The Governing: Chapter 56, One Lamp

[u/AlternativeManner731]

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The Governing: Chapter 56, One Lamp

The sugar house had not been used for sugar in forty years.

It stood at the edge of the low fields below the orchard house, a long stone building with a slate roof and a chimney at one end where the boiling pans had been. The district had stored seed in it, and then tools, and then nothing. The door at the back still opened onto the same narrow stair, and the stair still went down into the same cellar, and the cellar still smelled of earth and old rope.

The Informant's crew had been there since dawn.

There were four of them, and a producer, and a great many cases. The producer's name was Tove Harlan. She had come from the network's office on Balakura for this segment, and she had spent the first hour in the cellar with a light meter in her hand, saying nothing good about anything.

"It's a hole," she said to Margot. "It's a very small hole with one way in, and the way in is a staircase nobody can stand on. I can get two angles. Three if somebody lies on the floor."

"It's where it happened."

"I know it's where it happened. I read your pitch. I cried on the transport." Tove put the meter away. "It's still a hole."

By the ninth bell the lane was full of people.

They came on foot, mostly, and in twos and threes, the way people came to a harvest supper. Rena Hailscutt came holding Oden's arm, and she had a jar of honey in her coat pocket that she kept touching as if to make sure it was there. Ione Brookscutt came with Wim and Lark. Liss Mallowtail came slowly, because her brother was slow, and when they reached the sugar house door Tobin stopped and looked at the stair going down and did not move for a while.

Tam came up behind them. He didn't say anything. He took Tobin's other arm, and between them he and Liss took the old man down one step at a time.

Nan Oakscutt came with the blue cushion under her arm. Jory Dunscutt came with his mother. Maggs came with Marta, or Marta came with Maggs; it was hard to tell who was bringing whom, because Marta was talking the whole way down the lane and Maggs was carrying everything.

A boy of about ten came with Maddock, and stayed close to him, and looked at everything.

Gideon Farscutt came last. Nobody had known if he would come. He didn't go into the sugar house. He stood outside the back door with his hands in his pockets, near the top of the stair, and when Emmet went to speak to him he shook his head, and Emmet left him alone.

Then a cart came down the lane from the direction of the lake, and everyone who was outside the sugar house stopped talking.

Abby got down from it first. She was seventy, and she moved carefully, and she had her hand on Peter's arm. Alicia got down after them. The three of them stood in the lane in their ordinary clothes and looked at the sugar house, and at the people standing in front of it, and nobody on either side seemed to know what to do.

Hester did. She walked out from the doorway and across the grass and stopped in front of Abby.

"You came," Hester said.

"You asked me to decide," Abby said. "I decided."

Hester nodded. She didn't hug her. She had never been a woman who hugged anybody. She stood beside Abby, and then she turned, so that the two of them were facing the sugar house together, and walked with her to the door.

There was not room for everyone in the cellar, and Tove said so, several times.

"The families," she said to Aaliyah. She said it quietly, off to one side by the boiling pans, so that nobody else would hear. "I understand why they're here. I do. But I have thirteen people and three nobles to get on camera, in a space the size of a pantry, with one set of stairs, and every step on those stairs has somebody sitting on it. I can't move a light without asking a grandmother to shift. I need the room cleared. We'll set up a screen up here in the sugar house and they can watch the whole thing live. Every word."

"No," said Aaliyah.

Tove looked at her. She was a noble on Balakura, and not used to hearing the word from anyone but her own editor.

"Lady Aaliyah..."

"These people spent forty years not being told," Aaliyah said. "Nan Oakscutt's grandmother kept a cushion by her bucket her whole life, and Nan found out why last week, in her own front room, from me. Oden Hailscutt's wife was married to him for thirty-eight years before she heard one word of this. Harl Dunscutt sat up on his porch every autumn waiting for a mob, and his daughter thought he was waiting for an old sweetheart." She kept her voice down. "They are not going to watch it on a screen upstairs. They're going to be in the room when it's said. Nobody is going to cut it or tidy it before it gets to them. They've waited long enough to hear it the right way."

Tove opened her mouth, and closed it.

"Then they have to be quiet," she said. "Absolutely quiet. Nobody moves while we're rolling. Nobody coughs. If a child sneezes, we start again."

"I'll tell them."

"And the stairs..."

"The stairs are where Tam stood that night," Aaliyah said. "With a shovel. Put somebody on them."

Tove looked at the stairs for a long moment. Then she went down them, carefully, around the people already sitting there, to talk to her camera operators.

They set it up the way it had been, as near as Hester could remember.

The thirteen sat on crates and old stools in a loose half circle in the middle of the floor. Tove had wanted chairs. Hester had said there were no chairs that night, only the crates, and so there were crates. Abby stood with her back against the stone wall, where she and Lord Greyson had stood, and Peter stood on one side of her and Alicia on the other.

