NIL RETURN

I have balanced a ledger every working day for nineteen years, and I should like it understood, before any of the rest of it, that on the morning they gave me the castle my sums came out exactly.

Not nearly. Not near enough for government. Exactly — down the long column and across the short one, and the two meeting at the bottom like a pair of old men agreeing about the weather. I sat for a moment with my pen up, the way you do. Outside, the capital was being Murkminster at itself: barrows, bells, a man shouting about eels with the particular joy of somebody who has been shouting about eels since four. Inside, in the third room of the Exchequer, forty-one debts had been counted and forty-one debts had been found, and the world was, for the length of one held breath, correct.

I want that on the record. It matters later.

I have never been much of a one for explaining myself, so I will do it once, here, and then we need not come back to it. I like a thing that comes out even. I was born in this city and I have never been out of it; I have spent my money in it and earned it here and buried people here, in the proper way, with the bell going slow and the north gate open and somebody's hand on my arm, and afterwards it was terrible, and afterwards it was over. That is what a city is for. You put your grief through the gate and it goes.

A ledger that balances is a small version of the same mercy. Forty-one debts counted; forty-one found; nothing left over and nothing wanting. Done with. You may close the book.

I did not know, that morning, that I was about to spend nine days walking away from the only arrangement I have ever trusted.

Then Chancellor Ruck put his head round the door and said, "Sallow. Upstairs. Bring your good coat."

I have one coat.

The rooms of the Exchequer improve as you climb, in the manner of a cake. The ground floor is where the money is counted and smells of it. The first floor is where the money is discussed. The second floor is where the money is believed in, and has a carpet.

Ruck did not sit down, which meant it would be short, and he did not offer me anything, which meant it would be unpleasant.

"Castle Bastable," he said. "Arrears."

"Yes, sir."

"You don't seem surprised."

"No, sir." I did not add that the castle's arrears are the oldest joke in the building; that the file is brought out at Yuletide; that a clerk two desks along keeps a running total on the back of a blotter and will show it to anybody who has not yet fled. Ruck knows all this. Ruck invented some of it.

"Somebody," Ruck said, "in a room above this one, has decided it has gone on long enough."

There was a pause of the kind that has a shape to it.

"How long has it gone on, sir?"

"Long enough," said Ruck, "that the question is now considered impertinent."

Here is the difficulty, and I set it out plainly because it is the whole of the difficulty and everything that came afterwards grew out of it like mould out of damp.

The Crown is owed by Castle Bastable.

Castle Bastable pays in potatoes.

The Exchequer does not accept potatoes.

That is it. That is the sum of it. You may turn it over as long as you like — I have had nineteen years and a good deal of the road since — and it will not come out any other way. The castle and its people keep their accounts in sacks; it is not a joke to them, or not only a joke, and a man out there will tell you the going rate of a King Edward with the gravity of a banker, and be right, within his own parish, to the ounce. And the Royal Exchequer of Sogmarsh, which has an opinion about everything, has exactly one opinion about the potato, and it is no.

So there is a debt that is owed and there is a payment that exists and there is no lawful surface anywhere in the realm where the two may be introduced to one another.

I said something of this to Ruck. Not the mould. The sacks.

"I am aware of the currency position," he said.

"Then may I ask what I am to bring back, sir?"

And Ruck looked at the window, and Ruck said: "Something."

The file was thin, which surprised me. A debt of that age ought to be a shelf.

It was thin because almost nothing had ever happened. There was the original warrant, in an iron ink gone the colour of a bruise. There was a bundle of Committee correspondence which I did not read then and wish I had. There was a copy of a survey. And there was a single sheet, ruled in four columns, headed:

COLLECTORS APPOINTED.

There were nine names on it.

The first four had notes beside them of the ordinary kind. Retired. Deceased. Transferred to the salt duty. Deceased. You get used to that column; it is the only place in the building where the whole of a man's employment fits between two full stops.

The fifth said: Returned. No collection. Reported the road unsatisfactory.

The sixth said: Returned. No collection.

The seventh said: Returned.

The eighth and the ninth had no notes at all, only their names, and a space where somebody had begun to write something and had then, apparently, thought better of it, because the ink stopped after one stroke and the stroke had been left there for however many years it had been, going quietly brown.

I have filled in that column myself, for other men, in other matters. There is a form of words. There are about six forms of words. Not one of them is one stroke and a gap.

"Sir," I said, "the eighth and ninth—"

"Are not your concern," said Ruck, "and are also not available to be asked."

The survey copy was the last thing in the file and the only thing in it I liked.

It was a Committee sheet, done properly: elevations, a compass rose, the castle drawn from the south with that stiff official confidence they have, all of it signed at the corner by a Sir Crispin Dampworthy, Surveyor, in letters that took up more room than the drawing deserved.

But somebody else had drawn it.

I do not know how to prove that to you and I did not know how to prove it to Ruck. I only know that I have spent nineteen years looking at documents made by people who did not want to be making them, and I know the difference between a hand that is measuring and a hand that is seeing. The measurements were Dampworthy's. The castle was not. The castle had been looked at, by somebody who found it funny.

And down in the margin, small, in a different and much better hand, where the drawing showed a courtyard and a drain and a bucket standing under a bad piece of gutter, there was a note.

I will not tell you what the note said, because it was a joke, and it was a good one, and it was the first thing that had made me laugh since the Tuesday. It was signed, if you can call it a signature, in the manner they use out there:

A. Turnip (Assistant) (Temporary).

Temporary. The sheet was dated. I did the arithmetic, because I always do the arithmetic. Whoever she was, she had been temporary for eleven years.

Ruck gave me the warrant and the seal and a travel allowance calculated by a man who has never travelled, and he did not shake my hand, and at the door he said the only kind thing anybody said to me in that building in nineteen years, which was:

"Sallow. If it does not come out — write that it did not come out. Write it plainly. Do not go making it balance."

I said, "Sir, a ledger that does not balance is not a ledger."

"No," said Ruck. "It's a record."

I did not understand him then. I thought he was being clever at me, the way the second floor is clever at the ground floor, and I went down the stairs faintly annoyed, with the file under my arm and my good coat which is my only coat, and out through the Ink Gate onto the King's Highway, and I turned east.

It is forty-seven miles from Murkminster to Castle Bastable. Three to seven days by road, official.

I have walked it now. I have walked all of it, in both directions, and I am setting this down while the figures are still exact, because I have noticed that they do not stay exact, and I would like at least one account of that road to exist in a hand that was trying to tell the truth.

Forty-seven miles.

On that first morning, that seemed to me to be a fact.

I had never slept a night outside Murkminster.

I do not say that for pity. I say it because it is a fact about a man, like his height, and it explains a good deal of what follows. Forty-three years old, and every one of those nights had been spent inside the same ring of wall, under the same four gates, listening to the same bells getting it slightly wrong. I had believed, in the vague way you believe things you have never been made to examine, that the countryside was simply Murkminster with the buildings taken away.

It is not. It is a different arrangement entirely, and one of the differences — the first one I met, and the one this chapter is about — is that in the countryside nobody has agreed how far anything is.

I left by the Ink Gate a little after seven and turned onto the King's Highway, and for the first two hours I was, I am not ashamed to say, rather enjoying myself.

The road runs south out of the capital in good order. There were carts. There were people on them who said good morning to me, which does not happen in the third room of the Exchequer. My boots — office boots, thin in the sole, and the last sensible pair I would own for some while — went along nicely. And every so often there was a milestone.

