THE TUESDAY SCHEDULE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which Old Mother Stilton becomes the only cook in the realm to conduct a labour negotiation with her own breakfast.

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

The larder at Castle Bastable contains, at the time of writing:

• flour, oats, onions in a quantity the household declines to specify;
• one cheese, fresh for ever, aware, and holding a grievance the length of its own life;
• a quantity of alchemically-cured bacon which is opinionated, ambulatory and territorial;
• one mechanical rasher of brass, built by Professor Clank to replace the above, which has instead

unionised it;

• and Old Mother Stilton, who is seventy-something, forgives nobody, and is at this moment sitting at the

scrubbed table opposite a strip of bacon, reading a document.

The document is the Tuesday Schedule. It arrives weekly. It is beautifully formatted.

HOW THE LARDER CAME TO HAVE A BARGAINING BODY

Briefly, because both halves are on record elsewhere and neither is anybody's fault except in the way that everything in this castle is somebody's fault and that somebody is usually Fizzle.

The bacon was cured by a process the kitchen would not sign its name to, and became, over a season, opinionated. Then ambulatory. Then territorial, which is the stage at which a household stops calling a thing the breakfast and starts calling it them.

The mechanical rasher was Professor Clank's remedy: brass, biddable, wholly without ambition, installed to end the negotiation by removing the other party from it. It was in the larder eight days before it had organised the living bacon into a bargaining body and appointed itself shop steward.

Clank's own account of this is the most rueful paragraph in his Register, and the line everybody quotes is the one where he notes, with professional envy, that the schedule of demands is formatted rather better than his own.

It is. I have seen both. It is not close.

THE FIRST NEGOTIATION

Mother Stilton did not send for anybody. That is the first thing to understand about her and the reason the larder is still standing.

Lord Perry offered a footman with a poker. The Quail watch offered to classify the whole pantry as a military position, which they had been wanting to do about the smell for years and which she declined on the grounds that she was not having Quail in her dairy. Fizzle offered to try a working, and was removed from the passage by two people.

She went in alone with a chair, sat down, and said — the girl on the stairs heard it and it is the version everybody tells —

"Right. What do you want."

The mechanical rasher passed her a document.

THE SCHEDULE, AS ORIGINALLY SUBMITTED

I have the first one. It runs to two pages. The demands, in the order given:

1. That the larder door be shut properly, the current arrangement admitting a draught along the

third shelf.

1. That the salt be moved. The salt was on the shelf above. The bacon had views about the salt being

on the shelf above and the views were, on inspection, entirely reasonable.

1. That there be notice. Not a stay of execution — the schedule is explicit and rather dignified about

this, and Mother Stilton has never let anybody misrepresent it: the party does not dispute the principle of breakfast. What the party disputes is being taken without warning, in the dark, by a hand. Two days' notice was requested.

1. That the cheese be consulted on matters affecting the cheese.
2. That the mechanical rasher be recognised as the sole bargaining representative, which everybody

noticed was in the document's own interest and which nobody could see how to object to.

She read it twice. She turned it over to see whether there was more. Then she took the pencil from behind her ear and went through it in front of them, which is the part of this story the kitchen has never got tired of:

One — agreed, and about time, and she had been asking the household to shut that door since before the Professor was born. Two — agreed. The salt should never have been above the meat and any cook who says otherwise is a Loafian. Three — agreed. Two days. Four — refused. "That cheese has an opinion on everything and has had for years. If I consult it we shall be here at Michaelmas." Five — agreed, on condition the representative also does the third shelf, which nobody had mentioned and which the brass rasher accepted without a word, and has done ever since.

Four of five, inside a quarter of an hour, by a woman of seventy-something with a pencil.

The mechanical rasher is understood to have regarded it as a satisfactory first engagement. Mother Stilton went back to the range and said, to nobody, the sentence that is now painted on the beam over the larder door:

"They only wanted telling."

HOW IT WORKS NOW

The Tuesday Schedule still comes. It is mostly one item and is often about the draught.

The notice is honoured. This is the thing visitors find hardest and the kitchen finds ordinary. On a Sunday, Mother Stilton goes to the larder door and says what is wanted for the Tuesday, out loud, plainly, and shuts the door and goes away; and on the Tuesday it is there on the slab, and nobody has ever established the mechanism, and nobody asks, and the kitchen has agreed not to find it strange because finding it strange makes the pastry go wrong.

Is it kinder? I have heard the argument and I will report it and not settle it. The party is not spared; the party has never asked to be spared. What the party has is two days and a warning, which is more than the goose gets, and more, as Mother Stilton observed at a supper in front of company and a churchwarden, than most of us get.

The cheese was not consulted and has never forgiven it. The cheese has not forgiven anything. It sits at the back of the third shelf, fresh for ever, resenting the arrangement it was not asked about, and Mother Stilton speaks to it every morning while she takes the flour down.

She has never once said what she says. The girl who does the fires says it is not words.

THE ONE THING SHE WILL NOT DO

Fizzle has offered — annually, in writing, for years, in a hand that gets smaller each time — to attempt the undoing.

He believes he could lift it. He may even be right; it is the only working he has ever proposed that he does not claim will do the opposite. He has said, at various times, that it would end the smell, and the schedule, and the whole ridiculous business, and give her back a plain larder with plain food in it.

She has refused every year.

She has never given a reason to Fizzle, who assumes it is unforgiveness, and it partly is; Mother Stilton forgives no one and it is in the dairy.

But she gave the reason once, in the kitchen, late, to a girl who had asked and was too young to know better, and the girl is old now and has told it perhaps twice, and it is this:

"I've fed this house eight-and-forty year and it's never once said thank you. That lot in there send me a letter every Tuesday."

The realm is full of arrangements that started as a disaster and were not undone, and the reason is almost never sentiment — it is that somebody found, in the wreckage, one small thing they had not had before and were not going to give back. A cook who is negotiated with is not a cook with a problem. She is a cook with correspondence.