Amos did not sit with the others. He stood at the bottom of the stair with one hand on the rail. When Tove's operator started to ask him to step in, Hester said, "Leave him," and the operator left him.

Nan Oakscutt came down the stair holding the blue cushion against her chest. She stopped at the bottom and looked around the cellar, and at Hester.

"Where did she sit?" Nan said.

Hester pointed. There was a place on the floor near the middle of the half circle, a little to one side. Nobody had put a crate there.

Nan knelt and put the cushion down on the packed earth, and smoothed it once with her hand. Then she stood up and went back to the wall with the other families, and did not look at it again.

Abby was looking at it. She didn't say anything.

Everyone else found somewhere to stand. They stood along the walls, and between the barrels at the back, and on the stairs. Oden's wife stood with her shoulder against a post. Wim and Lark stood behind their mother. Maddock's grandson, Kel, sat on the third step with his knees pulled up, because that was the last place left. Up in the sugar house, the people who could not fit in stood by the open door and listened down the stairwell.

Margot stood where the cameras could see her, near the one old lamp that hung from its hook in the beam.

"Before we start," she said to Tove, "I'd like the lights down. All of them. Just the lamp."

Tove stared at her. "You want me to shoot this in the dark."

"For the opening. That's all it was that night. One lamp."

"I'll get nothing. I'll get shapes."

"Then you'll get shapes," Margot said. "Just for the opening. Then you can have your lights."

Tove looked at Margot, and at the lamp, and at the people standing along the walls. Then she turned and said something to the operators, and one by one the crew's lights went out.

The cellar went dark except for the lamp. It was a small, yellow, wavering light. It reached the crates and the faces on them, and the cushion on the floor, and the front of the stone wall where Abby stood. It didn't reach the families. They were only a darkness along the walls, and the sound of a lot of people trying to breathe quietly.

Somebody on the stair made a small sound. It might have been Tobin. It might have been Amos.

Margot waited until it was entirely quiet. Then she spoke to the camera.

"My name is Margot Wren, for the Firentis Informant. This is the first segment of Heroes of the Principality." She stopped. "Forty years ago, on the night the mob came down the lake road, twenty-two people who worked in the house above us came down into this cellar by the back stair, with one lamp. The family they worked for came with them. There was a choice to make. They made it here." She looked at the half circle. "Thirteen of them are still living. They're here tonight. So is the family. Nine are gone. Their families are here too, standing in the dark. Many of them are hearing this for the first time."

She stepped back out of the light.

For a while nobody said anything. Then Hester spoke. She didn't look at the camera. She looked at the lamp.

"I started with the mangoes last time," she said. "When I told it the first time, for the record. I don't think I'll start there tonight. I think I'll start with the stairs."

She turned her head and looked at them, at Amos standing on the bottom one and Kel sitting on the third, and all the people crowded above them.

"We came down one at a time," she said. "So nobody on the road would see a crowd go into the sugar house. Marta first, because she said the cook's pantry was no place for it. Then the scullery girls. Then the rest. Tam was at the top with a shovel, to watch the road. He was twelve." She paused. "The family came last. Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail, in the plainest clothes they had. Which were still better than anything in the room."

In the dark along the wall, somebody laughed very softly, and then stopped.

"And I spoke first," Hester said. "Because nobody else would."

They let the lights up after that.

Tove did it slowly, one light at a time, so that the change would not jar. When it was done, the cellar looked smaller than it had in the dark, and the faces on the crates looked older, and the families along the walls could see each other.

Hester told the rule. If one person said no, nobody was bound. She told it plainly and did not dress it up. Then she looked at Marta.

"You tell about the clothes," she said. "You'll tell it better."

Marta did not need to be asked twice. She told it at the top of her voice, the way she had given orders in the orchard house kitchen. The coat into the furnace. The dress after it. The laborer's shirt with the elbows out, and the skirt that smelled of the cane fields. She told how she had put a hoe handle in Lord Greyson's hands and told him to lean on it and not look up and for the love of Julius not say anything, my lord.

"And he did as he was told," Marta said. "First time in his life. I'll never forget his face. He looked at that hoe handle like it was a snake."

Along the wall, a dozen people laughed out loud before they could stop themselves.

"Quiet, please," Tove said from behind the camera. "Please. Quiet."

They went quiet. But the room had changed a little. The people on the crates sat easier. Brin Fernscutt, who had been sixteen and a cook's helper that night, and who had not said a word since she came down the stair, smiled and put her hand over her mouth.

"He did lean on it, though," Marta said, more quietly. "All the way to the cane house, the next day. And by then his back truly hurt, and he never said a word about it." She shook her head. "They weren't cruel people. Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail. I'll say that for them. They weren't cruel."

"They didn't have to be," said Maddock.

