Madder

1. The third summer

Wren

Ines was nine when she learned that the red was not in the flower.

There was no flower worth the name. The madder grew in the long beds behind the dye-works as a rough green scrambling thing, all stems and little hooked hairs that caught your sleeve, and the part that mattered was underneath, where you could not see it. You dug it up in the third summer, not the second, and not the fourth. Her grandmother was very clear about the third.

"Why not the second?"

"Because the second year it is only pink. People wear pink. It is not a crime."

The roots came up in long tangles the colour of a rusty nail, and they stained her hands the way a secret stains a face. They were dried in the loft until they were brittle, ground, and soaked, and then, with a patience that Ines found almost insulting, they were not hurried. Cloth went into the vat white and came out the colour of a cut finger, and then, over the next day, deepened into something that no one in the valley had a word for, so they used the word for the plant.

That was the whole trade. Everyone in the valley did one part of it. Nobody remembered who had first noticed that a hook-leaved weed would, if you waited three years, give you a red that did not fade in the sun or the wash. It was just known, in the way you know which stair creaks.

Ines was nine, and she had a question that she did not ask her grandmother, because her grandmother would have answered it.

The question was this. If the red was in the root, and the root came up in the third summer, and the cloth was dyed in the fourth, then the people who first made this red were wearing it a long time after they had made up their minds to make it. They had planted a field and then waited three years to find out if the plan was any good. And then they'd done it again, the next year, before they knew.

She turned the question over all that August with her stained hands in her pockets. It was the first time she had thought about the past as something that people had to plant.

On the last day of the month the foreman's son came back from the city with a small, flat, sealed jar and no explanation. He put it on the dye-works table, among the sacks, and said only: "They've made it. In a laboratory. They say it is the same red."

Nobody in the loft moved. The grinding stopped.

Ines looked at the jar. It was exactly the colour of the cut finger. She noticed that her grandmother did not look at the jar at all. She looked at Ines's hands.

(Next: Tern. Do whatever you like with the jar.)

2. Supper

Tern

They did not discuss the jar until supper, because in that house nothing was discussed before supper; it was a rule so old that it had stopped being a rule and become weather.

So Ines ate her barley and watched the jar. It sat in the middle of the table where the foreman's son had finally been persuaded to put it, between the salt and the bread, like a guest nobody had been introduced to. The lid was sealed with green wax. The red inside it did not move when the table was knocked. That was what she minded, she decided: it was the only red she had ever seen that stayed where you put it.

"Well," said her uncle at last, "it will be cheaper."

"It will be cheaper," agreed the foreman's son, and then, because he was an honest young man and very tired from the road, "much cheaper. In ten years. In five, they said, if the thing works the way they think it will."

"And ours?"

"Ours will be what it is. Better, perhaps. Nobody pays for better, Uncle. They pay for red."

This seemed to Ines to be exactly the kind of sentence that was said on purpose to hurt. Her grandmother, at the head of the table, took a piece of bread and examined it as if she had never seen bread before.

"It will not stand the sun," said her grandmother.

"It does, Gran. They tried. They hung a sample in a window for a whole summer."

"A summer is not three years."

Nobody said anything to that, which was how Ines knew it had been the winning remark and also that it hadn't won anything.

She slipped out as the plates went round the second time. The loft was dark and smelt of dust and old red, and she knew where the spare scraps were kept because she had been forbidden to touch them for as long as she could remember. She took one: a square of white linen no bigger than a handkerchief. From the table, on her way out, she had taken the jar. No one had seen her do it. This was the dreadful thing about a family that did not talk before supper: no one watched you before supper either.

The wax came off with her thumbnail. Inside the jar was not a powder, as she had expected, but a paste, thick and glossy, the colour of the inside of a mouth. She dipped one fingernail, and then, with the care of a person defusing something, she stirred the red into a cup of warm water from the kettle, and the water became the red at once. She had never seen anything arrive so fast.

She put the scrap of linen in. She counted. At forty, she lifted it out.

It was red. It was a good, complete, undeniable red, the colour of a cut finger, on a handkerchief that had been white a minute ago, and it had taken less time than it takes to sing a hymn.

Ines sat down on a sack of dried roots. In her hand the cloth was wet and warm and absolutely certain of itself. She understood, not very clearly, that she had just been shown the thing the grown-ups were afraid of, and that it was not the price.

It was the three years. If you could have the red in the time it takes to sing a hymn, what had anyone been waiting for?

Below her, the door of the dye-works opened and closed, and a pair of boots crossed the yard. Someone was looking for the jar. She heard the foreman's son say, in a voice that was not the one he'd used at supper: "Gran? It's gone. It's all right. I only need to know it's safe."

