Chapter Nine: The Widow's Grate

The bell rang at nine that night as we went out, the girl and the scuttle and me, into the snow on Tallow Lane.

Mrs Hobb saw us go. She was at the counter, under the cold Guild lamp, doing the accounts that Tansy had not had the heart to finish. She did not ask where we were going. She did not tell Tansy that a pledge must never leave the shop. That was a rule. I had heard her say it to a man who wanted to take his own clock home for one night to wind it.

"Bring him back before morning," was all she said.

Him. I want that on the record. It was the first time.

Tansy had wrapped the scuttle in her third cardigan, so that only my nose was out. She carried it in both arms, against her chest, as if I might spill. And she walked, carefully, in the new snow, all the way from Tallow Lane to Ferrier Street. I will tell you the way, because I will never see it.

The snow was fresh and squeaked under her boots like a mouse being stepped on, over and over, very gently. The air smelled of cold iron and of nothing, which is what snow smells of. Every so often, through the nothing, came a thread of coal smoke from somebody's chimney, and I could tell from the smell alone whether the hearth under it was given or bought. The given ones smelled of supper. The bought ones smelled of pennies.

There were more bought ones than given. Many more.

And every forty paces or so, we passed a Guild lamp. I heard each one long before we reached it. It gave its long thin hiss, the cat being asked to leave, and as we walked under it the light lay across my nose, bright and white. Then it was behind us, hissing to itself, and not one of them had warmed us by the smallest degree.

"Nineteen," said Tansy, under her breath, as we passed one.

"Nineteen what?" I lifted my nose out of the cardigan.

"Lamps, between the shop and the river." She was quiet for a few steps. "I didn't mean to count them. I just do."

I knew what number she was thinking of. I did not say it.

We crossed the river on the Corn Bridge. I could hear the water under us, black and slow and very cold, and smell the ice forming at its edges. On the far bank the streets got wider and quieter, and the houses got taller, and the snow on the doorsteps had not been swept. And then we turned into Ferrier Street, and I knew it at once. I had lived on Ferrier Street for sixty years. I knew the sound of the gutter at the corner, and the smell of the baker's that had closed, and the third step of number seven, which rocked.

Tansy knocked. It was a long time before anyone came.

Mrs Fennick opened the door with a candle in her hand. It was a Guild candle. I could tell from the smell. It gave her light to see us by, and nothing else.

"Oh," she said. And then, after a moment, "You'd better come in."

The house was cold. I mean cold the way a church is cold, a cold that has got into the stones and settled down to stay. It smelled of lavender and damp. Under the lavender, in every room, faint as a memory and stronger than either, was his pipe. It was in the curtains and the carpets and the wood of the stairs. Mrs Fennick had been right. It was like being inside his coat.

And it was silent. That was the worst of it. There had been a clock in the hall for sixty years, a long tall clock with a heavy tick, and I had slept to the sound of it more nights than I could count. Now there was nothing. It had stopped. Nobody had wound it.

She took us into the front room. She sat down in her chair. Tansy set the scuttle on the hearthrug, and I lay there, and I knew without being told what was in front of me. A grate. An iron grate, cold to its bones. I could smell old ash in it, gone damp, the way ash goes when nobody has lit a fire on it for weeks.

"I lit that," I said. "Forty years ago. The night you were married."

"I know you did," said Mrs Fennick. "He told me. He said you'd done it as a wedding present, and that you were very rude about it, and that it was the nicest thing anybody had ever given us." She was quiet for a moment. "It went out the week he died. I let it. I sat here and watched it go down and I didn't put any coal on, and I didn't go next door and ask for a light. I didn't want a fire that he couldn't sit by."

I heard Tansy, beside the scuttle, take a breath and not say anything. She was very good at not saying things. I was learning it from her.

"It wasn't for the rent," said Mrs Fennick.

"I know," I said. "You lied to Mrs Hobb. Your lavender goes sharp."

"Does it?" She laughed, a little, the way you laugh at a thing that isn't funny. "He used to say that. He used to say I couldn't tell a lie in this house, because you'd smell it." She was quiet again. "You smell of him. Did you know? Of his pipe. He smoked it with his feet up on your back for forty years, and you smell exactly like him, and I couldn't bear it. I couldn't come into a room and smell him there and find it was only you. So I took you to the pawnshop and said it was for the rent." Her voice went very small. "I'm sorry."

I did not say anything. I was thinking about a tall clock that nobody had wound, and a chair with nobody in it, and a song with three bars and no fourth.

"He hummed," I said at last. "In the evenings. The same three bars."

"I know." Her chair creaked.

"I never asked him what came next."

"Neither did I," said Mrs Fennick. For a while the two of us sat in that cold front room without saying anything else. The widow sat in her chair and the dragon lay on the rug, grieving the same man, both of us very badly.

Then I lifted my head. It took a moment. It was harder than it had been yesterday.

"I could light it," I said. "The grate. Now. It would be warm."

"No," said Mrs Fennick at once. She said it so fast that I knew she had seen it already, the grey at my edges, the size of me. "No. I can count too, you know. Not if it costs you."

"It's mine to spend," I said, and my voice rattled.

"Not on me," she said. "Not on this house. He wouldn't have wanted it, and I don't." She stood up. "Take him home, child. It's late, and he's cold, and so are you."

Tansy carried me back the way we had come. Ferrier Street. The Corn Bridge, and the black river under it. Nineteen lamps, hissing, one after another, all the way back to Tallow Lane. The snow had started again. It settled on the cardigan over my scuttle and did not melt, which told me something about how warm I was not.

We were nearly home when Tansy spoke. She said it the way she said prices, in that careful level voice.

"The Guild's two hundred crowns would save the shop," she said. "I've done the sums. Mrs Hobb owes the landlord and the coal merchant and the man who mends the roof. If you go to the Guild, she can pay them all. The shop stays open." She walked a few more steps. "I thought you should know. That it would do some good."

I thought about that for a while, in the snow.

"Then I suppose I'm useful," I said.

Tansy stopped walking.

She stopped so suddenly that the scuttle swung in her arms. She stood in the middle of Tallow Lane, under a Guild lamp that hissed at us both. She didn't move, and she didn't say anything, and the snow came down on the two of us. I could hear her breathing, and I knew she had heard herself in what I had said. I had meant her to.