THE CHEESE VOTE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which the larder is consulted, formally, and the two hardest things in the castle finally understand each other.

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

Since the settlement of the Tuesday Schedule, the larder at Castle Bastable is run by treaty, and one clause of that treaty is the clause Mother Stilton fought hardest against and lost, which is that on any matter affecting the cheese, the cheese shall be consulted.

She had refused it the first time. That cheese has an opinion on everything, she had said, and if I consult it we shall be here at Michaelmas. But the mechanical rasher, which negotiates for the whole larder now, had held the clause back and raised it again a year on, in the small firm way it has, and this time it had a matter that genuinely, undeniably, affected the cheese, and Mother Stilton had run out of grounds to say no.

The matter was this. The chapel wanted the great cheese for the harvest supper. The whole thing. To be carried out of the larder, across the yard, up to the chapel, set on the long table, and cut.

And the cheese, you will remember, is aware, and fresh for ever, and has sat at the back of the third shelf for longer than anyone can say, resenting an arrangement it was not asked about, forgiving nothing, which is precisely the trait it shares with the only other resident of that kitchen who matters.

So they held the consultation.

It was, everyone agrees, the strangest quarter-hour in the recent history of the castle. Mother Stilton sat at the scrubbed table. The mechanical rasher sat opposite as the larder's representative. A girl was posted at the door to keep out the curious, of whom there were many. And the question was put to the cheese, out loud, plainly, as the treaty required: would it consent to be taken to the chapel and cut for the harvest supper?

Now, how a cheese answers is not a thing this tale will pretend to explain, because nobody in that kitchen could explain it either, and the one honest account is Mother Stilton's, who said afterward only that she had asked it a straight question and got a straight answer and it was no.

Not sulking. Not spite. The girl at the door, who saw the whole of it, said the no had something under it, something that was not about the harvest supper at all, and that Mother Stilton had gone very still when she felt it, the way you go still when a person you have been angry at for years says a true thing.

Because what the cheese said no about — and this is the part the parish did not learn for a while — was that the great cheese, the aware one, the fresh-for-ever one, is the last of a make that no one living knows how to make again. Cut it for one supper and it is gone. There is no more where it came from. The household had been keeping it at the back of a shelf for so long, resenting it, calling it difficult, and had never once understood that it was not being difficult.

It was the last of its kind, and it knew it, and it did not want to be spent on a Tuesday.

Mother Stilton, who has fed that house eight-and-forty years and been thanked by none of it, and who forgives nobody, and who had spent a decade speaking to that cheese every morning without ever saying what she said — Mother Stilton heard the no, and understood it, all of it, in the still way she understands things, and did a thing she had not done for the cheese in all those years.

She agreed with it.

She went to the chapel herself and told the churchwardens they could not have the great cheese, not for the supper, not for anything, and that she would make them a supper cheese, a good one, an ordinary one, one that could be replaced — and she did, and it was excellent, and the harvest supper wanted for nothing.

And the great cheese stayed at the back of the third shelf, uncut, un-spent, the last of itself, no longer resenting an arrangement it was not asked about, because it had, for the first time in its long strange life, been asked.

They understand each other now, the cook and the cheese, in the way that two hard, unthanked, essential things understand each other once they stop mistaking each other for the enemy. Mother Stilton still speaks to it every morning while she takes the flour down. The girl who does the fires still says it is not words.

But it is warmer than it was. And once — only once that anyone caught — the girl swears that when Mother Stilton set the flour back and turned to the range, she said, to the back of the third shelf, not looking, in the voice she uses for nothing else in the world:

"Aye. I know. Me and all."

Two things a household keeps at the back of a shelf and calls difficult — the cook it never thanks and the last of a thing it cannot replace — are usually not being difficult at all. They are only waiting, the pair of them, for somebody to stop resenting them long enough to ask what is actually the matter. And the answer, more often than not, is the same answer, which is why it takes one to know one.