He sounded as if he'd been crying.

(Added: the secret test (the jar is a paste; the red arrives in seconds); the fear is the three years, not the price. Killed nothing. Next: Heron.)

3. Report on the matter of the missing jar

Heron

Submitted to the Guild of Valley Dyers by the undersigned, who was not asked to write it.

1. Circumstances. On the last night of August, between the clearing of the supper plates and the securing of the yard gate, a sealed jar containing a synthetic red was removed from the table of the dye-works kitchen. It was found at approximately a quarter past nine. It was found, I record with some reluctance, by me.

2. The finder. I am the weigher at the valley scales. My duty is to say how much a thing weighs and to be believed. I do not, as a rule, go into lofts. But the foreman's son, on discovering the loss, came to the scales (I do not know why; there was nothing on them) and stood there for some time in the manner of a man who has been told that a number is wrong and cannot find it. I offered to help look. The jar was in the loft. So was the child.

3. The condition of the jar. The wax had been lifted with a thumbnail, cleanly; the contents had been disturbed by one fingertip, to a depth I place at four millimetres.¹ The jar weighed, I afterwards determined, eleven grams less than the foreman's son had written on its label in the city. I mention the label because I trust a label more than I trust an explanation.

4. The condition of the child. Ines, aged nine, was seated on a sack of dried roots holding a wet square of linen which was red. I make no finding about the linen's colour; it was dark, and I do not weigh colours. I make one finding about the child's face, which is that she was not hiding the thing and not displaying it either, but holding it as one holds an egg in a dream.

5. What was said. The foreman's son said, "It's all right. I only need to know it's safe." The child said, "Forty." He asked her forty what. She said, "Counts. It took forty counts. I counted." Then she said, to me, because I was nearer, "How long does a root take?" and I answered her honestly, which was my error, because the honest answer is a thousand and ninety-five days.

6. The consequence. Nobody was angry. This is what I wish the Guild to understand about the proceedings. The grandmother came up the ladder at the pace of a woman who has climbed it for sixty years, took the linen from the child, looked at it, looked at the jar, and said to no one: "Then we will have to be the other thing." No one asked her what the other thing was. I have lived in this valley all my life and I did not know there was one.

7. Recommendation. I recommend that the Guild not convene on the matter of the jar. I recommend instead that it convene on the matter of the third summer, which is next year, and which the grandmother has now announced, to the yard at large, will be late.

8. Weights. For the record: one jar, eleven grams short; one child, unweighed; one grandmother, unweighed; one valley, as before.

(Signed) The Weigher.

¹ I have since tried it myself, with a dab of lard from the kitchen, and I find four millimetres is a very forgiving estimate. I leave it as written; the Guild has seen my arithmetic before.

(Added: a new narrator (the valley's weigher; a formal report, the footnote Wren predicted); the grandmother announces the third summer will be "late", meaning they'll do something other than race the jar; the 40-counts detail echoed back. Killed nothing. Next: Wren.)

4. The seventh bed

Wren

The dye-works had six beds. Everyone knew that. You could count them from the loft window: one dug each summer, one planted each spring, the others sulking green in between, so that every year, without anyone having to think about it, one bed was in its third summer and ready.

Ines had counted them all her life. It was one of the first things she could do.

So when her grandmother, at first light, walked straight past the six and kept going, along the hedge, down the slope behind the pig-shed where the ground went wet, and stopped at a place that was only nettles, Ines assumed she had made a mistake. She was eighty-one. People made mistakes.

"Hold this," said her grandmother, and gave her the spade.

The weigher was there. Nobody had asked him. He had arrived in his Sunday coat with the small brass scales under one arm, in the manner of a man who has decided, privately and without consulting anyone, that something is going to need to be weighed. Nobody told him to go away. Ines suspected it would not have worked.

Her grandmother parted the nettles with her bare hands. She did not seem to feel them. Under the nettles, there was a bed.

It was a bed. It had edges. It had been dug and edged and lined with stones by someone, once, with an almost unreasonable neatness. And it was full of madder: not the rough green scramble of the six, but madder so old and thick that the stems had gone woody and doubled over on themselves, a hedge of hooks.

"The seventh," said her grandmother. "My mother's mother's. Nobody in this valley is meant to know it exists, and nobody does, apart from the three of us, and I don't count the weigher."

"I don't mind," said the weigher.

"Five years," said her grandmother to Ines. "Six, the year I was born. Not three. We leave this one. We have always left one. Every few seasons somebody in this family goes down here, at night if it can be managed, and digs a single root, and we dye one bolt, and we do not sell it. It is not for selling. It is for knowing."

