Chapter 5
Stuart did not go to the book first.
That was the thing he had to make himself do, standing in the wood door of the Hall with the cold coming in past him, and every part of him that had been a man in four winters wanted to go forty yards out and pick up a canvas backed book off the snow.
He made himself look at the ground instead.
Because a book left in the open is a thing somebody wanted found, and a thing somebody wants found is the second most dangerous object on a battlefield, and Stuart Redman had learned that in a ravine in a fifth spring with a dog in it.
"Thora."
"Yes."
"Do not come out this door. Do not let anybody come out this door. Go to the front and find Davey and tell him south yard, and tell him quiet, and then go and stand at the front of this building and put your back against it and do not move."
"Mr. Redman."
"I know. Go."
She went.
He came out onto the step and crouched down on his heels with his elbows on his knees and looked at the snow for about ninety seconds without touching one inch of it.
The story was all there.
A man had come across forty feet of Hall floor on his knees and the sides of his feet, because he could not put weight on the soles of them and had worked out that the sides would take it for a while.
He had stopped twice on the boards and the marks of the stopping were long, which meant he had lain down flat and not sat.
He had gone out the wood door into six inches of new powder over the old crust.
He had gotten up onto his feet at the woodpile. Stuart could see exactly where, because there was a place in the snow where a man had gotten both hands on a split round and hauled himself up it, and the round had rolled out from under him once and he had done it again.
Then he had walked.
That was the part Stuart sat with longest, because a man with three toes gone on the left and a right foot that Maddie was still fighting for on the thirteenth of January does not walk.
He falls over. He goes eleven feet and he falls over and he lies there and he freezes and somebody finds him in the morning.
This man had gone forty yards to the book.
And then he had gone past it.
The track went past the book and kept going south across the flat, and it was not the track of a man dragging himself.
The stride was short and it was ugly and it wandered about a foot to either side, but it was a stride, and it went on and on out toward the ditch line with the two falls in it and both of them gotten up from.
"How," Stuart said out loud, to nobody.
Davey came around the corner of the Hall at a walk, because Thora had used the word quiet and Davey listened to words.
He stopped beside Stuart and crouched down the same way and looked at the same snow and did not say anything for a while.
"He's gone."
"He's gone."
"That's a walking track."
"That's a walking track."
"Stuart, that man could not sit up yesterday."
"I know it."
"I watched Maddie put him back down at noon because he tried to turn over and could not manage it."
"I know it, Davey."
They looked at it.
"Then something's wrong with this," Davey said.
"Something is wrong with every single part of this," Stuart said, "and I have been out here two minutes and I have got four things wrong with it already and I would like to say them out loud before I do one more thing,
because I have a bad habit of moving first and I have been paying for it since Tuesday."
"Say them."
"One. He cannot walk and he walked."
"Two?"
"Two. He left the book."
"He took the book off the table," Davey said. "Thora is certain."
"He took it off the table and he carried it forty yards and he put it down in the middle of an open flat where the first person out that door would see it," Stuart said.
"You do not steal a thing and carry it forty yards and set it down. That is not a man taking something. That is a man delivering something."
"Three."
"Three. There is no other track."
Davey's head came around.
"That's right," Stuart said. "Look at it. Look at the whole yard. There is his track out of that door and there is nothing else in this snow anywhere, no horse, no boots, no second man, and it snowed six inches between about four and six this morning and stopped before light."
"So nobody came for him."
"Nobody came for him, and nobody was waiting, and he went out that door under his own power alone in the dark of a morning in January with no coat."
Davey sat back on his heels.
"No coat."
"His coat was cut off him on the ninth and it is in a bag in the cellar in four pieces," Stuart said. "Thora will tell you what he had on and it was a blanket and two shirts and Maddie's wrappings."
"Then he is dead."
"Probably."
"Stuart, he is dead. It is eleven below out here and he has been gone an hour at the outside and he has got no coat and no boots and no feet."
"Probably," Stuart said again. "And that is the fourth thing wrong, because a man who is going out to die does not carry a book forty yards first."
