The Empty Glove

Chapter One: The Valley Sold

There is a difference between a grave and a hole, and the difference is a name.

I have cut names for twenty-two years. I know the weight of a mallet in the wrist by the second hour and by the sixth. I know that slate takes a fine serif and will hold it for three hundred years, and that the soft red sandstone they quarry above Ellingham will let you cut anything you like and then give it back to the rain in forty. I know that a widow will spend money she cannot spare on an extra line, and that the line is almost never scripture. It is almost always something like: and his mother beside him, or: she was our own.

What I did not know, in the April of 1897, was that a name can be a door, and that some doors are boarded for good reason.

The cart brought me down into Grindley on a wet Tuesday. The road came over the shoulder of the moor and then dropped, and the whole valley opened below like a dish held up to be looked at, and I saw at once that it was already dead. You can tell when a place has been sold. The roofs go first. Half the cottages along the lower street stood open to the sky, their slates stacked in neat grey piles at the gable ends, the rafters showing like the ribs of something left out in a field. Rain fell straight into kitchens. A dresser stood in one of them with the plates still on it.

It is one thing to read in the newspaper that the Corporation of Ellingham has purchased the valley of Grindley entire, and that ninety feet of water will stand over it by Michaelmas, so that the mills and terraces of a growing town may drink. It is another to come down the hill and see the water not yet there, and know it is coming, and see men taking a village apart tidily so that the water will have less to argue with.

The navvy camp stood on the eastern slope above the flood line: long huts of tarred board, a cookhouse, lines of washing strung between poles, the smoke going sideways. Below it, the works. They had opened the valley floor at the narrows into a trench so deep and so wide that the men in it looked like a mistake in the scale, and out of the trench came the sound of the whole enterprise — the ring of picks, the chuff of the pumping engine, the endless small clattering of tip-wagons on the tramway. Puddle clay, I learned later. A wall of it, driven down to bedrock and rising, that would hold the water in the way a bowl holds broth.

And in the middle of the valley, on its low green mound with the beck curling round three sides, the church of St. Chad, with a tower like a clenched fist and its graveyard opened up as though something had been let out of it.

They had been at the graves a fortnight. I counted eleven pits, each with a board laid over it and a number chalked on the board. The headstones had been drawn out and laid flat in rows on the grass with their faces up, so that the whole churchyard read like a page. Rain stood in the letters. That is how you see a worn inscription best — the water finds the cut and shows you what is left.

"Mrs. Sowerby?"

He came up the path with his hat in his hand and his coat wrong for the weather, a tall man of perhaps forty with a rough sandy beard and the flat, careful voice of a man who has spent years persuading committees. Hugh Skelton, resident engineer. He had written to me twice. His second letter had been better than his first, because in the second he had stopped saying "the deceased" and started saying "the graves."

"You're wet through," he said.

"So are you."

"I am always wet through. It's the profession." He looked at the rows of stones, then at me, and there was something in the look I liked, which was that he was embarrassed. "You'll think this a poor business."

"I think it's a business. Show me the terms."

He showed me in the vestry, standing up, with the rain going over the roof in handfuls. I was to be clerk of memorials. Every inscription in the church and in the yard was to be copied exactly, letter for letter, including the errors, including the parts that were gone — with a note on what was gone. Every stone was to be numbered in white paint at the base, and the number entered against the copy, and against the plot in the plan, so that when the stones were carried up to the new burial ground on the ridge they might be set out again in something like their old order, and the families of Grindley, who were being scattered to four towns, could come and find their own. Every fitting in the church — pews, screen, plate, the two brasses, the poor-box, the tablets — was to be listed, tagged, and crated for the new church above the waterline.

"Six months," Skelton said. "Less. The valve tower goes into service in the autumn and once we begin to close the sluices the beck backs up over the lower street in a matter of days. After that the church is on an island, and after that it is not there at all." He said it without relish and without apology, the way you would give a tide table.

"How many stones?"

"Four hundred and sixty in the yard. Thirty-one in the church."

"And how many graves?"

He hesitated. "Nine hundred and something. Not all of them are marked. Not all of them are on the plan." He turned his hat around by the brim. "Mrs. Sowerby, I'll be honest with you, because I have found that saving it up doesn't answer. There is no one else. There were two firms in Ellingham and both wanted a clerk and a boy at three guineas a week and both wanted to be done by August. You are, I'm told, the only letter-cutter left in three parishes. You are also, I'm told, the only person who was willing."

"That's two things you were told."

"I was told a third," he said, "but I would rather you told me that one."

So I told him, because it was going to be in the air in any case, and because I have learned that a thing said plainly early gives you peace later.

"My husband was Jonah Sowerby, monumental mason, of Ellingham. He died four years since of the dust — a stone-cutter's lungs; they go like a wrung cloth. We had a daughter. Daisy. Two years ago this June, while I was in the yard lettering another child's stone, she climbed on a crate and went head first into the water-butt by the shed wall, and drowned there, six feet behind me, in the time it took me to cut a capital D."

Skelton stood very still.

