The Report

Lady Pettigrew had never in her life had to describe herself, and on the ninth day the Court required it.

The Court had not said so. The Court says nothing. But an envoy who has been out of its sight for eight days, and has sealed a document in that time, has a report to make whether or not anybody has asked for one, and Pettigrew knew this the way she knew her own rank, which is to say precisely and without pleasure. She sat at the table with a sheet of the ledger's paper, which Grizel had given her without being asked and which she had accepted without saying so, and she composed aloud, because a person of rank does not mutter, and Grizel, across the table, was therefore present at the whole of it.

"'The envoy proceeded to the hollow.' Yes. 'The envoy stated the grievance of the Court.' Yes. 'The envoy was sat upon.'" The pen went through it. "No. 'And thereafter the envoy...'"

The pen stopped.

"Stayed," said Grizel, not looking up.

"An envoy does not stay. An envoy is posted."

"Who posted you?"

"That," said Pettigrew, "is the difficulty with the sentence."

She tried "remained." She tried "continued at the gate in the interest of the Court." She tried, at one low point towards noon, "was detained," and both of them looked down the path at the gate, where Mungo stood exactly as he had stood on the day she arrived.

"He has never detained anybody," said Grizel. "He cannot even keep them out."

Pettigrew scored it through with more force than the paper had earned.

"It is all in here," said Grizel, and turned the ledger round. "Every day. What you said and when you said it."

"The Court does not take its account of events from a grumlin record."

Then she read it. She read the whole week standing, turning each page with one finger as though it might be sticky, and she arrived at the sixth day, and at the two words "settling in," and stood over them for some time with the collar doing nothing at all. Then she went back to her sheet and wrote, in one go, scoring out nothing:

The envoy remains at her post. There is a stool.

Sorrel took it. The Court is a day's flight off and Sorrel does things, and she was over the hedge before Pettigrew had finished the sentence about how it ought to be carried, which is the correct way to receive that sentence.

Kit, meanwhile, had been sent for by Nettie, who did not regard the settlement of the mushroom patch as settled until a keeper had done something about it. What a keeper does about a mushroom patch is not in the ledger either. Kit went down and looked at the line where the hollow's mushrooms stop and Gnomesby's begin, which is invisible, and which Nettie can see.

"What do I do?"

"Ratify it."

"How?"

"You're the keeper," said Nettie, with her arms folded, in the tone of somebody who has bought a tool and expects it to know its own business.

Kit looked at the line a while longer. Then she picked a mushroom from her own side of it, and ate it.

Nettie watched her chew. "That'll do," she said. It went into the ledger as a ratification, and it is the only one there has ever been.

At dusk Pettigrew was still on the stool, facing the way Sorrel had gone.

"The Court will reply at once," she told the air. "It is known for it."

The ledger has recorded that she said so, and that her collar, which has met the Court, did not look convinced.