Orm trimmed wicks for a living. He went along the lanes of Coldbeck with a pocket knife and a roll of wick behind his arm, and once a year he went further than he needed to. That night was the night of the long question. He set a fresh candle on every threshold in the village, one at each door, and he lit them as he went. Then he said the same thing at every door he came to.

“A candle burns straight up while a house owes nobody anything. It leans down toward the person it has promised something to and has not given. Watch the candle and not the promise. The candle points at the person.” That was the whole of it. He said it forty times before the light went.

At the first door the candle stood up like a post. The woman on the step wanted to know whose turn it was to sit in the good chair at the long table on feast night. She asked her brother in the lane. He asked her back. “Ask the candle,” Orm said. It stood straight up.

At the second door an old man wanted his sister’s boy named in his will, and he wanted it written down before Advent. He said the boy had waited long enough. The candle stood straight up. “It is a small thing to ask,” Orm said, “but the candle does not care how small it is.”

At the third door there had been water in the bottom room since the spring flood, and two families wanted the house with the dry cellar. Both had been to the lawyer. Both had come out with nothing. The candle stood straight up. At the fourth door they had one bell and no money for another, and the school had asked for it and the chapel had asked for it. The candle stood straight up. “Next door,” Orm said.

At the next house lived Tam and Bess, and their girl Nell was out on the step with her shoes unlaced. The flame leaned. It leaned down and down toward the flagstones, and it leaned at Nell, and it did not straighten when she stepped back to let her mother look. The lane filled up behind her. People came out of their gardens and stood along the walls and looked at the candle, and for a while not one of them said anything.

“What is it telling us?” Bess said. “What do we owe her?” “I don’t tell you what you owe.” Orm crouched down by the candle. “I set candles. Look where it points.” Nell looked down at her own two shoes.

Inside, the long table had a bench down one side and a bench down the other, and the babies sat on the floor at meal times. There was one good chair at the head of it, with a woven seat and two arms, and at harvest it went to whoever the house decided. Gran had promised it. Two summers ago, with the chair pulled up to the fire and Nell on her knee.

“When you’re nine,” Gran had said, “you’ll sit in the good chair at our table like a person, and nobody will say otherwise to you.” Nell was nine in April. They had all known it since April. Tam said it was a small thing to argue about in front of the whole village. Bess said somebody ought to say it out loud first. Gran said she had said it out loud two summers ago, and then nobody had answered her, and that had been the end of it. So the chair went round and round, and nobody ever sat in it, and nobody ever said no.

Gran got up out of her own chair. She was eighty-one, and the good chair was heavier than it looked. “Bess,” she said, “take the other arm.” They carried it round the end of the long table and set it down by the fire for Nell. Then Gran pushed it back a hand’s width, the way you would push a plate. “We were never going to give it to her,” Bess said.

“No,” said Gran. “We were never going to say no either. That is the same thing, and it took a candle to say it out loud.” Then she went out on the step with the cloth and wiped the wax off the candle, and the wax came away in one long white thread. Behind her the lane was quiet.

In the morning there was snow on the lane and on the step. The candle had burned down into a flat pool of wax and the flame was gone. The good chair stood by the fire, and Nell had her hand on the arm of it.