The room at the top of the Combe Mill is four steps colder than the loft under it in every month of the year, and there is no window in it that opens, and the mill itself has had no fire in it since the year the counting house was built, a hundred and forty years back, when the owner had a dead boiler out of the west end and put the money into slate instead. The room is heated when it is heated at all by an oil lamp on an iron bracket, and the bracket is the only thing in that room anybody in this valley has ever thought to oil.

You cannot go up there. You can ask to go up there, and the asking has a form, and the form is a pay envelope with three things written on it: the date you wish to go, the entry you wish to look at, and the reason. The reason may not be a name. Corve Merrick, who has been master of the mill nineteen years and in the counting house forty-one, wrote that clause himself out of a copying book some years ago, and when Aldis Prowse asked him why a name could not be put down as a reason, he said that a name is not the sort of thing a person writes on a pay envelope in a mill yard, and that if you have to write a name down to get into a room then you have lost the thing you came for before you got in. She had asked for the fourteenth of March, and she had put entry four hundred and six, and for the reason she had written: to read one entry, and to be sure of the column.

The town tells the story of the three nights the way it tells every story, which is with the invoice left out. A miller is behind on the quarter. A strange little man comes up out of nowhere and spins gold out of a wheel with no drive. Three nights and the debt is clear. What the telling leaves out is the price, which was a name, given out of somebody’s mouth on a Tuesday in a bad month, and once a name is on a roll it is not a person, it is an account, and accounts in a mill town are the only thing anybody is frightened of. What the town tells about the night of the fourteenth of February 1971 is that Bess Prowse was called on the third night and did not answer.

That is not a story anybody made up. It is the settlement, and it has the specific shape that settlements have in a place where everybody is paid out of one mill: a household on the roll’s balance cannot sell, cannot marry, and cannot be buried in the churchyard. The Prowses could not sell the cottage on Mill Bank. Aldis Prowse is nineteen and is not to be married, and there is a woman in Nether Combe who has said so out loud. Bess Prowse died in the March of 1988 and is under a stone eleven yards from the lych-gate on the wrong side of the wall, and the stone has two dates cut into it and no name, because in that year nobody in that family was going to cut a name into a stone.

The stairs are at the back of the mill, past the scale house, and there are sixty-one of them from the yard to the loft, and four more from the loft to the door. Aldis counted them on the way up with her hand on the rail, and the rail is oak and cold, and by the time her hand was at the fourth one her fingers had stopped working, which is what everybody means when they say it is four steps colder in there. The room is eleven feet by nine. A stool. A wheel with a spindle and no drive and no belt and no bench, standing on the boards by the north wall. A tin box, japanned, with a hasp. The lamp and the bracket. Nothing else. The dust on the boards is not the dust of a room that is shut, because a shut room does not make dust, it accumulates it, and this dust is swept, in arcs, the width of a broom, and the arcs turn at the corners in the way that a person who has swept the same floor a great many times turns them.

Aldis took the roll out of the tin. It is bound in a coarse black calf with a linen tape, and the tape has been mended eleven times, and the calf is soft as cloth at the corners, and it is two hundred and thirty-five years old, and it opens flat, which is the one thing you can say for it. There are five hands in it. The first is the whole of the eighteenth century from 1791 and is a small upright hand with a long descender. The second is broader and lies to the left. The third is the merriest and there are only twenty-two pages of it. The fourth is small and cramped and there are a great many of those. The fifth is the hand of 1940 and after, and it does not hurry. Each entry has five things in it: the date of the loan, the term, the name, the form of the call as it was spoken, and the outcome. That is the form. It has been the form since 1791 and the second hand wrote it out at the front of the book in ninety words, and the first sentence of those ninety words is that no entry is of any force unless it is complete. “There is a date of the loan,” Aldis said, reading down the column, because that is what she does, she reads the roll in order, out loud, and she cannot stop in the middle of a sentence. “Eleventh of February, seventeen seventy-one. Term: three nights. Name: Bess Prowse. Form of the call, as spoken, and the person speaking: I call Bess Prowse. Outcome: —” She stopped.

The outcome column on that page was gone. Not blurred. Gone, in the manner of a thing that has been cut off at the edge. The roll was re-backed in 1841, when the leather gave and the sewing had to be replaced, and the man who did it was a binder out of Bristol and he trimmed the fore-edge to take the unevenness out, which is what a man does, and he trimmed it a quarter of an inch, and on a page of a book that is used flat and opened flat for two hundred and thirty-five years a quarter of an inch is a column. Four of the five columns stood clear on page four hundred and six. The fifth had been trimmed off the paper. “Nobody has read that page across,” Aldis said. “They have read it down. Every year somebody has opened the roll and gone down the name column, because the name column is the one everybody wants, and they have stopped when the name column stopped, which is the bottom of the page, and they have never once gone across, and the fifth column is on the right-hand edge of the paper, and it is the one that has been going.”

