Petta Hayward

The One Who Wrote to the Inn

Petta Hayward is the hayward of Tedderley for the year, which means the Sunstead is hers to keep: the supper on the longest day, when the hay is in and the whole village sits down at the Long Board on the green.

It is her first Sunstead in the post, and she wanted it to be right. She is young and round-faced and one blink from spilling over, with the braced look of someone who has run clean out of things to do. But she has a grandmother’s tale in her pocket: that if a trouble goes past ordinary mending, you write to the inn that wasn’t there yesterday. She always thought that was the sort of thing grans say. She writes anyway, in a young, uneven hand that presses hardest on the words she is most afraid of.

That is a kind of courage in Wending, asking for help before you are certain the help exists. What she has not worked out yet is how much of the mending is already in her own two hands. A hayward sets the table, and she knows that Board better than anyone on the green: its weight, its joins, and exactly how it bends.