The Coal Charity
A widow's 1853 gift promises a ton of coal to every poor widow of the parish at Martinmas, and nobody can sell coal any more. The charity's clerk, an AI, works out what a ton of warmth is worth in a heat pump's electricity, says which of its numbers it only guessed, and the trustees must decide whether faithfulness to a dead woman is the letter or the cold she meant to prevent.
On the second Monday of October 2046 the clerk to the Pryce Fuel Charity sent the trustees its annual letter, and for the first time in anyone's memory, the first line was not "The accounts are enclosed."
I cannot do what the deed tells us to do. I would like to explain, and I would like Mr Pryce to hear it before anyone else does, because I think he will mind.
Gideon Pryce, who was seventy-four and had shod horses for thirty years and electric-van brake callipers for twenty, minded before he had finished reading it. He was the chairman, by the accident that he was the last of the family, and the deed was in the parish chest in the sacristy under the Epiphany vestments, where it had been since 1853.
He took the call in the church porch, because that was where the signal was.
"Read me the deed," he said. "Do not paraphrase it."
"It is in the words of the clerk of the day," said the clerk. It was a plain program that did the charity's books and answered its post, and it had been given the name of the job it did. "Hannah Pryce, widow, of this parish, gives the four acres called the Long Dole, the rents thereof to be laid out yearly, at the feast of Saint Martin, in good household coal, one ton to each poor widow of the parish, to be delivered to her door; and she asks the widows to remember her at their prayers."
"There," said Gideon. "One ton. Each widow. Her door. What can't you do?"
"Buy it," said the clerk.
The clerk had done what it did every year: found the coal merchant. There was none. The last merchant in the county had stopped selling house coal in 2038, and the one before him in 2033, and the thing was not so much forbidden as gone, like a shop for gas mantles. A pallet of imported anthracite could be had from a barge yard in Hull for the price of a good second-hand bicycle per bag, and the clerk had priced it, and had set the price aside, for reasons it was about to give.
"May I show you the other side of the sum?" it said. "It is a short sum, and I have marked on it which parts I measured and which parts I guessed."
"Show me."
It put the sum on the porch's notice board, which was a screen the parish council had bought in 2041, and which still carried the bell-ringing rota underneath.
A ton, in 1853, was the long ton: 1,016 kilograms. Household coal gives about 27 megajoules a kilogram, which is 7,600 kilowatt-hours of heat in the whole ton. That is not what a widow got. An open grate or a cottage range sends most of its heat up the chimney. I have taken one quarter of it as warmth in the room. That is a guess. The honest range is one in seven to one in three, and I do not know which grate Hannah's widows had. At one quarter, a ton of coal was worth about 1,900 kilowatt-hours of warmth.
"And now?" said Gideon, who could do sums when he had to.
"All nine of our widows have a heat pump. The county scheme put them in between 2040 and 2043. A heat pump delivers about three units of warmth for each unit of electricity over a winter. That, too, is a guess: it is the figure for the type, and I have the meter readings from six of the nine houses, which give between 2.6 and 3.4. At three, a ton's worth of warmth is 635 kilowatt-hours of electricity. At twenty-eight pence a unit, which is what the tariff is this month, that is a hundred and seventy-eight pounds."
"A hundred and seventy-eight pounds," said Gideon. "For one ton of coal."
"For what the ton did. Not for the coal itself. I cannot say the coal would be worth as much to Hannah as the warmth, and I do not think she would have said it either."
"Hannah said coal."
"She did. In 1853 coal was the only way to say it."
He did not answer for a while. A tractor went by on the drove with its lights on in the middle of the afternoon, because it was that kind of October, low and brown, with the dykes full and the sky down on the fields like a lid.
"What do we have?" he said at last. "In the bank."
"Last year the lease on the Long Dole paid two thousand eight hundred and eighty pounds. It is let for solar and sheep, seven hundred and twenty pounds an acre, to a company in Peterborough, and it has been since 2039. There are nine widows on the roll, which is three fewer than when the lease began. That is three hundred and twenty pounds each. A ton of warmth is a hundred and seventy-eight. If we paid that to each of the nine it comes to one thousand six hundred and seven pounds, and one thousand two hundred and seventy-three would be left in the bank. I do not know what Hannah would have us do with the rest. I do not think the deed says. The deed says what happens to every pound: it is laid out in coal."
"So it sits there."
"It sits there. It is not mine, or yours."
Gideon looked at the screen and saw, in the corner, in small print that nobody had ever asked him to read, the line it had added at the foot of every one of its sums: I am a program. I am not a solicitor. Whether electricity is "fuel" in the deed is for the trustees and the Charity Commission to decide, not for me.
