The Peculiar Inheritance of Mortimer Underbough: The Trouble With Tax

The filing cabinet exhaled a small cloud of dust when Mortimer opened it, the way old things do when disturbed from their rest. He waved the grey plume from his face and squinted at the tabbed dividers within, each one marked in his own careful hand from the previous quarter. Licence Renewal. Correspondence Pending. Complaints, of Which There Have Been Three. The fourth tab, Commercial Filings, was where his fingers went without thought, muscle memory guiding the small errand he had set himself before breakfast.

The shop would need paperwork. Any shop did. A modest establishment trading in the curious and the curiouser had the same obligations under the Pecuniary Affairs Act of 1847 as any grocer or ironmonger. Mortime was, if nothing else, a creature of procedure.

He drew out a blank B-12 form, Commercial Establishment Declaration, and a second form he disliked more: the C-44, Location and Continuity Attestation. The latter required the filer to confirm that the premises in question existed, had existed, and showed every sign of continuing to exist. He had always found it a strange thing to certify, but one signed what one was asked to sign, and the world turned.

The parlour of the cottage smelt of toast and the lavender sachets that Great-Aunt Edna had once tucked into every drawer. Mortimer's fountain pen hovered over the first line. Name of Establishment. He wrote, in his neatest copperplate: Brackenhollow Curiosities. Address of Establishment. He hesitated a fraction of a second over the spelling of Brackenhollow, though he had spelled it correctly a hundred times in the will. Then the rest of the form. Nature of Trade. He thought about the cellar, about the cabinet that breathed, and wrote, Goods of a Miscellaneous and Occasionally Curious Nature. It was as close to honesty as bureaucracy allowed.

He read the form back to himself. It looked, to his relief, entirely ordinary.

The morning light through the parlour window was the thin, reluctant kind that comes off the moors in early autumn, and somewhere out beyond the garden wall a rook was conducting a one-bird argument with the wind. Mortimer gathered his papers into a neat folder, pocketed two spare nibs in case of emergency, and set off down the lane toward the village, where the Bureau of Pecuniary Confusions kept a posting box for those who preferred not to make the journey to Pellington.

The posting box stood on the green, between the bus shelter and a defunct drinking fountain. It was painted the precise shade of green that all government property wore in these parts, a colour somewhere between pond water and indigestion. Mortimer fed his folder into the slot with the small, satisfied feeling of a man who had done the responsible thing.

He had only taken three steps toward home when a thought caught him by the elbow. The folder was supposed to have a receipt stub. He needed the receipt stub to prove, when questioned, that he had filed. Without the receipt stub, the Bureau could deny all knowledge, and a clerk who could not prove his own filings was, in Mortime's professional opinion, a clerk who deserved whatever came to him.

He turned back. The slot was empty. The folder, gone with it.

Mortimer stared at the box. The box stared back, being a box.

He would simply file again, he decided. There was, after all, no rule against persistence. He went home, made out a second B-12 and a second C-44, this time in triplicate for safety, and returned to the green before the post had any reasonable excuse to have been collected. He posted the second folder. He watched the slot. He posted a third, for luck. The box accepted each with the mute indifference of a thing that has swallowed worse.

That was Monday.

On Wednesday, having heard nothing, Mortimer walked the four miles to Pellington in his good shoes. The Bureau of Pecuniary Confusions occupied the second floor of a building so respectable that it had twice been struck by lightning and refused to notice. Mortimer climbed the stairs, smoothed his hair in the reflection of a glass-fronted cabinet containing the bound statutes of 1822, and presented himself at the counter.

"I should like to enquire," he began, in the voice he reserved for officials, "about the processing of three Commercial Establishment Declarations submitted on Monday last."

The clerk behind the counter was a young woman with the expression of someone who had recently been personally affronted by arithmetic. She consulted a large ledger, running one finger down a column of entries that appeared to have been written by several different hands, several of them drunk.

