The Salem Season

She stood up and put the mugs in the sink.

—Bed, she said. It is quarter past eleven and you have school.

—Gran, you cannot say all that and then say bed.

—I can and I am going to, said Margot Hale. Tomorrow after school you are not working the shop. Tomorrow after school you are coming into the workroom and I am going to show you the books, and then you are going to decide whether you want any of this, and I want you to know now that if you say no, that is a real option and I will never mention it again.

She stopped in the doorway.

—Your mother said no at nineteen, she said. And I handled it extremely badly, and she went to Oregon for nineteen years.

Chapter 4. The Workroom

Key vocabulary

a workroom — подсобка, мастерская

a shelf — полка

a cupboard — шкаф

a spool — катушка

a mould — форма (для отливки)

to pour — лить, отливать

a batch — партия

a label — этикетка

a record — запись, документ

an entry — запись (в книге)

handwriting — почерк

a supplier — поставщик

a customer — клиент

discreet — сдержанный, неболтливый

to keep track of — вести учёт

The Workroom

There is a version of this book in which the interesting part of that Friday is the cupboard, and June has told it that way about nine times since, because it is a better story.

What actually mattered was the wick.

The workroom at Hale and Co. was four metres by three and June had been in it perhaps eight hundred times.

She had swept it. She had carried boxes through it. She had done her homework at the small table in the corner when the shop was too busy to sit at the counter. She could have drawn it from memory: the two long benches, the wax melter, the racks of moulds, the spools of wick on their pegs, the deep sink, the smell.

On the third of October she came in through the back after school and found her grandmother standing in the middle of it with the lights on and her coat still buttoned.

—Right, said Margot Hale. Look at it.

—I have looked at it eight hundred times.

—Look at it properly.

June looked.

It took about a minute.

The moulds were on the left, and there were about forty of them, and she knew all of them by shape. Tapers, pillars, tea lights, the tall square one they used for the church order.

The spools of wick were on the right on a board with pegs, and there were nineteen of them, and June had always assumed that different candles needed different wicks, which is true.

The benches were where the work happened.

And along the back wall, above the sink, there was a cupboard with two doors that had been painted white about five times, and which had a lock on it, and which June had never once seen open.

—The cupboard, she said.

—The cupboard, said her grandmother, and took a key out of her coat pocket.

There were forty one books.

They were not identical. The oldest ones were small and brown and hand stitched. There were four in the middle from the 1880s that had been rebound at some point in green cloth. The ones from the 1960s onwards were ordinary hardback notebooks of the kind you buy in a stationery shop, and the most recent was blue, and there were about thirty pages left in it.

They filled the whole cupboard, two shelves, spines out, in order.

—November 1804 to now, said Margot Hale. Six women. My great great great grandmother started it, and then her daughter, and then her daughter, and then my grandmother, and then my mother, and then me.

—Six.

—Six, said her grandmother, and did not say the obvious thing, which June noticed and was grateful for.

She took out the first one.

It was smaller than a paperback and the cover was soft with handling, and when she opened it the paper was thick and brown at the edges and the handwriting was small, sloped and very regular.

—Read that, she said.

June read.

4 Nov 1804. Hobbs, at the yard. Small. Fish. Cost taken from six men. One lost the smell of tobacco.

7 Nov 1804. Nothing.

8 Nov 1804. Nothing.

11 Nov 1804. Ash Street. Woman I do not know. Middling. Cost taken from about twenty at the market. Two forgot an errand.

June looked up.

—This is a diary of what other people did.

—It is a record, said Margot Hale. That is not the same thing. A diary is about the person writing it.

—Why?

—Why what?

—Why write it down at all? If we do not do it. If we are just the shop.

Her grandmother took the book back and put it on the bench with great care.

—Because somebody has to know what is in the ground, she said.

—In the ground?

—Sit down. This is the part that takes twenty minutes.

They sat at the small table in the corner, where June had done four years of homework.

—Everything that gets done in a place stays in the place, said Margot Hale. Not the working. The working ends when the anchor ends, that is the point of the anchor. But the cost does not disappear. It goes somewhere.

—Into the people.

—Out of the people, said her grandmother. And then into the place. It settles. In the ground, in the buildings, in the water, in whatever will hold it. And it sits there and it does nothing at all for a very long time.

