Juniper Races the Rain to Kettlebridge
On the morning she set out for Kettlebridge, Juniper Bellrunner rang the hundred and forty-four morning bells of Lantern Hollow eleven minutes early.
She rang them fast, too. All over the hill, people woke, looked at the clock, and lay down again, sure they had dreamt it. Then their own bell went off outside the window.
The last bell was at No. 144, up the street from the East Gate. Juniper rang it at six fifty-two and had the time written on the back of her hand before it stopped. She kept a stub of indelible pencil for the bell book, and the back of her hand was nearer.
Sedge was on the step with her broom, as she was most mornings. Beside her, on the swept part, sat an old bell-polish tin. It held damp sacking, and in the sacking was a quince cutting no longer than a hand. Sedge had coaxed roots out of it all winter on her kitchen windowsill, and now it was going east to Miri at the Orchard. Juniper was going with it, as far as the Orchard, for the walk.
“Why a bell-polish tin?” Juniper said.
“Right size,” Sedge said.
“Can it get wet?”
“Damp’s good. Wet isn’t.”
“Good.” Juniper looked at her watch. “I want to be clear. This is not a race. It’s only timed. Nobody has ever timed the road to Kettlebridge properly. People just say ‘a day’. A day isn’t a time. A day is a guess.”
Sedge leaned the broom by the door and picked up the tin in both hands. That was all the answer she gave, and it was the answer Juniper wanted.
At the gate, Steward Clove was unlocking for the day. He began to say that the bells had been noticed this morning, and their earliness, and by whom. Juniper and Sedge were out of earshot before he got to whom.
Halfway down the hill Juniper looked back. Far off, at the bottom of the valley, the sky had a grey edge to it, like a slate somebody had started to wipe.
“Where’s the rain?” she said.
Sedge did not look round. “Behind us. It’ll hold until the river.”
Juniper set the pace, and the pace went like this. She ran to the next bend and looked round it. She ran back and reported. Then she wrote the time on her hand and ran to the next bend.
“Clear to the mill,” she said. “One cart, going our way, slow. Hedges both sides. Puddle at the bottom, keep left.”
Sedge walked. She walked the way she swept a step, as if there were a right speed for it and she had found it years ago.
By the middle of the morning the wind had got up, the kind that comes in shoves. Round one bend a farm gate had blown open and was banging on its post. In the field beyond, a dozen sheep were looking at the gap the way sheep look at most things, as if it might be a trick.
Sedge stopped and held out the tin. “Hold this.”
Juniper held it. “Whose gate is it?”
“Don’t know.”
Sedge caught the gate on its next swing. The latch was stiff, so she worked it up and down until it wasn’t. Then she shut the gate and leaned on it once to be sure. The sheep went back to the grass as if they had never meant anything by it.
All this took four minutes. Juniper knew, because she spent them standing still with a tin in her arms, which is the hardest thing in the world for a bell-runner. Then the wind shoved at her sideways and lifted a corner of the sacking. She turned her back to it, held the tin against her coat, and tucked the corner down with one finger. She forgot to look at her watch for nearly a minute.
“Where’s the rain?” she said, when Sedge came back for the tin.
“Behind us. It’ll hold until the river.”
By noon Juniper had walked the road once and run it twice, out to every bend and back again, which comes to three roads. Sedge had walked one. The back of Juniper’s hand was filling up. Bells 6.52. Off 7.00. Mill 7.41. Sheep 9.12. It was beginning to look like something she would pin up in the bell house.
“What does Miri want a quince for?” Juniper said, coming back from a bend. “She grows pears.”
“Pears go on top,” Sedge said.
Juniper thought about that all the way to the next bend. She came back looking as pleased as if she had found a new short cut on her round.
At the halfway well stood Hobb’s cart, loaded with flour, and Hobb’s mule, and no Hobb.
“Hobb’ll be at the farm having lunch,” Juniper said. “That’s an hour. That’s an hour and a half if there’s pie.”
The tarpaulin over the flour had come loose at one corner and was flapping like washing. The mule had placed herself under the loose corner with her nose up, in case anything fell out.
“Hold this,” Sedge said.
Juniper held it. “Hobb can tie a tarpaulin,” she said, but she said it quietly, in case it sounded as if she meant it.
Sedge caught the corner, pulled it down over the sacks, and tied it to the side rail with a knot that went round twice. She tested it. Then she walked round the cart and tested the other three. The mule studied the tied corner for some time, and then looked at Sedge in a way that was perfectly clear, for a mule.
“We’re four minutes down on the mill split,” Juniper said.
Sedge took the tin back.
“Where’s the rain?”
“Behind us. It’ll hold until the river.”
