemed to him a small, odd mercy that he could.
At the landing she set up the instrument.
She did it slowly, with her tongue between her teeth, and she would not let him help.
He sat on the gravel and watched her do it, the three legs spread and pressed into the earth, the plumb line dropped, the little bubble coaxed to the middle of its tube.
She was short, and she had to reach up to look through the eyepiece.
She asked him for the bearing of the willow line from his book, and he read it to her, and she set the circle to it and sighted along it into the empty air where the willow had stood.
Then she swung the telescope in a slow arc, past the leaning alder, across the water, to the chapel on the far bank.
She read the circle.
She wrote the numbers down.
“Thirty-one degrees,” she said at last, in a flat voice.
“Twelve minutes.
Eight seconds.” She lowered her eye.
“That is your angle, kid.
Between the line to the willow and the line to the chapel.
You took it on your birthday.”
“I wrote it on my wrist.”
“Hm.” She did not look at him.
“It is exactly right.”
She made a mark in her own book, and shut it, and sat down on the gravel beside him with her short legs stuck out in front of her.
For a while they said nothing.
The river slid past, wide and brown, with a stripe of light on it.
He found the egg in his pocket and peeled it and offered her half, and she took it, and they ate it together.
It was very good.
“Tell me about your aunt,” said Hesper.
He told her.
It was easier than he had thought.
She did not interrupt, and she did not say anything kind, which was a mercy.
She asked about the ferry rope, and how it was spliced, and what the ferrywoman did in a flood.
She asked about the pipe.
She asked how Orla felt about the survey, and he said that she thought it was nonsense and a waste of good eels, and that she had never once refused him a day to go.
She asked about the girl, and he said that Brea was nine, and counted wrong on purpose, and liked the Weir’s black bread above any other.
Hesper looked at the loaf in his pack and said nothing.
He told her about the quarrel.
He had not meant to.
It came out all in a piece, the eel pie and the figures and the notice, and when he got to the end of it, to the shut door and the hinge that did not complain, he found that he was looking at his hands.
Hesper took the fennel out of her mouth.
“She sounds,” she said, “like a woman I would have liked.”
She said it quietly.
He looked at her, and she did not look back, and he saw that she had heard what she had said, and the tense of it, and that she was not going to take it back.
“Hesper…”
“I am not saying I believe you.” She lifted one hand.
“I will say it again, so there is no mistake.
I do not believe you.
I do not disbelieve you, either.
In my trade, kid, that is much the same thing.
It means I will go and look.” She turned the fennel in her fingers.
“And I have been going and looking at things for fifty years, and I will tell you what I have found.
Nine times in ten, when a man tells you that the world has gone wrong, it is the man.
And the tenth time…”
She stopped.
“The tenth time?” said Wystan.
“The tenth time you are going to wish it had been the man,” said Hesper Quarrel, and put the fennel back in her mouth, and did not say anything else for the rest of the afternoon.
They worked until dark.
It was a good, dull, steady kind of work, and he was glad of it.
They took angles.
They chained lines.
She sent him out along the riverbank with the rod, and stood at the instrument with her back to the sun and shouted figures, and he shouted them back.
At sunset they made a fire of driftwood and the dry stems of last year’s reeds, and she cooked something from Pugh’s leavings that was not quite an eel and not quite a stew, and he ate it.
She told him a story about a flood she had survived at the age of nineteen, in which she had spent three days in a tree with a priest and a goat.
He laughed.
It was the first time he had laughed since the Third Bend, and it came out of him like something rusty being pulled loose.
The night came down.
The stars came out, enormous, by the thousand.
The fire sank into a bed of red.
She told him to sleep.
He lay down beside the fire with his coat over him and the Ferry House stake at his head, and the whistle in his pocket against his heart, and watched the sparks go up.
He had thought he would not sleep.
To his own considerable surprise he was falling toward it, as a stone falls through water, in slow sure stages.
At the very edge of it, in the thin gray strip between waking and sleeping, he heard her speak.
She was sitting with her back to him on the far side of the fire, with her knees drawn up, looking out over the dark water.
She did not know he was awake.
He could see only the line of her shoulders, small and straight, and the fennel stalk glowing white in the firelight.
She was not talking to him.
She was talking, low, to the night, or to the river, or to someone who was not there, in a flat hard voice that he had never heard from her.
“Not again,” said Hesper.
“I will not do it again.
Not twice.”
He lay quite still.
Then, because he was seventeen and exhausted and had come to the end of what he could carry, he slept.