"Brackenhollow," Mortimer repeated, when she failed to find it. "Curiosities. Location and Continuity Attestation, form C-44."

"Bracken," she said, not looking up. "Brackenhurst. Brackensomething."

"Brackenhollow. Two L's, two O's."

"There's no Brackenhollow in the district register."

Mortimer's stomach performed a small, complicated manoeuvre. "Then perhaps under the parish," he suggested. "Brackenhollow is a small settlement, admittedly, but it does appear on the Ordnance map."

"It's not in the parish register either." She turned the page. "Not in the hundred. Not in the ward. Not in the county, as far as I can see." She looked up at him for the first time. "Are you sure you've got the right place?"

"I have lived there for nine days," Mortimer said, with more patience than he felt. "I can see it from my front step. There is a shop. It sells things."

"Has it got a number?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Houses need numbers now. New directive, came in last Michaelmas. If it hasn't got a number, it isn't a house."

Mortimer opened his mouth, closed it, and tried again. "It is not, strictly speaking, a house. It is a shop with rooms attached."

"Shops need numbers too."

"I was not informed of this when I inherited."

"Should have read the leaflet." She produced, from somewhere beneath the counter, a leaflet so badly folded it resembled a small, defeated bird. Mortimer took it. PROPERTY IDENTIFICATION: A GUIDE FOR THE CONFUSED, it announced, across the top in letters that were trying very hard to be jolly.

He set the leaflet down with great care. "The shop itself, then. Brackenhollow Curiosities. Surely that will be in the trade register, if not the parish."

The clerk consulted another ledger, larger and heavier, which she had to lift with both hands. Pages and pages of trades passed beneath her finger. Bakers. Bankers. Basket-makers. Bone-setters. Bookbinders. Bootblacks. Bottle-keepers.

"Curiosities," Mortimer said.

She went past Curriers. Cutlers. There was no Curiosities.

"Perhaps under Dealers," he suggested. "Or Miscellaneous."

There was no Miscellaneous either, when they came to look. There was a Miscellaneous Goods, which he was not, and a Miscellaneous Services, which he decidedly was not, and there was, bafflingly, a Miscellaneous Sundries of a Peculiar Nature, which he had a strong feeling might be him but which was, upon inspection, registered to an address in Pellington itself.

"I do not understand," Mortimer said.

"You and me both, love," said the clerk, with a sudden and unexpected warmth. Then she recollected herself, and the official mask returned. "Try the Boundary Office. Second door on the left. They might have it under a different heading."

The Boundary Office was a smaller room with a smaller window and a man behind it whose moustache had clearly been authorised to intimidate. Mortimer explained his errand. The moustache listened. When Mortimer had finished, the moustache made a small notation in a book and asked, without inflection, "Are you the proprietor?"

"I am the proprietor."

"Registered proprietor or acting proprietor?"

"I, ah, inherited. From a deceased relative."

"Name of deceased relative."

"Edna Underbough. Great-Aunt."

"Relation confirmed by?"

"The will. It is in probate. I can show you the probate."

"Have you filed probate with the Bureau?"

"I am in the process of doing so. That is, in part, why I am here."

"You cannot file probate before you have filed the Commercial Establishment Declaration."

"I have filed the Commercial Establishment Declaration. Three times."

"Then you should have a receipt."

"That is what I am here to enquire about."

The moustache regarded him for some time. "There is no record," he said at last, "of any Commercial Establishment Declaration submitted in the name of Brackenhollow Curiosities, at any address in any district administered by this office."

Mortimer felt the colour leave his face in a slow tide. "But I posted them myself. Through the box on the green. I watched them go in."

"The box on the green," the moustache repeated, with the faintest possible emphasis.

"The posting box provided by the Bureau."

"Ah." The moustache made another notation. "That box has been out of service since the spring floods. There should be a sign on it."

"There is no sign on it."

"There should be."

