The Coat in the Board Bag

The door of Maren’s observatory would only shut if somebody gave it a shoulder. On the morning of the fog, Maren had a box of sorted decks in her arms and a thought about frost in her head, and no shoulder to spare. So she left the door standing open and went off down the knoll.

The apprentice set down the board bag, went back up the step and shut the door properly. Then the apprentice picked up the bag again and caught up with her.

It was a thin, bright morning at the end of autumn, with frost still white along the bottom of every hedge. Maren was wearing what she always wore: a sweater with the sleeves pushed up past the elbows, and no coat. Nobody in the valley could remember the last time Maren had worn a coat.

“It’s cold,” the apprentice said.

“I’m not cold,” Maren said. “I’m interested.”

She stopped at the first lamp post to show what she was interested in. The frost had grown on its glass in feathers on one side and in tiny stars on the other, and she wanted very much to know why. She would have stood there until noon if the box of decks had not begun to slide.

At the meadow well, the well keeper was hanging sheets on the line. She looked at Maren’s elbows.

“Linnet asked me to tell her,” she said, “next time I saw you go past without a coat.”

“Then don’t see me,” Maren said.

“I’d be telling her every day. I said to her, I’ll need a slate.” She pinned a pillowcase. “There’s tea if you want it.”

“Tavi’s waiting,” Maren said. “And I’m not cold. I’m interested.”

“My sheets are interested as well,” said the well keeper. “They’ll stand up on their own by dinner.”

The plan, which Maren had said once over breakfast and twice since, was this: up the east road to the gate, the decks to Tavi, and home again before Wick lit the meadow lamps. There was a second part to the plan that she had not said out loud. Nobody, all day, was going to get her to admit she was cold.

At the foot of the east road, where Bramble’s hedge began, she could feel the apprentice looking at her again. So she said it to the nearest hedge-post, which had not asked, just to have it said. “I’m not cold. I’m interested.”

The apprentice moved the board bag to the other shoulder. Maren went everywhere with the field board in case something fell, and the apprentice went everywhere carrying it.

“That bag’s got heavier,” Maren said. “Since about the first frost. What have you got in there? Rocks?” She sounded hopeful. She liked a good rock.

“No,” said the apprentice.

* * *

Tavi was under the blue lamp at the East Gate, and had the lid off the box before Maren had quite let go of it.

“Sorted by a charter,” Tavi said, admiring them. “By starlight. On the ancient step of a tower.”

“On the step,” Maren said. “After lunch. It isn’t ancient. It wobbles.”

Tavi thought about this. “Sorted on a step,” Tavi said. “By Maren. It’ll sound better once you’ve gone.” Then Tavi looked at Maren’s elbows, and very wisely said nothing at all.

They turned for home early in the afternoon. They came out under the arch at the top of the east road, and the fog came up out of the valley.

It came up the way milk comes up in a pan, all at once. By the time they had gone ten steps the road had gone. Bramble’s hedge had gone. The arch behind them had gone too. There was white in front and white behind, and the cold in it found every bare elbow on the road. There were two, and they were both Maren’s.

“Oh, good,” said Maren, which is not what most people say about fog.

“Crown of the road for you,” she said. “The ruts will keep you straight. I’ll take the hedge.”

She went from post to post along Bramble’s hedge with a hand on each one, because the hawthorn in between was hawthorn. Every so often the apprentice said “Here” from the middle of the road, and Maren said “Here” from the hedge, and they went on.

It was slow. It got colder at every post. They passed the mule trough, which had a skin of ice on it, and Ivo’s milestone, which said two miles and, being Ivo’s, meant it. Maren’s nose had gone pink at the end. Between posts she tucked her hands into her armpits. At each post she took one out again, as if this were an ordinary way to walk down a road.

Down in the meadow, Wick would be checking his lamp covers about now. Then he would be checking them again.

Halfway down, Maren’s hand went into the gap Bramble leaves in the hedge for the badger.

“Halfway,” she said.

This was the stretch where the tall grass grows right up to the road and hums, and where stray flecks of star like to hide. There was a light in the grass, low down. “Over here,” Maren said, and the apprentice came across, and the two of them stepped out of the fog altogether.

