The cradle stood in the corner of Gran's front room, and it had not rocked since the day Nell was born. Nell was nine days old. She ate. She slept. She wet the cloth. She cried in the afternoon and stopped crying in the evening, the same as any child in Tolby. When she cried the cradle stayed still. When she was fed the cradle stayed still. When Tam put his palm flat on the rail and pushed, it went forward a finger and came back and stopped. Gran said the wind was in the chimney. Tam put his hand up the chimney. There was no wind in the chimney.

Hob Pike lived next door, on the low side where the ground went down to the beck. He came over on the second morning and stood in the doorway with his coat still on.

“I have seen this before,” he said. “Once, a long time ago, in a house up at Cold Wold. A cradle in that house would not rock, and nobody could find out why. It turned out somebody under that roof had said an untrue thing. Not a big one. The cradle stops the moment an untrue thing is said, and it starts again when the untrue thing is taken back or the true thing is said out loud. That is all it does.”

He said it once. Nobody asked him to say it again, and nobody repeated it, not even to themselves. So they began. Ruth said true things under the roof for a whole evening. She said the hens were in, the gate was shut, the baby was sleeping, and the bread was gone. The cradle stayed still.

They tried the women from the row, and the boy who delivered the milk, and old Barley with his dog. Every one of them stood in the room and said what was true. The cradle stayed still through all of it. Then they had to think of who had said something untrue, and it came to them that they were all in the room, and one of them was under this roof every hour of the day. She had better things to do than talk to a cradle that only sat there.

It was Gran. They found it out over a cloth and a bucket, and it was nothing much. Gran had said the washing was out. It was in the copper. Gran had said she had laid the fire. There was no fire laid. “You have been telling me he is coming back,” said Tam. Gran looked at the cradle. “Since when have you been asking about that?” “Since I was six.”

“Then you did not need an answer,” said Gran. “You asked it like a boy asks whether it will rain. You went off to look at something.” Tam stood in the cold part of the floor. He had never once asked Gran the second question. That was how the lie had lasted. It had lasted because he was nine and he was busy and everybody in Tolby had let it stand, because the other thing was harder to say out loud by the beck on a March evening.

He asked it in the dark, with the room gone quiet and Ruth in the kitchen doorway. “When is he coming?” Gran started the answer. Tam heard her start it. Then she stopped in the middle, and put her hand flat on the cradle, and Tam thought she was going to fix the blanket again.

“He is not coming,” she said. “He went down at the ford in the second week of March. They got him out on the Wednesday and they put him in the ground on the Friday, and the whole row stood at the gate, and nobody said it out loud, and I said he was coming, and I have said it since.” She took her hand off the rail. The cradle went across the boards and back, the way it had gone for nine days without moving at all.

Gran stood by the window with her apron folded over her arm and did not say anything else, and Ruth went out and shut the yard door gently behind her. Hob put his hand on the frame from the doorway and then left it alone. Tam lifted Nell out and held her against his shoulder. He had never once asked Gran a second question, and now he had asked one, and she had answered it in the same voice she used for the hens and the bread. In the corner the cradle rocked, and its shadow went over and over on the wall.