Mortimer opened his mouth. Closed it. Drew a long breath through his nose, the way one does when one is being tested by the universe and intends to pass.

"Then," he said, very carefully, "may I file here, in person?"

"You may attempt to file," said the moustache. "Whether the filing will be accepted is another matter. Step this way, please."

He led Mortimer to a small booth at the back of the room, containing a desk, a chair, a single form, and a great deal of stale air. The form, Mortimer saw with a sinking heart, was not the B-12 he had so carefully filled in. It was the B-12-X, the Extended Commercial Declaration, a creature he had only heard rumours of, said to require seventeen signatures and a sworn oath that the filer was of sound mind and not, under any circumstances, a wizard.

"Sir," Mortimer said, from the doorway of the booth. "Before I begin. Is there, by any chance, a record of me? Mortimer Underbough. I am a junior clerk here, in the Pecuniary Affairs department. Third floor."

The moustache consulted yet another book. Pages turned. Pages turned back. Pages turned again.

"There is no Mortimer Underbough on the staff list of this office," he said, at last.

"I work here," Mortimer said. His voice had gone very small. "I have worked here for six years. My desk is by the window that overlooks the courtyard."

"There is no desk by the window that overlooks the courtyard. That window has been bricked up since the fire of '09."

"There was no fire of '09."

"There was a fire of '09," said the moustache, with finality, and withdrew, leaving Mortimer alone with the form.

The parlour had been warm when he left it. The booth was colder than he had expected, and smelt faintly of old ink and older anxiety. Mortimer sat down. He put his hands flat on the desk, and he breathed, and he looked at the B-12-X, and for the first time since he had come to Brackenhollow, he permitted himself to consider the possibility that the place had eaten his paperwork.

The ink on the B-12-X was the colour of a bruise. Mortimer touched it with one fingertip, and it came away faintly damp, which ought to have been impossible, as the form had been lying in its cubby for at least a decade.

He wrote his name in the first box. The letters sat there, sensible and round. He wrote his address in the second. He wrote his date of birth in the third, and was just reaching for the fourth, which asked for the name and profession of his mother, when he became aware that the booth had begun to hum.

Not loudly. Not unpleasantly. It was the hum of a kettle just before it sings, or of bees in a chimney on a hot afternoon. It came from the walls, or from the desk, or from the form itself; Mortimer could not tell. He only knew that his teeth were vibrating faintly in his head, and that the question about his mother was now asking it three times, one on top of the other, in increasingly impatient type.

He put down his pen. The humming stopped. He picked up his pen. The humming resumed.

"Something," said Mortimer, to no one, "is not right about the Pecuniary Affairs department."

The cubby, which had been giving him nothing but trouble since he sat down, now produced a second form with no effort at all. It simply appeared, square in the middle of the desk, as though it had always been there and he had only just noticed. The form was not the B-12-X. It was smaller, and older, and printed on paper that had gone the soft, foxed yellow of a churchyard ledger in autumn.

Mortimer picked it up. The header read:

AGREEMENT, made this seventeenth day of October, in the Year of Our Lord 1824, between the VILLAGE OF BRACKENHOLLOW (hereinafter "the Village"), the BUREAU OF PECUNIARY COMPLIANCE (hereinafter "the Bureau"), and the OFFICE OF THE RURAL COURIER (hereinafter "the Courier"), concerning the matter of the ANNUAL SETTLEMENT (hereinafter "the Settlement").

The Settlement, the agreement explained, in language so dense that Mortimer could have built a small wall with it, was an arrangement entered into at the close of the Smoky Quarter, when the village had been, in the words of the original clerk, "in a sad state, and the ledgers worse." The Bureau, in those days a young and not altogether confident institution, had agreed to forgo the usual surveyance of Brackenhollow's accounts in perpetuity, in exchange for certain undertakings on the part of the village.

The undertakings were as follows. Mortimer read them twice, because he did not believe them the first time.

