The Boundary Stone — hints

Your job. Tabitha Kerr is in the house south of the green and you have been sent for, and viewing her is the office. Everything else in this act is you finding out what viewing her costs.

wash — at the pump on the green, at the vinegar in the boundary stone, or out of your own flask. It cleans your hands. It does nothing whatever to anything you are carrying, and the game will say so.

Gold is metal and metal takes vinegar. steep ring. That is the one thing in your possession this act that can be got clean.

Cannot be helped. Not by vinegar, not by fire. If you picked it up with it on your hands then it has it, permanently, and it is food.

Read the door. Then read the meters. Then decide, because the game refuses you once and after that it does exactly what you tell it.

Write up what you viewed. write book, and then go back to the green.

Three locks and one surviving key. ask rector about chest — he will open it himself, and he has taken the thing inside it out and put it back four times.

Two dates. The register in this room has one and the docket in the chest has the other, and nobody in Coldbarrow has ever put them on the same table.

You will not, in this act. But if you want to see what the mechanic does to paper: the Kerr bedding is still in the house south of the green, and somebody has to carry it out to the fire.

Yes. If you take it with it on your hands, it has it, and nothing in this village can take it off again, and it is the single most important piece of paper in the parish.

From the Justices at Bakewell, addressed to the searcher and not to the rector. Read it. They are not going to decide anything.

It is an old woman's private post and you do not go through it uninvited. ask margery about her son first — she has wanted somebody to read them for eleven months and has not been able to say why.

Where the first case actually came from, which is not where four hundred people have spent eleven months believing it came from, and the rector has known both dates were in the same building since March.

Ellen Ash at the stone, Margery Twigg in her doorway, the rector in the road. Ask the rector about Twigg. He has been waiting eleven months for one person to ask how a wool-comber who had not left the valley in four years came by it.

There is a hurdle across it, a pail of vinegar under it, and a folded linen cloth on the post. You invented that arrangement in November and it is the reason you have come out of that building nineteen times. take cloth.

Then go back out. The lane is one move and stepping into it clears the count outright, and the game warns you at three minutes and again at six before it does anything else.

View both. One is the sickness, exactly as it has been four hundred and thirteen times. The other is not, and you will know inside four seconds, and then you have a much harder day than you were expecting.

Ask Widow Cass about the night. Then go and find the person she names, who is at the croft row at the end of the green every evening, and ask him about Josiah, and about the night, and about Rachel. He is not hiding and he is not ashamed and he does not know what he did.

Take it. It is evidence, it is feather and ticking, and there is nothing in this village that can make it safe to carry through a door with no cross on it.

At the boundary stone, into Robert Kay's hand. He has filled six holes with vinegar every week for eleven months at four in the morning so as not to be seen doing it, and this morning he is standing in the open in daylight waiting.

certify on its own lists all four. Discharged, holds, where it actually came from, or nothing but the numbers.

You have not got enough of what it rests on. A certificate that cannot be supported is worse than the story it replaces, because the story at least holds people still.

Ask him. He has been sitting on that wall all night getting to an answer and he will give it to you straight away, and the thing in it that sounds like fear is not about himself.

None of them. Discharged saves ninety-four people and lets three of them carry it over the moor. Holds keeps four villages clean and kills some of the ninety-four. The truth is true and takes away the only thing that has held this parish still for eleven months. And the numbers alone are what four generations of searchers wrote before you.