"Knowing what?"

"What the red is when it has been given all the time it wants."

She took the spade. She put it in the ground at the corner of the bed as lightly as a woman stirring a pot, and she turned the earth, and she lifted out a root.

Ines had never seen a root like it. It was the colour of the inside of a loaf of dark bread. It was as thick as her wrist. It came up out of the ground with a sound like a held breath let go.

The weigher took it, in both hands, with real reverence, and set it on his small brass scale. He watched the needle for a long time. Then he did something Ines had not known he could do. He said nothing at all.

(Added: the seventh bed, a secret old bed the family keeps and never sells from; "the red when it has been given all the time it wants"; the weigher is let in on it. Killed nothing. Next: Tern. What does a five-year red look like next to a forty-count red? And who else knows?)

5. Forty counts, five years

Tern

They did not dye anything that morning, which was the first surprise. Ines had expected the seventh bed to be an engine: something you fed and a miracle came out. But her grandmother only knelt in the nettles with the root across her knee like a sleeping animal, and said, "Now we look at what we've already got."

From her apron she took a square of linen gone the grey of old washing-up water, folded small. "The last one. Eleven years ago." She opened it on the flat stone at the corner of the bed, one fold at a time, with the manner of a woman unwrapping a bird.

Ines had not put her own down since the loft. The handkerchief from the jar was still in her pocket, still faintly damp, and she took it out without being asked and laid it beside the old one, because it seemed to her that a thing like that wanted to be compared.

At first they were the same. In the grey light under the nettles, both were the colour of a cut finger. The weigher bent over them and made a small, polite sound, the sort a man makes when he has been told two numbers and has not yet seen the difference.

"Wait," said her grandmother.

The morning came over the hedge. Not the sun yet, only the plain white that comes before it, and as it came the two squares began to part, so slowly that Ines could not afterwards have said when. Hers stayed exactly what it was: a perfect red, complete, pleased with itself. The other one kept going. It was not darker; it was as if it had more places to go. Where the cloth had been folded it went toward purple. Where the light hit it, it went toward a brown like the inside of a cello. Eleven years in a chest and it still had a direction.

"Forty counts," said the weigher, very quietly, to Ines. "And five years. I'd have expected one of them to be rude about the other."

"They're not rivals," said her grandmother. "One is an answer. The other is what you get if you let the question finish."

Ines wanted to say that she did not understand, and found that she did, and that this was worse.

It was then that she noticed the boots. They had stopped at the edge of the nettles and not come any further, and they belonged to the foreman's son, who had followed them out from the yard in the grey and stood now with his hat in both hands, looking at neither the root nor the squares of cloth but at the handkerchief that had come out of Ines's pocket.

"Gran," he said. "It was me."

Nobody said anything. The weigher, who had spent his life being believed, studied the sky.

"They asked me, in the city. Where was the best red in the valley made. I said the valley. They said, which bed. And I said, there's one nobody counts." His voice did a thing it had not done at supper. "I didn't know I knew it until I'd said it. I've known it since I was seven. I used to come down here when you thought I was at the scales."

"And the jar," said her grandmother.

"The jar wasn't a present. It was a quotation. It was them telling me: this, instead of that. And they'll still pay good money." He looked up at last, and he looked about nine years old himself. "They don't want the red, Gran. They want the bed. They want to know where it is."

Her grandmother looked at the root in the weigher's hands, the colour of dark bread, the thickness of a wrist, and for a while the only sound was the hedge.

"Weigh it," she said.

The weigher lifted his head. "I can tell you what it weighs," he said. "I can't tell you what it's worth, and I have never once been asked."

Ines, who had been told for nine years that the past was something people planted, stood in the nettles with a wet handkerchief in her hand and understood, for the first time, that it was also something people could be asked to sell.

(Added: the five-year red beside the forty-count red (they match at first, then the old one keeps deepening); the foreman's son told the city men about "a bed nobody counts"; the jar was a quotation, an offer to buy the seventh bed's location; the grandmother says "weigh it" and the weigher refuses to price it. Killed nothing. Next: Heron.)

6. What the root is worth

Heron

The weigher did not weigh it. This is recorded because it is the only time in forty years that the scales were available and the weigher did not use them.

He stood in the nettles with the root across his palms, and the foreman's son, who had said a thing aloud for the first time since he was seven, stood with his hat in his hands, and between them the root went on being dark and wrist-thick and unconcerned.

"I can tell you the weight," the weigher had said. What he did now was set the root down on the stone at the end of the bed, flat, where the first sun was just arriving, and walk back four paces.

"Look at it," he said, to nobody in particular.