I should explain about the milestones, because they are the whole business.

All the main roads out of Murkminster are marked, and it is one of the few pieces of Crown work anybody in the realm speaks well of. The stones are sworn nine apart — that is the phrase, sworn nine apart, which I had always taken for a figure of speech and which turns out to be a legal term, and which turns out, further, to mean nine paces, or nine chains, or nine of them to the stage, depending which office you ask and what year you ask in.

I counted them. Of course I counted them. I have counted things since I was six years old; it is the only gift I have and it is not much of one, and on that morning I set myself to count paces between stones the way another man might whistle.

I walk a yard and a quarter to the pace. I have known this for nineteen years because we are measured for it when we are sworn, on the grounds that a collector who cannot pace a field cannot argue about one. A yard and a quarter to the pace is one thousand four hundred and eight paces to the mile.

I mention the figure now so that you will believe me later.

I came to the stone at about four in the afternoon and knew before I read it that there was something the matter, because I had been counting, and my count and my legs and the light were all saying five, and the stone said:

VII

Seven miles from the capital. Beside it, set back on a bit of firm ground with a yard and a bench and a sign, was an inn, and the sign said THE SEVENTH MILE, and the sign had been painted recently, and painted well, by somebody who was proud of it.

I stood in the road and did the arithmetic twice.

Seven thousand and forty paces from the Ink Gate. That is five miles exactly. Not five and a bit. Not five-and-something-I-have-rounded. Five miles, to the pace, and I would have sworn to it in any court in the realm — and I have, since, and I did not enjoy it.

So I did what I imagine any reasonable person would do, which was to assume I had made an error, and go back, and count it again.

It took me an hour and ten minutes each way. It came out at seven thousand and forty.

The landlady of the Seventh Mile was a broad, unhurried woman called Mrs Ottery, who watched me walk up the road, and then away down the road, and then up it again, and had a plate of something waiting when I finally came in, which I have always taken as the single kindest thing anybody did for me on that journey.

"You'll have been counting," she said.

I said that I had.

"Five," she said.

I put my pen down.

"How do you know it's five?"

"Because everybody who counts gets five, love. Sit down before you fall down."

Here is what Mrs Ottery told me, over a plate of something and a jug of what she called small beer, and I set it out as she gave it, because I have thought about it a great deal since.

The stone has been surveyed four times.

The first survey found seven, which is what the stone says, and which is why the stone says it.

The second survey, some years later, found five, and reported it, and was told that the stone was Crown work and the survey was not, and that the matter would be looked into.

The third survey found five and a half. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained the half, including the man who found it, who was asked to and could not.

The fourth survey found seven again — but the fourth survey was conducted by a gentleman of the Cartographic Revision Committee who had been at the brandy since Drudgeford, and who measured the road, by his own written account, "by eye, from the saddle, at a canter."

"So there you are," said Mrs Ottery comfortably. "Two sevens and two fives and a half, and the sevens win, because one of them's cut in stone and the other one's a knight."

I said that this was not a satisfactory way to run a road.

"No," she agreed. "But it's a lovely name for a pub."

I want to be honest about what I did next, because it is the least creditable thing in this account and because I would do it again.

I took the drunk.

I mean that I took the fourth surveyor — the brandy, the saddle, the canter — and I made him the answer. A stone cut wrong from a bad first survey; a bad first survey defended by pride; three later surveys ignored because the Crown does not like to be corrected in public; and a drunk knight to muddy the water at the end. That is not a mystery. That is the Exchequer on a Wednesday. I have seen worse defended for longer over less.

I opened the ledger there at the table and I wrote it up properly, in the variance column, in the form of words we are taught:

> Distance stone (VII), Murkminster road. Marked seven; measured five (paced twice, 7,040). Variance > attributed to error at original survey, uncorrected. Not material to collection. — S.

Not material to collection. Four words. I have written them perhaps a thousand times in my life. They mean: this is wrong, and it is not my wrong, and the sum still comes out.

And the sum did still come out. That is the point. Everything balanced. I had walked five miles and the road said seven, and neither of those facts cost the Crown a penny, and my ledger closed that night as neat as it had opened.

I slept upstairs, in a bed that was not in Murkminster, for the first night in my life, and I lay there a while listening to a countryside that would not shut up — water, and something in the thatch, and no bells at all, no bells anywhere, which I had not expected to mind and did.

In the morning Mrs Ottery filled my flask and would not take anything for the bed, and said, as I was getting my coat:

"You'll be the tithe, then. For the castle."

I said that I was.

She did not say anything unhelpful. She did not warn me, or go quiet, or any of the things that would have made a better story. She only said, in the same voice she'd have used about the weather:

"Last one got as far as here."

I asked which one, and she said she couldn't rightly remember, it was a good few years back, and he'd had a bad chest and a nice hat.

I did not take the list out of the file and look at the column. I had the file in my hand and I did not look, because I had a road to walk and a sum to do and I had already explained one impossible thing that morning and did not care to be offered another.

It is two-and-twenty miles from the Seventh Mile to Drudgeford.

Or nine. It depends who you ask, and I was beginning to understand that asking was the mistake.

You hear Drudgeford before you see it, and what you hear is money.

Not coin — argument. A town where everything crosses the river and everything crossing pays for the privilege is a town in which several thousand people are, at any hour of the working day, disagreeing about a figure at the top of their voices, cheerfully, with no ill will at all. I came over the rise above the crossing about noon on the third day with my feet in a condition I will not describe, and I stood there listening to it, and I thought: oh, thank God. These are my people.

I was very nearly right. That is what makes this chapter hurt.

Drudgeford knows what things cost.

I liked it, and what happened there was not its fault. It is not a frivolous town. Everything that crosses the Sog crosses at Drudgeford, and everything that crosses is weighed, counted, tolled and entered, and the entering is done properly. I spent an hour in the Toll Office out of sheer pleasure, the way another man might spend an hour in a garden. Their pitch ledger is a beautiful thing. There is a market pitch there — number fourteen, by the west range — which has been under dispute since eighteen hundred and two, and which is entered every quarter, faithfully, as contested, by clerks who were not born when the argument started and who will not see the end of it.

I asked, of course, what the dispute was about.

"Nobody's rightly sure now," said the clerk, in the fond tone you'd use about an old dog. "But it's ours."

I laughed. That is the last thing in this account that I laughed at without qualification, and I have gone back to it since, the way you do.

Then I asked my question, which was a simple one, and which I had assumed would take a minute.

How far is it to Castle Bastable?

I needed the figure for the travel allowance. That is all. Ruck's clerk had calculated my expenses on the Crown Survey distance and I had already spent two days learning what the Crown Survey is worth, and I wanted a working number from people who actually go there.

I got seven answers in one afternoon. I wrote them down as I got them, in the back of the ledger, because I am the sort of man who writes things down, and here they are, exactly as entered:

| Asked of | Given as | |---|---| | The Toll Office (official) | 47 miles. Crown Survey. Confirmed twice, in writing, with a seal. | | The market clerk's road map | Three days good, seven days real — and a note that the Committee will dispute your bill either way | | The ferryman | "Depends what the river's doing." Declined to give miles. Gave tides. | | A carrier, west range | A day and a bit to the Woods, then it depends. | | The same carrier, pressed | "Depends on the wet, and the ground, and what you're carrying — and who wants you." | | The Committee's surveying agent | 41 miles, "pending revision," and would I like to see the revision | | The Bastable factor | "About nine." |

Not one of these people was lying, or being difficult, or trying it on. Every one of them answered promptly, in good faith, and would have sworn to their figure. Two of them offered to show me the paperwork. The Bastable factor — a pleasant, boiled-looking man in a good coat gone at the cuff — said "about nine" with the calm of a man quoting scripture, and when I said nine what, he said, "About nine," again, and looked at me kindly, as if I had asked what colour blue was.