Juniper looked anyway. The grey line had come a long way up the valley. The Hollow’s hill had gone soft behind it, and the blue and gold lamps were only a smudge.
The last stretch went up over a long bare hill and down the other side to the river. By the top, the afternoon had gone dim and the wind was coming in bigger shoves. Below them lay Kettlebridge, with its lamps already lit along the rails and a queue of carts waiting behind Rook’s rope. On the near bank, smoke was going sideways out of the chimney of Nessa’s house. It was half a mile away, all downhill.
Behind them came a sound like a great many people deciding to clap.
“Where’s the rain?” Juniper said.
Sedge turned round and looked, for the first time all day. The grass on the hill behind them was going flat and silver in a long line, and the line was coming.
“There,” she said. She held out the tin. “Run it in. I’ll be behind you.”
“You’ll get wet.”
“Yes.”
Juniper put the tin inside her coat, did up every button over it, and ran.
She had run the bell round of Lantern Hollow every morning for years. She had never run like this. She went down the hill with both arms wrapped round the lump in her coat. She did not look back, because looking back costs a second at least. She heard the rain reach the top of the hill, and she heard it start down. She passed the end of the cart queue, and a carter on the last cart stood up and cheered without knowing what for. A drop hit the road beside her heel. Then another, nearer.
Nessa’s door opened before Juniper reached it. Nessa had been at the window, because on wet days Nessa watched the road the way some people watch a pot.
Juniper shot over the step, turned round, and counted. “Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.”
Then the rain came down on the step, all of it at once.
“Thirty seconds,” Juniper said. “I had thirty seconds on it.”
“On what?” said Nessa.
“The rain.”
Nessa looked delighted.
Sedge came in a minute later. She had not run. She had walked the last half mile at the speed she swept a step, and the rain had caught her at the top of it, so she was wet the way a pond is wet. She stood dripping on the mat and looked at Juniper.
“You won,” she said.
Nessa got bossy, which is what happens to Nessa when there is somebody wet to worry about.
“Coat. Off. No, now.” Nessa hung the coat over the rail above the stove, where it began to steam at once. “Boots. Socks. I’ve got dry ones. They’re Tolliver’s, they’re clean, he won’t miss them. He’s got a story about every pair and he can make one up about these. Sit there, at the warm end. There’s a bowl if you want one, and you want one.”
So Sedge sat at the warm end, in Tolliver’s socks, with a bowl. Nessa said it was leek and something, and anyone who guessed the something could have seconds.
Juniper unbuttoned her coat and took out the tin. The sacking was exactly as damp as it had been on the step of No. 144 that morning, and not one drop wetter. Sedge put a finger on it and nodded.
“Good,” she said. She set the tin on the windowsill. The rain ran down the glass on one side, and the quince sat dry on the other.
“The rain cheated at the end,” Juniper told Nessa. “It came straight over the hill. We had to use the road. The road has bends in it.”
“Oh, that’s a good one,” Nessa said. “Say that again when Rook comes in. Rook’s had a day.”
Juniper wrote Nessa’s 4.38 on the back of her hand, under everything else. Nessa took her wrist, turned it to the lamp, and read the lot.
“That’s a bell schedule,” Nessa said.
“That’s a race,” Juniper said. “A formal one. I’ve decided.”
“You said it was only timed.”
“It was only timed until I won it.”
Then she looked at her hand for a while. The longest gaps between the times were at the sheep gate and at Hobb’s cart. Both times she had been standing still with the tin while Sedge did something for somebody else.
“I’d have won by more if she hadn’t kept stopping,” Juniper said. “And I’d have had nothing in my coat at all if she hadn’t carried it the whole way first. Give her the seconds. Even if she didn’t guess the something.”
“She guessed it on the first spoonful,” Nessa said. “Nutmeg. Nobody ever gets the nutmeg.”
Nobody asked Sedge how she had known about the nutmeg, or how she had known the rain would hold until the river. Juniper meant to, and then the seconds came, and there was bread with them.
“Where tomorrow?” Nessa said.
“Whistling Ridge,” Sedge said. “In the morning. If the wind lets us.”
“Is the ridge timed?” Juniper said.
“No.”
Juniper wrote Ridge on her wrist, with a space after it.
In the morning somebody else would ring the hundred and forty-four bells of Lantern Hollow at the proper time, which Juniper considered late. But that was the morning. Tonight the rain came down on the river and the bridge and the carts behind Rook’s rope. Back up the road, it came down on a latched gate and a tied tarpaulin and a mule with no flour on her nose. It did not come down on the quince at all.
Juniper Bellrunner had won the first formal race to Kettlebridge by thirty seconds. Sedge had come second, and she sat by the stove in Tolliver’s socks with her second bowl, as pleased as anyone had ever been to lose a race.