A MATTER OF BREEDING

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which Lord Perry makes a joke about a baker, and the joke, being well made, comes home.

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

Lord Percival "Perry" Bastable XXVII came down into the village on a Tuesday, which is the day the water is measured and therefore the day nothing else in the parish is getting done, and he came down for the oldest of reasons, which is that there was nothing to eat up at the castle and a great deal of pride to be eaten instead.

He would not have called it that. He would have called it taking the air, and he took it magnificently, in a coat that had been very good in 1841 and had been going off, with enormous dignity, ever since — much like its owner, and much like the whole line of Bastables, of which Perry was, though he would drink rather than say it, the last.

And he came to the door of Goodman Barm, the baker, because Goodman Barm's shop was warm and smelt of bread, and because a lord may stand in a warm doorway for a surprisingly long time before anyone has the standing to ask him to buy something.

Now, you should understand Goodman Barm, because the whole of this turns on him. He was a big, calm, floury man whose bread rose — every loaf, every morning, no matter the wet — and whose fortunes had risen with it, quietly, over thirty years, until he was, though nobody in the parish would have put it so rudely, a good deal richer than the castle. He had four healthy children, a sound roof, and a starter of leaven he had kept alive and fed for so long that it was older than Perry and in considerably better condition.

Perry looked at him for a while, in the doorway, with the particular expression of a man loading a joke.

Because that is Perry's gift, and it is worth being fair to him about it: he is genuinely, baroquely funny, and he knows the parish will forgive a great deal from a man who makes it laugh, and he has been living on that credit for years, having no other kind left.

"Are you a baker?" said Perry.

"I am, my lord," said Goodman Barm, who could see the shape of it coming the way you see weather coming off the Slough, and stood square to it.

"Ah," said Perry, and let it land in his own time, the way the good ones do. "Forgive me. I only wondered — you have rather the look of the interbred about you."

And it was, everyone agreed afterwards, a lovely joke. It is a breeding joke and a bread joke at once, and it is exactly the kind Perry does best — the sort that sounds like a compliment for a whole second before it turns — and two lads by the trough laughed before they could stop themselves, and were sorry, and told their mothers so.

Goodman Barm did not laugh, and did not scowl. He wiped his hands on his apron, and thought about it, the way a man thinks about whether a loaf is done, and then he said the only thing he said in the whole affair, and he said it kindly, which was the worst of it:

"That'll be the bread, my lord. It comes of turning it. You have to keep working the same stock, over and over, hand over hand, and feed it, and never once let it sit — or it goes sour, and falls, and won't rise again." He nodded, quite gently, up the hill toward the castle. "I've a starter older than your house. Difference is, I've turned mine."

There was a silence in that doorway of the particular quality you get when a joke has gone all the way round the parish and come back by the other road.

Because everyone standing there did the sum. The Bastables had the oldest blood in the valley and had done nothing with it but keep it, and marry it back into itself, and let it sit, generation on generation, in a cold house with a hole in the roof — until it had gone exactly the way Barm's leaven would have gone, untended: sour, and sunk, and unable to rise. Perry was the last of it, broke and grand in a doorway, cadging warmth off a baker.

Perry, to his enormous credit, and this is why the parish keeps him, understood it completely and at once.

He stood a moment. Then he inclined his head — properly, the bow he gave to equals, which the parish had not seen him give to a tradesman in living memory — and he said, "Yes. Quite. Well turned, Goodman Barm," and he bought a loaf, at the full price, in coin he could ill spare, and he carried it up the hill himself.

He ate it, they say, to the last crust, and did not make the joke again, and told it on himself at dinner that night to the Bust, who has opinions, and who agreed with the baker, which Perry found unbecoming but did not dispute.

A joke about breeding is a mirror with a laugh painted on it. Make one at a man's expense, and be very sure your own stock has been turned — because the parish is doing the sum while you deliver the line, and the oldest blood in the valley is worth nothing at all if it has been left to sit and sour, and a baker who feeds his leaven every morning of his life has better breeding than a lord who has only ever kept his.