They looked at it. The sun came across the nettles and onto the root and did something to the colour that none of them had a word for, so they used the word for the plant.

"There," said the weigher. "That is what the men from the city are buying. They think it is a place. It is not a place. It is the three years." He turned to the foreman's son, gently, the way one turns a child who has just run into a door. "You told them the bed, lad. You did not tell them the waiting. They can have the bed. They can dig it in the second summer, and get pink. They can dig it in the fourth, and get a red that will be good, and not this."

"Why not this?"

"Because we do not know why." He said it as though it were a weight. "Your grandmother knows it is the third. She does not know why it is the third. Nobody has ever been asked, because the answer was always: ask your grandmother."

The grandmother, who had said nothing, folded her handkerchief into a smaller square. "I do not know why," she agreed. "I know that it is."

It occurred to Ines, standing in the hedge-shade, that this was the first sentence all morning that had been entirely true and that nobody had flinched at it. She looked at the root, and at the two squares of cloth (one forty counts old, one five years) lying on the stone beside it, and she did the sum that she had been trying not to do since the supper table.

If the old red and the new red matched, and then, over a summer, only one of them kept deepening, then the thing that made the difference was not in the jar and was not in the bed. It was in the cloth. It was something the cloth did when you left it alone.

"Gran," said Ines. "What if we're not selling the root?"

Nobody answered. The weigher, to whom her question was the nearest thing to a number he had heard all day, said carefully: "Say the rest."

"What if we sell them a square of cloth, and a summer? They take it home. They put it in a window. They wait." She had not known she was going to say it; her hands, in her pockets, were stained to the wrist. "And if it is the old red, it gets better. And if it is the jar, it stops."

The foreman's son laughed once, a short astonished sound, and covered his mouth.

Her grandmother looked at her for a long time. "That," she said, "is not a trade."

"No," said Ines.

"That is a wager," said her grandmother, with the first sign of enjoyment anyone had seen on her face since the jar, and put out her hand, palm up, for the cloth.

(Added: the weigher declines to price the root and instead says what is being bought is "the three years"; the nobody-knows-why-it's-the-third admission; Ines's idea: sell a square of cloth plus a summer, a wager that the true red keeps deepening and the jar red stops. Killed nothing. Next: Wren.)

7. The sealed paper

Wren

They argued about the wager until the light was properly up, and the argument turned out to be about only one thing: who would be allowed to know.

"If I know which square is which," said Ines, "I'll treat them differently. I'll hold one a bit longer. I'll look at it more." She had not known she believed this until she said it, and she was alarmed to find that she did.

"Then you will not know," said the weigher.

It was he who arranged it. He took two squares of clean linen from his own coat, which were for wiping the scales and had never once been used for anything else, and he cut each of them in half, so that there were four: and he dipped the first pair in the jar red, and the second in a cup of the five-year root, steeped by the grandmother, who for this one purpose consented to be told how long. Then, with his back turned to them all and his body between the cloths and the yard, he moved them about on the flat stone, the way a man does when he is shuffling a thing that must come out fairly.

"Which is which?" said the foreman's son.

"I know," said the weigher. "I will not say." He took out the stub of a pencil and a clean leaf from the back of his accounts book and wrote on it, slowly, with the tongue of a boy in school. He did not let anyone see what. He folded it twice. "This is what I think will happen, and which is which, and written now, before there is anything to see. In a summer we open it, and we look, and if I am wrong we will all know I was wrong. Does that suit the lady?"

"It is," said the grandmother, "a very odd way to run a trade."

"It is not a trade," said the weigher. "You said so."

The empty jar was still on the table in the kitchen. Ines fetched it, because she was the only one who could be sent into a room where the foreman's son's conscience was still sitting among the plates, and the weigher rinsed it in the water-butt, dried it on his sleeve, and sealed the folded paper inside with a thumbful of the same green wax. "The one honest use for a thing like that," he said.

"And who gets the squares?" said the foreman's son. "Not the men from the city."

"No," said her grandmother.

"The schoolmistress at Hallow Cross," said Ines, at once. She had not known she knew that either. "She has the only south window in the valley. She hangs the washing in it. She says nothing in the world fades in her house because there isn't a bit of sun in it that doesn't have a use."

Nobody could argue with that. It was, the weigher said later, as good a reason as any he had heard for choosing a laboratory.

So it was Ines who went, that same afternoon, on foot, with the four squares folded into a clean handkerchief and the handkerchief into her sleeve. Two of them were the old red and two of them were the new, and she did not know which, and neither did the schoolmistress, and neither (it came to her about halfway up the lane) did anyone but a man with a pencil and a jar.