I did what I do. I made a table and I tried to reconcile it.

It cannot be done. I sat in the Market Cross that evening with the seven figures in front of me and worked at it for three hours the way I would work at any variance, and the difficulty is not that they disagree — figures disagree all day long and a competent man reconciles them. The difficulty is that they disagree in different units, and every unit is correct.

Forty-seven miles is a true statement about the ground. Three days good and seven days real is a true statement about the road. Tides are a true statement about the river. "Who wants you" is — and I did not understand this until much later — a true statement about the journey.

And about nine is a true statement about the Bastables, which is not the same thing as a statement about distance, and which is, in its way, the most accurate answer I was given all day.

You cannot add them. There is no column that takes all seven. I sat there with my pen up, the way I had sat in Murkminster four days earlier over a ledger that came out exact, and I understood, dimly and for the first time, that I had left the country where questions have answers and entered the country where they have opinions — and that nobody here considered this a problem, because nobody here had ever needed a total.

I entered the Crown figure. Forty-seven miles. It was the only one with a seal on it and it was almost certainly the wrong one, and I entered it, because the form has one box.

The Market Cross rings a barge bell at closing.

I had not heard a bell since the Ink Gate. I had not known how much I had been missing it until it went — that flat, wet, unmusical clang, nothing like Murkminster, nothing like the proper bells, and I sat in the warm with my useless table in front of me and my eyes stung, which I put down to the peat smoke, and which was not the peat smoke.

That would have been a good evening to end on.

But the Market Cross was full, and a man at the bar told me to try the quiet place near the old market hall, and I walked round there in the dark because my feet wanted the wall to lean on, and I went in, and that is where I saw the chair.

It is a small house, low, and warm, and perfectly ordinary in every respect but one.

There is a table by the window with two places laid. One of them is used. The other is laid every evening — plate, cup, knife, the lot — and cleared away untouched at closing, and laid again the next evening, and it has been done every evening for a hundred and twenty-seven years.

I asked whose it was.

The landlord did not take offence, and did not tell me. I have since learned that this is the local courtesy: everybody in that town knows, and nobody says, and a stranger who asks is simply not answered, and is given his drink, and the matter goes by. He filled my cup, and he looked at the table the way you'd look at a fence you keep meaning to mend, and he said: "It's laid, that's all. In case."

In case.

I have thought about my reaction a great deal since and I am not proud of it. I did not find it touching. I found it indecent.

I had buried people. My wife, four winters back — the spring cough that comes up out of the low quarters and takes whom it takes. And a girl, before that, small enough that one man carried the box.

I did it properly, both times, with the bell going slow and the north gate standing open. And I can tell you the exact moment each of them finished, because a man in my trade keeps the moment the way he keeps a receipt: it is when you turn from the filled ground and walk out through the open gate, and the thing that was unbearable an hour before has become, in the plain act of walking, a thing you can carry. Not gone. Carried. Light enough to lift. That is the whole of what the ceremony is for, and it worked, both times, and it is the only mercy this life hands out reliably.

And here was a town that could not be cheated on the weight of a sack of barley, laying a place every evening for a hundred and twenty-seven years, in case — a town that had never once been given the gate to walk out of, and had built this instead.

I said something. I am not going to write down what I said. It was not loud, because I am never loud, and it was not kind, and the landlord took it far better than it deserved, and said only:

"Aye. Well. You've not been out this way before."

I left Drudgeford early, before the market, when the mist was still sitting on the river and the tables in the ferry house were still cut short at one end because the river leans.

I was still angry, in the small tight way I am angry, and I was still telling myself that a laid place is sentiment and sentiment is not a fact and none of it goes in any column.

It is a day and a bit to the Woods.

That is what the carrier said, and the carrier turned out to be the only person in Drudgeford who told me the exact truth about anything, and I have often wondered since whether he knew it.

The Woods begin without telling you.

There is no edge to them. The road out of Drudgeford goes east through open ground and then through ground with some trees on it and then, at some point you cannot afterwards identify, you are in woodland, alder and willow standing in water, and the light has gone the colour of weak tea, and you have been in the Woods for some while without having entered them.

I mention it because it is the first honest thing the country did to me. Everything since Murkminster had been a wrong figure. This was not a wrong figure. This was simply a place that did not have a boundary, and my objection to it was mine, not the wood's.

I had eleven names in my roll and a day and a half of daylight, and I thought that would be plenty.

I should set out the entries, because they are the point of this chapter and because I have them still.

The tithe roll for that district carries, under its own heading, a village of eleven households. Eleven liable persons, one to a house. Every one of them entered in the proper form: name, holding, sum owing, sum paid, date of payment, hand of the receiving officer.

They had paid.

That is the thing I want understood before anything else. Not "they had a debt." They had paid — every quarter, in full, on time, going back further than the ledger I was carrying, which went back further than me. Eleven households, in the poorest corner of a poor district, discharging their obligation to the Crown with a regularity that would embarrass most of Murkminster.

And their names were on it. All eleven. In full.

I did not think anything of that at the time. It took me until the second evening to understand what I was holding, and I will come to it.

The village was called Lowmoss.

It is not on the Committee sheet.

I checked, standing in the road with the file open against my chest and the damp getting into it, because I am a methodical man and the first thing a methodical man does is consult the map. The Committee's survey of that district is a fine piece of work. It shows the road, the ground, the water, the standing timber, three tracks and a well. Where Lowmoss ought to be there is woodland, drawn carefully, and across the woodland, in the small tidy hand they use for observations, there is a note.

The note says:

> bog vapour, persistent.

That is all. That is the Crown's entire recorded finding on the subject of eleven households paying tithe since before living memory: weather.

I laughed at that too. I was still laughing at things, on the fourth day.

I looked for it for a day and a half.

I am not going to make an adventure of this, because it was not one. It was the most tedious failure of my professional life. I did what you do: I took the road as my datum, walked it, marked my paces, took each track in turn, walked it out, walked it back, and struck it off. I gridded a wood. On the second morning I went at it properly with a compass and a stick and I quartered the ground north of the road in strips, and I did it well, and I would defend the method to anybody.

There is nothing there. That is not a figure of speech, and it is not the beginning of a ghost story. There is woodland, and standing water, and mist that comes up off it in the afternoon exactly as the Committee observed, and three tracks that go in and come out again, and a great deal of my own bootprint.

I asked people, because people are better than compasses.

This is the part I have never been able to explain to anybody in Murkminster.

Nobody denied it existed.

I want to be precise, because the precision is the whole of it. If a village did not exist, you would be told so. "No such place." "Never heard of it." "You've the wrong district, sir." I have been told all three about places that did exist, by people who did not want a tithe-man in them. I know that music by heart.

This was not that. I asked a man cutting withies and he said, "Oh aye," and went on cutting. I asked a woman on the Mucklecombe track and she said Lowmoss was that way, and pointed, and the way she pointed was a wood. I asked a boy with a hurdle and he told me it was eleven minutes.

"Eleven minutes from where?"