Fenn Creech had been the binder at the Great Bindery for thirty years and could not read half the hands in the roll, and he had carried the roll downriver twice in his life, once to have a board mended and once because the counting house wanted the weight of it taken. “He goes down the names,” Aldis said. “He gets to the bottom of the name and he closes it, and he has been perfectly right to, because he did not know there was anything else on the page.” She put the lamp on the floor and got her own lamp from the sill and set it low, at the level of the page and to the left of it, so that the light came across the paper and not down onto it. You do that with brass, with seals, with a page that has writing on the other side of it. You can do it with a page that has had a column trimmed off it, because the ink of that column is still in the paper, and the leaf above has taken the impression of the leaf below in reverse, and if you hold the leaf up to a lamp at a low angle you can read the whole thing. It took her a quarter of an hour and the lamp went twice.

It said: ANSWERED. THE DAY IS IN THE BINDERY. Twenty-four words, in the fifth hand, in ink gone brown at the edges the way the fifth hand had gone brown by 1971. The A was made with a bar across it, the way a man makes an A when he has made it a thousand times. The final full stop was a small square, not a round, and the fourth word was the only one on the page written with the pen turned sideways, which is what a person does when the words are getting long and the hand is used to fitting a word into a narrow space. Aldis Prowse read it eleven times, and then she took out the pay envelope, and turned it over on the flat of the tin lid, and wrote it out in pencil in her own hand, both hands, exactly as it stood, with the square full stop. Then she shut the roll and put it in the tin and closed the hasp, and the tin went back on the shelf under the bracket where the lamp is, and the room was four steps colder than the loft with one person in it rather than none, and she went down the four steps and found that her hand had begun working again somewhere around the second one.

The Great Bindery is a mile and a half downriver, at the tail of the water, where the river has dropped six feet over a sill and the flax dust hangs in the air and does not go anywhere. It is one long open shed with the river side open to the weather and forty presses down the length of it in two rows, and it is hotter than the mill by ten degrees in February, and the light in it comes in at one end at a time and in bars, and the bars move when a barge is going by. The counting part of the bindery is a lean-to off the back with a window, and a girl of thirty-one sat in it with a day book open in front of her and a board-chalk in her hand. “Two hundred and six pieces this week,” she said, before anybody had asked her anything. “Forty-one of them on the fourteenth of February, and four of those were seconds, and two were seconds the week before, so the week is not a bad week, it is a normal week with a bad fortnight in it.” “I am not here about this week,” Aldis said. “The fourteenth of February, then. I know that page.”

It was Merrin Dole who had said it, and she had said it in the way that people say a thing when they have been waiting eleven years to say it to somebody and have had to make do with saying it to nobody. The bindery writes a day three times over, in three places, and Merrin Dole laid the three out on the counting table the way you would lay out three boards. The first is burned into the board. Every board has the date and the press burned into the end of it with a hot iron, and a bindery keeps its boards for forty years, and the rack at the end of the shed has been full since the year before the mill was rebuilt. The second is the day book, a ruled book in a column for every working day of the year, and against the date it gives the press, the count, and the number of the cart. The third is the cart list, a slip of paper, and the cart list is the only one of the three anybody ever looks at, because a cart goes down the river and a cart can be stopped at the bridge. “And the marks,” Aldis said. “And the marks.”

The corner mark on a piece of finished linen in a mill valley is a customer. It is cut into the corner with a small pair of shears, or written in ink with a quill, or stamped with a bit of type on a handle, and it is the name of the house the piece is going to, and it is put on in the bindery and not at the mill, because the bindery is the last place a piece of cloth is touched. Every piece goes out marked. A piece goes out unmarked twice in the working life of a bindery and not three times: once if it is a sample, and once if somebody has made a mistake, and the sample goes into the sample book, which has a page for every year with the date and the customer and the reason. “There is no sample in the sample book for the fourteenth of February, seventeen seventy-one,” Merrin Dole said, “because I looked, and because the book for that year has a fire in it, and the page has been recopied, and the copy says what the page said, and the page said nothing.”

The board said: 14 II 71. 19. And the day book said: 41, and three carts, the last at four o’clock. And the cart list said three carts, the last at four o’clock, and the last cart went down the bank to the landing at Bristol four days by road. “Forty of them are marked,” Merrin Dole said. “I have counted it four times this morning and I counted it before you came, and I counted it in February when I found the board, because a board is a board and the rack is where the boards go.” She had a cloth in front of her, a piece of fine linen about a yard and a quarter long, and on the corner of it, written in iron-gall ink gone to rust, was a name. “Forty corner marks in one hand,” she said, “and one piece with no mark at all, and the day book is the only book in this shed that has ever been afraid of nothing, and I am going to write it in the day book, and then I am going to chalk the board, because that is what is done with a board.”

