THE ROSETTE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the rosette of Sir Reginald "Reggie" Thwackbottom, which has been rained on since 1989.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm.

I am a rosette. I was red once. I would ask you to take that on faith, as everyone else has to.

I have been rained on since 1989 — not constantly, but as near to constantly as makes no odds in this realm — and I have been pinned, every day of it, over the heart of Sir Reginald "Reggie" Thwackbottom: the Rt. Hon., the Member for Sogmarsh & the Greater Boglands, the people's champion, the man of the marshes, hand on my heart.

I want to be exact about that last part, because I am the only witness in the realm with the standing to testify. When he says hand on my heart — and he says it the way other men breathe — the hand comes up and lands flat upon me, and I am pressed to his chest, and so I can report to you, under oath, the one fact about Reggie Thwackbottom that nobody else can:

The heart is there. And it beats hardest on the word "honest." Every single time.

I shall let you decide, over the course of this story, what that is evidence of. I have had thirty-odd years, and I am still deciding.

This is the story of the Peatdike election, which we walked to overnight, through a flood, arriving with the dawn and half the river.

You will want to know what was being elected. So did Peatdike. The post was Fen-Reeve — which is the person who decides, when two ditches disagree, which of them is right. It carries no wage, no cottage, and no thanks; it carries a rod, a duty to be stood in cold water while both ditches' families shout at you, and a strong likelihood of being blamed for the weather. It had fallen vacant in the usual way, which is that the last Fen-Reeve had finally got his boots dry and refused, politely and from behind a locked door, to ever get them wet again.

We had heard about it two parishes away. My man can hear a vacancy the way a gull hears a dropped chip.

By the time Peatdike woke, he was up on the back of a borrowed cart in the drizzle, hat in both hands, and I was pinned fresh over his heart — straightened twice, though nobody straightens a rosette for the mud's benefit — and the speech was already at full sail.

I have heard the speech, at a modest estimate, eleven hundred times. It is never the same twice, and it is always identical. It has the origin, the hardship, the triumph, and the vow, and each of them grows a little between parishes, like a marrow.

That morning in Peatdike, he was raised in a caravan on the marsh edge — which is true, and I can vouch for it, and it wants no improving. By the second telling, outside the peat-stacks, it had become a coracle. By the third, at the communal fire, it was the mist itself, and a woman stirring the pot asked, not unkindly, whether the mist had been terribly proud of him, and he said, hand upon me, that it had never once written, and that he had forgiven it — and the whole fire-circle laughed, and he glowed, and took it for support.

He was told at school he would never amount to anything more than a prize-winning leek grower. He tells this one everywhere, as the wound that made him. What he does not tell them — what he has never once told anybody, in eleven hundred speeches — is that the leeks are real, and have won things, and that I have been pinned to his coat at three vegetable shows where he stood beside a leek the size of a rowing-boat oar with his face as soft as I have ever seen it. He thinks the leeks are the failure. He campaigns on the wound and hides the actual medal. I have given up rustling at him about it.

And the limp. The famous limp, the first limp in the realm to stand in every constituency simultaneously. I am positioned, you understand, where I can feel the man walk.

It changes legs depending on which side of the room the voters are sitting.

I do not believe he knows. That is the part I need you to understand about my man, and it is the part nobody in the taprooms believes: he is not lying. I am pinned to the chest of the one man in Sogmarsh who has never once, in my thirty years, said a thing he did not, in the moment of saying it, wholly believe. The limp moves. The caravan becomes a coracle. The heart underneath me bangs like a proud drum on the word "honest." All of it, all at once, all sincere. There is a gentleman in a damp coat who sells property on the same principle, and the two of them once shook hands for a full minute, each certain he had at last met the realm's other honest man, and I felt the heart under me going like a wedding bell.

Peatdike gave us the full day. Peatdike gave us tea.

I must say something about the tea, because the tea is the thing I have never got to the bottom of. In thirty years and — he keeps the count himself, in a wet notebook — four hundred and eleven elections, no door in this realm has ever been shut in his face. The tea is always poured. The chair is always pulled out. The old men walk with him along the ditches and point out the bad culverts as if to a colleague; the children follow the cart; the women at the fire feed him twice and wrap a third portion "for the road." They ask after his leeks. They ask after Kevin, the pike, of whom the less said the better, except that the Labrador has never contradicted the story, which my man regards as decisive.

