The Grafted Name

Chapter One: The Reckoning

The letters wanted to be deeper. Rose Cobbett could feel it through the handle of the mallet, the way you feel a tooth that isn't right yet.

She was cutting a shepherd's stone, a plain slab of grey Barrowshire lias, and the shepherd had been eighty-one years old and had walked the same nine miles of downland every day of his life. A man like that deserved letters you could read in slant light from thirty feet, with the serifs crisp enough to hold a shadow. Rose set the chisel back into the belly of the S, angled it a half-hair steeper, and struck.

The chip came away white. Chalk-country stone always looked like bread inside.

It was the third week of October and the yard smelled of wet dust and the cider press two doors down. Rose worked with her sleeves rolled past the elbow, and her forearms were grey to the crease of them, and had been since she was eleven. She was thirty-four. She was broad in the shoulder from twenty years of the mallet, and her hair, which had been brown, was going the colour of the stone she worked, which she thought was fair enough. You gave your life to a trade and the trade gave you its colour back.

Behind her, on the shelf where she kept her whetstones and her oil and the little tin of beeswax, a piece of slate stood propped against the wall.

It was not a beautiful thing. It was nine inches by six, edges left rough, and the letters on it were small and close and cut with a fine point. It said:

ROSE COBBETT, STONEWRIGHT AND LETTER-CUTTER OF HALTERWICK IN THE COUNTY OF BARROWSHIRE.
DAUGHTER OF BARTY COBBETT, LETTER-CUTTER, AND OF SUSANNAH HIS WIFE.
SWORN TO THE COMPANY OF LETTER-CUTTERS OF THE CHALK IN HER ONE AND TWENTIETH YEAR.
SHE TOOK UP THE TOOLS AND KEEPS THEM.

Every Lady Day, the twenty-fifth of March, Rose took that slate down, laid it on the bench, and recut every stroke of it in her own hand. She pricked the heel of her thumb with the point of her smallest chisel and worked the blood into the letters with the flat of her finger until the strokes went dark, and then she wiped it, and put it back on the shelf, and got on with her day.

Her father had taught her the practice when she was seven years old. He had made her learn her own name that way before he let her cut anyone else's. He had never once told her why.

When she was fifteen she had asked, and he had said, Because a name that's yours ought to be somewhere you can find it. When she was nineteen she had asked again, and he had gone out to the Ram and Wether and not come back till the small hours, and she had learned to stop asking. He died three years later with a face like a scraped plate, and she had cut his stone herself, and she had gone on recutting her Reckoning every Lady Day, because you keep the things the dead gave you even when you think they were only superstition.

She assumed it was superstition. Old craft, old nonsense, like putting a coin under a threshold.

She kept it anyway.

"Rose Cobbett."

She finished the stroke before she looked up. That was manners, in her yard; the stone came first, and anyone who could not wait ten seconds could wait outside.

A groom stood in the gateway with his hat in both hands, a lean-faced boy in Sparrowgate livery, and behind him in the lane a chestnut cob shifted its weight and blew.

"Mrs. Sedley's compliments," the groom said, "and would you come up to the Hall."

"For what work?"

"Correcting, she said. On the tomb."

Rose set the mallet down. "Which tomb?"

"The family one. In the chapel."

"I cut that tomb," Rose said. "Eight years ago, when the old gentleman died. There's nothing wanting on it."

The boy looked unhappy. He was perhaps sixteen, with the sort of face that had been told to deliver a message and not to think about it. "She says there's a name left off."

"Whose?"

"The eldest son's," said the groom.

Rose stood quite still. From the churchyard over the wall came a long, tearing hiss, and then the flat slap of wings — Admiral, the churchyard gander, who belonged to nobody and had for eleven years driven every dog, tinker, and visiting bishop off the consecrated ground on his own authority.

"There is no eldest son," Rose said. "There's Matthew. Nineteen years old. And there was the little girl, Lottie, that died at seven, and I cut her too. Isabel Sedley had two children and she has one."

