The Umbrella in the Margin

The tea line went down in yellow chalk, right round the long reading table in the Hall of Names, one good stride back from the edge. Edda drew it on hands and knees while fourteen wet people stood by the door and dripped.

“Tea on that side,” Edda said, getting up and dusting off. “Ledgers on this side. Nothing from that side comes over to this side. Not a cup, not a spoon, and not a biscuit, however small.”

Then Edda put the kettle on, because rules are rules, but wet is wet.

It had been meant as a quiet day. Edda had the old Court ledger out of its boards, the one the lamp-polishers used to keep, with its stitching worn through. The plan was to sew it into new boards, slowly, with nobody talking. Then at ten o’clock the rain came down on the Glowmarket all at once. Linnet’s teal awning filled up like a sail and tipped the lot over Tavi’s counter, and Tavi announced that every pack was now hand-washed, which put the price up. The gutters ran over. The square became a pond with stalls in it. And half the street ran up the steps of the Hall of Names, because it was the nearest roof that didn’t leak.

Purl was already there.

He was lying on the bench under the front window with a polishing cloth folded over his eyes. He had been lying there since nine. When fourteen people came in shaking out their coats, he lifted one hand an inch off his chest, to show he knew, and put it back.

Edda poured. Mrs. Alder got the only chair, because Mrs. Alder needed somewhere to sit and said so. Ned, a carter’s boy, got a dry sack round his shoulders. He had been holding a mule in the square when the gutter went over, and he was wet right through to his opinions. Teasel, a ferry hand off the Cloudbreak boat, got the cup with the handle, because her fingers were still cold from the cloud. The man with the goose under his coat got a saucer of water for the goose.

Then Edda looked at the fourteen of them, holding their cups behind the yellow line. Edda looked at the window, where the rain was coming down in rods. And Edda had a thought so lovely that Edda had to sit down.

Nobody could leave.

* * *

There is a thing worth knowing about Edda. Edda loves a mismatched date more than most people love pudding. Two deliveries that ought to be one. A lamp lit on a day it was marked broken. A signature that is nearly right. Edda finds them, and keeps them, and tells them, and they are Edda’s.

The best one Edda had ever found was in the old Court ledger, the very one lying open on the table. In three winters Edda had never once got to the end of telling it. Warden Iona had heard the beginning and been called away to a lamp. Steward Clove had heard the middle and offered to turn it into a form. Purl had heard all of it, once, and been asleep before the good part.

“I have something to show you,” Edda said to the room. “It will take a while. There’s more tea.”

Fourteen people leaned across the chalk.

Edda turned the ledger round, put a finger under one line, and read it out. “‘All lamps of the Court polished. Weather: rain all day.’”

Nobody said anything. Edda had expected that. People never saw it straight away.

“Polished,” Edda said. “All of them. Every lamp in the Court. In rain. All day. Nobody polishes in rain. The glass streaks.”

“Wrong cloth,” said Purl, from under his cloth.

Edda did not turn round. “And the hand is nobody’s. I have every polisher’s writing in this Hall, and I have checked this against all of them. Twice. It’s a young hand. It runs downhill. It makes its sevens like little gates. Sixteen years old, I’d say.” Edda took a paper slip from the pile, wrote on it, and tucked it into the page. “That’s a guess. I’m marking it as a guess.”

The slip said GUESS, in capitals. Once a ledger came to the Hall, nobody wrote in it again except Edda, and Edda only wrote facts. Guesses went on slips.

Edda slid the ledger an inch nearer the chalk. “And then there’s this.”

In the margin, beside the entry, somebody had drawn an umbrella. It was no bigger than a fingernail, with a hooked handle and six panels, and it had been drawn with great care.

Ned put his nose so close to it that Edda held a hand under his cup.

“What’s that for?” Ned said.

“That,” Edda said, “is the whole question.”

Edda had worked it out on long evenings, with a pencil and a clock. One polisher, alone in the Court, on a day of rain all day. A dry cloth in one hand. An umbrella in the other, held over each lamp in turn so the glass stayed dry while it was rubbed. Three minutes and three quarters a lamp, with walking between.

“Nine hours,” Edda said. “Somebody stood in the rain for nine hours, holding an umbrella over every lamp in Beacon Court one at a time, so they’d be bright for the evening. Then drew the umbrella in the margin, so we’d know.” Out came a second slip. “That’s a guess. I’m marking it as a guess.”

“Wrong cloth,” said Purl.

“Nine hours,” said Ned. “That’s the best thing I ever heard.”

“It’s daft,” Mrs. Alder said. “Nine hours? He’d have wanted his lunch.”

“He could have had his lunch under the umbrella,” Ned said.

“With which hand?” said Mrs. Alder.

Teasel had been turning her cup round and round. “What sort of rain?” she said.

“Rain,” Edda said. “It says rain.”

“Nobody on the ferry would ever write just rain,” Teasel said. “Ferris would put them off at the next rope. There’s drizzle, and there’s the sideways kind, and there’s the fine stuff that hangs about and never seems to land. Rain all day is never one rain. It changes.”

“Thank you,” Purl said, to the ceiling.

Edda gave the bench a look. “You’re asleep.”

“I’m resting my eyes,” Purl said. “My ears are working. Nobody polishes the Court dry.”

