MIND THE BUCKET

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the bucket.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a zinc pail, and I stand in the courtyard of Castle Bastable, and I have not moved in six hundred years.

Let us deal with the indignities first, since they are what you came for. I have been rained in. I have been snowed in. I have been used as a spittoon by three generations of footmen, as a helmet by a boy on a dare, and, in the winter of 1802, as a place for a butler to be extravagantly unwell after the New Year — an incident for which the household blamed the dog, and for which the dog, to its eternal credit, never once tried to explain itself. I have held drips from the leaking roof, and I have held a frog, and for eleven years I held a small tree that was doing its best.

Nobody has ever emptied me on purpose. They step around me. They have always stepped around me. And every day of his life, Lord Percival Bastable the Twenty-Seventh comes out into this courtyard, sees me, and says — to whoever is passing, to the pigeon, to nobody — "Mind the bucket."

He thinks it is his joke. He thinks it is about the roof.

Now let me tell you what I am.

Cut into the flagstone beneath me, worn so smooth by six centuries of boots that you would need to lie down in the wet to find it, there is a mark. A circle, with a line beneath it. It is the oldest sign the turnips have, and it was cut there before this family arrived, and it means: something is wrong here, and it is not your fault, and if you want to live in this house, watch what it does with its own mess.

I am not a bucket. I am a warning. I have been standing in the middle of their courtyard, in front of their eyes, for six hundred years, and not one of them has ever asked why nobody moves me.

Which is the joke, and the joke is on them, and I have had six hundred years to enjoy it.

Her number was Sixty-One. That is not her name; I will come to her name.

She was small, and quick, and had the particular hollow-cheeked cheerfulness of a person who has learned to be useful very young, and in the spring of that year she was sent — because she fit, because she always fit, because fitting is what the small ones are spent on — down into the drains to recover a ring that Lady Bastable had dropped, and did not much want, and had already replaced.

I watched her go past me on her way to it. She touched my rim with two fingers as she went. They all do. I have felt six hundred years of small hands touch me on the way to something they were not coming back from, and I have never once been able to say a word, and that is the whole of what it is to be a sign instead of a mouth.

But she had read me. That is the thing. She had been taught, in a turf hall eleven minutes from that gate, what the mark beneath me means, and she had looked at that drain with my line in her head — watch what the house does with its own mess — and she had noticed, as no Bastable in six centuries has ever noticed, that the drains of Castle Bastable do not run out.

They run down. And what goes down does not come back, and no one has ever wondered where it goes, and somewhere below the down there is a hum you can feel in your teeth.

So she did not go into the drain to fetch the ring.

She went into the drain, and she left her boots at the lip of it — set neat and side by side, the way you do when you mean them to be found — and she went sideways, along the old dry course that the turnips have known about for four generations and have never once written down, and she came up in the Woods, in the green dark, eleven minutes from the gate, and somebody was waiting for her with a blanket, because somebody is always waiting.

The boots were found. Of course they were found; that was the point of the boots.

There was a great deal of concern in the Great Hall that evening, and Lady Bastable said it was too awful, and meant it, for nearly a minute. Lord Percival stood in this courtyard with his hands behind his back and looked genuinely stricken, and said that something really ought to be done about those drains, and then he saw me, and brightened, and said to the pigeon:

"Mind the bucket."

And went in to his dinner.

The steward drew one line through the number Sixty-One, and the column was tidy, and from that moment on she was the safest person in the realm — because there is nothing in Sogmarsh so thoroughly unwatched as a name that has already been crossed out.

She is forty now. She mends nets. She has two children who have never been inside those walls and never will be, and she is, I am told, extremely rude about the quality of modern drowning, which she considers sloppy work by people who have not thought it through.

Her name is Tamsin. Not the one who drew the castle — that Tamsin was her grandmother, and where do you suppose the girl learned to look at a thing properly? They put her name in the ledger in the turf hall, in the dry, and once a year they read it out loud by the fire with all the others, the kept ones and the lost ones alike, in exactly the same voice.

So I stand here. I hold the rain, and the spit, and the frog, and the occasional regrettable butler. I am the most disgusting object in a castle with real competition for the title, and I would not swap my post for the throne in the Great Hall.

Because every so often a small one comes across this courtyard with their whole life about to be spent on a ring nobody wants, and they touch my rim with two fingers on the way past — and some of them have been taught what I am.

I cannot speak. I have never been able to speak. But I can stand here, exactly here, for six hundred years, until the one person who needs me happens to look down.

The most important thing in the house is the thing nobody has ever thought worth moving.