THE WALKING-OUT

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which two people who will not be introduced are introduced anyway, by a parish that pretends it is only running errands.

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

You cannot court indoors in Sogmarsh, because there is nowhere dry, and you cannot court by speaking, because the parish would hear, and the parish hearing is the one thing a courting Sogmarsher will die sooner than allow.

So the realm courts by walking.

A young man is sent to fetch a thing from Drudgeford. A young woman is sent to fetch a thing from Drudgeford. They are sent, you understand, entirely separately, by entirely different people, for entirely unconnected reasons, on the same afternoon, along the one road there is — and they meet in the middle, by the purest chance, and walk the last stretch together because it would be rude not to, and neither of them ever finds out that the whole of Sogmarsh arranged it over their heads and is watching from behind every hedge on the route.

This is called a walking-out, and the parish is very, very good at it.

The two in this tale were Tibb Sennet and Alma Crouch, and they were the hardest case the parish had handled in a generation, because they were both shy — and two shy people, left to themselves, will walk past each other for the rest of their lives, each certain the other has not noticed them and relieved about it.

The parish noticed. The parish always notices. It noticed the way Tibb went the long way past the Crouch gate and the way Alma found reasons to be in the yard when he did, and it did what it does, which was to convene, without ever calling a meeting, and get to work.

The general in charge was Gammer Yarrow, who is eighty and has not stood up in some years and runs the entire social life of the parish from a chair by the green, and who has walked out more couples than the chapel has married, which she considers roughly the same job done properly.

Her method was errands, and the errands began gently.

Tibb was asked, by his mother, who had been asked by a neighbour, who had been asked by Gammer Yarrow, to take a basket to Mucklecombe. Alma was asked, by an aunt, who had been asked by the same chain, to bring one back. They passed on the road. They said good afternoon. That was the whole of the first day and Gammer Yarrow declared it a triumph and everybody agreed.

The second errand put them on the green at the same hour. The third had them both waiting for the same cart. By the fourth, the parish was becoming ambitious, and this is where a walking-out can go wrong, because an over-managed one starts to smell of management, and a shy person who smells management bolts.

Tibb very nearly bolted. He was sent to fetch a bucket that did not need fetching — the fourth invented bucket in a week — and even Tibb, who noticed nothing, noticed that Sogmarsh appeared to have run entirely out of buckets in exactly the places Alma Crouch happened to be standing.

He said to his mother, carefully, that it was strange how many buckets wanted moving lately.

His mother, who is not a liar and hated every second of it, said the roof was bad this year. And Tibb, who loved his mother and did not want to catch her in something, decided to believe her, and the walking-out survived, on the thin grace of a boy choosing not to look too hard at a kindness.

It came right on the day of the long fetch, which is the manoeuvre Gammer Yarrow keeps for the hard cases, and which she had not needed to use in six years.

They were both sent to Drudgeford — properly sent, real errands, real things to fetch, so that even the most suspicious heart could find no fault — from opposite ends of the parish, timed so that the only way either of them got home before dark was to walk the middle stretch together.

And they did. And it was raining, because it is always raining, and they shared the one dry bit of the causeway, which is not wide, and they walked the whole of the Drudgeford road not saying very much, and what they did say was about the weather and the state of the road and a goat they both knew, and it was, by every account that reached Gammer Yarrow that evening, the most successful afternoon in the recent history of the parish.

They were married in the autumn. At the wedding, which the whole parish attended and wept at as though surprised, not one soul mentioned the buckets, or the baskets, or the six years of errands, or the chair by the green from which the entire campaign had been run. That is the rule, and it is absolute: a walking-out is never, ever admitted, least of all to the couple.

Years later — this is the part Gammer Yarrow liked to tell, at the end, when she told it at all — Tibb Sennet came to her chair by the green, on his own, an older man by then, and sat down beside her without being asked, which nobody does.

And he said he had worked it out. Not at the time. Long after. He had lain awake one night and counted up the buckets, and the baskets, and the carts they had both just happened to want, and he had understood the whole of it, every hedge and every hand, and he had told nobody and would tell nobody, but he had wanted, once, to sit by the person who did it and say thank you.

And Gammer Yarrow, who has walked out half the parish and been thanked by none of them because that is the price of the trade, looked at the green for a while and then said the only thing the rule allowed her to say, which was that she didn't know what he meant, and the roof had been bad that year.

And Tibb said aye, it had, and they sat there, the two of them, not admitting a thing, for a good long while.

Some kindnesses only work if the person never knows they were done — so a whole parish will spend six years pretending to run out of buckets, and take the thanks to its grave, because the gift was never the marriage. The gift was letting two proud, frightened people believe they had managed it all by themselves.