By now the Hall had taken sides. Ned and five others were for the umbrella. Mrs. Alder and the man with the goose were for lunch. Teasel was for the weather, which was not really a side, but she kept to it. The rain came down on the windows in sheets, so nobody could go anywhere, which was exactly how Edda liked it.

So Edda went on. Edda showed them the other entries on the page, all in proper hands, all on dry days. Edda showed them the hook of the umbrella’s handle under a glass, and how the ink matched the entry, so no joker had added it later. Then Edda read out the next morning’s line, in a different hand, which said only “Court: done.”

“Somebody came in the next day and found nothing to do,” Edda said. “I think they were astonished.” A third slip went in. “That’s a guess. I’m marking it as a guess.”

Three slips now stood up out of the page like a little row of flags. And every time Edda stopped for breath, the bench said something.

“He’d want a leather for that.”

“Not the yellow cloth. Never the yellow cloth.”

“Wrong cloth.”

Edda put the pencil down. “Purl. I have been trying to tell this for three winters. Would you like to tell it?”

“No,” Purl said. “I’d like to sleep.”

It was Ned who asked him in the end. Ned had decided that if anybody knew about lamps, it was the man lying down. He walked up to the chalk and leaned across it as far as he could go without his cup going too.

“Mister Purl,” he said. “What’s the umbrella for, then?”

Purl did not take the cloth off. “Rain-wash,” he said.

The Hall went quiet. Even the goose.

“Thin rain,” Purl said, the way a man explains a thing he has explained before. “Not this. This is a bucket. The fine stuff, after. It takes the soot off the glass better than any water you could carry. Gets in the corners. Leaves no streaks. You don’t polish in it. You let the rain do the polishing, and you go round behind it with a wash leather. Then you draw the umbrella, so the morning crew knows it’s done and doesn’t do the lot again.”

“Court: done,” said Ned, very pleased.

“Everybody knows that,” said Purl.

“Nobody knows that,” said Edda.

“Every polisher knows that.”

“It isn’t in any of your ledgers.”

“We write it out in words now. The Hall wanted words.” Purl turned his head a little. “What’s the hand like?”

Edda picked up the ledger, holding it level in both hands, and carried it the long way round Ned’s cup to the bench. Purl lifted one corner of the cloth and looked at the page with one eye.

“That’s mine,” he said, and put the corner down again.

“It can’t be,” Edda said. “Your hand is one of the best in this Hall.”

“It is now,” Purl said. “That was my first season. I was fourteen, and the head polisher gave me the ledger because nobody else would take it. I wrote it up a ladder.”

“Fourteen,” Edda said. “I had you at sixteen.”

“I was tall,” said Purl.

Edda stood holding the book and looking at the little umbrella. Everyone could see what Edda was giving up: the nine-hour polisher, the brave tired arm, the umbrella moved from lamp to lamp all day. It had been a beautiful guess. Mrs. Alder, who had said it was daft, was kind enough not to say it again.

Then Teasel put her cup down and looked at the window. The sound on the glass had changed. The rods had gone, and in their place was a fine grey rain that hung over the Glowmarket and hardly seemed to land at all.

“There,” Teasel said. “That’s your rain.”

Purl sat up. He took the cloth off his eyes, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “About time,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for that since nine.”

* * *

Beacon Court shone blue and gold through the fine rain, the way the Hollow’s lamps shine even by day. Purl let the fine rain run down the first lamp for a slow count of ten. Then he went over it once with his wash leather and stepped back. Its blue and gold came out so clear that the next lamp looked dusty beside it.

“That one’s brighter,” Ned said.

Purl went round behind the rain with his leather, lamp by lamp, singing a song about a carter and a hill that had nineteen verses, and he knew every one. Ned asked him a question at the third lamp, so Purl told him to hold the ladder, and Ned held it for the rest of the afternoon. Mrs. Alder stood under the awning to watch her own lamp done, which she said she had never once seen in forty years.

Edda came last, with the old ledger wrapped in a waxed cloth, and opened it on the bench under the awning, well out of the wet. Beneath the little umbrella, in the margin, Edda wrote:

Explained by the polisher. Fact. Annoyingly.

Then Edda held out the pen.

Nobody but Edda had ever been allowed to write in a ledger once it came to the Hall. Purl knew it. Everybody in the Hollow knew it. He looked at the pen for a moment, and then he went to wipe his wet hands on the waxed cloth.

“Wrong cloth,” Edda said, and gave him a dry handkerchief.

Purl dried his hands properly. He signed under Edda’s note in his good, neat hand, and dated it, and the seven, after all those years, was still a little gate.

“You found it,” Purl said, handing back the pen. “I only drew it. Nobody ever looked at it before you.”

“I’m glad it was you,” Edda said. “A nine-hour polisher couldn’t have signed it.”

It is the only margin in the Hall of Names that anyone but Edda has written in. Edda kept the three GUESS slips as well, in a drawer, because they had been very good guesses.

After that, Edda told the story of the umbrella in the margin often, from start to finish, and now it had an ending with a signature on it. Everyone agreed it was a marvel. Everyone agreed that Edda had found it. And if Purl happened to be on the bench under the front window with the cloth over his eyes, he agreed too. He said Edda had found it and he had only drawn it, and would everyone please keep it down.