He stood up.
His hip made a noise about it and he ignored it.
"He left it for us," he said. "He got himself off that table and across that floor and out that door and forty yards into the open, and the forty yards were the whole point, because if he had left it on the table we would have thought he had simply gone,
and if he had left it inside the door we would have thought he dropped it. He put it where it could only be one thing."
"Which is what."
"A message," Stuart said. "And I have not read it yet and I am about to, and I want you standing next to me when I do, for the same reason you would not read it out loud on Monday."
They went out to it.
They went carefully and they went wide, and Stuart put his own boot beside the track the whole way without once stepping in it, and at the book he stopped and looked all the way around the horizon before he bent down.
The book was sitting square on the snow.
It had not been dropped. It had been set, flat, on its back, and there was a stick laid across it to keep the wind from taking it, except there had not been a breath of wind in fourteen days and the stick was there anyway because a careful man is careful.
Stuart picked it up.
It fell open in his hands, because there was something in it.
It was a pencil. It had been laid in the gutter of the pages to mark the place, and the place it marked was the back third, past the columns and past the list of towns, where the writing ran the full width of the page with no margin and the hand had gone bad.
And across the top of that page, written in the last four days in a hand that had been done with wrapped fingers and had cost the man something, was one line in letters an inch high.
READ FROM HERE. I WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SAY IT OUT LOUD.
Davey put his hand over his mouth.
"Oh," he said.
"Yes."
"He was never going to stand in that room."
"He was never going to stand in that room," Stuart said, "and he knew it on the ninth, and Maddie knew it on the tenth and told me on the twelfth and I did not hear her properly."
"Maddie knew?"
"Maddie said he had not asked her about his own feet once in three days," Stuart said. "She said a man who does not ask about his feet has decided he is not going to need them for long, and I thought she meant he was giving up, and she did not mean that at all."
"What did she mean."
"She meant he had already worked out what he was for."
They read it in the back room with the door shut and four people in it, which was Stuart and Davey and Camille and Maddie, and Davey turned the pages because the book was the town's and he was the man who counted things.
It took an hour and forty minutes.
Stuart did not speak for the first twenty of those and when he did it was only to ask Davey to go back a page.
It was not a confession.
That was the first surprise and it went on being a surprise for the whole of the reading. Stuart had braced himself for a confession, because he had read one once, in a different book, and he knew what they did to a room.
This was an account.
It began on the fourth page of the back third with a date, which was the eleventh of October, and a sentence that Davey read out and then had to stop and start again.
I am going to put down what a place like this actually is, because everyone who knows is inside it and everyone outside it thinks it is a story about a man with a beard.
And then it simply went.
It went for sixty pages, in the small cramped hand that ran the full width of the page because paper was the scarcest thing in that valley and he had one book, and it was dated at the top of every entry, and there were forty-one entries between the eleventh of October and the second of January,
and the last eleven of them had been written on a crust in the dark with the pencil held in a fist.
There was almost nothing in it about himself.
That was the thing Camille said out loud about halfway through, and she said it like an accusation against the paper.
"He is not in this."
"No."
"He is the only person who is not in this. There are one hundred and eleven names in this book and his is not one of them and he wrote it."
"That's deliberate," Davey said.
"Of course it is deliberate. That is what I am objecting to."
There were one hundred and eleven names.
That was the count Davey made, going through twice, on a separate sheet, because he was Davey and he had built that habit in a bad year.
One hundred and eleven names, and beside each one there was a line or two, and the lines were not the lines a man writes when he is building a case.
Ilse Brantner. Came in the second winter with a boy of nine. The boy is called Toller and he is fourteen now and he is the fastest reader in that place and they do not know it.
Perpetua Nash. Sixty-one. Has a bad hip and they moved her to the drying shed in the third year and she has not been outside it since except to the yard.
Fenna Oyelaran. Twenty-six. She is the one who worked out that the north gate bar is dropped at nine and lifted at five and she has been counting it for two years and she has told nobody but me.