The board by the balance room door carries the ten rules in ten lines of whitewash, and none of them is numbered, because it was lettered before anybody in Wyver Hold thought that a thing ought to be numbered. The seventh is the one people look at. A car may not run empty. The Grip cannot move without somebody's weight in the other end. The wind that morning was twenty-six at the mast and falling, and Ivo Trant gave the town its numbers before it asked him for any.

“Gusting forty on the top,” he said. “Twenty-six at the mast, and she’ll hold. Four minutes to the brake from the third trestle.” He was fifty-two, with a red woollen mitten on his left hand and a bare white right hand up to the second joint, and he counted aloud in fours under his breath the whole time he said it. Emrys Vale’s chair stood empty in the office. Emrys was at a burial in the low country and would not be back until Thursday, and Perrin Tovy was at the mechanics’ institute taking a paper in accountancy he had never once passed. So the consent book lay open on the desk with nobody keeping it, and Bronwen Vasey, who kept the second book and the survey of the line, was keeping the first as well, in a hand that was not Emrys’s.

“Eleven names before the tide turns,” she said, to nobody in particular, which was how she said it. “I have not got a second pair of hands. I am telling that to a drum.” The drum did not answer. It never did. She took her spectacles off the cord and looked at the balance room through them, at six pans on chains over the pit, two deep and one shallow, and the shallow one empty, as it had been most of the morning.

Elin Trewhella came in at twenty past ten with her hood down and her hair wet to the ears. She was thirty-four and lived at the harbour end, on the lower line, and her mother was in one of the four beds at Tannery Moss with a chest that had not cleared since Candlemonth. The doctor had said a fortnight. A fortnight was eleven days gone. “I want Tuesday’s car,” she said. “Not the Saturday. The Saturday is too late to be any use to anybody.” “Eleven names already,” said Bronwen Vasey. “You’ll be twelfth.” “That’s all right.”

“It is not all right. I am telling you what it is, not turning you away.” She turned the page and laid the pen along the rule. “Go and say it at the pan. You know how.” Elin Trewhella went and said it at the pan. She had said it eleven times since Candlemonth and had never once been told there was anything else to do afterwards. She stepped into the shallow pan, which is cut deep enough for a man and worn to a curve by eleven thousand pairs of boots, and put her hands on the rail, and said, in a voice pitched to carry across a stone floor to a man on a drum four feet above her head: “My name is Elin Trewhella, and I hold for the up.”

Ivo Trant heard it. He was giving the brake time to the cabin at that moment and heard it anyway, the way a man hears a thing said into his own work. He said, “I have you, Elin Trewhella,” because that is what they say, and then said to himself, under his breath, “one, two, three, four.” Then she stepped out of the pan and up onto the stone, because the car was at the platform and going, and because nobody in her life had ever told her the pan was the place you stayed in.

Nobody stopped the car. The eighth rule says that no holding may be given or taken while the cable is moving, and that the grip-man pulls the brake rather than trust anybody’s timing. But no holding was being given or taken. That had all been done. The sentence had been said out loud with her own name in it, the grip-man had heard it, and the clerk wrote it on the page while the sentence was still in the air.

Rule three says a nod is not consent, a mark is not consent, and a name written by a clerk is not consent. On that morning the town did rule three perfectly, and rule seven went out of the room through a door nobody had thought to lock. The car went up at two minutes past eleven, the pit grating showed a shallow pan with nobody in it, and the cable went over twenty-two trestles with one woman in the uphill car. It did not stop, and it did not want to.

Gwilym Ore filled the ballast tank at the balance end every morning at six, and it had been full since six that morning and stayed full, because nothing had been in the pans to run it out. He came into the balance room at half past three to look at the level, because that is what you look at when the line is quiet, and stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and looked at the shallow pan. “Emrys is away,” he said. “Aye.”

“He fills that tank at six and I fill it at six, and neither of us has emptied it in a week. Sixteen hundred and forty gallons. Call it eleven ton of water, and the car is three and a half.” He put his fingers round the pencil behind his ear without knowing it was there. “Gwilym.” “I have not said a thing yet.” “You have said a thing.” He took the pencil out, looked at it, and put it back.

They found it out at four, and then they found it out eleven times. Nell Cardew did the finding, because she was permitted on the pans and because she eats her lunch standing up facing the drum, and she had been looking at that shallow pan all day without knowing she was looking at anything. She had Emrys’s list of the day out of the drawer, and the book, and the eleven pairs of boots at the pan-side rail, and she counted.

“Eleven names in the book,” she said. “Eleven. And there were two in the pans all day and they were both Persisce Jones, and she has held twice, which is not allowed.” “Nell.” “She is not allowed. It is four.” She put her finger on the page. “And all eleven of these went up on the car, and not one of them stood in a pan, and I have been on this job since I was fourteen and never once known that was possible.”

She looked up, and gave a time, because that is what she did when a number would not come. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “I have been twenty minutes finding that out and it has been twenty minutes all winter.” The thing nobody could put down afterwards was how ordinary it had been. Elin Trewhella had not hidden. She came down on the Friday with a school slate on which she had written the eleven journeys in pencil, the dates in one column and nothing in the other, and put it on the mess room table and sat down opposite Teofil Rownt.

“That is what the book is,” she said. “That is what everybody says it is. You put your name down and you go up. I have said my name at that pan eleven times and ridden up eleven times, and not one person in this town ever told me there was a difference between saying it and standing in it.” “Somebody always tells you,” said Bronwen Vasey. “Then somebody always tells somebody.” It went on all winter. Nobody was quiet and nobody was trying, and there was no villain in the winding house to be found, which was what a good many people had come down the hill expecting. Gwilym Ore held one position the whole of it and never moved off it.