One. That on the first convenient Tuesday after the autumn equinox, a courier of the Bureau would be received at the village, hosted for the night at the expense of the village, and entertained with such small hospitalities as the village could offer, including, but not limited to, a hot supper, a bed with clean linens, and a glass of something bracing, the nature of the bracing thing to be agreed between the parties according to the season.

Two. That during the courier's visit, the village would present its accounts for the year, in good order, on a single sheet of paper, in figures or, if figures were beyond the village, in tallies, but in any case in a form which the courier could carry away in a satchel without injury to his back.

Three. That the courier, upon receipt of the accounts, would convey them to the Bureau, where they would be entered into the great ledger of the realm, and that, thereafter, the village would be held to be in good standing, and not subject to further inquiry, until the next autumn.

The agreement was signed, in faded brown ink, by a village elder whose signature Mortimer could not read, by a clerk of the Bureau whose signature he could (a man named Cavendish, who had apparently held the same position Mortimer now held, and who had died, according to the tiny date beside his name, in 1847), and by a courier whose name was given only as R.B.

Below the signatures, in a different hand and a fresher ink, someone had written a single line:

"Cancelled, per Order 17, 1905. Courier service discontinued in rural districts."

And below that, in Edna Underbough's cramped and careful hand:

"No it has not. Come at once. E.U."

Mortimer sat back. The cubby hummed. The form, in his hands, felt heavier than paper ought to.

He had inherited, he now understood, not merely a cottage and a parlour and a great-aunt's particular brand of midnight. He had inherited a piece of a contract that the village had stopped honouring nineteen years before his great-aunt had died, and that the Bureau, apparently, had not stopped expecting.

He thought of the moustache, consulting his book, turning pages, turning them back, turning them again. He thought of the window that had been bricked up since the fire of '09, which had not happened. He thought of the B-12-X, which he had not filled in, and which was nevertheless sitting in his desk, waiting.

The humming in the cubby rose, very slightly, in pitch.

The first thing Mortimer did, when he left the booth, was look for the window. It was not, he noted with the careful detachment of a man who has decided to be unsurprised by anything, by the window that overlooks the courtyard. It was by a wall of solid brick, very old brick, with a faint sooty tide mark about four feet from the floor, as though something had once burned there, thoroughly, and had been put out with effort.

The second thing Mortimer did was go downstairs to the third floor, which he had worked on for six years, and which was, according to the staff list, the Records Archive, and had been since 1903.

The third floor was a single long room, lined with filing cabinets, each of which was labelled with a year. Mortimer found the cabinet for 1905. He pulled the drawer. The drawer was empty. He pulled the drawer for 1904. Empty. He pulled the drawer for 1906. Inside, beneath a great deal of dust, was a single folder, and in the folder was a single piece of paper, and on the paper was a circular, stamped RECEIVED, and the date 17 October 1905, and the words: Courier service to Brackenhollow SUSPENDED pending review. Review to be conducted at the convenience of the Bureau.

There was no record of the review ever having been conducted.

Mortimer stood for a long time, with the folder in his hands, and listened to the filing cabinets tick and settle around him, as old wooden things do, and to the distant hum of the office below, which sounded, if he listened carefully, a little like a kettle just before it sings. He thought about his great-aunt, who had spent forty years writing letters to an institution that had, in his professional opinion, no intention of answering them. He thought about Juniper, who had told him, in the first half-hour of their acquaintance, that his great-aunt had not been a woman who wrote letters without reason.

He thought about the agreement in his pocket, and the cancelled line, and the line beneath it, in his great-aunt's hand.

He thought about the tax inspector, waiting in the parlour, or not waiting, because men who did not blink probably did not wait either, but simply stood, in a particular way, until the world came to them.

Mortimer put the folder back. He closed the drawer. He went downstairs, out of the Bureau, through the door that the doorman did not hold for him, into the street, where the cobbles were still there, and the carts were still there, and the rain had not yet started, though it smelt as though it meant to.

