Rule 533 - Lie At The Roads - Part 2 of 3

The trouble with the Chancellery fence, from the point of view of a man counting goats, was that the goats went through it.

They went through it the way water goes through a sieve, one at a time and with no opinion about it, in at the gap by the water butt and out under the rail on the seaward side, so that the Realm had one goat in it, then four, then none, then the brown one back again with a cabbage leaf hanging out of its mouth like a flag of its own. Bjorn gave up separate lines after the third time and wrote LIVESTOCK TRANSIENT ACROSS BOUNDARY in the margin, a phrase the form had plainly been printed in expectation of.

Muir came down from the flagpole while he was doing it, with the portfolio under his arm, and stopped in front of him, and bowed.

It was a good bow, done from the waist, with the hat coming off, and it caught Bjorn entirely unprepared, standing on a slope with a pencil in his teeth.

“The Realm greets the Harbour’s officer,” said Muir.

Bjorn took the pencil out of his mouth. Somewhere behind his ribs his whole body had already begun Ellwood’s bow — the hand was coming up towards his breastbone, the head was going down and a little to the left, it was all happening with a smoothness he had not known he had — and he stopped it halfway on the thought that a bow to credentials is a reception, and turned the rest of the movement into bending down to a bootlace that did not need tying.

He was still bent over it when the brown goat, which had come through the fence again and had been watching, arrived at speed to see whether the new arrival wanted its head pushed.

It pushed his shoulder. He went down onto one knee on the turf, kept hold of the form, and came up again with grass on his trousers and a great deal of his dignity still available for use later.

“Chancellor,” he said. “Sorry. Your Chancellorship. Your —”

“Chancellor will serve.”

“Sir,” said Bjorn, and settled on it.

Muir accepted it with a small inclination of the head, as though it were the first payment on an account, and looked past him at the dairy.

“Mrs Cleeve,” he said. “The Harbour will want to know whether the Realm’s produce is offered by the Realm.”

Jenet was in the doorway with her arms folded.

“It’s cheese,” she said. “It’s offered by me.”

“Under the Instrument, produce of Crown land is exported by the Realm.” Muir said it kindly. He came up the slope and stood at the edge of her spring channel with his shoes clear of the water. “You have four days of cheese and a hard lease. Consider what I am able to do for you. Under the Realm, the Holm exports free of duty, and the saving comes off your rent instead of going into the Harbour’s customs house. Anyone who takes cheese in and declares it as her own is not selling cheese. She is telling the Harbour that there is no Realm here.”

“And if there’s no Realm,” said Jenet, “what happens to the rent?”

“It goes on being paid to the Proprietor,” said Muir, “as it has been since your husband’s grandfather’s time, and it goes on rising, because he is not a man to be reasoned with from a distance. I have tried. I write to him four times a year.” He turned his hat round in his hands. “The scheme is his. I don’t pretend otherwise. But I will tell you plainly, Mrs Cleeve, that a realm’s rents are not taxed at home as an estate’s rents are, and that the difference is the only reason he has ever agreed to lower anything. For as long as it lasts, you are better off inside it than out.”

Jenet did not answer at once. Bjorn saw her look at her forty rounds and at the line on the Notice about the Warden, and then, for the first time, at Muir’s shoes, which were good, and dry.

“For as long as it lasts,” she said. “And then he’d find a way of calling the saving his as well.”

“Very probably,” Muir agreed, and put his hat on.

“Take one in, then,” said Bjorn. “In your own name. Let the Harbour say what it is.”

Callow was at his elbow with a bag of soil scrapings. Both of them had been right, it was still only a quarter past twelve, and he had just picked one.

* * *

At one o’clock the Three played the anthem again, up at the flagpole, and every goat in the Realm and out of it turned, and Muir leaned into the bell with his watch shut in his hand.

“By the Instrument of the Realm, and with effect from this hour, the Sovereign Realm of Gorse Holm is the Flag of the Realm, and such ground as the Flag flies over, wherever the Flag is flown.”

Two lads had the flag down off the pole before the echo had finished coming back off the water, which suggested to Bjorn that they had been told in advance. They carried it down the path, and Muir went down after them with the portfolio, and at the landing stage the flag was lashed by its edge to a boathook, and the boathook was set upright in the stern of the rowing boat between Muir’s knees, and Lemuel took his oars.

The flag would not fly. There was not enough wind at water level, and it hung down the boathook like a tea towel, and Muir held it upright all the same, like the last man left at the end of a long parade.

“Warden,” said Jenet, from the top of the ladder. “If I bring one round in on the co-op boat, will your office look at it? Just the one, so I know.”

“My office will look at it,” said Callow. “Customs are a different office.”

