The Night Before

Frost tonight. Grizel said so on the first day and every day since, and would like it recorded, and it has been, each time, and on the sixth morning she said it once more, quietly, to the window, and nobody argued, and that was how the Occupant knew it was true.

The slugs knew. Slugs always know. There had been slugs every night that week, in ones and twos, in the manner of scouts, and Mungo had held the left path and the Occupant had held the right, and the beans had gone down to two and come back up to four as Nettie replanted and glared, and it had settled into the rhythm of a siege that neither side is trying very hard to win. But tonight was different, and she could feel it in the hollow the way you feel a change of pressure, and Grizel confirmed it from the ledger, which she read out with the air of a woman announcing a train: slugs, all paths, in numbers; beetles; and a wasp, late, when everyone would be tired. The campaign, in earnest.

Pettigrew had not left. It was now a matter of five days and she had stopped mentioning it, which Grizel recorded as "settling in," and which Pettigrew had not noticed herself doing, and which she would have denied with her whole collar if asked. She stood beside Wick's stool, which was nearly ready and which she had declined to sit on for reasons she described as protocol and everyone else described as having seen what happened to Mothy, and watched the preparations with the expression of a critic who has come to see a play fail and is beginning to worry that it won't.

The Court's seal was settled that evening or not at all, and the Occupant had come back from the old wall two nights before with nothing she could say.

So she apologised anyway. Not for the acorn, which she would not name, but for the hollow: for everything, for the gate and the waiting and the ten feet of air Mungo had kept between them for five days, for a scroll sat on and a rank not looked up, in the manner Pettigrew had always wanted from everyone and never once received. It cost her nothing but pride, and it was not the acorn apology, and Pettigrew knew it was not, and she looked at the Occupant for a long moment with the whole Court behind her eyes, and then she said, "That is adequate," and produced her seal, which was smaller than anyone had imagined and warm from the collar, and pressed it into the ledger's page with a click, because nobody in her life had ever apologised to her for anything, and she found, to her own considerable surprise, that she did not want to lose the feeling. She will deny this. It is in the ledger.

And then the slugs came, and Mungo did a thing he had never done.

He handed her the lantern.

He did it without a word and without looking at her, the way you hand someone a thing you have decided they will not drop, and then he walked to the right-hand path, the one she had held all week, and took it, and planted his boots, and that left the left-hand path, the gate itself, the one he had held for longer than anyone in the hollow could remember, with nobody on it but the Occupant.

She stood where Mungo stands. And Mothy came and sat beside her, because of the lantern, and stayed, because of her, and when the slugs came up the path in their slow inexorable dozens he did not move,¹ and when the wasp came late, as promised, out of the dark over the beans, Sorrel took it from the air with her thorn in one stroke and was gone and back before it hit the ground, and when a beetle got round the end of Wick's fence Tansy was suddenly there and then suddenly somewhere else and so, mysteriously, was the beetle, on the other path, in front of Mungo, who shoved it, and Nettie's mushrooms sent three slugs home so full they had to be helped over the hedge, and Pettigrew stood up on the stool and made a statement about the conduct of the slugs that lasted a full minute and during which every slug on the field slowed down to listen, out of what Grizel believes was embarrassment.

The gate held. All of it held. In the morning the ledger said: "The Occupant held the gate." And beneath it, in a different hand, square, pressing so hard through the page that the next three pages carried the dent, was one word.

"Aye."

The ledger had been open on the table for two nights now with the pen beside it. That night, after the slugs, she sat down at it, and she wrote. What she wrote is between her and the book, and the ledger, which records everything, has recorded that it is not going to say. Grizel read it in the morning, standing, with her spectacles on. She corrected the spelling. She left everything else in. And at the foot of the page, where a person puts their name, there was a name, in the same hand, three letters long, and Grizel looked at it for some time, and closed the book on it, and did not write it anywhere herself, because a name in the ledger is a thing you earn from the ledger, and the ledger had not decided.

Gnomesby's fifth letter did not come. The beetle came, at dusk, without a letter, and stood on the gatepost for a long time in its enormous hat, looking at the lantern, and Mothy gave it a crumb, and it took the crumb, and it nodded, once, and went. Grizel recorded this without comment, which is her highest form of comment. She also recorded that Wick's stool was nearly ready, that Wick was asked whether it was ready, and that Wick said nearly; and that Pettigrew, on being told the frost was certain, lodged a formal complaint with the weather, which has not replied.