Sufficient

A letter came for Lady Pettigrew on the seventeenth morning. The hollow knew at once that it was not from the Court, because it came.

The beetle stood on the gatepost with it held up in two legs and looked, not at Grizel, nor at Kit, but along the foot of the hedge to the stool, where the envoy of the Court of the Fliskies sat ten feet from Mungo, not staying. Pettigrew did not get up. Envoys are brought things. So the beetle walked the ten feet with the letter over its head, which took a while, and she read it sitting. Her collar, which had gone out to meet it the way a sail goes out to meet wind, came in, and stopped.

It was from the Provost of Gnomesby. It was addressed, correctly, to Her Adequacy. It observed that the hearing at midwinter would turn upon the keeping of a book; that a book kept by one party could hardly be read out by that party; that the occasion wanted a neutral person of rank; and that Gnomesby, having consulted the Table of Precedence, could think of nobody in the Anunder more suitable, and would be honoured. It was written in a hand Grizel afterwards described as "warm, for him."

Pettigrew read it twice. The war that followed was short, was fought entirely in the collar, and had no winner, both sides being the same person.

"The Court," she told the air a foot above the beetle's hat, "does not keep grumlin books." She folded the letter once, exactly. "It reads them." And she handed it back unanswered, and looked out across the green towards Gnomesby, which nobody had ever seen her do.

But the letter had told her something. In fifteen days at a gate she had become a person somebody wished to have. The collar knew it, and would have denied it, and stood a little higher all morning.

She came to Grizel in the afternoon. She came the long way round, by the shed, and arrived at the table as though by accident.

"The Court would wish, for its information, to understand how a grumlin record is kept."

"Would it."

"Not to keep one. To understand one."

Grizel turned the ledger round.

"A thing is recorded," she said, "or it is noted. Recorded means it happened. Noted means I was there."

"Those are the same."

"They are not remotely the same. I was there when Nettie said Gnomesby sent the slug. It is noted that she said it. It is recorded that the slug was going the other way."

Pettigrew considered this. "So one may put a falsehood in the book."

"One may put in the book that a falsehood was said. That is the whole of the law, and most of history."

"And these?" A finger, not quite touching the page.

"One line under a thing means it matters. Two lines mean I am shouting."

"Might the Court use three?"

"Nobody has ever needed to."

"The Court," said Pettigrew, "has needs this hollow has not dreamed of." She had found the hook in the margin. "And that?"

"For a thing I have decided not to have an opinion about yet."

"Ah. The Court has an entire department for that."

"The ledger manages with a pen."

They looked at one another across the book with the beginnings of respect, which both of them would have described as indigestion.

She was shown the Table of Precedence, between the recipe and the grudge, with her own rank on it second from the foot. She looked at it and said nothing, and the collar said it for her. She asked what was on the page Grizel's hand was lying on.

"A grudge."

"Whose?"

"It is not for a Wednesday," said Grizel, and did not move the hand.

At the end of the afternoon Pettigrew rose, and pronounced on the lesson in the voice she keeps for rulings.

"Sufficient," she said, and went back to her stool.

Grizel sat a moment. Then she turned to the Table and looked the word up. It was at the very bottom, one below her guest.

"I see," said Grizel, to the empty chair. "It was like that, was it."