The Likeness

The Above had drawn Mungo, and the theology had no page for it.

Grizel wrote at the head of the day, after the weather, "the Likeness," with a capital, which is what a thing gets in the ledger when it has no other name and is plainly going to need one. Then the hollow came by to look at it again, each of them having happened to be passing.

Lady Pettigrew happened to be passing first.

"A tribute," she ruled. "The Above's acknowledgement of this hollow, made through its sentry, as the Court's acknowledgement of a garden is made through its wall."

She looked longer. The collar came in.

"Where," said Lady Pettigrew, "am I?"

Nobody at the table cared to be the one to say.

"I have been at that gate for twenty-one days. I am ten feet from the figure depicted. I am, I would have said, difficult to miss." She went on looking for a collar, a wing, a stool, anywhere on the page, and the page went on having a hedge and a grumlin on it. "The Court," she said at last, "will not comment on the omission," and went back to the stool to not comment on it, at length, to Mothy.

Nettie looked at it with her arms folded.

"Surveillance. Gnomesby's had somebody up there drawing him. For the hearing."

"It's in crayon," said Kit.

"That's how you'd do it, if you didn't want it to look like surveillance."

Wick came with a peg and measured the figure on the paper against it, and then went and measured Mungo the same way, from a respectful distance, while Mungo allowed it by not appearing to notice.

"The proportions are out," he reported. "A peg and a half too narrow. He's wider than that. Anybody can see he's wider than that." He looked at the sheet again, for a while. "The hat's right," he said, quietly, to the paper, which is the highest praise the shed gives, and went in.

Mothy came last, from the lantern, and studied it for a long time.

"That's a lamp," he said. And then, having given thought to the colour: "It's yellow."

"It is," said Grizel.

"It's the right yellow."

Grizel wrote that down. It was the only finding of the day that nobody disputed.

Sorrel did not come by at all. Nobody had seen her go, which is how she goes.

Towards dusk Kit took the sheet down to the gate again and asked the one person it had not occurred to anybody to ask. She held it up in the light of the actual lamp. A Mungo passed, and Grizel did not time it, on the ground that some things should be let be the length they are.

"It's the hat," said Mungo.

That was all. He did not say the hat was right, or wrong, or his. He said it was the hat, and went back to the green. The Likeness was pinned over the table with one of Wick's pegs, so that whoever writes in the book now writes underneath it.

Kit stood in front of it a while after the others had gone. The strokes were pressed hard where the hand had been sure, and hardly at all where it had not. It was a small hand. She looked out through the door, and up, at the third floor of the Stair.

"Tomorrow," she said.

Grizel looked up. "Tomorrow what?"

"Nothing. Weather, probably."