Chapter 23 #2
"One tree." étienne's voice had gone flat.
"You do not cut one tree on a slope like that.
You take out one and the wind gets into the gap and next winter it takes four more, and the winter after that the snow comes down on the pass because there is nothing left to hold it.
I would be closing the only road my people have to the valley for the sake of a man I met an hour ago. "
"Yes," Benjamin said. "That is what I am asking you for."
The fire moved between them.
"There is another road," étienne said at last, grudgingly. "Longer. Two days added in summer and four in weather like this. My grandmother is seventy-one and she will walk it and she will say nothing about it, which is worse."
"I know what I am asking."
"You do not." étienne looked at him for a long moment. "But you have not pretended otherwise, and that is more than most."
They reached the pass an hour before the light began to go.
It was as étienne had described it — the rock rising sheer on either side, the track narrowing until two men could not walk it abreast, and above the northern wall a stand of pine leaning out over the gap with a century of snow-weight in them.
Benjamin walked the ground twice, and then went up the slope to the trees and put his hand on three of them before he chose.
"This one." He set his palm flat against the trunk. "It is already going. Look at the lean of it and the rot at the foot. It would have come down inside five years without any help from me."
étienne looked, and swore, and did not argue.
They cut in turns, from the uphill side, and it took the better part of two hours with a hand axe not meant for it.
The light went blue and then grey. Benjamin worked with his coat off and his shirt soaked through and did not stop when his hands began to open, and étienne, watching him, said nothing about that either.
They were three-quarters through when étienne came down off the slope and dropped flat behind the rock.
"They are in the pass."
Benjamin looked down.
Six men strung out along the narrow track in a loose column, moving without hurry, and two mules behind them roped nose to tail and loaded high.
Maddox was fourth. And at the head of the column, ten paces ahead of the rest and directly beneath the lean of the pine, a young one — bareheaded, watching the ground for prints, doing his job properly and looking in exactly the wrong direction.
The trunk cracked.
Benjamin heard it start — the long fibrous tearing that comes half a second before the fall — and he shouted, and the man looked up, which was the wrong thing to do and the only thing anyone ever does, and after that there was no time left to shout again.
He was off the rock before he had decided to be.
He hit him across the shoulder with the whole weight of himself and drove him three paces up the track, and the pine came down behind them with a sound that filled the pass end to end and went on filling it long after the tree had stopped moving.
Snow went up in a white wall.
When it settled, the trunk lay across the track from wall to wall — a hundred feet of it, four feet through at the base, branches jammed hard into the rock on both sides. The mules were behind it. So were five of Maddox's men.
Benjamin got up out of the snow. The young man stayed where he was, on his back, breathing hard, looking at the place he had been standing.
Benjamin walked to the tree and went over it — awkwardly, using a branch stub, one man with nothing in his hands — and dropped into the snow on the far side beside étienne.
Then he turned round and looked back over the top of it.
Maddox was already at the tree with his hand flat on the bark, and he did not look at the trunk at all. He looked past it, at the mules.
"Well," he said. "That is a considerable amount of work for a man in a hurry."
"It was." Benjamin's hands had opened across both palms and he did not look at them.
"You will want me to believe we cannot get over that?"
"You can get over it. So can every man you have.
" Benjamin let that sit. "Your mules cannot.
Your tents cannot, nor your rope, nor eight days of food, nor the powder, nor whatever you are carrying to keep six men from freezing above the snowline.
All of that is on the wrong side of a hundred feet of pine wedged into rock, and there is no track round it inside two days. "
Maddox said nothing.
"So you may come over," Benjamin said. "You will come over with what is on your backs and what is in your hands, four days above the valley, in weather, chasing a man who has somebody up here who knows the ground.
You will not catch me. You will spend two nights out and lose fingers doing it, and then you will have to come back over this tree to reach your own supply, and by then you will be six men who cannot hold a rifle. "
"You could be lying about the ground."
