The kitchen window is cold to the touch when your fingers rest against it, and beyond the glass the valley is full of mist, pooled white along the beck and rising only as high as the lower walls. You have come down in wool socks and the floor flags are cool through them. Behind you the coal fire shifts in the grate with a small dry sound, a settling of red under grey. The kettle has not long come off the hob and stands on the slate draining-board, breathing out its last thin thread of steam. You lean a little closer to the pane. On the gritstone wall that runs down from the back door, a robin has landed, and is turning its head in quick small movements, looking at nothing and at everything.
You lift the latch on the back door and step out under the lintel. The stone of the threshold is worn to a shallow dip in the middle, smoothed by a long procession of boots. The air that meets you smells of woodsmoke and wet bracken and the faint iron of the beck below. You do not go far. A few steps onto the flagged path, to where the cottage wall ends and the garden begins, and you stand there with one hand on the cold stone. The mist is thick enough in the valley that the far side of the dale has gone, and the nearer fields show only as grey shapes, a barn's roof, the dark line of a hedge. Above the eastern moor the sky has begun to warm, pale rose laid over grey, the colour of the inside of a shell.
The robin has followed, or seems to have, moving along the wall in short flights. It lands on the cap-stone nearest you and dips forward and back, balancing. Its breast is the only strong colour in the morning. Somewhere further off a blackbird begins a low chatter from the hawthorn by the gate, not yet the full song but a kind of tuning. From the byre down the lane comes the soft cough of a ewe, and after a moment another answers. The beck is running quietly tonight, just the suggestion of water over stone, a sound that has been there since before you woke and will be there long after you go back inside. You listen for it and lose it and find it again, and each time it is a fraction clearer, as if the mist were thinning by degrees you cannot see.
You walk the path to the low gate at the end of the garden. The flags are set unevenly, tilted by frosts, and you feel the lip of each one through your socks. The gate is iron, and its top bar is dewed; you rest your palm on it and the cold goes through immediately, a clean small shock, and then becomes a slower cold as your hand warms the metal a little. The latch lifts with a familiar grind. You do not go through. You stand with the gate leaning slightly open against your hip and look down the track, where the ruts are filled with standing water and the puddles have caught the rose of the sky and hold it, each one a small piece of the east lying in the mud. A fieldfare crosses the track low, going west, and is gone into the mist before you can follow it.
The smell out here is layered and slow. Closer in, the woodsmoke from your own chimney, drifting down the wall because the air above the dale is still heavier than the air below. Under it, the wet green smell of moss on the stones, and the sharper smell of nettles further off where they have been knocked down by rain. Further still, the peat smell that comes off the moor when the wind turns, dark and faintly sweet, like strong tea gone cold. You breathe it in without thinking and it settles somewhere at the back of your throat. A single drop of water falls from the eave behind you and strikes a flag with a small flat sound. Then another, longer after. The slate above is letting go of the night in its own time.
Back inside, the kitchen is warmer than you left it, which is how small rooms are in the first hour. You cross to the range and set the kettle back on, though you do not really need more water; it is a thing to do with your hands. The fire has opened up a little. You take the poker and move one piece of coal against another, and the grate gives back a shower of orange sparks that climb the back of the flue and vanish. The mantel above the range is crowded with quiet objects, a brown jug, a tin of matches, a glass float the colour of weak tea, a hare carved in dark wood by someone long ago whose hand you can almost feel in the shape of the ears. You take down the brown jug and set it on the table. You do not fill it. You only wanted it nearer.
Light is beginning to come into the room properly now. It enters low through the east window, across the scrubbed pine of the table, and lies there in a long pale rectangle, picking out the grain of the wood. Where the table has been worn most — at the near corner, where a hundred mornings of elbows have pressed — the grain stands up a little and the light catches each ridge. You put your hand flat on the wood and feel the faint roughness, the places where knots have risen with the years. A cup rings softly on the draining-board as the house shifts a degree warmer. Outside the window, the mist has begun to lift in patches. The top of the ash tree by the lane shows, then the nearer wall of the lower field, then the pale shape of a sheep lying down.
A sound comes in from the lane, very faint, the slow clop of a horse's hooves on wet road. It is some way off still. You wait at the window and do not see the horse. The sound travels down the dale ahead of the animal, bent by the stone walls and the curve of the land, so that for a while there is only the rhythm, unhurried, patient, matched to the pace of someone who has walked this lane in every weather. Then it grows a little clearer and then fades, as if the lane had taken a turn you cannot quite follow from the window. The robin is gone from the wall. In its place, a wren works the base of the stones, a rapid small shape among the moss, gone before you have properly placed it. You lift your mug. The tea inside is dark and still steaming faintly, and the steam carries up into the light and turns briefly gold before it is nothing.
You sit down at the table with the mug between your hands. The chair is the one with the cushion worn thin in the seat, tied on with two frayed tapes at the back. Under the window the sill is deep, stone beneath the paint, and on it sits a saucer with three small stones brought up from the beck, each one dry now and paler than they had been in the water. You pick one up. It is smoothed on one side and rough on the other, and warmer than you expected. You set it down in the same place. Through the glass, the eastern sky has gone from rose to a thin gold, and the gold is travelling down the flank of the moor, field by field, wall by wall, taking the mist with it as it comes.
The kettle begins its low murmur again on the range, not yet a whistle, only the sound of water thinking about moving. The fire is a quieter red now, banked low, a bed of heat. Outside, a single long call from somewhere up on the moor — a curlew, perhaps, or only the wind in the wire — rises and falls and is gone. You let your hand stay on the warm china of the mug. The light has reached the far wall of the kitchen and is climbing slowly up it, across the dresser, across the blue rim of a plate, toward the low ceiling with its dark beam. In the grate a coal gives way and sinks an inch, without hurry. Beyond the window the mist thins and thins, and the dale comes up out of it in pieces, and the morning goes on arriving, softly, without needing anyone to watch…