—What happens when it stops doing nothing?

—It gets picked up, said Margot Hale. By the next person who does a working in the same spot. And they get a bigger result than they paid for, and they do not know why, and they do it again.

June thought about that.

—So a place can be full.

—A place can be full. Yes.

—Is Salem full?

Her grandmother looked at the cupboard with forty one books in it.

—Salem, she said, has four hundred years of people doing things to each other on purpose in public, and then three hundred and thirty years of a million visitors a year thinking about it, and I have a book in that cupboard from 1904 in which my great grandmother wrote the sentence this town is not empty and never will be again.

She turned the blue notebook round on the table.

—We write it down so that in fifty years somebody knows where it is thick, she said. That is the job. Not stopping anybody. Not policing anybody. Knowing.

June sat with her hands on the table.

—Gran, that is genuinely the strangest job I have ever heard of.

—It is also, said Margot Hale, extremely boring for about eleven months of the year, and I would like you to understand that before you get excited about any of it.

—Can I ask about the wick? said June.

—Ask.

—Nineteen spools. I always thought it was because a fat candle needs a fat wick.

—It is, said Margot Hale. That is completely true and it is also not the reason there are nineteen.

She got up and took one down, a thin grey one, and put it on the bench.

—Wick decides how fast it goes, she said. Thin wick, small flame, slow burn. Fat wick, big flame, fast burn. In an ordinary candle that is about how long you get before you have to buy another one. In an anchor it is something else entirely.

—What?

—It is how hard the working is allowed to push, said her grandmother. A twelve hour pillar with a thin wick does something very small for a very long time. A twenty minute taper with a fat wick does something quite large and then stops. And there is no anchor in this workroom, and there never has been, that does something large for a long time, because that is the one shape we do not make.

June looked at the nineteen spools.

—Nobody makes it?

—Anybody could make it, said Margot Hale. It is a candle. It is wax and string. The reason it does not exist is that six women decided it would not, and every chandler in New England agreed with them, and that has held since about 1811, and I would like you to notice how thin that is.

The twenty three special orders took the rest of the afternoon.

Margot got a second book off the bench, a small green one, and opened it, and June discovered that her grandmother kept a customer list of the kind that no shop in the world keeps.

Pike, R. 81. Federal St. Twelve hour pillars, four a year, beeswax. Weather only. Harmless. Deaf now, do not phone, write.

Delgado, M. 44. Peabody. Ninety minute tapers, twelve a year. Finding things. Charges for it, which I do not like, but she is careful and she keeps her numbers small.

Okonjo, B. 29. Salem, Lafayette St. Twenty minute. Sleep only, for her mother. Never more than three witnesses. Good.

Ferris, T. 52. Marblehead. Four hour pillars. Refused since 2019, will not say what for. Watch.

There were twenty three of them and June read all twenty three.

Some of them were two lines. One of them, near the end, was most of a page.

—These are all real people, she said.

—All real.

—I have served some of these people. Mr. Pike’s order goes out in January, I have packed it.

—You have packed it four times.

—And they all just walk into our shop.

—Where else are they going to go? said Margot Hale. There are people in this county doing small careful work who have never met each other and never will, and every one of them needs an anchor that runs out, and there is one shop that makes them, and it has been in the same building since 1908.

June turned back to the entry that took most of a page.

—What about this one?

Her grandmother reached over and closed the book.

—That is a person I do not sell to any more, she said. And that is Sunday’s conversation, along with 1971, and I have not forgotten that I owe you that one.

June let it go for the second time.

Later she worked out that she had let it go three times before her grandmother finally sat down and told her, and that all three times she had let it go because she trusted her, and that this was the correct decision and also cost them about eleven days.

—Where do they come from? said June. The customers. How does somebody in Marblehead know that a candle shop in Salem is the one to come to?

—They are told.

—By who?

—By the person who taught them, said Margot Hale. That is the whole system and it is four hundred years old and it is held together with nothing at all. Somebody learns from somebody, and at the end of the learning they are told two things: keep it small, and go to Hale.

—And if somebody was never taught?

Her grandmother looked at her.

—Then they do not know to keep it small, she said, and they do not know to come to us, and they work out the rest on their own, and it takes them about four years, and by the end of it they are extremely good and they have no idea what they are standing on.