"From the gate," he said, meaning the castle, which was two days off.

"And from here?"

He thought about it with real effort, wanting to help. "Four hours," he said. "If you don't know the way."

I said that I did not know the way, and asked whether he would show me, and I offered him money, and he said yes very cheerfully, and we walked for four hours, and at the end of it we were on the Mucklecombe track about a mile east of where we had started, and he was perfectly satisfied, and I have never seen anybody less dishonest in my life.

That was the second evening, and that was when I read the eleven names properly, sitting on a fallen alder with my feet wrecked and the light going.

I had read them a dozen times as figures. I had not read them as names.

I have to explain something about the people of that district, and I did not know it then; I have learned it since and it has cost me some sleep. The households out there are servants' households — the castle's people, the ones who go up and work and come back down. And the castle does not use their names. The castle numbers them. It has done it for six hundred years, and it does it for reasons of convenience which were doubtless excellent at the time, and the numbers run to ninety-nine, and when the roll turns over the old number is crossed out and a new one is entered, and the person who had it is not mentioned again.

They are numbers up there. All of them. For their whole working lives.

And on my roll — on a Crown tithe roll, drawn up by the Exchequer for the sole purpose of extracting money from them — they are:

> eleven people, by name, in full, with their fathers' names after them, entered in ink, and paid up.

Because a tithe roll is a legal instrument. You cannot levy on a number. The law requires the name of the person liable, entered correctly, or the levy fails.

So the cruellest document anybody has ever pointed at those eleven households is also the only place in the realm where they are written down as themselves.

I sat on that log for a long time. I am not going to make more of it than that. I had spent nineteen years being the most hated man in three counties and I had made my peace with it years ago on the grounds that the ledger is not me, and that a man may keep a cruel book kindly, and that the arithmetic does not care who holds the pen.

And then I found out that my cruel book was the only one out there that had bothered to write their names down.

I did not feel better. I felt considerably worse, and I have never entirely got over it, and it is the reason I am writing any of this at all.

They came out to me on the third morning.

I did not find them; I want that stated plainly, because in the years since I have heard the story told the other way and it is not true and it matters. I did not find Lowmoss. I have never found Lowmoss. On the third morning I was on the track packing my things to go on to Mucklecombe, having failed, and there was a woman standing at the edge of the trees with a hand-cart.

On the cart was the tithe. Eleven households' worth, made up in eleven lots, each lot labelled in pencil with the name of the house it came from, in a good clear hand.

It was potatoes.

Of course it was potatoes. It was always going to be potatoes. I had known since the second floor of the Exchequer that it would be potatoes, and I had walked four days and gridded a wood and I stood there on that track and looked at eleven neat labelled lots of a currency I am forbidden by statute to accept.

She waited while I worked through it. She had clearly seen a man work through it before.

I said: "I can't take it."

"No," she agreed.

"It isn't — " I stopped, because the next words were it isn't money, and I could hear how they would sound to somebody standing in the wet at seven in the morning beside a cart she had loaded in the dark. "The Exchequer won't accept it. It has to be coin. I'm sorry. It has always had to be coin."

"We know," she said. "We send it anyway."

"Why?"

And she looked at me as though I had asked what colour blue was — the second time in a week that a person had looked at me like that, and I was beginning to dislike it.

"Because we've paid," she said. "It's for the book. So it says we've paid."

I did not accept that and go, which is what a wiser man would have done. I worked the problem, because it is the only thing I am, and because for about ten minutes I was certain I had solved it.

I would buy it. Not the Crown — me. I had a travel allowance in my bag, worked out by a man who had never travelled and generous accordingly; I would purchase the eleven lots at a fair price, out of my own pocket, render that coin to the Exchequer against the debt, and the sum would come out. Eleven households who had paid would be recorded as having paid. The only person a farthing worse off would be me, which I could bear, and had half a mind to enjoy.

I put it to her. She heard me out, and when I had finished she asked the one question that took the whole thing down.

"At what price?"

I opened my mouth to say the going rate, and shut it again.

Because there is no going rate — not one the Crown can see. The Exchequer does not accept potatoes, and a thing it will not accept is a thing it cannot value, and a thing it cannot value has, in the eye of the only law that governed my errand, no price at all. I could not buy the lots for the Crown, because to the Crown they were worth nothing. And I could not buy them with coin of my own and enter it as a payment, because then it was me paying the castle's tithe out of pity, on a Crown form, which is a thing the form has no box for and which the second floor would, on a clear day, be entitled to call a fraud.

I had found the way through, and the way through was a wall with my own face painted on it. I put the purse away. She watched me do it and did not say she was sorry, because she had known before I began, and had let me find it out myself, which was a kindness and felt like one.

Then I marked them in arrears.

Every one. Eleven households, eleven names, eleven sums, and against each of them, in my own hand, in the column provided: in arrears — tender refused (kind). It is the correct entry. It is what the statute requires and what my oath requires and I would be obliged to make the same entry today.

That is the sum of my professional achievement in the Woods: I went in with eleven people who had paid, and I came out with eleven people who owed, and neither the money nor the potatoes moved an inch.

At the bottom of the page, where there is room for the receiving officer's remark, I wrote the truest thing I had put in that ledger since leaving the capital, and it took me three attempts to get it short enough for the box:

> Tithe tendered in full and refused for form. These persons are not in default.

It has no legal effect whatever. Ruck could have told me that. Ruck did tell me that, four days earlier, on the second floor, and I had not understood a word of it: write that it did not come out; do not go making it balance.

She turned the cart round to go back in, and I asked her — because I still had the file in my hand and eleven names in it and I had been four days learning to ask better questions — whether she would tell me hers.

"Hettie," she said. "Hettie Turnip."

I said thank you, and I wrote it down, though there was no column for it and no reason on earth to have it.

It is still there. It is the only entry in nineteen years of ledgers that I made for no purpose at all.

Mucklecombe took me in the way a dry room takes in a wet dog: without ceremony, and with some remarks.

I came up the track from the Woods on the fifth day looking, I am told, like something the Drownings had rejected. My coat had stopped being a colour. I had four days of road on me and a night in a wood I would rather not discuss and eleven names I could not stop thinking about. A woman on the green looked me over with the frankness of a person pricing a horse and said, "You'll want the Arms, and you'll want it before you want anything else," and I said that I was the tithe, and she said, "Aye, well. You'll still want the Arms," and that was the whole of my reception.

They knew what I was inside four minutes. Villages always do. And they gave me stew anyway, which is more than Drudgeford managed and considerably more than Murkminster would have.

I should say plainly what Mucklecombe is, because it is the reason this chapter is short of incident and I am glad of it.

It is a sensible place.

That sounds like faint praise and it is the highest compliment I know how to pay. There is a green with a maypole leaning at an angle everybody has agreed not to correct. There is a chapel. There is the Arms, with cellars that are somehow dry in a district where nothing is dry, which the landlord attributes to good building and everybody else attributes to the landlord's mother. And there is Goodwife Muckle, who is not an official of any kind, and who runs the place in the manner of a keel: invisibly, and completely.

She came and sat opposite me while I was eating and said, "You'll be here about the Fothering holding."

I was not. I had never heard of the Fothering holding. But I had learned by then that the correct answer to anything said to me in that district was tell me more, so I said that I would be glad to look at it, and she told me, and by the end of the telling I was.

It was the dullest possible dispute and I want to describe it in full, because after the Woods I would have walked to the Hem for a dull dispute.