He had three hours, the inspector had said. Three hours to produce a settlement.

Mortimer began to walk, very quickly, back towards Brackenhollow.

The road out of the city took the long way around the river, where the willows had grown so heavy with rain that their branches trailed in the current like green fingers searching for something lost. Mortimer walked faster than was wise on a road that dipped and rose without warning, and by the time the chimney pots of Brackenhollow appeared above the rise, his boots were dark at the toes and his breath came in small white puffs that the damp air swallowed almost before they formed.

He did not go to the cottage first. He went to the woodshed at the back of the property, where his great-aunt had kept, in his memory, a small leather-bound volume she called the House Book, which contained nothing useful whatsoever about the house and everything useful, she had once told him, about the previous occupant. He had not believed her. He believed her now.

The she'd smelt of turpentine and old rope and something underneath that he could not place, something sweet and faintly medicinal, like the inside of a drawer where someone had once kept lavender and camphor together. He rooted through the shelves with more haste than care, knocking over a tin of wood stain and a coil of binding wire, until his fingers found what they were looking for, tucked between a bundle of dried thyme and a cracked porcelain jug shaped like a hare.

The House Book was smaller than he remembered. The leather was the colour of weak tea, and the pages, when he opened them, were covered in his great-aunt's careful hand, which had always reminded him of a clerk's hand, though she had never been a clerk. She had been many things, he was beginning to understand, but never what the records said she was.

He read as he walked, which was something his mother had warned him against, but the path from the woodshed to the cottage was one he knew by heart, and the light, though failing, held.

The first entry was dated sixty-two years before his great-aunt's death. It concerned a chimney. The chimney in question ran up through the east wall of the cottage and had, according to the entry, been bricked up by a previous tenant who did not wish to receive certain communications by that route. The tenant had been a man of peculiar habits, his great-aunt wrote, who paid his rent in buttons and who answered the door only on alternate Tuesdays. He had left, eventually, for reasons the entry did not specify, and the chimney had remained bricked.

Mortimer's hand went to his pocket, where the agreement lay folded, and to the line his great-aunt had struck through, and to the line beneath it, in her hand, which read or by such other aperture as may have been agreed, whether or not such aperture appears in the plans deposited with the Bureau, which plans are, in the writer's considered opinion, incomplete.

He turned the page. The second entry concerned a bell. The bell had hung in the garden, by the gooseberry canes, and had been rung, according to the entry, on the occasion of every full moon, whether or not anyone heard it. The bell had been removed by a subsequent tenant, who had complained of the noise. The subsequent tenant had been a woman of ordinary habits who paid her rent in produce and who answered the door every day of the week. She had stayed eleven years and had left, eventually, for reasons the entry did not specify.

The third entry concerned the three gentlemen. Mortimer's step slowed on the path, and then stopped, and then, after a moment, resumed, more slowly.

The three gentlemen, his great-aunt wrote, had called at the cottage on a Tuesday in late autumn, forty-one years before. They had been dressed alike, in coats the colour of wet slate, and they had carried between them a boxwood case bound in brass. They had asked, very politely, to see the owner of the property, and when told that the owner was not at home, they had asked, very politely, to be shown in anyway, and to wait.

They had waited. They had waited, according to the entry, for three days and three nights, without complaint, without refreshment, without, as far as his great-aunt could determine, any of the ordinary indications of sustained attention. They had not sat. They had not leaned. They had not shifted their weight from one foot to the other, though they must have, because bodies of that size simply did. On the fourth morning, they had thanked his great-aunt for her hospitality, picked up the boxwood case, and left.

They had not returned until the week of her death.

Mortimer closed the House Book and stood for a moment at the edge of the garden, where the lavender had gone to seed and the apple tree had dropped its last fruit into the long grass. The light was going. He could smell the rain coming, low and iron, and underneath it the sweeter smell of the cottage, which was the smell of his great-aunt's life, which had been, he understood now, longer and stranger than he had been told.

