The Wake at Harrow House

The letter had come to the studio on Westgate Road on Monday morning, black-edged, on thick paper that smelled faintly of camphor, and it had said what such letters always said. Mrs. Harrow of Harrow House, Bellingham, begged to inform the photographer that her husband, Mr. Silas Harrow, had departed this life on Sunday evening, and would be grateful if the photographer could attend at the house at the earliest convenience to take his likeness, and that of the family, before the funeral. A carriage would meet the afternoon train. Terms as advertised.

Terms as advertised. Mara had read that line twice. It was the kind of thing a person wrote when they had never had to put a price on grief before and did not mean to start now.

So on Tuesday Mara took the train out of Newcastle with the cases in the guard's van and a carpet bag on the rack, west along the Tyne to Hexham, where the line for the Border Counties branched off and climbed north beside the other river. The North Tyne was low and brown between bare alders. The carriage was cold. A farmer's wife with a basket of eggs got off at Wark, and after that there was nobody else in the compartment, only the rattle of the wheels and the window steaming and clearing and steaming again.

Mara had done this work for nine years now. Long enough to know the shape of a house in mourning before the door was opened: the drawn blinds, the stopped clocks, the mirrors turned or covered, the black crape on the knocker, and the way the servants lowered their voices even in the kitchen. Long enough to know that the family would be stiff at first, and then grateful, and then, a month or two later, would write to ask for more prints, because the picture was the only one they had of him and it was going on the piano. There were the other things, too, the ones nobody wrote in a letter: the widow who asked for the eyes to be painted open on the print afterwards, the father who would not leave the room, the old servant who straightened a collar that did not need it, just to touch him once more. Mara had learned to wait for all of that, and to set up the tripod slowly, so that nobody felt hurried. People said it was a morbid trade. Mara had stopped arguing with them. It was a quiet trade, and a careful one, and it came down in the end to light, stillness, and the courage to look at a face for a long time.

At Bellingham the platform was empty except for one lamp, already lit at half past three, and a man in a long coat beside a flat cart and a brown cob that stood with its head down as though it had heard the news too.

"Harrow?" the man said.

"Harrow," said Mara.

He was old and thick-shouldered, with a face like a walnut, and he gave his name as Snaith, carrier, and said that Mrs. Harrow had sent to him because the carriage horse was lame and the coachman was no use on the moor road after dark anyway. He loaded the cases himself and would not let Mara take an end. He handled them gently, the way he might have handled eggs. When the last one was roped down he looked up at the sky, which was the colour of an old pewter plate, and then away to the north, where the hills were going soft at their edges.

"We'll be up before it comes down," he said. "Likely."

They went out of the village past the church and a row of grey cottages and over the bridge, and then the road turned uphill and the trees fell away and there was nothing on either side but brown moor and black stone walls running away into the distance, and sheep, and the cold.

"Did you know him?" Mara asked. "Mr. Harrow."

Snaith thought about it for a quarter of a mile.

"Everybody knew him," he said at last, and then, as though that had been too much, he blew on his fingers and looked at the cob's ears for a while before he went on. "Magistrate. Sat on the bench at Hexham thirty year. High Sheriff once, the year of the bad fever. He had a horse I sold him, a grey, back when I was young and he wasn't old." He clicked his tongue at the cob. "He was a hard man to sell a horse to. Knew what he wanted. Knew what it was worth, and what you'd paid for it, and what you'd say if he asked."

"And the house?"

"Big. Cold. Stood there two hundred year." He was quiet for a while. "They don't keep a big staff. Never did. Mrs. Thirlwell's been housekeeper since before I could shave, and there's two girls from the village, and a man for the garden. Lads in the stable, girls in the kitchen, a governess once or twice for the young ones. Folk don't stay long up there, mostly. It's the wind," he added, in the tone of a man who had decided that it was the wind.

Mara waited, but he did not say anything else, and when the cart reached the top of the long rise he pointed with his whip to where the road went on across the moor like a pale thread, and said only, "There. See the chimneys?"

Harrow House came up out of the moor all at once, the way such houses do, as if it had been crouching behind the hill and had stood up.

Close to, it was larger than it had seemed from the rise, and older. It was grey stone, long and low in the middle and taller at either end, with a slate roof and a row of tall chimneys of which only two were smoking. There was a line of wind-bent sycamores along one side and a wall around what might once have been a garden. Every blind in the front of the house was drawn. On the heavy door, as the cart came round the last bend, Mara could see the black crape knotted on the knocker, stirring a little in the wind.

Behind the house the moor went on rising, empty, to the skyline. In the hollow below the garden wall a sheet of water lay dull and flat, the colour of slate. A pond. Beyond it, in the valley they had come up out of, the white line had thickened. It had stopped being a line. It was coming up the hill.

Snaith pulled the cob in at the door and sat for a moment looking at the house. Then he got down and began to untie the ropes.

"I'll not stop," he said. "If it comes down tonight it'll come down for a week, this time of year. You'll want to tell them that. Nobody'll get up that road, nor down it neither, till it lifts." He set the first case on the step, gently. "I'll come back for you when it does."

"Thank you," said Mara, and meant it.

He nodded, and put the second case down beside the first. Then he looked up at the drawn blinds of the long front windows on the ground floor, where the parlour would be, and touched his hat to them, as if somebody were standing behind the glass.

Mara stood on the step with the cases and watched the cart go back the way it had come, the cob's breath smoking, Snaith's coat a dark shape against the darker road, until the grey closed round them both and there was only the sound of the wheels, and then not even that. The wind had dropped. The cold had not. Somewhere on the moor a sheep called once, and nothing answered it.

The door opened before Mara could knock.