“I know what customs are.”

Callow wrote her a line on a page of his almanac, tore it out and gave it to her. Bjorn had not seen him give anybody anything before.

* * *

The Ecology launch overtook the rowing boat halfway in, on the flood, and Bjorn had a long, slow look at the Realm as they went by: an old man rowing, a tall man sitting, a wet purple flag on a boathook, and behind them the island, swinging by inches on its cables, turning its dairy away from the Harbour and its goats towards the co-op’s moorings.

Two co-op boats were working the roads round the Holm’s seaward end, and neither of them was happy. A skipper hailed the launch to ask how long the island was staying, and what anybody thought happened to his nets when a quarter of a mile of turf took a sheer on the ebb, and Callow told him to put it in writing. The skipper said what he thought of that, at some length, and then said that he would.

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“They’ll all put it in writing now,” Callow said, as the launch came in past the breakwater. “I’ll have nine letters about that island by Friday and every one of them will be right.”

Bjorn got out at the diplomatic quay steps with the goat form, the soil bag, the sample jar with a cheese in it, and the corner of the form missing, because the brown goat had eaten it.

* * *

The Diplomatic Liaison office was a first-floor room over the quay with a long table and a great many flags in canvas sleeves standing in a corner like umbrellas. From the left-hand window you could see the whole run of the diplomatic quay, the flagpoles at Berth Four, and the steps.

Ellwood was at the window. Rolf stood at the table with the seven pages of the letter of credence squared out along it and Bjorn’s goat form beside them, reading both with the same attention.

“Sixty-seven,” he said.

“Possibly sixty-four.”

“Sixty-seven, the Warden’s counted, and the Warden signs for it.” Rolf turned the form over and looked at the bitten corner without remark. “What’s on the doors?”

“Printed sheets. By the Instrument of the Realm.” Bjorn thought about it. “On four doors out of twenty. The rest have nothing. And one man was hoeing all the way through the anthem, both times.”

“Good,” said Rolf, and wrote it down, which surprised Bjorn considerably more than a rebuke would have done.

“He’s coming,” said Ellwood.

The rowing boat came up the quay wall at a walking pace, and stopped at the foot of the steps, and did not tie up. Bjorn went down with Rolf, and Ellwood came as far as the head of the steps and stopped a clear pace back from the edge of them, the way people stand near a dog that has had them before.

Muir stood up in the stern with the flag on its boathook. Up close, the crown on it was gold braid, and coming unstitched at one corner.

“Harbour Master. The Realm is the Flag, and the Flag asks for the berth.”

“A flag doesn’t berth,” said Rolf. “It gets flown from something that berths, or it gets folded and declared as cloth.”

“The Flag is sovereign ground.”

“Then it’s sovereign ground in a rowing boat off my steps, and it’s not coming up them, because the Warden has the Holm’s goods held.” Rolf put out one hand, palm down, towards the water, which was as much of a gesture as he ever made. “Mr Muir. This morning the Realm was an island. Now it’s a tablecloth on a stick. You can go smaller than this. I want you to understand that it doesn’t help you, because I’m not measuring the Realm. I’m measuring the arrival.”

“You have not measured it at all, Harbour Master. You have refused to say what it is.”

“I’ve refused to say what it is,” Rolf agreed. “I don’t recognise it. I don’t not recognise it. I measure it.”

Muir took out his watch, and Bjorn understood, with a slow sinking of the heart, what the next hour was for.

At two o’clock, from the bottom of the diplomatic quay steps, the Three played eleven bars of the anthem of the Sovereign Realm of Gorse Holm off the face of the quay wall, off the warehouse fronts opposite, and up into every open window along the terrace. A window went up over the chandler’s. Somebody in it shouted a question about whose funeral it was. Two of Berth Four’s flag halyards began slapping in sympathy.

Muir unfolded, from under the stern seat, a wooden folding chair.

He set it up in the bottom of the boat, lashed the boathook to its back so that the flag hung over it, sat down in it with the portfolio on his knees, and addressed himself, over the anthem’s last bar, to the Harbour Master.

“By the Instrument of the Realm, and with effect from this hour, the Sovereign Realm of Gorse Holm is the Chair of State of the Realm, and the Flag above it, and the person of the Chancellor seated therein.”

The anthem stopped. Water slapped the steps. Up the terrace the window came down again.

“Harbour Master,” said Muir. “May a chair berth?”

Rolf looked down at him for a while.

“No,” he said. “A chair isn’t an arrival. It came on one.”

“Then the Realm is not too large to berth.”