The inspector, he thought. The inspector who did not blink. The inspector who had said three hours in the way that other men said the weather looks like clearing . The inspector whose hat had been a hat and whose eyes had been eyes, and whose face, when one looked for it, had been, somehow, not there.

He thought about the three gentlemen, who had waited without sitting, and about the agreement in his pocket, which his great-aunt had signed, or had not signed, or had signed in a way that the Bureau would not, perhaps, accept.

He thought about Juniper.

He walked to the cottage.

She was on the doorstep, as he had half expected, sitting on the upturned crate she used for splitting kindling, with a mug of something warm in her hands and a look on her face that he had learned, in the short time he had known her, to associate with the approach of weather, or trouble, or both.

"You look," she said, "like a man who's been reading the House Book."

"I have been reading the House Book."

"And?"

"And I think my great-aunt was, in the official sense of the word, a tenant."

Juniper said nothing for a long moment. She took a sip from her mug. The steam rose into the damp air and vanished.

"Come inside," she said, at last. "I've put the kettle on, and there's a man waiting in your parlour who I don't care for, and I'd rather not have this conversation on the step."

The cottage, when they went in, was warm, and smelt of rosemary and of the kind of soap that comes in bars the size of small books. Juniper set Mortimer down at the kitchen table with a mug of his own and went to the window, where she stood for a moment looking out at the garden, which had grown so thick in the years since his great-aunt's death that the gooseberry canes had begun, quietly, to take over the path.

"The chimney," she said, without turning. "The one in the east wall."

"Yes."

"I bricked it up again, after she died. She asked me to, in a letter. She said it had been opened, once, by a man who should not have opened it, and that it ought to be closed before anyone else thought to look."

"Who opened it?"

"She didn't say. She said only that he had been very polite about it, and that he had left a calling card."

"What did the calling card look like?"

"It looked," said Juniper, and turned from the window, and her face in the lamplight was not afraid, but was not, either, quite at ease, "like a hat with eyes in the brim."

The parlour door, when they came to it, was closed. Mortimer could hear, or thought he could hear, on the other side, a small sound, which might have been the ticking of a clock that was not in the room, or might have been the sound a man makes when he is standing very still in a small space and is, perhaps, breathing, or perhaps not.

He opened the door.

The inspector was where Mortimer had left him, by the mantelpiece, in the same position, in the same coat, with the same hat tipped at the same angle over the place where a face ought to have been. The eyes in the brim regarded the room with what Mortimer could only describe, in the absence of any other word, as patience.

"Mr. Underbough," said the inspector. "You have returned."

"I have returned."

"And you have, I trust, given some thought to the matter of the settlement."

"I have," said Mortimer, "given some thought to the matter of the agreement."

The inspector inclined his head, in a manner that might, in a man with a face, have indicated polite interest.

"The agreement," said Mortimer, "is between my great-aunt and the previous owner of this property, who was, by the description in the House Book, a man of peculiar habits who paid his rent in buttons and who answered the door only on alternate Tuesdays. The agreement is witnessed, in the margin, by a woman of ordinary habits who paid her rent in produce, and it is countersigned, on the second page, by my great-aunt, in her own hand. The agreement concerns, among other things, a chimney in the east wall, and a bell in the garden, and the manner in which certain communications may be received by certain parties, whether or not such communications appear in the plans deposited with the Bureau."

He paused. He was aware that he was speaking in the manner of a clerk reading aloud from a document, and that this was, perhaps, not the manner in which one ought to address a man who did not have a face, but it was the manner he knew, and he had decided, on the walk home, that if he was to be eaten by a tax inspector, he would at least be eaten in his own voice.

"The plans," Mortimer went on, "are, as my great-aunt observed, incomplete. The Bureau has been aware of this for forty years. The Bureau has, in that time, conducted no fewer than three reviews of the relevant paperwork, and has, in each case, declined to attend the property in person. The reason for this is, I suspect, that the Bureau knows what is in the east wall, and what is in the garden, and what waited in this parlour for three days and three nights in the autumn of forty-one years ago, and the Bureau has decided, very sensibly, not to look."