A holding on the north side had been assessed years back at a certain acreage. The family had always paid on that figure. Then a Committee man came through — the same brandy-and-saddle article who did the Seventh Mile, by the sound of him, though I could not prove it — and produced a new figure, larger, at a canter, and the assessment went up, and the family had been paying the larger figure for six years while writing letters that were answered by other letters.

"They can pay it," said Goodwife Muckle. "That's not it."

"What's it?"

"It's wrong," she said.

So I measured a field.

I want to record that it took me the better part of a day and that it was the happiest day of that entire journey and probably of that entire year.

I did it properly, because there was no other way I wanted to do it. I borrowed a chain from the smith. I had two lads hold it, who were extremely interested for the first twenty minutes and thereafter had to be found repeatedly. I ran the boundaries; I took the awkward corner by the ditch twice; I did the arithmetic sitting on a gate with the wind trying to take the page, and I did it three times because the third time is free.

And it came out.

Not nearly. Exactly. The old assessment — the original, the one the family had always paid, the one written down before any of us were born by some long-dead clerk who had gone out with a chain and done his job — was right to within a fraction that I could not honestly call a difference. The Committee's figure was out by better than a fifth, in the Crown's favour, at a canter.

I sat on that gate in the wind and I laughed out loud, alone, like an idiot.

The ground had an answer. After the stone that said seven and the seven distances and the wood with a village in it and no village in it, I had put a chain on a piece of Sogmarsh and asked it a question, and it had given me the same answer twice, and the same answer a dead clerk had got a century before. It was the first honest number anybody had handed me since the Ink Gate, and it came out of a wet field.

I wrote it up. I wrote it up beautifully. Sixteen years of dry entries and I put my whole heart into that one: the old assessment reinstated, the Committee's revision struck, the overpayment quantified to the penny and entered as due back, with a note of the method, the chain, the date, and the two lads.

Then the thing happened that I have not managed to explain to anybody since.

I read it out to them in the Arms that evening, because that is the practice — a variance in the family's favour is read aloud so the parish hears it — and I got to the end of the overpayment figure, and there was a pause, and the room said thank you.

Nobody thanks a tithe-man.

I want to be exact about this, because it is a professional fact and not a piece of sentiment. In nineteen years I have been sworn at in four dialects, had a dog set on me twice, been prayed over, been offered bribes of a startling variety and once, memorably, a goat. I have been called by my own name in the street in a tone that made a child cry. I have never once been thanked, because the arithmetic is not on your side and everybody knows whose side it is on, and a man in my coat who expects gratitude has misunderstood his job.

They thanked me. The old man whose holding it was shook my hand and could not say anything at all, and his wife said something brisk to cover it, and somebody put a drink in front of me that I had not asked for, and Goodwife Muckle said, "Well. That's that put right, then," in the voice of a woman closing a door properly.

Put right. Two words. A thing that was wrong, and then was looked at, and then was not wrong any more, and then was over.

I had not heard anything finish since Murkminster.

The map is on the wall of the Arms, and I looked at it a long time that night, and it taught me something I have been chewing on ever since.

It is scratched into the plaster. It has been added to for generations, by anybody who felt they had something to add, in charcoal and chalk and in one place what I am fairly sure is soot from a candle. There is no scale on it. There is no compass. There is no border, no cartouche, no seal, and no surveyor's name, because no surveyor has ever been within a mile of it.

It shows the green, the chapel, the Arms and the well. It shows which field floods, marked with wavy lines by somebody who was tired of explaining. It shows a hedge with a gap in it and whose hedge it is. It shows the dry path. It shows, very small, a spot on the lane north of the chapel that Elias Podd will not walk past after dark, and does not say why, and has not said why for as long as anybody can remember.

And out at the edges, where the plaster runs out, there are three notes, and that is the entire remainder of the world:

> the Castle (don't) · the Marsh (don't) · away

I had, in my file, at that moment: a Crown Survey with a seal on it, a Committee sheet explaining a village with weather, a market clerk's road map, a toll ledger, and seven mutually contradictory distances I had been given by people who were all certain.

And the most accurate map I had seen in five days was scratched on a pub wall by people who could not agree on the spelling of it — because it is the only one that does not claim anything it does not know.

It does not say how far away the castle is. It says don't. Which was, as it turned out, the correct figure.

I slept well.

I want that in, because it is the last time. I had a dry bed over the dry cellars, and a field that had come out exactly, and a room that had said thank you, and I slept like a man with a balanced book.

There was one thing, and I dealt with it the way I dealt with everything on that road, which was badly.

They had mentioned, over the stew, in passing, the way you mention the weather, that the vestry still meets under the old incumbent, who has been dead some while, and who chairs it, and who is generally held to have improved.

I laughed. Everybody laughed; it is a joke out there, it is their joke, and it is a good one.

And then at about three in the morning I lay in that dry bed in the dark and thought: they laughed the way Drudgeford didn't. Drudgeford lays a place and does not talk about it. Mucklecombe laughs about a dead man who has not left his post.

And I thought, quite clearly, in the way you do think at three in the morning: nobody out here seems able to put anything down.

And then I turned over and told myself I was tired, and that a joke is a joke, and that I had measured a field that day and it had come out, and that the world was therefore in working order.

It is four miles to Nettlewick, and they told me the bread there is the best in the realm, and that is the last piece of information I received on that journey which turned out to be straightforwardly true.

The bread at Nettlewick is the best in the realm, and I have never heard anybody dispute it, and I am not going to be the first.

I say that plainly at the start because everything else in this chapter is difficult, and because the bread is not a metaphor for anything. It is simply very good bread, made by people who have been making it in the same ovens for a long time in a district where flour arrives damp, and the fact that they manage it at all is the most impressive piece of engineering between Murkminster and the sea.

They gave me some. They also, and I noticed it, did not give me a name to write down.

Nettlewick is four miles from Mucklecombe and about four hundred years further out.

You see the ribbons before the houses. That is the first thing anybody tells you about the place and it is accurate: the trees along the last stretch of track have rags tied to them, hundreds of rags, in every colour that cloth goes when it has been out in weather — reds gone brown, blues gone grey, some so old they are more idea than fabric. There is a clearing behind the houses with a fire pit at the middle of it and herb plots fenced against the goats and a woven arch of living willow at the entrance that somebody has been training for longer than I have been alive.

And in the estate ledger, which I had in my bag, that clearing is entered as follows:

> Waste. No rent.

Two words and a judgement. I had read it in the Exchequer without a flicker. It is the commonest entry in the book. It means: nothing grows here, nobody profits, do not trouble the column.

My business at Nettlewick was small and, I thought, mechanical.

The Committee's revision — the same canter, the same brandy, the same man, following him about that district like a smell — had flagged the clearing as potentially assessable, on the grounds that it was plainly in use, and had recommended it be looked at by somebody with a chain. That somebody was me. I had a form. The form has boxes.

I want to walk through the form, because the form is the chapter.

Holding: extent. I could do that. I did do that. It is a little over two acres and I paced it and it behaved.

Holding: in whose occupation? This is where it began.

"Whose ground is this?"

"It's the clearing," said the woman who kept it.

"Yes. Who holds it?"

"Anybody who needs it."

I explained — patiently, I think; I was still fresh — that the Crown does not levy on anybody. The Crown levies on a named person in occupation. If nobody holds it, it is waste and I go away. If somebody holds it, they are liable, and I write their name.

"Then it's waste," she said, comfortably.