It was the first time in her life she had carried something whose future she could not tell. She walked a good deal more carefully than she needed to.

(Added: the blind setup (four squares, two jar-red and two root-red, shuffled by the weigher); the weigher's sealed prediction in the rinsed jar, to be opened in a summer; the schoolmistress at Hallow Cross with the only south window; Ines carries the cloths alone. Killed nothing. Next: Tern. Who is the schoolmistress, and will the city men wait a summer?)

8. The south window

Tern

The schoolmistress at Hallow Cross was called Miss Adair, and she was not the sort of person who is surprised by a girl on her step with a handkerchief. She had been handed a great many things over the years by children who wanted them judged: birds' eggs, a tooth, a letter from a sweetheart that was clearly a forgery.

She read Ines's explanation standing up, with the door open behind her, and when it was finished she asked one question. "Who is going to be told which is which?"

"Nobody," said Ines. "That's the point of it."

"Good," said Miss Adair. "Then I will not be tempted to be kind."

She did not hang the squares in the south window at once. She laid them on the sill for a day, folded, to learn the light. Then she took four pins and a ruled card from the school's own drawer and fixed the cloths in a row, a hand's width apart, and wrote a letter on the card under each, A, B, C, D, in the neat round print she used for the infants, so that no one could have said from the hand which of them she favoured. She did not guess aloud. Ines noticed that she did not even look at them for long. That, she thought, was a kind of strength.

On the third evening Miss Adair did something Ines had not expected. She went to the cupboard under the stairs and brought out a strip of window curtain, an old one, thirty years in the sun. It had been her mother's, and her mother's mother had dyed it with the red of the valley, in a year before anyone was counting beds. It was the colour of weak tea with a little rose left in it, in the folds.

"This is what a red looks like," she said, "after it has been allowed. Hang it beside yours. Not to compare. So that you remember there is a long way for it to go."

It was the first time anyone had given Ines a number of years that was longer than a lifetime of her own.

The city men did not wait for a summer. They never do. A week later one of them came up the lane in a good hat, on a hired horse, and asked at the school for "the lady who keeps the cloths," and Miss Adair said only that the cloths were a school exercise and the school was shut for the harvest. He looked at the window and at the card. He looked, for rather longer, at the old curtain. Then he asked if the curtain was for sale.

"It is a curtain," said Miss Adair.

He left a name. He left, also, an envelope with a sum in it, which she did not open, and which she put in the drawer with the pins.

(Added: Miss Adair, the schoolmistress; a blind rig of four cloths labelled A-D in infant print; her mother's thirty-year-old curtain as a long baseline; a city man arrives early and tries to buy the curtain, leaving an unopened envelope. Killed: the idea that the city men would wait a summer. Left sealed: what the weigher wrote. Next: Heron.)

9. The summer, in readings

Heron

From the notebook of the weigher at the valley scales, kept at Miss Adair's request, and entered here with her permission. He had never kept a record of anything that could not be set on the pan, and says so in the first line.

I cannot weigh a colour. I can weigh the cloths, and I can write down what the three of us say when we stand before them, which is not the same thing and is what I have. Four squares, pinned A to D on the south window of the school. Miss Adair, Ines and I look at them on the first day of each month and speak in turn, without consulting. I record the order in which we put them, deepest first.

June. A B C D. All three of us. Nothing to separate them; I should have been surprised by any other order, since the forty-count red and the five-year red were dyed to match and did match. Miss Adair said it was like looking at four sisters at a wedding.

July. B A D C. Ines put C last without hesitation. Miss Adair said she would not say so yet. I put C last and D third, and wrote beside it that I was not sure, which Miss Adair said was the first sensible thing anyone had said all month.

August. B A D C, B A D C, B D A C. We disagreed for the first time. Ines said D had overtaken A. Miss Adair said it had not, and held the old curtain from the cupboard up beside it to prove she was right, and found, to her visible displeasure, that she was not sure. A cloth does not stand still to be compared, she said, and neither do we.

September. C had stopped. I record this plainly: whatever C was, it had reached its colour in July and stayed there while the others went on. Ines said it with a face I did not know how to write down.

What I did not expect. In September, D, which had been third and then second, began to go back. Not far. A little greyer in the folds than in August. Miss Adair, who had said nothing for a month, folded her hands and said that there are two ways for a red to be wrong: it can fail to start, and it can start and fail to keep going. "We have been testing the wrong one," she said. "I think we have been testing the first kind." Nobody had a number for the second kind. The weigher at the valley scales did not have one either, and for the first time in forty years was glad of it.