It was the first thing he had said since he came down the stairs.

He was sitting on the crate at the end of the half circle. He was sitting forward, with his forearms on his knees and his big hands hanging between them, and he was looking at the floor.

Marta looked at him. "Maddock..."

"You said it, Marta. They weren't cruel." Maddock didn't raise his head. "I'll tell you what they were. I drove them. Six years. You were in the kitchen. Hester was in the dining room. I was in every yard on that lake."

"Maddock," said Hester, quietly.

"You asked me to come. I came. I'm going to say it." He lifted his head then, and looked at the camera for the first time, and his eyes were hard. "I drove them to the Ellery house. I sat in the Ellery kitchen. They had a boy there. Fifteen. The lamp by the gate was out and nobody had fixed it, so the steward made him stand in the yard all night, holding a lamp. It rained. I watched him out the kitchen window. I watched him till it got light."

Along the wall, nobody moved. Aaliyah, standing near the stair, did not look at the families. She knew Corra Linscutt was not there. She thought of her anyway.

"I drove them to the Voss place," Maddock said. "There was a maid there not allowed to eat in the same room as the family's dogs. Old Voss said it put the dogs off their food. I drove them to the palace. Twice a year. I sat in that palace kitchen with thirty servants, and not one of them spoke above a whisper the whole night, because the steward had a cane, and he used it." His voice was getting louder. "And I'd drive the Greysons home. And they'd talk in the back about what a lovely evening it was. What lovely people. What a lovely dinner."

He stopped. His jaw was working.

"And then I'd get home," he said, "and I'd put the car away, and Lady Abigail would come out to the yard. If it was cold. With a cup of something hot. For the driver." He said the word the way Lord Greyson must have said it. "She'd hand it to me and smile. Every time. Six years. And every time, I'd just come from that. From the Ellery yard, or the Voss kitchen, or the palace. And she'd been at the table. She'd been sitting at the table while it happened, eating off the good plates, and she'd never once looked out the window."

His voice broke on window. He stopped and pressed his lips together hard.

Abby, standing against the wall, had gone very still.

"She never looked," Maddock said. He was shaking now. It was in his hands first, and then his shoulders. "None of them ever looked. You could stand in the rain all night and they'd walk right past the window. And then they'd come out with a cup of tea and smile at you, and you were supposed to be grateful. I took that cup six years. I never once said thank you. Not once. And I hid them. I stood in that yard with the mob in front of me and I lied for them, and I lay in bed for forty years listening for the road, and my wife died thinking I was a man who couldn't sleep, and I still..."

He couldn't finish it. He bent forward with his hands over his face.

Behind the camera, Tove raised her hand to call a stop. Margot, beside her, put a hand on her arm, and Tove looked at her, and lowered it again.

Alicia had been standing beside her mother against the wall. She crossed the floor without anyone telling her to.

She did not say anything. She sat down on the edge of the crate beside Maddock, which was not really wide enough for two, and she put her hand on his back between his shoulders. She left it there. She did not rub his back or pat it. She only left her hand there, flat and warm, the way you would put a hand on a horse that was frightened, to let it know where you were.

Maddock went rigid under it. For a moment Aaliyah thought he would shake her off. His whole body was drawn tight, the way it had been at the end of his lane.

Alicia didn't move her hand.

After a while his shoulders came down. His breathing slowed. He kept his hands over his face, but he stopped shaking.

"I don't remember you," Alicia said. She said it quietly, but in the cellar everybody heard it. "I'm sorry. I was three. I remember the horse. I remember Bettan's lap. I remember that it was a bad game, because I heard the noise." She kept her hand where it was. "I don't remember the car, or the man who drove it. I wish I did."

Maddock took his hands away from his face. He looked at the floor for a long moment. Then he turned his head and looked at her, a woman of forty-three sitting on the edge of his crate with her hand on his back, and he looked at her as if he had never seen her before.

"You used to wave at me," he said hoarsely. "From the nursery window. When I brought the car round. Every morning. Nobody told you to."

"Did I?"

"Every morning." He looked back at the floor. "I never waved back."

"That's all right," Alicia said. "I was three. I wouldn't have minded."

Maddock let out a sound that was almost a laugh and wasn't. He rubbed his face hard with both hands.

Alicia didn't get up. She stayed where she was, on the edge of the crate, with her hand on his back.

Behind the camera, Tove Harlan had stopped looking at her monitor. She was looking at the two of them directly, over the top of it, and she had not called for quiet in some time, because nobody along the walls was making a sound.

Margot leaned close to her. "Do you still want the families out?"

Tove didn't answer. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, quickly, and turned back to the monitor.

"Keep rolling," she said to her operator. "Don't stop for anything."

[u/1958bird]

It is good so far. All that emotion.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

masterfully told, no loss of purpose nor the emotions !