"But it's in use."

"Yes."

"Those are different things."

"No," she said, "they're not," and offered me more bread.

Holding: yield.

"What does it produce?"

She looked at the herb beds, which were producing, visibly, in front of us. She was not playing with me. She thought about it properly, the way the boy in the Woods had thought about four hours, wanting to give me something I could use.

"Comfrey," she said at last. "Some years."

"And?"

"And it takes things off people."

I asked her to say that again, and she said it again in exactly the same words, and I wrote comfrey in the box, which was a lie by omission, and which is the entry that is on the roll to this day.

She told me about the ribbons without being asked, while I was doing the extent, in the tone of somebody explaining where the privy is.

You bring a piece of cloth. It should be yours — worn, preferably; something that has been against you. You tie it on, and you say the thing, out loud or not as you please, and then you go home.

And then you leave it there. And the weather gets at it. And over a year, or five, or fifteen, the cloth goes thin and goes to threads and goes to nothing, and by the time there is nothing left of it, the trouble it was tied for is supposed to be finished with you.

"Does it work?" I asked, because I am the sort of man who asks that.

"It takes as long as it takes," she said. "That's the point of it. You can't hurry a rag."

I had spent five days assembling a complaint, and been rather pleased with it: that nothing out here could be put down.

And here was a two-acre clearing entered in the estate books as waste, no rent, whose only crop — in the one sense that mattered — was letting things go.

They had built a machine for finishing, out of rags and a hedge and fifteen years, and the Crown had valued it at nothing, and I stood in front of it with a form that had no box for it, and I had buried people in a city with a bell and a gate and a ceremony, and thought, until that moment, that we were the ones who knew how it was done.

Then the counting.

I want to set this out carefully, because it is small and stupid and it is the first thing on that road I have never been able to put a lid on.

I counted the ribbons. Of course I counted the ribbons. It was going in the box marked observations and I have counted things since I was six years old and it is the only gift I have.

The first count was two hundred and eleven.

I did not like the way I had done it — I had come at the tree from the track side and lost my place round the back — so I did it again, properly, working left to right, marking with my thumb.

Two hundred and forty.

That is not a small discrepancy. That is not miscounting. I have counted a market's takings in a crowd. I counted a funeral once, at the door, because I could not think what else to do with my hands. Twenty-nine ribbons is not a slip of attention; it is a different tree.

I did it a third time, slowly, out loud, with the woman standing there watching me do it, and I got two hundred and twenty-six, and I stopped, because my voice had gone peculiar and I did not want her to hear it.

She did not say anything clever. She did not smile, or look knowing, or any of the things that would have let me be angry, which would have been a great relief. She waited until I had put the pencil away and then she said, in the exact tone she had used about the comfrey:

"Aye. It's a lot of them."

The wind. That is what I put.

There was a wind that afternoon — a real one, off the Drownings — and the branches were moving, and the rags overlap, and some of them are threads and it is a matter of judgement whether a thread is a ribbon or the remains of one, and a reasonable man counting a moving tree in a wind three times may reasonably get three figures.

I wrote approx. 220 in the observations box and I underlined approx., which I have never done before or since, and I knew while I was underlining it that I was lying to a form, which is the only professional sin I have ever cared about.

Because at the Seventh Mile I got five, and five, and five. It was wrong and it was steady. A wrong, steady number is a clerical problem and I have eaten a thousand of them for breakfast.

This was not steady. This was the ground declining to hold still while I looked at it, and the ground had picked the one thing I do — the only thing I do — to be unsteady about.

She offered me a rag at the arch, on the way out. Just held it out. Not solemn about it. A strip off something grey.

I said, "I'm a Crown officer," which is not a reason, and which I have thought about approximately once a week for the rest of my life.

She put it back in her apron without any fuss at all and said the last thing anybody said to me that day:

"It'll keep. They mostly do."

It is six miles from Nettlewick to the Poxbury lodge gates, and the road climbs, and you can see the castle from the second mile.

I saw it that afternoon for the first time — a long way off, on its rise, with the smoke going up off the east side that everybody had told me about and nobody had explained.

And I stopped in the road and got out the file and looked, at last, at the column I had not looked at in Mrs Ottery's parlour four days before: COLLECTORS APPOINTED, nine names, and the notes going Retired. Deceased. Transferred. Deceased. Returned. Returned. Returned. — and then the two with nothing after them but a single stroke of ink and a gap.

I stood there a while with the wind coming up the road.

Then I put it away and walked on, because the alternative was to turn round, and I had a form to complete, and I have never in my life left a form incomplete.

Poxbury is the handsomest thing in the Bogmoor and it would like you to know it.

You come up out of the wet through a lodge gate with urns on it, and the ground stops being ground and becomes grounds, and there is gravel, and the gravel has been raked, and somebody rakes it again after you. There are trees planted in the shape of an opinion. There is a lake that was a bog until it was told otherwise. After five days of a country that does exactly as it pleases, Poxbury hits you like a shout in a library.

They received me with enormous civility. That is worth saying, because it did not have to happen. A tithe-man at the lodge gate of a great house is usually kept standing in the yard as a point of principle. I was taken in, and given cider, which was excellent, and sat in a room hung with hunting prints of a sort I would rather not describe in detail — a good deal of teeth in them, and everything happening slightly closer to the viewer than is comfortable — and told that the family would be delighted.

The family was delighted. They were, all the way through and without exception, charming to me, and they were entirely serious, and they were entirely certain, and not one of them was a fool.

The trouble at Poxbury is a hedge.

I had better set out the position as it was given to me, twice, by both parties, in full, with documents.

There is a hedge on the eastern side of the estate. It is a real hedge. It is standing there now; you can walk up to it and put your hand on it, and I did. Beyond it, historically, lies a field, and the field is claimed by Poxbury and it is claimed with equal conviction by House Grimshaw on the other side, and the dispute has been running, in one form or another, for four hundred years.

The difficulty is not the hedge. The hedge is fine.

The difficulty is that nobody can now locate the field.

Not "the boundary is disputed." The field. There is ground out there — a great deal of it — and there is the hedge, and somewhere in the arrangement is a parcel that two families have been at war over since before the Exchequer had a second floor, and no living person can walk you to its corners.

The Poxbury estate map shows it clearly, with the boundary marked in a firm hand and a row of small defensive spikes along the line, which I took at first for a decorative convention and which I am now fairly sure was sincere.

The Grimshaw map shows it equally clearly, in a different place.

And the Bastable sheet — I had a copy, being on my way there — does not show it at all. Where it ought to be there is a note in the margin, and the note reads, in its entirety:

> nothing here. never was.

I checked the roll, because that is my job and because by then I badly wanted my job to be the thing I was doing.

Grimshaw's Hedge is entered in the Crown books as not chargeable.

I read it twice. Not chargeable. No assessment, no yield, no liability, no revenue, nothing. Four hundred years of legal action, two families, God knows what in fees, over a parcel of ground the Crown does not consider worth a farthing and has never taxed.

I had no business with it whatsoever. It was not Crown work; it was not on my warrant; nobody had asked me to touch it, and if I had walked past it and gone on to the castle nobody in Murkminster would ever have known or cared.

I offered to survey it.

I offered before the cider was finished. I heard myself do it. And I have had a long time to think about why, and the answer is not creditable and it is not complicated: I had measured a field at Mucklecombe two days before and it had come out exactly, and it was the last good thing that had happened to me, and I wanted another one.