They were standing in a room made of clear air. It was perfectly round and about the size of a kitchen, and the fog stood all around it like walls. Straight overhead, though it was the middle of the afternoon, the sky was dark blue and full of stars.

At their feet there was a line across the grass, as neat as a tide mark. Outside the line every blade was grey with wet. Inside it the grass was bone dry. Maren knelt and put one finger on each side of the line, wet and dry, and laughed out loud.

In the very middle of the room, no bigger than a seed, a fleck of fallen star sat in the grass and shone.

“It’s made itself a room,” Maren said. “Of course it has.” She was already sitting down. “Get the board out. It’ll want a game before it goes. They always do, in the grass.”

The apprentice unbuckled the bag, took out the field board, the little lamp and two decks, and buckled the bag shut again.

Maren dealt two hands, one for herself and one for the fleck. She played her own hand to win, because it would have been rude not to. When it was the fleck’s turn, she held its cards over it one at a time, and the fleck glowed a little brighter over the one it wanted.

In the Afternoon round Maren put down her Moonlit Whale. For a moment a whale about the length of a loaf swam slowly over the board with the stars on its back. Then the fleck brightened over a Kind Gust. The gust lifted the whale off the board as gently as a hat, and up it went into Maren’s sky, one more small star among the real ones.

“Fair,” Maren said.

By the Night round she had the fleck down to its last two lanterns. She held up its Sunbeam Squire, which would have gone charging off after her lanterns. The fleck stayed dim. She held up a little Lantern Page, the plainest card in the deck. The fleck shone. So the Page stayed home by its lantern, and when Maren’s last push came, the Page was there.

The fleck won by one lantern.

“You kept your Page at home,” Maren said, very pleased. “That’s a cautious game. I’ll write that down.”

The fleck went dull and grey, the way they do, and Maren tipped it into her tin, where it rattled. The clear room folded itself up, gently, the way a sheet is folded between two people. The dry grass went grey with wet. The stars went away overhead. The fog came back.

And Maren shivered. Just once, but all the way down, from her shoulders to her boots.

The apprentice unbuckled the board bag again, took out a coat, gave it a shake and held it open.

It was Maren’s own brown coat. She had not seen it since the first frost, and she had not once wondered where it was. There was a square pressed into the back of it: one sharp corner and two straight sides, the exact shape of the corner of the field board. A coat does not get a dent like that in a day. It gets it by being folded at the bottom of the same bag, under the same board, on every walk for a month.

Maren looked at the dent for a while. Then she looked at the bag, which had got heavier since about the first frost.

Then she put her arms into the sleeves and did up the buttons, all of them, right to the top.

“Don’t tell Linnet,” she said.

* * *

They went on down the east road, Maren on the hedge side with one hand on the posts and the other in her pocket, the apprentice in the crown of the road. “Here,” said the apprentice, and “Here,” said Maren. Below the badger’s gap the fog began to thin. By the meadow gate it was only a little white lying in the low places, and the hedge was a hedge again, and the posts were posts.

They were not home before the lamps. They were halfway up the knoll when the first one came on below them, small and gold in the blue air. Then the next. Then the next. Wick lit them in order, post by post. From the knoll Maren could see the little pause at each one where he checked the cover, and then the second little pause where he checked it again.

It was the coldest it had been all day. Maren stood in her coat and watched every lamp come on, and nobody asked her whether she was cold. For once she did not have to tell anybody that she was interested.

At the top she gave the observatory door her shoulder, and it opened, the way it does for a shoulder. She hung the coat on the hook by the door, at the height of her nose, where she would walk straight into it in the morning. The apprentice put the soup on. Maren found her notebook under the maps, next to the bread, and wrote by the stove:

Fleck in the tall grass, halfway down, in fog. Made itself a dry room with stars in it. Wanted a game. Plays a cautious game. Kept its Page at home and won by one lantern.

She did not write anything about the coat. But in the morning, when there was frost on the lamp glass again, feathers on one side and stars on the other, she put the coat on at the door before anybody could ask. She wore it all the way to the first lamp post, where the frost needed looking at with both elbows. Then the coat went back into the bag, under the board, and that is where it goes now, on every walk, in case.

Maren was every bit as interested as she had ever been. Now she also knew where her coat was, and that, it turned out, was interesting too.