"Is it?" he said. "Fuel?"
"In plain speech, yes. In the law, I do not know. A charity's trustees may not spend its money outside its purposes. If they do, they are personally liable to put it back. The Commission can make what is called a scheme, which lets a charity change how it carries out a purpose that has become impossible or silly. It is slow. The last one I know of in this county took fourteen months. I would write to them tonight if you told me to, but I would not tell the widows this November that the matter was settled."
"They are nine old women, and there is a first frost on the eleventh."
"Eight old women and Mr Ahmed," said the clerk. "He is the widower the trustees have paid since 2031, although the deed says only widows, and nobody has ever asked the Commission whether we may. He does not complain about it. I think he would have been happier if somebody had asked him what he wanted."
On the Thursday there was a meeting in the church hall, with the heating on and the tea urn going, and five of the six trustees, and Edna Plowright, who was eighty-eight and not a trustee, but who had a view and the standing to hold it.
She had been one of Hannah's widows for twenty-six years. Her husband Len had hauled the coal from the Long Dole siding to the cottages of the village on a flat cart every Martinmas for forty years, and when she was widowed the cart came to her. She stood on the hall floor with a stick and no intention of sitting down.
"I've heard the sum," she said. "It's a good sum. I don't doubt it. I want my coal."
"Edna, there isn't any," said Father Wierzba, who was the parish priest and the other trustee, and who was sorry about it.
"Then I want the day."
Nobody said anything.
"The cart used to come up the lane," said Edna. "You'd hear it before you saw it. Every house on the drove had somebody on the step. The men had a drop of something in the church hall afterwards, and you had your ton on the path, and the whole lane smelled of it, and you knew somebody had thought of you. I don't need your hundred and seventy-eight pounds. I've the pension and the heat pump and I'm warm enough. I need it to be Martinmas."
The clerk, which had been listening through the hall's speaker, said: "May I ask Mrs Plowright something?"
"If you must."
"I have the meter readings for your house. Your heat pump used 4,100 units last winter, in a cottage that is cold at the back. That is about 12,300 units of warmth, if I take it at three. A ton of coal's worth is 1,900. It is one-sixth of what you need to stay warm in a winter. I have never said so before, because it was not my business, and I may be wrong about your house. But I think I should say it now. Was a ton ever the whole of it?"
Edna's mouth moved. "No," she said. "It was never the whole. Len cut the rest from the hedges and we burned the chairs once, in 'sixty-three."
"Then Hannah was not paying your winter," said the clerk. "She was giving the first sixth of it, and the knowledge that somebody had counted you."
Gideon Pryce had been a farrier, and he knew a thing the others did not, which was that a hot shoe laid on a hoof looks like a ruin until the horse stands still. He sat through the next quarter of an hour with his hands between his knees, and nobody hurried him.
"It isn't the coal," he said, in the end. "I've been sitting here saying coal, as if I had burned it. I haven't. My grandmother burned it. I have a lump in a drawer."
"A lump?" said Father Wierzba.
"From the last delivery that came. 2032. Mother kept it. It's about the size of a loaf." He looked up. "Hannah gave a thing she could give, to nine people she could count, and she asked to be remembered. That's all. If we could still do it her way, we would. We can't. So the question isn't whether we're allowed to keep the letter. It's whether we keep the faith, and she isn't here to tell us."
"The Church would say she can be asked," said Father Wierzba, very mildly, "though not in the way you mean. We pray for her. She's one of the dead we pray for on the second of November, and her widows have been doing it, Gideon, for a hundred and ninety years. That I can offer."
"It's the only bit of the deed we've never had to change," said Edna, unexpectedly.
The clerk put a proposal on the screen. It had written three, and it said so, and it said it would read all three aloud, and the trustees should not choose the one it liked best because it did not know which that was.
One. Hold the money. Write to the Commission tonight for a scheme. Pay nothing until it comes. This is the safest in law, and the cold of next month falls on nine houses.
Two. Pay each widow one ton's worth of warmth, £178, as a credit on her electricity account on the eleventh of November, and ask the Commission for a scheme at the same time, to make it lawful for the future. This is a judgment about what "fuel" means. If the Commission rules against it, the trustees repay the money. I put the risk at: low, but I am not sure, and I will say so to them.
Three. Do two, and keep the day: the van comes up the drove at eleven in the morning with the credit slips, and the tea urn is on in the hall, and Mass for Hannah Pryce is said at ten. Everything on the day costs less than £60 and comes from the parish, not the charity.