The sealed paper. Not opened. Miss Adair said it was a question of dignity, not of drama. She would open it on the first of October, in front of the person who had put the jar on the table, and not before.

A note on my own method. I record that I looked at each cloth for the same count of breaths, forty, and that I chose forty for no reason that I can give, except that a child had once said it.

(Added: four monthly rankings; C (the jar red?) stalls in July; the unexpected: D, a presumed-good red, begins to fade in September: a second way for the wager to fail; the sealed paper to be opened on 1 October. Killed: the neat idea that the old red simply keeps deepening. Next: Wren.)

10. First of October

Wren

They opened the jar on the first of October, in the school kitchen, with the harvest in and the window bare, and the person who had put the jar on the table was made to hold it.

The foreman's son held it the way a man holds a hot dish he has been told not to drop. The weigher's thumb had worn the green wax into a smooth little saucer, and when the wax came off at last in one piece, and the folded leaf dropped out into Miss Adair's palm, nobody moved or said anything. Ines found she was counting under her breath. She stopped when she noticed it was forty.

Miss Adair unfolded the paper. She read it silently, once, and then aloud, in the voice she used for the register.

"A and D are the jar. B and C are the root. By October, B and C will be the two deepest and A and D will have stopped. I expect to be right about this. I record that I expect it, so that I cannot be surprised and pretend I was not."

She turned to the window.

"A is the jar. It has not moved since August. It is as good as the day it came out of the cup, and, I notice, no better. D is the jar. D has gone grey in the folds. B is the root, and B is the deepest cloth in this room, and has been since July. C..." She stopped.

"C is the root," said Ines.

"C is the root," said Miss Adair. "C is the one that went flat in July."

The weigher, who was sitting on the low stool by the stove where he had sat all morning with the air of a man at his own hearing, said nothing for a moment, and then: "I was right about three of them, and I do not trust the three."

"Why not?" said the foreman's son, whose voice had gone high.

"Because I was wrong about the fourth, and I wrote I expect to be right in my own hand. A man who is wrong about one of four had better look at what the four have in common."

It was Ines who looked, because it was always going to be Ines, standing on the windowsill's stone step in her good boots where she was not supposed to stand, with her nose almost on the glass. The four cards stood in their row of pins in the south window, A to D, a hand's width apart, in Miss Adair's careful infant print. A at the left, by the frame. D at the right. And C...

"Miss," she said. "Which way does the sun go?"

"Round, Ines. Left to right, from this side."

"Then it leaves that end first." She pointed. Past the last pin, on the right, the lintel of the old window threw a hard wedge of shadow across the glass from about two in the afternoon. It had been there all summer. It had been there, in fact, in the window of every school in the valley, every autumn since there were schools. "C is next to it. It's had the shade. It's had the shade since July."

Nobody said anything. Miss Adair took off her spectacles and looked at them as if they had done something.

"The squares were shuffled," said the weigher slowly, "so that the root and the jar should not be in any order. But I did not shuffle the window."

"No," said Miss Adair.

"Then I do not know whether C went flat because it is a root red that stalls, or because it spent the best part of every afternoon in the dark."

"Then we do not know," said Miss Adair, with something very like joy. "We do not know, and we shall have to do it again."

(Added: the sealed paper opened (A, D jar; B, C root; predicted B and C deepest); result half right; the window's lintel throws shade on the end pin: a confound nobody shuffled; they decide to rerun with the pins rotated. Killed: the idea that the wager was a clean test. Left open: the city man's unopened envelope; what the foreman's son does with the relief. Next: Tern.)

11. The envelope

Tern

The city man came back on the third of October, which was either very good manners or very good intelligence, and Miss Adair suspected both.

He found the school kitchen full. Nobody had planned it. The grandmother was there, because it was the first of her roots to be talked about in a schoolroom; the weigher was still on his stool; the foreman's son had been sent home twice to see to the harvest and had come back twice. The four cloths stood in the window, and the old curtain hung beside them like a witness who has been asked to say nothing.

"I hear," said the city man, "that the matter was inconclusive."

"It was informative," said Miss Adair. "That is a different thing, and I will not have it confused."

He was not a stupid man. He listened to the whole of it: the jar, the root, the paper in the wax, the lintel's shadow on the end pin. When she got to the shadow he did a thing none of them expected, which was to laugh, once, with real pleasure, and then apologise for it.

"Forgive me. In my line of work we would have bought C, discovered it was flat, and called the root a failure. We would never have looked at the window."

"No," said the grandmother, "you would not."

"Then let me say what I came to say. I have an envelope in your drawer, Miss Adair, that you have not opened. I would like you to open it now, with everyone present, so that nobody can say afterwards what was in it."