They love him. I am a rosette; we are manufactured to know a crowd; I am telling you, they love him.

And at the count — which in Peatdike, as everywhere, is counted in boots, not heads: stood in a row outside the meeting-hut, one boot per household, and a man may send his boots if honest work detains him — at the count, when the Fen-Reeve's rod went to its winner, the number of boots stood beside the name of Sir Reginald "Reggie" Thwackbottom, the people's champion, the best-fed man on the fen, the only candidate who had campaigned, the only man present who wanted it —

was none.

Not one boot. Four hundred and eleven elections. Not one boot, ever, anywhere, in thirty years.

The rod went to Jethro Podd.

I want you to picture Jethro Podd, because he is the other half of this story. A peat-cutter. Arms like wet oak. He had not stood for the post. He had, in point of fact, hidden behind the peat-stacks when the nominating started, and been fetched out by his own mother, and he took the oath of the Fen-Reeve in the rain with the expression of a man being measured for something he had specifically said he did not want, protesting quietly all the way through it, while the whole of Peatdike nodded with satisfaction and my man applauded warmly from the back.

That is how it is done here. I have watched it four hundred and eleven times. The parish hunts its officers like a press-gang hunts sailors, and the one man running toward the post with his arms open is the one man the parish steps around, gently, with tea. Nobody has ever explained it to him. Nobody has ever explained it to me, and I have had time to think, pinned out here in the rain, and the nearest I have come is this: the parish can smell wanting the way I can smell rain coming, and it has decided — long ago, in its bones, for reasons it has never had to say aloud — that the wanting and the rod are never to be kept in the same man.

He took it, as he takes all four hundred and eleven of them, with tremendous grace and total incomprehension. He shook Jethro Podd's unwilling hand. He called it "a strong result for the movement." He is the movement. He updated the wet notebook. Moral victory, he wrote. He writes that every time. The notebook is nothing but moral victories and rain.

And then — and here is the part I stay for; here is why I have not let the rust take my pin in thirty years of weather —

on the road out of Peatdike, past the last house, where no voter could see and no vote was left to win, we came upon a parlour with the flood still standing in it, and an old man standing in the flood, bailing, alone, slow, with a saucepan.

And my man stopped the cart.

He took off the good coat — I go with the coat; I was hung on the gatepost; I had the whole of it in view — and he rolled up his sleeves, and he went in, and he bailed that parlour for two hours and ten minutes by the church clock, in his shirt, in the cold, properly, the way a man bails who did twelve years of it for wages: fast at the corners, patient at the hearth, kind to the furniture. He unblocked the ditch outside. He listened to the whole of the old man's account of a stubborn bulrush, and asked a follow-up question, and meant it. And he never mentioned it at the next hustings, and he has never mentioned it at any hustings, not once in thirty years — the one true thing, the thing he is actually made of, the thing every parish somehow knows about him anyway, which is why the tea is always poured.

He campaigns on the mist and the coracle and the limp. He keeps the drainage to himself, like the leeks.

I have decided — I said I was still deciding, but there on the gatepost, watching the saucepan, I decided — that I am pinned to him for good, whatever colour I end up.

We slept in a barn. In the morning he brushed the coat, straightened me — twice — and consulted the wet notebook, where it seems there is shortly to be an election in Sodden Bottom for the post of Warden of the Chapel Bell, the bell being underwater, the wardenship being therefore chiefly ceremonial, the ceremony being therefore, in his words, "exactly where a man of vision can make a difference."

Four hundred and twelve.

Hand on my heart.

The moral, from the gatepost: a parish is wiser than it can say — it will pour tea for a man's true self and vote for it never, and both of these, together, are how it loves him. And if you must be made entirely of wanting, want the way Reggie Thwackbottom wants: out loud, in the rain, forever, with your hand on your heart — and do your real good on the road out of town, where nobody is counting. The heart, I can report, is there. I have felt it. It beats hardest on the word "honest." I no longer believe that is a lie. I believe it is a vote — the one vote he has ever won, cast daily, from the inside, and counted by nobody but me.