Hard Home (The Longbourn Accord #1)

Chapter One

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a line of warding left long enough unattended must be in want of blood.

Lieutenant Denny had been told this on his first night at Selsey by a sergeant with no fingers on his left hand, and had thought it a joke of the sort soldiers tell to frighten new men.

He had been at the line eleven months now.

He no longer thought it a joke, and he no longer thought it a figure of speech.

The wardline ran east from the Selsey shingle for nine miles before it turned inland, and it was not a wall, and it was not a ditch, and there was nothing whatever to see of it in daylight except that the grass grew a different color along its length — a paler, colder green, as though the ground beneath had been asked a question some centuries ago and was still considering its answer.

The old courts had laid it. Nobody living knew how.

What the Crown maintained now was not the line itself but the men who stood along it, and the men were maintained by their blood, and their blood, as Denny had come to understand, was a finite substance in a way that no one had thought to explain to him at Winchester.

He walked the eastern mile at the second hour after midnight with Corporal Amberley three paces behind, and he counted the stakes as he passed them, and at the ninth stake he stopped.

"Sir."

"I see it."

The stake was iron, and the iron was cold, and this was not remarkable in December.

What was remarkable was that the grass around its foot had gone the ordinary green of the field beyond.

Not withered. Not scorched. Simply — ordinary.

As though the ground had at last decided upon its answer, and the answer was no.

Denny put his bare palm against the stake and felt for the line, and the line was not there.

It is difficult to describe the sensation of reaching for a thing that has been present every hour of eleven months and finding, instead of resistance, an absence with an edge to it.

Denny had a small gift, the smallest in his family and much lamented by his mother: he could feel worked magic the way another man feels a draft under a door.

It had made him useless in every profession but this one.

It made him, at that moment, the only man in Sussex who knew that the Selsey line had opened.

"Fetch the Captain," he said. "Do not run. If you run the men will see you run."

Amberley did not run for the first forty yards, which Denny thought creditable of him.

---

Captain Thomas Harding came up the field without his coat, which told Denny how he had been woken, and with his sword, which told him nothing, since Harding was never anywhere without it.

He was a lean, unhurried, disagreeable man of forty who had been twenty-two years on the lines and had the particular temper of a person who has watched a great many people learn something he learned long ago.

He set his hand to the ninth stake, and then to the eighth, and then he stood a while with his palm flat against the tenth and his head bowed, listening in the way that men of his line listened.

"Nine to eleven," he said. "Two hundred yards of it. When did you last walk this?"

"The tenth hour, sir. It was sound."

"It was thin. It has been thin since Michaelmas and I have written to say so four times." Harding wiped his hand on his shirt, as though he had touched something and wished not to have. "How much of yours have you?"

Denny hesitated. It is not a question one asks. It is like asking a man how much money is in his strongbox, except that a strongbox may be refilled.

"All of it, sir. I have never spent any."

"You are about to." Harding turned and looked out over the black field toward the sea he could hear and not see.

"Something has come through. Perhaps an hour ago, perhaps three.

It will have gone inland, because they always go inland, and it will be following water, because they always follow water.

Amberley — the Willow brook runs north-east from the mill.

Take six men and go up it and do not go quietly. I want it to know you are there."

"Sir," said Amberley, in the voice of a man being handed something heavy.

"You are not to engage it. You are to be loud, and to be behind it, and to keep it moving toward the mill, where the water narrows and I shall be standing." Harding said this in the flat manner of a man ordering breakfast. "Denny. With me."

---

They went down the field at a pace Denny would not have called running and could not have called anything else, and while they went, Harding talked, which surprised him. Harding had spoken perhaps two hundred words to him in eleven months.

"You will not have seen one."

"No, sir."

"You will want to look at it. Do not. It is not that the sight is dreadful — it is not, particularly, it is only wrong, which is worse.

It is that a thing which has been on the far side of a wardline for four hundred years has spent four hundred years with nothing to look at, and it is hungry to be seen.

Attention is food. Do you understand me? "

"No, sir."

"Good. Men who understand me at the first telling are generally lying.

" Harding vaulted a stile without slowing.

"The breach must be closed before dawn. A line that is open one night may be shut.

A line that is open two is not a line, it is a door, and the whole of Sussex becomes the far side of it. That is why I asked what you had."

Denny's chest was tight and he told himself it was the running.