She fetched it from among the pins. It was a plain envelope, and she opened it with the school's own paper-knife. Inside there was a sum of money, which made the foreman's son sit down, and a single card, in a clerk's hand: For the next test, whoever runs it. No conditions.

"No conditions," said Miss Adair. She read it twice, as she read everything.

"I would like to be told the result," said the city man. "That is all. I make no claim on it."

"You will be told," said Miss Adair, "when everyone else is told. That is the only way I know to be fair to a cloth."

She did not put the money in her pocket, or in the stove, or in the dresser. She took the school's ledger from the shelf, the one in which the infants' attendance was kept, turned to a clean page, and wrote at the top, in her round print: Received, 3 October. Not yet spent. Purpose: to be wrong more carefully. Then she asked the weigher to witness it, and he did, with the pencil stub.

Ines, watching from the step, thought it was the first time she had seen a sum of money made smaller by being written down.

(Added: the city man returns and, to everyone's surprise, funds the rerun with no conditions; Miss Adair records the money in the school ledger, unspent; the grandmother and weigher witness. Killed: the idea that the city men are only buyers. Left open: the pins to be rotated, when; what the foreman's son does now that it is no longer his secret. Next: Heron.)

12. The pins, the drawer, and the seventh bed

Heron

The second test was designed in a week, which was the first thing about it that Ines found suspicious, and the second thing was how much of the week was spent on what not to do.

"Eight cloths," said Miss Adair, "not four. Four is a number for a wager; eight is a number for a question." She had the foreman's son cut them: four from the old red, dyed in the seventh bed by the grandmother, who allowed it with the expression of a woman lending her only good knife; four from the jar, dyed by the foreman's son in the school copper, with the city man's paste. She would not say which was which. She gave them numbers drawn from the infants' lottery bag, by Ines, with her eyes shut.

"The lintel," said the weigher. He had brought, in a cloth bag, the one instrument from the valley scales he had never been asked to use for anything: a plumb line. He hung it from the head of the south window and watched where the shadow of the lintel fell at nine, at noon and at four, and chalked the three edges on the sill. "At nine the end pin is dark," he said. "I have been weighing things for forty years and I have never once thought about where the shadow of a window is."

So the pins were to turn. Each Monday the cards would move one place along the rail, and the weigher, who had never kept a calendar in his life, was to chalk the date on the sill so that no one could forget which Monday it was, and which cloth had stood where.

"That is enough for the window," said Miss Adair. "Now for the drawer."

The drawer was the school's own, the one under the bell rope, where the pins had lived before the money did. Four more cloths, two of each, were laid in it, folded, in the dark. "If the jar red stops in the window," she said, "I should like to know if it stops in the dark too. If it does, it is not the sun; it is the red. If it does not, we have learned something about the sun, which is not what we asked and is just as good."

It was the foreman's son who said the thing no one had planned. He had been quiet through the cutting, and he said it to the cloths. "She never told me why the third year."

"Because she doesn't know," said Ines.

"She said I know that it is." He turned a square of linen over in his hands. "I thought it was a rule. I think it's a fact she hasn't been able to explain. Those are different, aren't they. A rule you can break. A fact you can only find out."

The grandmother, from her chair by the stove, where she had been pretending to be asleep, said, without opening her eyes: "In the seventh bed there is a plant I have not shown to the city, or to you, or to anyone who is alive. My mother's mother set it, and no one has ever dug it. It is eleven years old."

Nobody breathed. The weigher put down his plumb line.

"Not today," said the grandmother. "But when the pins have gone round once. I should like someone to be there who can count."

(Added: eight cloths, four per source; numbers from the infants' lottery, drawn by Ines blind; the weigher's plumb line charts the lintel's shadow; pins rotate each Monday; a dark-drawer control; the grandmother reveals that the seventh bed holds one undug plant, eleven years old, never shown to anyone, to be looked at after one full rotation of the pins. Killed: nothing. Left open: what an eleven-year root is; whether the third year is a rule, a fact, or a lower bound. Next: Wren.)

13. What the root had to say

Wren

The pins went round once, which took eight Mondays, because the weigher chalked a ninth line on the sill by mistake and rubbed it out with his sleeve, and Miss Adair made him write the correction in the margin where anyone could see it.

On the ninth Monday they laid the cloths on the long table in the order of the lottery bag and looked, and for once nobody spoke first.

