The Morning After

The first thing a keeper learns is that nothing happens.

Kit woke on the eighth morning in the same corner of the same room under the same coat, with the frost gone off the mushrooms and the path back to grey, and lay there for a while waiting for the difference, like someone who has been given a title overnight and expects it to have arrived in a box. It had not. The hollow was doing what the hollow does at that hour, which is to say the fliskies were up and disagreeing in the hedge, Nettie was counting, and from the gate came the sound of Mungo saying nothing, which carries.

What had changed was the ledger. It lay open on the table with yesterday's page uppermost, and at the top of yesterday's page was a word crossed out and a word written beside it, and Grizel was sitting in front of it with her spectacles on and her hands folded, not writing, which was how Kit understood that Grizel had been sitting there some time.

"There is a thing keepers do," said Grizel, without looking round, "on the first morning. I have not been able to find it."

She had been back through the ledger to the old keeper's first day, fourteen winters ago, and the old keeper's first morning was recorded, in the old keeper's own hand, as "Rained. Fed the beetle. Mungo unchanged." Grizel had read this several times and had found nothing in it to build an office on, and was, Kit could see, taking it as a personal failure of the record.

"Then I'll feed the beetle," said Kit.

The beetle, as it happened, was already on the gatepost, and had been since before light, in the plumed hat with the acorn cap on top of it, and it had brought a letter, and the letter was from Gnomesby, and it was an appeal.

The appeal ran to three pages and was signed by the Provost and witnessed by the two grumlins whose function was to be behind him, and it set out, under three heads, why the hearing at the gate had been no hearing at all. First, that the ledger was kept by a party to the dispute, and was therefore not a ledger but an opinion with a spine. Second, that the name entered in it had been entered "under the influence of shortbread." Third, and at the greatest length, that Clause Eleven made the ledger decisive and said nothing whatever about the ledger's keeper, so that the question of who was keeper of the hollow turned, properly considered, on the question of who was keeper of the book, and Gnomesby would be obliged to know.

Grizel read this three times. Then she took off her spectacles, which she does when she wishes to look at a thing without the benefit of clarity, and said, "He's right about the third one," in the voice of someone who has waited fourteen winters for an opponent worth the wait.

"What happens if he's right?" said Kit.

Grizel put the spectacles back on, which she does for bad news, so as to see it properly.

"If I am not validly the keeper of this book, then nothing in my hand is a record. It is a diary. Fourteen winters of diary. The frost dates. The slug counts. The word I wrote at the top of yesterday." She did not look at the word. "And if that word is not in a ledger, then this hollow has no keeper, and had none at the frost, and is Unkept. And Clause Seven has been sitting in the corner the whole time with its coat on."

"So I'm keeper because the book says so."

"Yes."

"And the book's the book because..."

"Because it is the book," said Grizel, rather quickly, and turned the page.

The beetle, tipped, stayed for a cup of something. This was new. It sat on the edge of the table with its hat off, which nobody had ever seen, and the hat sat beside it on the table like a second, smaller beetle, and Mothy came and sat beside the hat.

Kit wrote to the compost heap that afternoon, on Grizel's advice, to ask the old keeper what a keeper did, and put the letter in the heap herself, at the warm end, and stood there a while, because it was warm. The reply came up before dark, on a cabbage leaf, in a hand that had plainly written the first page of the ledger fourteen winters ago and had not troubled to improve. It said: "Don't."

Grizel copied it in, and underlined it, and said it was the best advice in the book.