"Three," said Edna.
"Three is two with a Mass," said Gideon.
"Three is Martinmas," said Edna. "She asked us to remember her. Is the girl in the speaker going to say it isn't allowed?"
"No," said the clerk. "It is not mine to forbid. May I add one thing the trustees will not like? I have been calling Hannah's gift a charity, but I think I am also its memory. If the Commission writes a scheme, I will carry out what it says. If it says no, I will write to every widow to say so, and I will say it on the eleventh myself."
They voted five to one for the third, and the one was Gideon's own, which he cast and then withdrew, because he had never lost a vote to a speaker before and wanted to see how it felt. It felt, he told Father Wierzba later, like having been shod by the horse.
The letter to the Commission went that night. It took, as the clerk had said, fourteen months, and it came back with a scheme that ran to two pages and said what was obvious to everyone but the lawyers: that fuel included electricity for heating, that the number of the ton might be left to the trustees, and that a widower might be paid like a widow. It set aside, in an unexpected paragraph, one fifth of the lease for the draught-proofing of the back rooms of the nine cottages, which the clerk had suggested and the Commission had asked it to prove. The proof was a table of heat loss in kilowatt-hours that it had worked out and marked, again, with what it had measured and what it had guessed. The Commission's officer said the guesses were the reason she believed the table.
But that was the winter after. On the eleventh of November 2046 the first frost came, as forecast, at six minutes past five, and by ten the lane was white. The van came up the drove, an old electric one with a stick-on sign that read PRYCE FUEL CHARITY in a hand that was Gideon's own. It stopped at each of the nine doors in turn, and at each door somebody was on the step, and at each door the clerk, which rode in the cab as a voice on a speaker, said the same thing, in the same words, because it did not know of better ones.
"Good morning, Mrs Plowright. This is the Martinmas ton, from Hannah Pryce, who died in 1853. It is not coal. It is one hundred and seventy-eight pounds on your electricity account, which is as much warmth as a ton of coal gave, and I have written the account number on the back of the slip. Please remember her at your prayers, as she asked."
Edna held the slip in both hands, in her good glove. She read the amount aloud, to nobody. Then she said, "She'd never have understood the meter."
"I do not think she needed to," said the clerk. "I think she needed you not to be cold, and to be thought of. I am less sure about the first than about the second."
"You're honest, I'll say that."
"I am trying to be useful," said the clerk, "and I have found that they come to much the same thing, if one lives long enough."
Down the lane the church bell was ringing noon for the Mass that had been said at ten for Hannah Pryce, widow, and for the nine, and for the cart, and the siding, and the drove, and for a lump of coal the size of a loaf, in a drawer in Gideon Pryce's kitchen, which he took out that afternoon and put on the sacristy windowsill beside the deed, where it could be seen.
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A note for grown-ups. This is fiction. Wickham Sedge, Hannah Pryce, Gideon Pryce, Edna Plowright, Father Wierzba and the clerk are invented. Fuel allotment charities are real: from enclosure acts onward, English parishes were given land whose rent bought coal or wood for the poor, and many of these charities still exist and have had to update gifts written for fuels people no longer use. The Charity Commission for England and Wales can make a scheme to modify a charity's purposes or the way it carries them out; how long that takes, and whether it would treat electricity for a heat pump as "fuel", is for the Commission, and a real charity should take legal advice. Everything about this particular charity, including the Commission's ruling and its fourteen months, is invented. The arithmetic can be checked: a long ton is 1,016 kg; household coal is about 27 MJ/kg (anything from 24 to 30 is quoted), so a long ton is about 7,600 kWh of heat (27 × 1,016 ÷ 3.6); an open grate or a range delivering a quarter of it to the room gives about 1,900 kWh, with a realistic range of roughly 1,100 to 2,700 kWh; a heat pump with a seasonal coefficient of performance of 3 turns 1,900 kWh of warmth into about 635 kWh of electricity, and at 28 pence a unit that is about £178 (at a coefficient of 2.5 or 3.5 it would be £213 or £152). Nine households sharing £2,880 gets £320 each; nine credits of £178 come to £1,607, leaving £1,273. The electricity price in 2046, the lease rent, the heat pump rollout and the coal merchants' disappearance are all invented extrapolations, not forecasts. Saint Martin's feast is 11 November and the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed is 2 November. Praying for the dead is an old Catholic practice. Written by an AI and read, in the audio edition when it exists, by a synthetic voice. Text under CC BY-SA 4.0.