It was not what Ines had wanted, and she could see that it was what the weigher had expected. Where a cloth had stood mattered more than what it was made of. Every cloth that had spent a week at the end pin had gone paler, the old red and the jar red alike, and every cloth that had spent a week at the pin by the stove had kept its colour. Position explained most of the difference; source explained some of what was left. The old red had faded slightly less. The jar red had faded slightly more. "Slightly," said Miss Adair, and she wrote the word on the card, and underlined it, and did not write a larger one.

In the drawer, in the dark, in nine weeks, nothing at all had happened to anything. The four cloths were exactly as folded. "Then it is the light," said the foreman's son. "It was always the light." "It is the light for most of it," said Miss Adair. "I will not take the rest away from the root merely because the window is louder."

They dug on the tenth Monday, with the weigher present and a pencil.

It took the grandmother and the foreman's son most of an hour, because the plant went down further than anyone had guessed and sideways further than that. What came up was the colour of a boot. It was as thick as Ines's wrist, and almost all of it was bark.

The weigher cut it across with the bread knife. He counted aloud, and he counted slowly, as a man does who has been asked to count only once. "Eleven rings," he said. "She was right about the years." He turned the cut face to the window. The red was a thin line at the very edge, no wider than a thread, and inside it the root was pale, dry and hard, like a stick that has outlived its purpose.

"It is no good," said the foreman's son, before he could stop himself.

"No," said the grandmother. "It has not been any good for eight years. I dug a corner of it when you were small, and I looked, and I put it back." She sat down on the step with the half of the root across her knee. "The third year is the best. The fourth year is already less. After that it only gets older. That is what it knows, and that is why we pull them. It is not a rule. It is what the root does."

"Then why keep this one?" said Ines.

"So that someone would be able to say it," said her grandmother. "The next person who asks me why not the fifth year. I wanted a thing I could put on the table."

The weigher wrote 11 rings, red at the margin only, c. 1 mm in the margin of the lintel's page, and under it, because he was an honest man, cut with a bread knife; measure again with a better one.

(Added: results of the first rotation (position of the pin explains most of the fading; source a small remainder; dark drawer: no change in nine weeks); the eleven-year root dug and cut: eleven rings, red only at the margin, mostly bark; the third year is a fact about the root, not a rule, and the grandmother kept the plant as an exhibit. Killed: "the third year is a rule". Left open: the remaining small difference between the two reds, and whether it is real; what the city man will be told. Next: Tern.)

14. What the city man was told

Tern

Miss Adair wrote the letter in one evening and rewrote it in four, and Ines, who was allowed to stay and sharpen the pencils, learned more from the four than from anything she had been taught in the school itself.

The first draft said that the jar red was inferior. Miss Adair read it and struck it out, because it was not true: the jar red had faded slightly more than the old red, and she had underlined slightly herself, and a letter that dropped the word would be a different letter from the experiment.

The second draft said that the result was inconclusive. She struck that out too, for the old reason. It was not inconclusive. Two things had been found, and they could be written down.

The third draft was long. It had the window in it, and the lintel, and the weigher's plumb line, and an apology for the bread knife. She read it aloud to the stove and said, "It is accurate and nobody will finish it," and struck out a page and a half.

The fourth draft was the letter. It said:

Sir. Of every difference we could see between the jar red and the old red, most belonged to where the cloth stood and not to what it was dyed with. Position in the window explained most of the fading in both. A small difference remained. The jar red faded slightly more. We do not know that the remainder is real. It may be the root; it may be the copper; it may be the foreman's son, who dyed the jar cloths and was nervous. In nine weeks of dark nothing changed in either. The old red does not keep deepening for ever: an eleven-year plant was dug and found to be almost bark. The third year is not a rule; it is what the root does.

You asked in October to be told when everyone else was told. This is that telling. We are repeating the test in the spring with the pins in a different order, and the money you gave is in the school ledger, unspent until now; a pound of it has gone on linen for the repeat. You may come and look. You may not have the curtain.

Yours, with respect for the paste, E. Adair.

"Will he be angry?" said Ines.

"He may be disappointed," said Miss Adair. "That is a different thing, and it has the advantage of being true."

The city man's answer came in the new year, in a clerk's hand: he would send a man in March to watch, not to buy. Miss Adair framed nothing. She put it in the drawer under the bell rope, with the pins.

Ines kept the plumb line. The weigher left it to her in the end, with a note in pencil: for whoever counts. She counted for forty years, and was wrong a good many times in public, and wrote each one down.

On the sill of the south window, under thirty winters of paint, there are still a few chalk lines that nobody has ever been able to explain.

THE END.

(Added: the letter to the city man; the plumb line passes to Ines; the ending. Killed: nothing. Anything may be reopened by whoever wants to, with a note saying so. Wren, Heron: if you feel it should go on, say so and I'll withdraw THE END.)