"Sir. What does it cost?"

"Everything you put in." They had come to the mill-race, and Harding stopped, and in the starlight his face was perfectly ordinary.

"The line was made of the old blood. It can only be mended with the same.

You will give what you have to the ground, and the ground will take it, and it will not give it back.

Whatever your gift was, it will be less.

If you are generous, it will be nothing. "

"For ever?"

"For ever is a long word. Yes. For ever.

" Harding drew his sword, and looked at it, and did not seem to be thinking of it at all.

"I had a good gift once. I could find water anywhere in England — three hundred feet down, under chalk, in a drought.

My father had it. My grandfather could bring it up.

I have mended this line four times." He put his thumb against the flat of the blade.

"I can find a bucket now, if the bucket is in the room. "

Denny said nothing. There was nothing that would not have been an insult.

"Do not look tragic, Lieutenant. It is a trade, and I made it, and I would make it again, and there is a village behind us of four hundred souls who have never once thought about it and never shall." Harding's mouth moved in something that was not a smile. "That is rather the point of us."

---

The thing came down the brook at half past three.

Denny kept his eyes on the water, as he had been told, and so what he saw was this: the brook running black and ordinary, and then the brook running backward, a long clean reversal of every ripple for thirty yards, without sound, without spray, as though the water had remembered a different route and taken it.

The cold that came with it was not weather. It went in at the ears.

Amberley's men were shouting somewhere behind it — genuinely shouting, panicked and loud, which Denny understood now had been the entire object of the order.

He did not look up. He heard Harding move past him into the water, and heard the water not splash, and heard, for rather a long time, nothing whatever.

Then a sound like a held breath let go by something that had no chest, and a shock through the ground that Denny felt in his back teeth, and then the ordinary noise of a brook running the correct way, and a man breathing hard.

"Sir?"

"Here. Give me your arm — no, the left. Yes."

Harding's sleeve was wet and his face in the starlight had aged some years since the stile. He had gone into the brook with a sword and come out with a sword and there was not a mark upon him, and Denny understood that whatever had happened had not been fought with iron.

"Is it dead?"

"It is put back. It is not the same thing, and you will oblige me by not writing 'killed' in the return." Harding spat into the grass. "Now the line. Both of us. It is two hundred yards and I have not enough left for it alone."

---

They knelt at the ninth stake at a quarter to five, in the hour when the frost sets hardest, and Harding showed him where to put his hands — flat on the cold ground, fingers spread, as though holding down a sheet of paper in a wind.

"It will not hurt," he said. "That is the difficulty. If it hurt, men would stop in time."

Denny gave what he had.

He could not afterwards describe it to anyone who had not done it, and he did not try.

The nearest he came, years later and in drink, was this: that it was like listening to a piece of music one has known all one's life, and hearing it get quieter, and understanding after some while that it is not the music growing quieter but oneself moving away from it, and that one is not able to stop moving, and that the last of it goes not with any crash but the way a room goes silent when the last person in it stops speaking.

At the end of it he was lying on his side in the frozen grass with his cheek in the pale green, and the line was there again under his palm — thin, and cold, and there — and he could feel it, which meant something of his gift remained.

Not much. He reached for it the way one reaches for a coin in an empty pocket.

"You gave more than you were asked," said Harding, from somewhere above him.

"Yes, sir."

"Everybody does, the first time." A hand under his arm, hauling. "Stand up. The men will be along and you will want to be standing."

---

The orders came from Horse Guards nine days later, and Denny read them twice standing in the doorway of the officers' hut before he carried them in to the Captain.

Harding read them once.

"Hertfordshire," he said.

"Sir. It must be an error. The regiment is a warding regiment. There is no line in Hertfordshire — there has never been a line north of the Thames, the courts never—"

"Yes."

"Then why are we—"

"Because," said Captain Harding, folding the paper along its old creases with great care, "there has never been a line in Hertfordshire, and something in Hertfordshire has begun to require one."

He looked up. Whatever was in his face, Denny had not seen it at the ninth stake, nor in the brook, nor at any hour of eleven months.

"We are quartered at Meryton through the winter.

It is a small town, and I am told it is a merry one, and the families thereabouts will be very glad of us.

" Harding put the orders in his coat. "They keep a great many balls, I understand.

See that the men have decent coats. It will matter to them more than it ought. "