"I only carry what I'm told," the groom said, and then, lower, in a different voice altogether, "There is one, though. Mr. Silvester. He's been at the Hall since August."

"Since August."

"Aye." The boy's eyes went sideways, the way a horse's do near a covered thing. "He's — everybody likes him."

"Do you?"

There was a pause long enough to be an answer, and then the groom put his hat on and said, "Ten o'clock tomorrow, if it suits," and got up on the cob and went.

Rose stood in her yard among the blanks and the offcuts and the four finished stones waiting on their trestles for the carrier, and looked at nothing in particular.

She had cut the Sedley tomb in her twenty-sixth year and she remembered every hour of it, because it had been the best commission of her life to that point and she had been frightened of spoiling it. Blue-black slate from the north, ten feet of it, laid into the floor of the private chapel at Sparrowgate. She had cut the whole roll of them, all the way back: the founder in the reign of the second Charles, and his sons, and their sons, down through nine generations to Isabel Sedley's husband, dead of a chest complaint at forty-four.

She had cut the children's line last, at the bottom, in the smallest letters on the slab, and she had wept once, quietly, over the second one, because the girl had been seven years old and Rose had known her by sight, a small brown-headed thing who used to hang over the churchyard wall and shout at the gander.

Matthew Sedley, born 1806.
Lottie Sedley, born 1809, died 1816.

Two names. She had spaced the whole bottom register for two names. She remembered the arithmetic of it, the way you remember a knot you tied.

There had never been an eldest son.

She went in and made herself tea she did not drink and sat with her hands round the cup, and after a while she got up and took down, from the top of the press where it lived under a sheet of oiled paper, the guild book.

It was her father's, and his master's before that, and it had a broken clasp and a smell of cold iron. Inside were the oath and the rules and the roll of the Company of Letter-Cutters of the Chalk, which had once been forty men and women across four counties and now, so far as Rose knew, was one woman in Halterwick.

The oath she could say in her sleep. She had said it at twenty-one, in the church porch, with her hand on the stone of the doorway and her father's chisel in her palm.

I cut what is. I cut what was. I cut nothing that never was. I set no letter I have not proved. What I cut in true stone I stand behind while I live, and my hand goes to my apprentice after me.

Under the oath, in a neat old hand, were the working rules, and she read the fourth one over as she had a hundred times without ever thinking about it:

True stone is stone taken whole from a living bed, never before lettered, never before put to another use. It is cut by a sworn hand only. The cutter shall set his blood in the strokes, this being the proof of the hand.

And the fifth:

The cutter shall not letter a birth he cannot prove by the register, nor a kinship he cannot prove by the register, nor any name upon a root, for any fee whatsoever, nor upon any lord's asking, nor to save his own life.

Root. There was that word again. It was in the book eleven times and it was never defined, and Rose had always taken it to mean the oldest stone of a family — the founder's tomb, the hearthstone, the rim of the bell they gave the church — because that was how the old cutters had used it in their notes on repairs. Go careful at the root. Never new-cut a root, only clean it. Refuse the root.

Her father had said that last one out loud, once, when he was drunk, which was most evenings of the last four years of his life. He had said it to the fire, not to her. Refuse the root, Rosie. Whatever they offer. And she had put a blanket over him and gone to bed.

Rose closed the book.

Outside, the light was going amber over the roofs of Halterwick, down the crooked hill of Sheep Street past the market cross, and the church tower stood up out of the elms with rooks turning round it, and beyond the town the chalk ran away west in great pale shoulders where the flocks were coming down for the winter. Two hundred years, that view. The church, the sheep fair, and the letter-cutting yard, all in the same relation to one another, like three stones set in a wall.

She would go up to the Hall in the morning, she thought, and look at the slab, and find that some fool had mistaken the founder's name for an omission, and she would be home by noon.

She took her supper standing up. She sharpened four chisels and set them in the roll. Then, without letting herself examine why, she wrapped the Reckoning slate in sacking and carried it up to her bedroom, and set it under the bed where the floorboards were sound, and slept badly.