“The Realm is whatever you say it is at the top of every hour. The arrival is four hundred and forty yards of turf riding to three anchors in my outer roads, and it is where it has to be.” Rolf had his hands behind his back. “Mr Muir, you’ve a good eye for a Rule. Use it on the last five words. Whatever it declares itself to be. Whoever wrote that had met somebody exactly like you, and I’d guess it took them all day too.”

Muir’s face did not change, but he sat back in the Chair of State, and for a moment he looked less like a chancellor than like a man at the end of a long working day in a boat.

“The Realm withdraws to the roads,” he said, “and will be heard at three.”

Lemuel, who had been holding the boat off the stone with an oar all this time, touched his cap to Rolf and rowed the Realm away.

* * *

The refusal came back up the quay at twenty past two, by way of a co-op boat, a porter and a boy.

Jenet’s one round of cheese had gone to the fish-quay customs steps with Callow’s line from his almanac, and the customs officer on the steps had read the line, and looked at the round, and read what was stamped on the round, and had not taken it. The message the boy brought up was six words long and had been repeated exactly, in the way of messages carried by boys.

“He says, Crown Produce of what crown.”

Taking it in had been Bjorn’s idea.

Ellwood sat down at the long table and pressed both hands over his eyes.

“There it is,” he said. “There it is. That’s the whole thing in six words. If the man on the steps takes it, we’ve received a state on a cheese rind. If he refuses it — and he has refused it, because what else could he do — then the Harbour has found that there is no Realm, and it did it at the fish quay, at twenty past two, without a hearing, on the word of an officer who was only trying to get his afternoon’s work done.” He looked up. “And she’s forty rounds and four days, and she has done nothing whatever wrong.”

“She’s declared nothing yet,” said Rolf.

“She’s tried.”

“She’s asked a question and been given an answer about a stamp.” Rolf drew the office’s day book across the table. “Write it as it happened, in the order it happened. One round of soft cheese, presented, not declared; not accepted; the officer’s words as reported; no finding made by this office on the stamp or on what the stamp claims. Then take Bell down there and put a line in the customs book to the same effect before anybody else on that quay has an idea.”

Ellwood got the pencil out from behind his ear and wrote, and his hand steadied as he went.

At three o’clock the anthem came in over the water from the outer roads, faint and thin and eleven bars long, and none of them could make out a word of what followed it.

Ellwood went to the window with a brass glass and got it on the Holm.

“There’s a boat coming off the landing,” he said. “One at the oars. One only.” He kept the glass on the boat. “It’s the old man. The one in the sash.”

“With what?”

“With something in his hand. And —” Ellwood adjusted the glass, and his voice went flat. “He has a cheese under each arm.”

Rolf came away from the table.

* * *

It took Lemuel Cleeve the better part of forty minutes to row in from the outer roads, and every minute of it was visible from the Liaison office window. Nobody in the room found anything else to do.

Ellwood had the book down off the shelf by then, foxed at the corners, with FORMS OF ADDRESS AND RECEPTION stamped on the spine, and he read out the part he already knew by heart, because reading it out was better than the alternative.

“A person presenting a letter of credence at the foot of the diplomatic quay steps is met by the Liaison officer upon the third step, who receives the letter and bows.” He closed the book. “There’s no note. There’s no exception. There’s nothing in it about whether the state exists, because nobody who wrote it ever imagined we’d be in doubt.”

“Then don’t meet him,” said Bjorn.

“Then I’ve refused a letter of credence at the Harbour’s own steps.” Ellwood almost laughed. “Which is a finding, Bjorn, and a louder one. I’d be the man who refused Gorse Holm. It would be in the book by supper, and it would be in the book in a hundred years, and every small place that has ever wondered what this Harbour thinks of it would be able to read what we do when we don’t fancy the look of a flag.”

He took his good coat off the back of the chair and put it on.

“Harbour Master,” he said. “Tell me not to go down.”

“Can’t,” said Rolf. “You’d be right, and I’d be making the finding instead of you.”

The boat came the last thirty yards. Bjorn was down on the steps by then with Callow’s goat form still in his hand, because nobody had told him to put it anywhere, and the pages of it were rolled into a tube in his fist, and he could hear the oars.

Lemuel Cleeve shipped them and came alongside the bottom step, and stood up in the boat, and got his hat straight, and his sash straight, with a cheese under each arm and a folded paper held against the top of one of them. He was out of breath, and his colour was very high, and he looked up the steps at the Harbour’s Liaison officer with an expression of pure, unarmoured happiness.

“From the Chancellor,” he said. “To be given to the Liaison officer. By a subject of the Realm, standing.”

Barnaby Ellwood came down two steps and stopped on the third.

His right hand went flat to his breastbone. His head began to go down, and a little to the left.

End of Part 2