"So I cannot work in Ellingham," I said. "That is the third thing. Every stone I have cut for two years has been for somebody's child, and every one of them has had my hand shaking on the second half of the name. I want work that is somewhere else and I want a great deal of it. Yours is a great deal of it."

He put his hat on. "Then I'll not say I'm sorry, since you'll have had a bellyful of that."

"I have."

"Three guineas and your lodging. The cottage at the end of the lower street still has its roof; I'll see it keeps it till you're done. You'll want candles." He paused at the vestry door. "You'll want a great many candles."

I should say here what I have never said to anyone, because it belongs at the front of this account rather than the back.

In my shed in Ellingham, under a sheet of tarred sacking, stands a slab of good blue-grey slate, three feet by twenty inches, dressed and rubbed and edged, with the margins scribed and the lines ruled in pencil, ready. It has stood there twenty-two months. It is Daisy's stone. There is not one letter on it.

I have taken the mallet to it eleven times. I have set the chisel on the first upstroke of the D and I have not been able to strike. Because a name cut in stone is a name given away. It is the end of the sentence. While the stone is blank the sentence is not finished, and while the sentence is not finished I have not yet agreed to it.

That is the whole of me, if you want it, and it explains everything that followed, including the worst of it.

I began on the Wednesday with the yard, because the yard was going to be emptied and the church was not, and because I wanted to be out of doors while the weather was merely bad. I worked the rows on my knees with a canvas pad, a brush, a bucket, and my father-in-law's old rubbing kit: heelball, lining paper, a soft graphite block. Where the stone was legible I copied it into the ledger. Where it was not, I took a rubbing and worked at it in the evening with the lamp low and sideways, which is the trick — light across a surface tells you more than light on it.

Grindley had been a valley of five hundred souls and four families. Tunnicliffes on the west bank, Hoyles at the mill, Crowthers in the churchyard for four generations of sextons, and Halliwells in the parsonage for three of parsons. The rest were incomers, which in Grindley meant they had arrived under George the Third.

I liked the work. I will not pretend otherwise. There is a kind of peace in giving four hundred and sixty dead people your whole attention, one after another, and taking nothing from them but their spelling.

On the Friday I found the blank stone.

It stood in the north-east corner, in the sour part of the ground where the yew drip kills the grass, close against the wall, and it was a proper stone — not a boundary marker, not a rubbing-post. Good millstone grit, well dressed, with a plain moulded head and a scribed margin an inch and a quarter in from the edge, cut by somebody who knew his business.

Inside the margin: nothing. Not a worn nothing. A clean nothing. I lit it sideways with the lamp when the light went and I got down with my face almost on the grass, and there was no ghost of a letter anywhere on it. Nobody had ever put a chisel to that face.

Somebody had paid a mason to dress a headstone and then buried it over a grave with nothing on it.

I wrote in the ledger: No. 219. Grit. Uninscribed — never inscribed. Plot to be identified. And I sat back on my heels in the wet and looked at it for a long time, because in twenty-two years of the trade I had seen stones worn smooth, stones broken, stones defaced, stones with the wrong name cut and the wrong name scratched out. I had never seen a stone raised deliberately empty.

Except, of course, one. Mine.

It was raining harder, and the light was going, and the church door was ten yards off and unlocked. I went in to write up the last of the row out of the weather.

St. Chad's is a low, thick, ugly, entirely beautiful church: Norman at the base, patched in every century since, whitewashed inside so often that the mouldings have gone soft as candle-wax. Two aisles, a squat chancel arch, box pews of black oak, a smell of cold lime and hymn-books and mice. My candle threw my shadow up the wall and along the ceiling.

And because it went along the ceiling, I looked up.

Across the nave, some fourteen feet above the flags, runs a single great oak tie-beam, dark as a coal barge, with the roof timbers going up from it. Along the beam, set into it at intervals of a foot or so, was a row of iron hooks, hand-forged, old.

From nine of them hung nine hoops.

They were about the size of a dinner plate, each one a bent withy of hazel bound round and round with white paper, and stuck all over with paper roses, and dressed with ribbon that had been every colour once and was now the colour of weak tea. Some were nearly perfect. Some had rotted to a bare hoop with three roses clinging on. They hung dead still in the still air, and they turned very slightly, all of them, in the draught from the door I had left open behind me.

And sewn to each hoop, hanging below it, was a glove.

Not a real glove. A glove cut flat out of stiff paper, two of them stitched at the edges, with the fingers spread and the cuff scalloped. On each glove, in old ink gone brown, a name and a year.

I stood under them with my candle up and read them off one by one, because that is what I am for.

Sarah Wilde, 1791. Martha Tunnicliffe, 1803. Rebecca Hoyle, 1817. Ann Pilkington, 1826. Grace Ingleby, 1834. Mary Ellen Bostock, 1849. Jane Braithwaite, 1861. Emma Shackleton, 1874.

Eight names. Nine gloves.

The ninth hung at the far end of the beam, nearest the chancel arch: the oldest by the look of it, the hoop bare of all but two roses, the ribbon reduced to a grey thread. Its glove was heavier paper than the rest, and better cut, and someone had taken trouble with the scallops on the cuff.

On it, in the same brown ink, was a date. 1782.

There was no name.