“The machine is honest,” he said. “I have said it in this room before and I am saying it now. It weighed eleven ton of water and three and a half ton of car and it did what it did. The machine did not make a mistake. A name was written down that ought not to have been in the book, and the machine took it at his word, and that is not the machine lying.” “It weighed water,” said Bronwen Vasey. “It weighed what was in front of it.”

“Gwilym, I have audited this line eleven times. I have audited the weights and the dates and the figure on the water, and every audit came out clear, down to the quarter of a hundredweight, and I have known for two years that an audit is a thing that is done by a person and not by a number.” “Then do the audit,” he said. “I have never known you to want one.”

Teofil Rownt could not leave it alone, because a hole in the rules is a hole in his rota, and he turned his brass token over with his thumb while he talked. “She should pay for it. Not in standing. In coin. She has had eleven journeys a man down there paid for, and the mill will advance it out of the winter fund, for the year, then, and she settles it over four quarters, and then it is a debt like any other debt and nobody has to be uncomfortable about it again.” Nobody answered him for a while.

“Rule five,” said Aldith Marner. “Rule five is about what holding is repaid in.” “Rule five is that holding is repaid in labour and never in coin. You have just put her on a list with people who owe money.” She put her chalk-dusted cuffs on the table. “Now tell me why a woman who said a true sentence out loud, to a man who heard it, should end the year owing money to a mill.”

Aldith Marner taught two hundred and six children the hour by the Grip, and on the Friday she put the question to the room in the imperative and then waited, which was the whole of her method. “Look at the pans,” she said. Two hundred and six children looked at six pans on a slate. “Not the numbers. The pans. Every one of you has a name in that book. Say your own name out loud to me now, and then tell me where your boots were when you said it.” Nobody said anything for some seconds.

“Gwilym Ore told this room that the machine is honest,” she said. “He is right. It is also the only instrument in this town that has never once been asked whether it was being lied to. It was asked whether it was heavy.” Nell Cardew sat in on it once and said the thing that turned the winter, in numbers, because she could not find the other words.

“We have four hundred and ten feet,” she said. “Four people on a Saturday in February, because Teofil’s rota has nobody in the eleven o’clock, and eleven hundred and forty names in the book for the lower line, and about five hundred and forty people live at this end of the hill. Twice as many names as boots. Forty years of auditing the number of names. Nobody ever counted the number of people in the pans, because the book says there is one, and the book is the law.” “Which is what the board says,” said Bronwen Vasey.

“No,” said Nell. “The board says there is one and the book says there is one and the town says there is one. That is three pieces of paper. I have never in my life seen the fourth thing, which is a person standing in an iron pan with their hands on a rail.”

Ivo Trant said very little through all of it, and what he said was about stopping distances. “I heard her,” he said. “I said I have you. And I was giving the brake time, and I did not look at the pan, and I have run this drum for thirty-one years.” “That is not an excuse,” said Aldith Marner. “No,” he said. “It is a distance. Nineteen seconds from where I was standing to the brake, and she was a quarter of a mile up by then. Say what you like about it. Nineteen seconds is the number.”

Elin Trewhella would not be fined and would not be paid, and when they had gone round the room twice she said the thing that had been underneath it since the first Friday. “I am not here to be paid,” she said. “My mother is in a bed at the top of this town, and eleven of my journeys to her were given to me, and I am not going to sit in this room and hand them back.” She turned the slate round. “I want one more. I want to know what I am supposed to do about it.

Everybody keeps telling me what I have done wrong, and I have done one thing wrong, and it was stepping out of a pan, and nobody in this town can tell me the rule that says do not step out of a pan.” “Because there is not one,” said Ivo Trant. They did not change the rules. Nobody could have got a change through in the middle of a winter, and Teofil Rownt put it to the assembly once on the fourteenth of February and did not put it a second time. What they did was in the balance room, on a wet Tuesday in March, with the pit grating raked and the pans hanging. Elin Trewhella had the idea, standing on the stone with her hands on the rail of the shallow pan.

“If I cannot step out without lifting a foot over something, then nobody can step out without lifting a foot over something.” Gwilym Ore had it made in nine days. It is a bar of iron at shin height across the mouth of every pan, on two shoulders cut into the frame, and to get out of a pan a person must put a hand on the bar and swing a leg over it, which cannot be done in the time it takes to say a word.

“A bar,” said Teofil Rownt. “That is your answer to the seventh rule. A bar of iron and a man who is quick.” “A bar,” said Gwilym Ore, “that a man cannot be quick enough over. That is the answer. Not to the rule. To being quick.” He set it himself, the last bolt, and stood with his hand on the iron, and then took the pencil out from behind his ear and looked at that as well.

“I said the machine is honest,” he said. “I am not taking it back. It weighed what was in front of it on the eleventh of November and it told the truth about that. It has taken me four years and a bar of iron to work out that being honest is not the same as being asked the right question, and I would have got there sooner if anybody had asked it.”

The shallow pan fills on the Saturdays now. Teofil’s rota has a gap in the eleven o’clock, and the gap is only a gap in the paper, because nobody can be made to fill it, and the line runs on the days it runs. Elin Trewhella stands in it most weeks. She has not been to the top since the eleventh of November, and she will not be this year, because a person who holds does not ride, and there is no clerk in Wyver Hold with a column for it.

“The time is not recoverable,” said Bronwen Vasey, writing it in the ruled notebook as she said it, which is what she does when she wants a thing to be there in a week. “Nine seconds from the drum to the bar,” said Ivo Trant. “Anybody can do nine seconds.” He put his white hand flat on the brake lever. “One, two, three, four.”