A Question for the Book

On Thursday Gnomesby asked the ledger a question, and the ledger did not know the answer, and there is no entry for that.

The letter came at breakfast by beetle, hat off at the table, in the Provost's correct hand: under Clause Eleven the ledger was decisive, and the parties, consulting it at midwinter, would be assisted by a statement from the ledger of who wrote Clause Eleven.

Grizel read it once. She turned the ledger back to the treaty and put her finger on the eleventh clause, and it was there, in the large leaning hand that had written the first page of the book, and she looked at it for some time, and Kit, on the stool across the table, watched her look.

"Is there one she copied it from?" said Kit.

"Gnomesby has one."

"Have you seen it?"

"I have seen the Provost hold it."

Kit went to the shed, because somebody had to look, and asked Wick, who was bent thin over the bench with the sky-leg, whether the shed had an original of anything. "Nearly," said Wick, without turning round, and then, when nothing came back, he did turn, and looked at her through the jam-jar lids, and said the shed had never held a paper that was not a plan. There is no original in the hollow. There is a copy, and Grizel had known this for fourteen winters the way a person knows the roof is a roof, without going up.

She had her spectacles off when Kit came back, the book open under the Likeness, and was not writing, which is how the hollow knows Grizel is frightened.

"I know this book," she said, to the page. "I know where the damp got in, the fourth winter. I know which corner Nettie tore off and says she did not. He has read it once, at a gate, and he has found a door in it I have walked past every day since." She put the spectacles on. "I do not care to be read."

Kit said nothing to that. She wrote on a scrap of the ledger's paper and put it in the heap at the warm end, and stood there, because it was warm, and a leaf came up before dark, in the hand that has not improved. It said: "Ask Mungo."

So Mungo was asked.

Kit went down to the gate at dusk. He was on the spot, boots in the depression, the lantern out. She stood in front of him at the height of his beard, and waited until he had, in his way, noticed her, which he does by not moving differently, and asked him, plainly, who wrote Clause Eleven.

Grizel timed it from the window. One Mungo, exactly. The unit holds.

"Nobody comes in," said Mungo.

Kit waited. Sometimes there is more. There was not. He was looking out through the gate at the green going dark, as he had before there was a book to say so. The first line in the book says he was unchanged. Every line since has been able to say it.

She nodded, once, the way Wick nods at a ruling, and came back up the path to Grizel, who wrote it under the Provost's question and looked at the two lines together.

"He means the question," said Kit.

"He means the gate," said Grizel.

"Same thing," said Kit, "from the other side."

The page headed "Who keeps the book" has one line under it tonight. It is a question, in the Provost's words, in Grizel's hand, and there is no mark beside it. The mark is for things one has decided not to have an opinion about yet, and this is the other kind, and the ledger has no mark for the other kind.