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.

Mara turned up the collar of the coat and watched the moor instead.

It was beautiful, in the way that only bare country is beautiful in November: no green anywhere, only brown and rust and the black of wet stone, the dead bracken lying down flat in the hollows and the heather the colour of old wine. The light was going early. It came sideways across the hills from somewhere low in the west and turned the wet road silver for a while, and then it went out, and everything was the same grey.

There was a way of looking at country like this that came from the trade. Mara found she could not help it. That hill would want the sun behind it, low, in the morning. That wall would make a good line through a picture, running away to the corner. That single thorn tree, bent over by the wind, would hold still for any exposure you liked. The moor did not move except for the sheep and the grass, and the grass only a little. It would be the easiest sitter in the world. Not like people, who breathed and blinked and fidgeted and could not, however hard they tried, hold their faces still for half a minute while the light did its slow work on the glass. Not like children, who could not hold still at all. Only the dead were better at it than the moor.

Far off to the north a line of white had begun to lie along the bottom of a valley, very flat and still, like milk poured into a dish. Snaith saw Mara looking at it and did not say anything, but he shook the reins, and the cob, which had been walking, began to trot.

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.