I went out with the chain on the second morning with the Poxbury agent and a Grimshaw man who had been sent over on the understanding that this was not a concession of anything.

We ran the line from the Poxbury mark — a stone at the corner of the long covert, established by the survey of the year the family always cites, and perfectly good.

It gave a line. A clean one. Chain, offsets, corners; I did it properly and I did it twice and it agreed with itself to within a hand's breadth. Under that line, the field is Poxbury's, and it always was, and the Grimshaws have been trespassing for four centuries.

Then we walked back and ran the line again from the Grimshaw mark, which is a different stone, half a mile south, established by a different survey in a different year, and equally perfectly good.

It gave a line. A clean one. It agreed with itself. Under that line the field is Grimshaw's, and always was, and the Poxburys are the encroachers.

Both surveys were correct. I did not make an error. Both lines are right, and they are eleven acres apart.

The agent asked me, on the walk back, which one was true, and I did not answer him, because I was working something out that I should have worked out twenty years earlier and had never once needed to.

A boundary is not in the ground.

That is all. That is the whole of it. There is nothing in soil that is a boundary. You cannot dig one up. The chain does not find the line; the chain finds the distance from a mark that people agreed to — and the agreement is the boundary, and the mark is only a note of it. Where the agreement survives, my chain is an instrument of truth and it is a joy to use one. Where the agreement has been lost, the chain is a very good device for measuring a wrong thing accurately.

At Mucklecombe the agreement had survived. A dead clerk had gone out with a chain, and the family had gone on paying on his figure, and the ground and the paper and the people were all still holding hands. That is why it came out. It did not come out because the world is orderly. It came out because nobody in Mucklecombe had let go of the rope.

Out here, both ends of the rope had been let go of four hundred years ago, and the two houses had been hauling ever since on lines attached to nothing, with tremendous vigour and impeccable documentation.

I had spent nineteen years believing I measured facts. I stood in a wet field on the Poxbury side of a hedge and understood that I had spent nineteen years measuring agreements, and that the difference had never mattered before because I had never in my life been anywhere the agreements had failed.

I went in and told them.

I told them well, I think. I laid out both surveys, and the two stones, and the two years, and I explained — carefully, without condescension, because they were not fools — that neither family was lying and neither family was mistaken, and that the surviving marks were irreconcilable, and that there was therefore no fact of the matter to be found in the ground.

And then I said the thing I had been building towards since the lodge gate, and I said it with real warmth, because by then I wanted it more than they did:

"But it can be settled. Not found — settled. Split it. Take the mean line between the two surveys, get both houses to set their hands to it, and I will chain it, and mark it, and lodge it, and it is done. Today. It is eleven acres of not very good grazing. You would both lose about five and a half and never think of it again."

There was a pause of a kind I had not heard before.

The Dowager put her cup down. And she said — kindly; that is the part I cannot get past; she said it as one says a hard truth to a young person:

"Mr Sallow. What on earth would we do then?"

I did not understand. I said something about the fees, and the cost, and four hundred years.

And they explained it to me, all of them, talking over one another, entirely good-humoured, and I got it at last, and I have never been able to un-get it.

The dispute is the oldest thing either family owns.

It is older than the house at Poxbury and older than the Grimshaw line and older than the Exchequer. It is the thing their grandfathers taught them and the thing they will teach their children; it is what the two families have of each other; it is the reason there is any relation at all between two houses six miles apart who would otherwise never have spoken. There are letters. There are rituals. There is a Christmas custom, involving a goose and a formal insult, that I have promised not to describe.

Settle it and there is no more war. And after four hundred years, no more war means no more Grimshaws, in the only sense in which the Grimshaws have ever mattered to Poxbury.

"It's not a problem, Mr Sallow," the Dowager said. "It's an arrangement."

I left the next morning, early, and they filled my flask and sent a man to the gate with me, and were very sorry I could not stay, and meant it.

Six days out of the capital, and on that last road, with the castle getting larger, the thing I had been circling since the Ink Gate finally held still long enough to be looked at. It is not that this country cannot finish things. It is that nobody out here wants to. An ending, out here, is simply reckoned too expensive, and they have all quietly declined to pay it.

And I had come out from a city that ends everything — a bell, a gate, a ceremony, a column that closes — carrying a book that must balance, on my way to a house that has not paid since anybody can remember.

The smoke off the east side was very clear by then. You could see individual windows.

And I thought, with my whole chest, the most foolish thing a grown man has ever thought:

They will be reasonable at the castle. It is a great house. Great houses keep books.

The gate stood open, and a man came out to take my bag, and I was expected.

I want to put that first because I had spent six days building a castle in my head, and it was not that castle. There were no locked doors. Nobody was rude to me. In nineteen years I have never been received anywhere with such complete, unhurried, genuine courtesy as I was received at Castle Bastable, and I have thought about that a great deal since, and I have concluded that it costs a house nothing to be gracious about a debt it has no mechanism for paying.

The east side was burning. You could see it from the road and you could see it from the yard and there was a haze of it in the upper corridors that got into your throat by evening. Nobody mentioned it. When I mentioned it — on the first night, carefully, in the way you raise a death in the family — the steward said, "Ah, yes," in the tone of a man agreeing that it had been a wet spring, and offered me more of something.

It has been alight, in one part or another, since long before anybody now living came into service. It is not an emergency. It has had a hundred years to become a feature, and it has taken every one of them.

Lord Bastable received me on the second morning and was delighted.

He is a large, kind, entirely untroubled man and he shook my hand with both of his, and said that the Crown had been very patient, and that he had always said this ought to be sorted out, and that he was extremely glad I had come.

I said that I hoped we might settle it.

"Absolutely," he said. "Wonderful. How far did you come?"

"Forty-seven miles, my lord. Officially."

"About nine," said Lord Bastable comfortably.

I said, with the last of my professional courage, that I did not think it could be nine.

He patted my arm. "About nine," he said again — not correcting me; agreeing with me; the way you agree with weather — and went off to see about a horse, and I stood in the hall for a moment with the smoke in it and understood that I had just been given, by the man himself, the most honest figure on the entire journey. It was not a distance. It was never a distance. It was a statement about how much the Bastables intend to know about anything.

Now the accounts, which are the reason there is a chapter and not a paragraph.

They gave me everything. That is the thing I could never make Ruck understand afterwards. I did not have to ask twice; I did not have to threaten; the steward put me in a dry room with a fire and brought me the books himself and asked whether I wanted the earlier ones too, and when I said yes he brought those, and when I asked at ten at night for a specific quarter from a specific decade a boy went and got it and was pleased with himself for finding it.

The books are magnificent, and I say so as a man who has audited three hundred estates. The hand is good, the entries are prompt, the arithmetic within each book is impeccable. Somebody down there has been keeping accounts properly for six hundred years.

And you cannot total them.

Not "they are hidden." Not "they are false." I have found false books; false books are almost restful. This is not that.

Here is how it goes. The household book balances — against the kitchen book. The kitchen book balances — against the estate book. The estate book balances against the tenancy roll; the tenancy roll balances against the labour book; the labour book balances against the household book.

And that is the whole of it. That is the entire structure. Every book in that castle is reconciled against another book in that castle, and the chain closes, and there is nothing at the end of it that touches the outside world. There is no anchor. There is no point at which the castle's accounts are checked against anything that is not also the castle.