"I could." Benjamin nodded at étienne without turning his head. "He is standing here. You may draw your own conclusion about whether I have help."
The wind moved in the pines along the northern wall.
"And you will not cut through it either," Benjamin said, more quietly.
"Look above you. That slope has a hundred years of snow standing on it and I have just taken a tree out of the line holding it.
Put axes and men and noise under that for a day and it will come down, and it will come down on both sides of this trunk.
Mine as much as yours. I am not warning you off something I am safe from. "
Maddox's hand came off the bark.
"Think of your men, they will want to go back to their families," Benjamin said.
"My men want what I want."
"Do they?"
"They want you to answer for that square."
"What was your mission, Captain Maddox?"
Maddox did not answer.
The silence went on considerably longer than it needed to, and every man in that pass was standing in it, and all of them could hear the snow shifting somewhere high up on the northern wall.
Then the young man — hatless still, snow down the whole of one side of him — came up beside Maddox and did not look across the tree at all.
"Sir," he said. "The light is going."
Maddox stood a moment longer with his eyes on the trunk.
"I am not turning round because you asked me to," he said.
"I know it."
Maddox lifted his head then, and looked across properly, and there was nothing in his face that gave anything away.
"This is not over. We will go back to London. We will make a better plan, and we will hunt you down — if you ever return."
"I will," Benjamin said.
Maddox held his eyes a beat longer. Then he turned, and said something short to his men, and they took the mules by the head and went back down the pass in a loose column the way they had come, and the light went out of the rock above them as they walked.
étienne waited until they had gone round the bend.
"You could have let that boy stand where he was."
"I could have."
"He is the one who spoke."
"Yes." Benjamin was looking at his own hands now, opening and closing them slowly. "That was not why."
étienne looked at him a long moment. Then he shouldered the axe and turned up the slope.
"Come on, Englishman. You have cost my grandmother four days. The least you can do is meet her."
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The garden was loud with birdsong that morning, the kind that had not been possible when everything within it was black and dead.
Amelia knelt at the newly turned bed along the south wall, pressing seedlings into soil that still smelled faintly of ash beneath the fresh earth Frederick had worked in. She sat back on her heels and frowned at the empty row beside her.
"Where are the rose seeds? We ordered them a fortnight ago."
"They will come in a few days, my lady." Frederick did not look up from the row he was weeding. "Patience."
"A few days?" She pulled off one glove and tossed it onto the grass, faintly exasperated. "Tell them to hurry it along."
"May I ask why we are in such a hurry?"
"I want the garden restored by the time he returns."
Frederick set down his trowel and looked at her a long moment.
"As much as I understand the sentiment, my lady, I would advise a little more caution in how you say such things aloud. Particularly in front of your father."
"He will have to face the truth of it eventually."
"No doubt he will." Frederick returned to his weeding. "But if you wish to have his blessing when that truth arrives, you would be wise to be a good deal smarter about how you deliver it to him than you are being with me just now."
Amelia sat back, genuinely surprised. "So you have no difficulty with him. With Benjamin."
"None whatsoever, my lady, and never have.
" Frederick did not pause in his work. "The man saved this house, and every soul inside it, when he had no obligation to do either.
My only difficulty has ever been with the trouble his name brings behind it — not with the man himself.
There is a difference, and I would ask you not to confuse the two of us on that account. "
"He will clear his name." Amelia lifted her chin. "And I confess, I do not much care whether he manages it or not."
"Society cares, my lady. Your father cares."
"Ashcombe does not seem to care in the slightest, from what I have seen these past weeks." She glanced at him sideways. "And my father has softened considerably of late. He even took up a spade beside me, not three days past."
Frederick's mouth twitched, something close to a real smile breaking through his usual composure. "That, I confess, I would not have believed possible until I saw it with my own eyes."
They both laughed at that, and Amelia pulled her glove back on, and the two of them returned to the work — row after row, seedling after seedling, the garden slowly, stubbornly, coming back to life beneath their hands.
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