Picture a shadow, falling across the notice. You can almost hear it reading both the words.
There’s a track leading off the road, toward a small group of bleached buildings.
Picture dragging footsteps.
Picture a door, open.
Picture a cool, dark room, glimpsed through the open doorway. This isn’t a room that people live in a lot. It’s a room for people who live out-doors but have to come inside sometimes, when it gets dark. It’s a room for harnesses and dogs, a room where oil-skins are hung up to dry. There’s a beer barrel by the door. There are flagstones on the floor and, along the ceiling beams, hooks for bacon. There’s a scrubbed table that thirty hungry men could sit down at.
There are no men. There are no dogs. There is no beer. There is no bacon.
There was silence after the knocking, and then the flap-flap of slippers on flagstones. Eventually a skinny old woman with a face the color and texture of a walnut peered around the door.
“Yes?” she said.
THE NOTICE SAID “MAN WANTED.”
“Did it? Did it? That’s been up there since before last winter!”
I AM SORRY? YOU NEED NO HELP?
The wrinkled face looked at him thoughtfully.
“I can’t pay more’n sixpence a week, mind,” it said.
The tall figure looming against the sunlight appeared to consider this.
YES, it said, eventually.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start you workin,” either. We haven’t had any proper help here for three years. I just hire the lazy good-fornothin’s from the village when I want ’em.
YES?
“You don’t mind, then?”
I HAVE A HORSE.
The old woman peered around the stranger. In the yard was the most impressive horse she’d ever seen. Her eyes narrowed.
“And that’s your horse, is it?”
YES.
“With all that silver on the harness and everything?”
YES.
“A
nd you want to work for sixpence a week?”
YES.
The old woman pursed her lips. She looked from the stranger to the horse to the dilapidation around the farm. She appeared to reach a decision, possibly on the lines that someone who owned no horses probably didn’t have much to fear from a horse thief.
“You’re to sleep in the barn, understand?” she said.
SLEEP? YES. OF COURSE. YES, I WILL HAVE TO SLEEP.