It is perfectly consistent and it cannot be audited. It has been perfectly consistent, and unauditable, since before the Exchequer existed to be annoyed about it. Six hundred years of flawless internal bookkeeping, closed in a ring, balancing forever against itself.

I sat with it for two days. I am good at this — it is the one thing besides counting that I am good at — and I want to say clearly that I did not fail through lack of skill. There is no total. Not a hidden total; not a difficult total. The sum I was sent to collect does not exist as a number, and no arithmetic performed by any person will make it exist, because there is nothing outside the ring to measure it against.

On the second evening I tried to force it: I took the tenancy roll and started building an external figure from the ground up, holding by holding, the way you would value a stranger's estate. I got four pages in before I understood that I was doing it in potatoes, because that is the unit the ground out there is measured in, and that the moment I converted to coin I would be inventing a number and calling it a finding.

That is what they mean, in our trade, when they say the ink goes potato-shaped. I had always taken it for a joke about the district. It is not a joke. It is a precise description of what happens to your work.

They offered to pay. That is the part nobody in Murkminster has ever believed.

The steward came to me on the third day, apologetically, and said that the household had discussed it, and that they were anxious to make a gesture, and that they could go to — and he named a figure, and the figure was enormous, and it was in sacks.

I said I could not accept it.

"No," he said. "No, we thought that. But we wanted it minuted that it was offered."

And he waited, with his hands folded, until I got out the ledger and minuted that it was offered.

I met the eighth collector on the fourth day, in the stable yard, and I did not know that was who he was until we had been talking for some time.

He is an old man now. He does something about the tack; I am not sure it is a real post. He was perfectly willing to talk to me — pleased to, in fact; he remembered the Exchequer, and asked after two men who have been dead for twenty years, and I did not have the heart.

I asked him — carefully — how long he had been at the castle.

He thought about it. He was not being evasive. He simply had to work at it, the way you work at a sum you have not done for a while.

"I came about the tithe," he said.

I said, "So did I."

"Aye," he said. "Well." And then, after a while: "I did mean to go back."

I asked him what had happened. He was not frightened, and he was not warning me, and there was nothing behind his eyes but an old man in a yard on a cold morning. He said that nothing had happened. That the weather had been bad for a week, and then there had been a thing with the horses, and then it was Yuletide, and they were short-handed, and he had made himself useful, and it had all been perfectly reasonable at each stage, and he could not now point to the day on which not-going-back had become staying.

"It wasn't a decision," he said. "That's the thing of it. I never once decided."

And he went back to the tack, and I stood in that yard and I understood the two names in my file with a single stroke of ink after them, and the understanding was not the least bit supernatural, and I have never been so frightened in my life.

I began, from that hour, to plan my leaving. Not to decide to leave. To plan it, in writing, with times on it, because I had just been shown precisely how a reasonable man does not leave a place, and it does not happen all at once, and it does not announce itself, and at no point does it feel like anything but a sensible week.

I found the hand that evening, in the long room where they keep the estate papers.

I was not looking for it. I was pulling the survey copies for the boundary — Poxbury was still in my bag like a stone in a boot — and there were the Committee sheets, the originals this time, Dampworthy's, and there was the same beautiful margin, the same joke, in the same hand as the copy in my file.

There were dozens of them. Years of them. Somebody had been drawing that castle, properly, for a very long time, and signing none of it, and putting one small joke in the corner of each sheet where the surveyor would not look.

I asked the steward whose hand it was.

"Oh," he said. "That'll be Sixty-One's grandmother."

She was in the same room within the hour, because they sent for her, and because at Castle Bastable when a Crown officer asks for somebody, somebody comes.

She was older than the sheets had made me expect and she came in with her hands wet from something and stood in the way people stand when they have been sent for and do not know why, and the steward said, "A. Turnip. The gentleman was asking about the drawings," and went out.

I said that the drawings were the best I had seen in nineteen years of looking at drawings, which was true.

She said thank you, and waited, because she thought that was the whole of it.

I asked how long she had been assistant.

"Eleven years."

"It says temporary."

"Aye," she said, and for the first time something went across her face, and it was not sorrow, it was amusement — the same thing that was in the margins — and she said: "It's said that a while."

And then I asked her the question, and I want to set down exactly how I asked it, because I got it wrong and she was kind about it.

I said: "What is your name?"

And she said, "A. Turnip," which is what is written on the sheets, and what the steward had called her, and what the castle has called her since she came into service, and she said it perfectly readily, because it was a reasonable answer to the question I had actually asked.

So I tried again.

I said: "No — I have a tithe roll in my bag with eleven names in it, and it is the only book in this district that has any names in it at all, and I would like to write yours down properly. What is your name?"

She was quiet for long enough that I thought I had offended her.

Then she told me. And I wrote it down.

There was no column for it. There is no column for it. It is the second entry I have made in nineteen years of ledgers for no purpose whatever, and the two of them are four pages apart, and I look at them more often than is good for me.

I filed a nil return.

It took me one evening and it is the shortest thing I have ever written and I got it right, which after everything is the only professional consolation I am entitled to. I did not make it balance. I did not convert anything. I did not invent a figure and dress it as a finding.

I wrote what had happened.

That the accounts of Castle Bastable are complete, competent, and closed in a ring, and cannot be totalled against anything outside themselves, and that no sum is therefore ascertainable by any method known to me. That payment was offered in full, in kind, in good faith, and refused for form, and that the household is not in contempt. That eleven households of the Lowmoss district have tendered their tithe faithfully every quarter within memory and are not in default, and are entered as such by name. That the collector was received with courtesy throughout and obstructed by nobody.

And at the bottom, in the box for the receiving officer's remark, where a better man might have put something about the road:

> No collection. Nothing here can be brought to an end, and I do not believe this is a fault of the > arithmetic. — S.

I have been told since, by people entitled to tell me, that it is not a document. That it has no legal effect, no standing, and no use.

They are right. It is not a document.

It is a record. It took me six days and forty-seven miles and one old man in a stable yard to hear what Ruck said to me on the second floor, and I heard it at last with a pen in my hand at eleven o'clock at night in a burning house.

I left before light, on foot, having planned it in writing with times on it, and I did not stop to be thanked, and I did not accept the offer of a horse, because a horse would have to be returned.

I went out through the gate and down the road and I did not look at the castle, and I walked until I could not hear anything behind me, and I have never been back.

I did not go home either.

I got as far as Drudgeford and I sat down in the quiet house near the old market hall, where there is a table by the window with two places laid, one of them used, and I sat there for a long time with my bag between my feet and my coat steaming.

Six days earlier I had stood in that room and called it indecent.

I understood by then what it was. It is not a refusal to let go. Nobody in that town is waiting for anybody; they know perfectly well he is not coming. It is a way of continuing to do something for a person about whom there is nothing left to do. Nettlewick sells you fifteen years of weather for the same reason. It is not the opposite of ending. It is what you build when ending is not on offer.

The Drudgeford round fell vacant that autumn, and I asked for it, and got it, because nobody else wanted the wet.

I have kept it ever since. I walk out to the stilt villages and the peat and the low parishes and I take what people owe, and I am hated in three counties, and I have never once raised my voice, and every so often I fail to find a child's potatoes.

And on the anniversaries — there are two — I go round to the quiet house by the old market hall, and I have a drink I do not want, and I sit at the other table.

I do not lay a place. I have not got that far.

But I know now what the man meant, and I have stopped calling it indecent, and I am forty-nine years old and that is the entire distance I have managed to travel.

About nine, I should think.

THE END