But first there was the rule, and it took a quarter of an hour to state it out of the entries, and neither of them wanted to say it out of a feeling, because a feeling is not worth a chalk mark. “A lent name is not gone,” Aldis said. “That is the whole of it. A lent name is held. The holder has it, and the holder is responsible for it the whole time, and everything that is done in this town under that name on a day is the holder’s act and not the person’s act, and the holder is accountable for it at the roll.” “Then the day book is the holder’s day,” Merrin Dole said. “Not hers. His. Hers to bear, because she gave it, and his to answer for, because he held it. And the day book is kept down here, in a shed, by women and girls, and nobody in the mill has ever asked to see it.” She wrote on a slip of paper and pushed it across. Two shillings and sixpence, taken at the bridge toll on the fourteen, on the last cart, counted out of the toll money by the carter and entered by him and never questioned, because a toll is a toll.

Eight shillings and fourpence struck off a chandler’s slate in Nether Combe, a slate that had stood two years and a bit, the items oil, tallow, and twine, and the twine was for the bindery, which is the bindery’s business and not the family’s, and the whole of the eight and fourpence came off on the fourteenth of February in a hand that was not the chandler’s. One letter, out of Bristol, dated the thirteenth, delivered by the mail cart, received on the fourteenth. “Received,” Merrin Dole said. “By whom signed?” Aldis had the mill’s own copy of it in her hand, or the mill’s copy of it in her head, which is the same thing. The counting house keeps the Bristol letters in a letter book, and the counting house has kept them since the year the mill was rebuilt, and the letter of the thirteenth of February 1971 concerning the quarter’s cloth is on the leaf, and it is addressed, in the merchant’s own hand, to the name. “Addressed to her,” Aldis said. “At the mill house. Received at the mill house on the fourteenth, and the mill’s copy of the letter says received, and it does not say by whom, because the mill never asks by whom. In fifty-five years the mill has never once asked by whom.” “So the letter is his,” Merrin Dole said. “He took it in and he signed for it, or he did not sign for it, and either way he is the one the merchant will want, and in the morning the merchant will go to the mill house, and Bess Prowse is dead, and the mill will say that her daughter takes her correspondence.”

And then the sum, which neither of them had gone looking for. A day of fine linen at the bindery is valued at the mill’s own cloth price, because the bindery does not value anything, it only presses it, and the valuation is done in the counting house at the end of the season out of the cloth book. Forty-one pieces, of which four were seconds. Forty-one pieces of fine linen at the cloth price for that year came to three pounds two shillings and sixpence. The loan on the eleventh of February 1971 was three pounds two shillings and sixpence. “That is not a thing a clerk can put down as coincidence,” Merrin Dole said, “because a clerk is the one person in this valley who is paid to say when two numbers are the same. They are the same. And the gold that was weighed at the mill for that loan, if there was gold, and there would have been gold, is the lender’s gold while the debt stands, and it was weighed and entered, and the entry is in the mill’s gold book on a high shelf, and the gold is three pounds two shillings and sixpence worth of spun metal, and it is made out of a name.” Nobody spoke for a while. There is not much noise in the bindery at half past three on a Tuesday in March. There is the river at the sill and the forty presses standing still and the sound forty women make when they are all breathing at once in a warm room.

The other half of the afternoon went on what the twenty-four words do and do not do, which took longer than the twenty-four words. “The call was answered,” Aldis said. “That is all that column says. It does not say the loan was paid. It does not say the name was given back. Answering is not paying, and a call that has been answered is a call that cannot be made again, and that is the whole of what the Prowses have been carrying for fifty-five years. They have been carrying a second call to a call that was already discharged.” “Then the balance is still on the house.” “The balance is still on the house. Three pounds two shillings and sixpence to a lender nobody can name, on a loan made in a bad month. So a cottage on Mill Bank cannot be sold, and I cannot be married, and my mother is under a stone with two dates on it and no name, and all of it is owed for a call he made once and had answered inside a single afternoon by a person who used the name to get a letter out of the mail and forty-one pieces of linen down to Bristol.” Merrin Dole wrote the date on the corner of a scrap and did not look up. “Then somebody puts it to the roll.”

