THE STOOL NOBODY SAT

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which a punishment is built, and a parish so tangled by kinship it cannot be cruel to itself quietly turns it into an honour.

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

In the year the Family Catastrophes give as the Incident of the Ducking Stool, Sir Mortimer Bastable decided the parish had grown unruly and required correcting, and commissioned, at some expense, a ducking stool.

A ducking stool, for those spared the knowledge, is a chair on the end of a long beam, over water, into which a troublemaker is strapped and then dunked, repeatedly, until the parish is satisfied or the troublemaker is. It is a fine old instrument of public discipline, and Sir Mortimer had a good one made, oak and iron, and had it set up over the mill pond, and sat back to watch order return to Sogmarsh.

Order did not return to Sogmarsh. What happened instead is the whole of this tale and is, the parish holds, the most Sogmarsh thing that has ever happened, which in this realm is a considerable claim.

The trouble began the moment Sir Mortimer tried to use it, and the trouble was cousins.

To duck a troublemaker you need three people who are not the troublemaker: someone to name the offence, someone to work the beam, and a magistrate to say the word. Sir Mortimer had the stool. What he did not have, and could not for love or money obtain, was three people in the parish of Sogmarsh who were not all related to each other and to the accused and to Sir Mortimer besides.

The first man he ordered to work the beam refused, on the grounds that the accused was his wife's cousin and he had to live with her. The second refused because the accused was godfather to his youngest. The magistrate refused because the accused had lent him a cart in the wet spring and a man does not duck a neighbour who lent him a cart. Sir Mortimer, growing heated, demanded to know whether anyone in the entire parish was unrelated to the accused, and was told, after some genuine effort by the whole village to help him with the sum, that no, there was not, and furthermore that the accused was, at three removes, related to Sir Mortimer, which ended the conversation.

He tried a second offender. Same wall. A third. Same. It emerges, if you build a ducking stool in a place the size of Sogmarsh, that you have built a machine for being cruel to your own family, and there is not a soul in the fen who will work it, because tomorrow it is your aunt in the chair, or your godson, or the man who lent you the cart, and everybody knows it, and the whole apparatus of public discipline collapses against the simple fact that these are all, every one of them, people you have to see on Tuesday.

The stool was never used. Not once. Sir Mortimer went to his grave having spent good money on a punishment the parish quietly, unanimously, and without ever holding a meeting about it, declined to allow to exist.

But it stood there. Oak and iron, over the mill pond, a good sound stool, and Sogmarsh does not waste a good sound anything.

And so the second half of the tale, which took about a generation, is the story of what the parish did with a punishment nobody would inflict, which was to slowly, without deciding to, turn it into the exact opposite.

First the children played on it. Then, one hot Dust, somebody sat in it to be swung out over the cool of the pond, which is, it turns out, the single most pleasant place in the whole parish on a warm day. Then it became the seat you were swung out on for your birthday, gently, once for each decade, by people laughing. Then it became the seat of honour at the mill-pond gatherings, the place you put the oldest person present, or the guest, or the couple newly walked-out.

By the time anyone thought to write it down, the Ducking Stool of Sir Mortimer had become the Honour Seat of the Mill Pond, and to be swung out on it over the cool water, gently, by your neighbours, on a warm afternoon, was the nearest thing the parish had to a knighthood, and the whole grim purpose of it had been so completely digested by the kindness of a place too interrelated to be cruel that visitors had to be told, and did not believe, that it had ever been meant for anything else.

It is still there. They still swing the old folk out on it in the summer, once for each decade, laughing, and the oldest woman in the parish holds the record for decades and is very proud of it.

And the parish tells the story of Sir Mortimer and his three offenders and his hopeless search for one person unrelated to anybody, and they tell it fondly, because it is the story of the day the fen looked at a machine for hurting itself and found it simply could not, not out of virtue exactly, but out of the plain unarguable fact that everyone here is somebody's cousin, and you cannot duck your own aunt, and a place where that is true is a hard place to make cruel.

Build an engine of cruelty in a village small enough and it will not run, because there is no stranger in it to pull the rope — and given enough summers, a people too tangled in kinship to hurt itself will take the very seat you meant for punishment and swing its grandmothers out over the cool water on it, laughing, once for every decade, which is a better use, and the only one Sogmarsh could ever have been persuaded to find.