The Pan

There is a pan at Castle Bastable that comes down when it likes.

It is an iron frying-pan, black as a magistrate and broad enough to fry a christening, and it hangs from a single nail in the great kitchen where it has hung longer than the nail can remember. Twice or three times a year — always in a lean season, always a day or two before the last of anybody's store has run properly thin — it lifts off that nail of its own accord and lands on the flags with a note like a cracked bell heard through rain. Nobody is ever standing beneath it. Nobody, in six generations, has so much as stubbed a toe. It is simply, suddenly, on the floor; and the castle fetches two extra sacks of oats up from the cellar, and is glad of the warning.

Putting it back is an office. The Pan-Hanger holds the post by inheritance, hangs the pan with a long ash pole, and is forbidden — not by any written rule, but by the far stronger authority of always-having-been — to look at the nail while he does it. His father did not look. His grandmother did not look. Ask him why and he says, "You don't look at the nail," in the tone of a man explaining that you don't salt the tea; and that is the end of it.

A gentleman came from the Capital to explain the pan. He had an interest, he said, in the domestic omens of the boglands, and a title for his paper already written — which is the surest sign of a man come to be disappointed. He interviewed the household for three days and collected thirteen accounts, no two agreeing, each delivered with perfect conviction.

The cook said it dropped when the cellar mice turned south, mice being sensible about weather. The blacksmith said iron-rot and the salt in the air. The priest said it was Saint Tarry clearing his throat, and dared the gentleman to prove otherwise. The brewer said the pan and the ale went sour together and always had. The steward said accounts, somehow. A very old woman said the pan grieved. A very young one said it was bored. Two of the children said it fell when it wanted to, which was nearer the mark than either was thanked for. The laundress blamed the moon; the ostler, the coming of visitors; the almoner, the conscience of the household; and the Pan-Hanger, when pressed, said only, "The wall." That was thirteen, and the gentleman's pencil went greyer at each.

On the fourth morning he took a candle behind the panelling and found a beam. The nail was driven into an old oak tie that drank the bog-mist across two centuries the way a biscuit takes tea; and when the mist came up off the fen — reliably, some eight-and-forty hours before a hard freeze — the beam swelled, the nail rose the width of a fingernail in its socket, and the pan, weary and patient, stepped off it onto the flags. It was not an omen. It was a barometer with a temper.

The gentleman sat on the cellar stair a while with that. Then he wrote, at the foot of his notes, the best sentence he managed in all his time in the wet country — the pan is not magic; this is not the same as saying it is not important — and he did not publish, and he went home. A castle that has read its winters off a frying-pan for two hundred years has small use for a man who arrives to tell it the frying-pan is only damp.

That is the pan, and that is very nearly all of the pan; and were that the end it would be a tidy tale, which the wet country distrusts on principle.

For there is a fourteenth account, and the household does not give it, because it is not about the weather. Once — the valley will not date it, and I will not press them — the pan came down out of all season. It was no lean time; the stores were full, the mist was not up, the beam was dry as a sermon. It came off the nail in the black middle of a wet night: the same night the brass of the East Postern stood dull at first light for the only morning in anyone's memory, unstarted, because for once no one had knelt to it. And that pan was not put back with the pole. The Pan-Hanger of that year would say, ever after, only that it had been a different falling — that some things come off the nail because the weather turns, and some because a body reaches up and takes them down.

Which it was, that night, no ledger says. Captain Quail's helmet — the one he and the girl shined each morning against the wars that never came — went off its peg that night and was never hung there again; it is kept now behind the dead ledgers in the parish clerk's back room, where no one has cause to look, and taken down and shined by Abel Redd — a man never in his life seen to do a sudden thing — who has never said why. Captain Quail opens the east gate still.