“Nobody puts it to the roll. The roll is the lender’s book. The mill enters on the roll when a lender keeps a name that has been paid for, and that is theft, and theft is the only thing that goes on the roll in this valley. The mill cannot strike a call off for us and could not if it wanted to, because the mill is not the lender and never has been. We have found the day out of a book down here that is two hundred and twenty-three years old, and the day is in a hand that is on page four hundred and six, and to use one word of it somebody has to come up sixty-one stairs.” “Yes,” said Merrin Dole. “And you cannot ask him. You cannot ask him whether you may. That is the arrangement.” “That is the arrangement,” Merrin Dole said, “and I have a board to chalk and a piece of cloth with a man’s name on it and nothing to be done about any of it until the right person comes up the stairs, and there has not been a right person up those stairs in fifty-five years, and you will not get one by standing at the bottom of them with a piece of pencil.”

Nanny Rowe lived in two rooms over the pound house at the top of Mill Bank, and she was seventy-nine, and she wore a black wool shawl in July, and Aldis Prowse had never once been into her rooms, and the reason was that the two of them had never had anything to say to each other until the fourteenth of March. “You will want to know what was in the house,” Nanny Rowe said, and turned the lamp down before she started, which she does, and which Aldis had been told about by three separate people and had not believed until the wick went down and the room came to about the colour of a wet slate. “It is eleven years since anybody asked me that and it is nineteen months since anybody asked me anything, and I have been asked it eleven times and I have given eleven answers and I should like to be clear with you that the eleven answers were not the same answer.” “What was in the house,” Aldis said. “Two of us. The lady and me. That is the house. That is what was in it.” “And after the light went off the west window.”

“After the light went off the west window there were two of us in it, because the one who came was let in, and I have said for fifty-five years that there was one, and there was not one, there were two, and that is the whole of the difficulty and it has been mine the whole time, because I have never once said it out loud to anybody, and a thing you do not say is a thing you have not done, and I did not do it.” Aldis did not say the next thing. She had it ready and she kept it there, because it was not the question, and the whole difficulty of a house in Nether Combe is that everybody has one question and it is never the useful one. “You will want to know how long,” Nanny Rowe said. “From the light leaving the west window to the last cart going down the bank. That is longer than the sermon and shorter than the psalms, and I know it because I heard the psalms start in the valley and the cart go down the bank after, and there is not a great deal between them in February.”

“Was it a man,” Aldis said, and heard herself, and did not take it back. “I have never heard it turn. There is no drive on it, and I have never heard it turn, and I have lain in this room fifty-five years with the mill under me, and the mill is the loudest thing in this valley in every month of the year, and I have never once heard that wheel go round.” She said it in the present tense, and she was not joining anything to anything, and she was talking about a room she had never been in. “It is the wheel people mean,” Nanny Rowe said, “the one in the water, and that one has a drive, and that one goes all winter. There is the other one. You have all got that one wrong for two hundred years, and I have never said so, and you are the first person come up that road who has had the sense to ask me a question instead of a story.”

The bindery was lit by a hard blue bar off the river when Aldis went back into it, because it was gone four o’clock, and Merrin Dole had the cloth on the table with the corner turned back and the daylight on it, and the mark on the corner was a name in iron-gall gone to rust, written in a hand with a bar across the A. “It is the fifth hand,” Aldis said. “It is the hand that writes the outcomes. The hand that has written the outcome of every loan since 1940 wrote this, on a Tuesday in February, on the corner of a piece of linen, in the marking shed, with a quill.” “It is a quill,” Merrin Dole said. “It is not a bit of type and it is not the shears. Somebody wrote it, and wrote it small, and wrote it in a hurry, and did not do the other forty the same way, because the other forty are marked in type and that one is marked with a pen.” They stood over it for a while.

“The person who worked that press on the fourteenth of February 1971 could write,” Aldis said, “and could not sign, or would not. A person in a bindery for a fortnight marks in type, because the type is quicker, and a person who marks one in a pen on the last day has been somewhere that day which is not a press.” “Then it is an error,” Merrin Dole said. “And errors go on the board. That is what a board is for.”

She wrote it in the day book on the line for the day she was in, because a day book is written up the same day or the day after and not six months after, and she wrote: fourteenth of February, seventeen seventy-one, forty-one pieces, board nineteen, one piece without a mark, last cart, four o’clock, no hand to it. And then she took the chalk, which is the bindery’s chalk, and which is the only thing in this valley that gets wiped and begun again every single day of the year, and she wiped the board and wrote the day’s figures on it, and the figures were two hundred and six for the week and forty-one for the day, and she put the board back on the rack where the boards go. Under the chalk the board said 1971, because the iron under the chalk said 1971, and it would say 1971 for as long as the shed stands. “Forty-one pieces and forty marks,” Merrin Dole said, “and one went down the bank on the last cart to the landing at Bristol, and Bristol is four days by road, and in fifty-five years nobody in Bristol has ever sent a piece of linen back.”