Chapter 1 The Boil Begins at Four

The fire wanted lighting at four, and Cerys lit it. She had the kindling split to the width of a finger by autumn and had laid it the night before, because a woman who has to think at four in the morning is a woman who has been awake since three. Ash from the previous boil greyed the bars. She put the taper in, waited for the straw to catch, fed the kindling in three goes, then the coal from the scuttle in one steady pour, the way her mother had taught her, which was to pour as though the fire already owed her something. Above the fire the front pan breathed. Salt crystals had formed on its underside during the night, a pale crust an inch thick in the corners, and she raked them down with the iron bar before she let the brine in. The pan was six feet across and held about nine hundredweight of water when it was full. Four pans behind it stood empty and cold, waiting for a day that had not come yet, since the works at Sallowry ran on the sun as much as the fire and June had been thin. The whole family had been boiling since she was nine years old. Her father had stood where the weigh-table stood now, and her mother at the ledger desk in the corner, and her grandmother before that at the same desk with the same lamp. The office of Tidewarden at Harnsey Wick had lapsed in the war and nobody had seen fit to revive it, but the desk stayed, and the lamp stayed, and the roll stayed in the press beneath it, wrapped in oilcloth, and it came out twice a year when the spring tides turned the mud flat at Collow Ness white. She did not open it. She had opened it once, at seventeen, and had not been able to close it again properly for three days. "Gwyn," she called. "Gwyn, the upper pan." The boy came up the ladder two steps at a time and stood blinking over the rim. Sixteen, and still useless before breakfast. "You're late," she said. "The water came over the sluice at half three. I had it in the front pan myself." "I was at the cottage." He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. "There's a man at the top of the bank asking for you." "What kind of man." "He had a case. He asked Gwyn Morris whether there was a Saltwyke woman and Gwyn Morris said there was, and then he asked me was I the same one." Cerys put the bar down. "Ask him whether he's selling anything." "He said his name was Tranter." The sluice at Harnsey Wick had been out of repair since the winter's tide took the pumping house and put three feet of salt water through the foreman's office. Salt had come up out of the ground in the chapel yard and stayed. Nobody had mended it since, because mending it meant money from the Harbour Board, and money from the Harbour Board meant an account, and an account meant somebody reading what the account said. "Tell him I'm boiling," Cerys said. "He can come down at ten." "He said he'd come down at ten whether or not you were boiling." "Then he can wait on the step and watch me boil." The boy went. She drew the first water into the front pan and set it over the fire and began to count, because her mother had counted out loud when she was learning and the counting had got into Cerys the way the counting of a rosary gets into a Catholic. Three hundred for the first draw, six hundred for the second, nine for the third. The brine would come to a boil in forty minutes at this fire. Then the crust, and the rake, and the wet salt, and the barrow up the slope to the drying floor, and the noon tide under the pan, and the afternoon draw, and then the second fire at four o'clock for the last of it, and the drawing off at nine. Seven hours in, once, and never twice in the same day. The morning came up grey over Ebbmouth and lay flat. The water did not move. Collow Ness showed as a black bar with a light along the top of it, and somewhere out past Bellrigg a trawler went about its business with a patience that made her want to be sick. On the mud at the foot of the pans there were two hundred rooks, walking, walking, stopping, all of them facing the same way, and the sound of them was the sound of a room where a great many people were breathing and nobody was speaking. "Miss Cerys." The voice came from the top of the slope, from above the rim, and she did not need to go up the ladder to know who it was. A certain way of standing and a certain way of waiting. Ivor Threave was on the step with his case under his arm. He had been to Harnsey Wick and back and had not gone home. He had lost his brother on the small ebb in March, and the village had spent eleven weeks being kind to him, and Ivor Threave had spent eleven weeks learning that kindness is a thing people do at you while they are waiting to ask. "You'll want to come up to the house," Cerys said. "I want to ask you a thing, and I'd rather ask it than have it asked at me in an office by a man in a wet coat." She let him down to the pan room and gave him a stool, and he sat with the case across his knees and did not open it, which told her he had brought it so that he would have something to hold. "They want the roll," he said. "Who wants the roll." "The Board. Tranter's the Board's clerk." He looked at the pans rather than at her. "There's a list of men that went out on the Lowtide, and the list's incomplete, and the only other record of who was on the mud that morning is the one your family has kept since God knows when." "There isn't a record." "There is, Cerys." "No." She turned the crust with the bar so that he would have to watch her hands. "There's weather. There's a tide table in a shed at Ildwater and a harbourmaster with a bad chest. What my family kept was who was owed money." "It's not money." "No," Cerys agreed. "It isn't." He waited. He had got better at waiting since March. He had gone thin in a way that suited the sharp bones of his face, and there was salt white in the seams of his coat that had not been there at Christmas, and when he finally spoke his voice had dropped into the register that made people want to give him things. "My mam's asking me to ask you." "What does she want asked." She stopped the rake and looked at him properly then, and he shifted on the stool the way men shift when they have been seen. "She wants to know if it was wrote down that he was on the Steps," Ivor said. "The Steps out at Ashenholt. She's had it from her mother all her life, that the Steps show when the Long Ebb comes, and that the water takes one out of every family that walks them, and she's saying to me, if it was in your book then somebody knows, somebody in this village, and I could go and ask them and it would be over." The fire shifted. A log that had been lying across two others rolled and showed a white line of ash along its length. "That's the old way of it," Cerys said. "The Steps were out in 'ninety-three. That's ninety-three. And the bell out there rings before a low tide the way a clock rings before the hour, and people have been carrying that story down the generations like a horse collar, and it comes out comfortable at the front and chafes at the back." "She isn't asking for it to be comfortable." "She's asking whether there's a list in a press with her son's name on it. There is no such list. There never has been." The pan began to sing. That was the moment when the first of the brine went over, a thin whistle at the edge of the noise and then a whole room of it, so that she had to raise her voice to be heard at all. "Come up to the house when you're boiling," she said. "I'll make tea and I'll tell you what's in the press and what isn't." "You'll tell me." "I'll tell you what's in it." She let the rake down. "After the noon draw. Not before. I haven't fed this fire since five o'clock." At the ladder she stopped with her hand on the rung, and the thing she said next was not to him. "Olwen's at Ildwater since March and knows none of this, and if anybody in Harnsey Wick asks you tomorrow morning, you were up here for the water and nothing else." Ivor Threave shifted the case on his knees. "Miss Cerys." "Yes." "She's my brother." "I know what he is," Cerys said, and went up the ladder into the light. ---