Chapter Twelve: House to House

For the next hour in Greyhithe, nobody shut a door.

I lay in the scuttle on the lots table in the auction hall, and I was very small. I want to be honest about that. I had given Tansy everything I could spare, and a little more, and what was left of me would have fitted in a teacup. My scales had gone grey all over, the grey of a coal that has been out for an hour and is only just warm in the middle. I could not lift my head. I could barely lift my eyelids, and there was no point, so I didn't.

But I could feel. I have always been able to feel fire, the way you can feel the sun on your face with your eyes shut. And what I felt, in the first minute after I breathed, was Tansy's candle, burning in her two hands beside me, warm as a summer step.

"Al," she said. Her voice had gone to pieces. "Al, what have you done?"

"Pass it on," I said. It was all I had the breath for.

She understood. She always did, in the end, once you had said exactly the thing you meant.

The first person was the woman in the front row. I didn't know her. She had come to buy back a shawl and been outbid by a man who wanted the fringe. She had a Guild candle in her hand, a bought one, burning cold, the way they all did. Tansy reached out and tipped her own flame to the wick.

"Can you spare a light?" said the woman. She said it after it was done, in a sort of daze, the way you say grace after you've already started eating.

"Gladly," said Tansy. "Pass it on."

And the woman's candle was warm.

I felt it happen. I felt the cold go out of the flame and the warmth come into it, as if somebody had changed their mind. And then the woman turned round to the man behind her, and held it out to him.

I cannot tell you everything that happened in that hall in the next quarter of an hour, because I did not see it. And nobody who did see it has ever told it the same way twice. But I can tell you what I felt. I felt one warm flame become two, and two become four. I felt it go along the front row and back along the second, and spread out across the benches like spilt tea across a cloth. Hundreds of people had come to that Reckoning with bought candles in their pockets, because nobody in Greyhithe went anywhere in winter without one. Now they held them out to one another, and asked, and were answered, and passed it on.

Can you spare a light? Gladly. I heard those words in a hundred voices. Old voices and children's voices. Somebody's grandmother, saying it the old way, with the shape exactly right. A boy at the back, who had never said it before in his life and got the words in the wrong order and was given a light anyway.

And the hall grew warm. Truly warm, for the first time in forty years. The wet coats began to steam. The child with the cold stopped coughing. Somebody laughed, and then somebody else, and then a great many people at once.

Then the doors opened, and Tansy was gone.

I felt her go. I felt her flame go out of the hall and across the square and onto the Corn Bridge, moving fast, the way she moved, small quick steps. And behind her, a great many other flames, following. Then, at the far end of the bridge, they began to spread out.

Here is how I know where the first house was. I felt Tansy's flame turn off the main street into a quieter one. I knew the turning, because I had lived on it for sixty years. Ferrier Street. I felt it stop at number seven and go in, through to the front room. Then it bent down to a cold iron grate that I had lit forty years ago as a wedding present.

Mrs Fennick had gone with her. I don't know when. I only know that the lavender had left the front row of the hall, and that ten minutes later, on Ferrier Street, a grate that had been dead since the autumn caught and held. I felt it like a hand on my back. I imagine she sat down in front of it. I imagine the house still smelled of his pipe. I hope she let it.

After that, I lost count. Tansy had taught me to count, but there were too many. I felt the warmth go back across the river, street by street, the way you feel a choir fill up a cathedral, one voice and then a row and then all of them. Tallow Lane. The cobbler, who had a light already, giving it to everyone who knocked. Mr Abel and his colder wife. The woman with the tin, who put a given coal back in it and wept, I'm told, for an hour. Twelve houses on Tallow Lane that had been cold that morning. All twelve.

Nobody paid. That was the thing. Nobody in all of Greyhithe paid a penny that afternoon for fire, and so every bit of it was warm.

At noon, Mr Strand came to the lots table to take possession.

His boots came first, and then the lamp oil and the starch. He stood there for a long time. Then I heard him take his thermometer out of its little leather case. He slid it under my wing, the way he had in the shop. He did not ask. But his hand, I noticed, was a great deal gentler.

He waited. He looked at his watch. After a minute, he took the thermometer out and held it up to the light.

"It hasn't moved," he said, to nobody. "Not a degree."

Behind him, one of the lamplighters had lit his pole from what was left of me. I had not given it to him. He had simply held the wick against my scales, where the last of the fire showed through, and it had caught. A bought dragon. A bought flame. It burned on the end of his pole, white and bright, and threw no heat at all. The lamplighter held his hand over it, and then held his hand over the candle of the woman next to him, and then over his own flame again. He said a word I won't repeat.

Mr Strand did not say anything for a long time.

"It's true, then," he said at last. "The grandmothers' tale. It was never the age of the flame. It was the paying for it." He was quiet. "Forty years. We've been selling them cold for forty years, and telling them it was the weather."

He took off his gloves. He did not fold them. He let them fall on the table, beside the scuttle. Then he turned round to the sellers' bench.

"Mrs Hobb," he said. "I've bought a dragon I can't use. Its fire will be cold to the Guild as long as it lives. And it can't be sold on. Anything I sell will only be colder." He took a breath. "I'd like to give it back to you. For nothing. If you'll have it. It seems to be the only way it'll ever warm anyone."

Mrs Hobb said nothing for a moment. Then she said, quite drily, "I'll not be giving you your two hundred and ten crowns back, Mr Strand."

"I wouldn't dream of asking," said Mr Strand. "It would only go cold."

The auctioneer had been waiting, with his gavel, for some time. He cleared his throat. He looked at his list, I suppose, because when he spoke it was in the voice of a man reading something he would rather not.

"Lot nineteen," he said.

There was nobody on the sellers' bench beside Mrs Hobb. There was only an empty space and a bag.

Mrs Hobb stood up.

"Withdrawn," she said.

"Withdrawn by whom, Mrs Hobb?" The gavel stayed in the air. "Only the holder of the ticket can withdraw a pledge."

"I hold it," said Mrs Hobb. "I always have. Never you mind the rest." And she came to the lots table and picked up my scuttle in both her arms, the way Tansy carried it, against her chest. She had never once carried me. She did not ask first. I did not mind.

She carried me out of the hall herself, and down the steps, and across the Corn Bridge. She carried me all the way home to Tallow Lane, where every chimney was smoking and every one of them smelled of supper.

And Tansy had not come back yet.