The inspector did not move. The eyes in the brim did not blink.

"The settlement," said the inspector, "is due in three hours."

"The settlement," said Mortimer, "is not, I think, what the Bureau believes it to be. The Bureau believes it to be a sum of money, payable to the Crown, in respect of an inheritance that the Crown considers, for want of a better word, real. The Bureau is mistaken. The inheritance is not, in the ordinary sense of the word, real. It is, in the sense in which my great-aunt used the word, an agreement, and the agreement is not with the Crown."

"With whom," said the inspector, "is the agreement."

"With the previous tenant," said Mortimer. "Who was a man of peculiar habits. Who paid his rent in buttons. Who answered the door only on alternate Tuesdays. Who has, I am given to understand, been waiting, with two companions, in a small room at the back of this cottage, for rather longer than three hours, and who will, I imagine, wait a little longer, because that is what the agreement says they will do, and the agreement, as far as I can tell, has not been broken."

There was a silence.

It was the kind of silence that has weight, and texture, and a faint smell, which was, in this case, the smell of buttons, and of old brass, and of the dust that gathers on the brim of a hat that has been worn, without a face beneath it, for a very long time.

"The Bureau," said the inspector, at last, and his voice, for the first time, had something in it that might, in a man, have been hesitation, "will require, in these circumstances, a revised schedule."

"The Bureau," said Mortimer, "will require nothing of the sort. The Bureau will go back to its filing cabinets, and its three reviews, and its plans that are incomplete, and it will leave this cottage to the people who have lived in it, and who have paid their rent, and who have answered the door, and it will not, if I may be so bold, trouble itself again."

The inspector stood for a moment longer. The eyes in the brim regarded Mortimer. The eyes in the brim regarded Juniper, who had come to stand in the doorway, with her arms folded, and her chin set, and the look on her face that she had worn when she had first told him about the chimney.

Then the inspector inclined his head, in a manner that might, in a man with a face, have indicated respect.

"The Bureau," he said, "will, in that case, take its leave."

He turned, and walked, in his particular way, to the door, and out, and down the path, and through the gate, and into the lane, where his footsteps, after a moment, were no longer to be heard, though the lane was quiet enough that they ought, in an ordinary man, to have been.

Mortimer stood for a long time in the parlour, with the lamp guttering, and the House Book in his hand, and the agreement in his pocket, and the smell of the cottage, which was the smell of his great-aunt's life, all around him.

Juniper, after a while, put her hand on his arm.

"There's a bell," she said, "in the garden, that I dug up last spring, and a chimney in the east wall, that I have bricked up, and a man at the back of the cottage, who has been waiting, with two companions, for rather longer than I care to think about. What," she said, "are you going to do about them?"

Mortimer looked at her. Mortimer looked at the parlour. Mortimer looked at the lamp, and at the chair by the fire, and at the window, through which the first drops of rain were beginning to fall, as he had smelt them, all afternoon, coming.

"I am going," he said, "to put the kettle on. And then I am going to the back door. And then I am going to knock, very politely, and ask the gentlemen in, and offer them tea, which they will, I expect, decline, because they did not, in my great-aunt's experience, accept refreshment. And then I am going to ask them, very politely, what my great-aunt owed them, and whether the agreement has, in their view, been kept, and what they would like me to do, now that she is gone, and I am, for want of a better word, the owner of the property."

"And if they would like," said Juniper, "to stay."

"Then," said Mortimer, and he put the House Book down, and he took off his coat, and he hung it on the hook by the door, which was where his great-aunt had always hung hers, "then we shall need a larger kettle."

The rain began, in earnest, against the windows of the cottage, and the lamp steadied, and the fire, which had been low, lifted, as fires do when someone has decided, quietly, to stay.