Chapter 16 The Harbour Board

The board did not want a second meeting. It took a special resolution, which required Enoch Ferryman to propose it and Enoch Ferryman to vote for it, and which passed by four to three, and the four were the men whose fathers had been on the board and the three were not, and neither of the Shands was in the room. They wanted her to speak about the mark. She spoke about the mark for eleven minutes and gave them a duplication, a stamp, an inference and a request, and the request was that the district engineer be asked to inspect the base of the north cardinal and of the mouth mark for interference, and that in the meantime both marks be left as they were and neither be re-laid, and that the false temporary be lifted and the light extinguished on the north end, since a lit mark in the wrong place is the most dangerous object in any bay and is the one thing on which nobody in the room disagreed. Then they asked her about the water. "You've been seen on the road," said the chairman. "On the fourteenth. There's six people in this room who've told the board that." "Seven," said the chairman's neighbour, and did not look up. "Seven. Yes." She put her hands flat on the table. "I was on the road at five past five on the morning of the fourteenth with Mr Roache and I stood on it for a hundred and two minutes by my own watch and I did not walk beyond the second pair of cuts, and Mr Roache has told you he walked further, and I am not going to contradict him, and I am not going to describe what either of us did out there in a room with a minute-taker, because the description would not be evidence of anything except that two people were on a set of stones at low water and came off them, and that is not a crime and is not a matter for this board." "Miss Ashgrove—" "I'm going to say one thing and then I'm going to ask you to put it in your minutes, and then I'll answer whatever else you like." She looked round the table. "I am a professional surveyor employed by a firm that has put a lead plug in a mark with a stamped number in it. Whatever else is true in this bay, that is true, and it is in your minute-taker's hand as well as mine, and when somebody comes to this board in fifteen years and asks why your harbour has a mark with two numbers in it, the answer is going to be in a set of minutes in this room, and it is not going to be in a drawer, and it is not going to be a book somebody took forty leaves out of and put back badly sewn." Nobody spoke for a while. The fire had not been laid and the room was cold in April and the men kept their coats on. "And I'll say the other thing now," said Nell, "and I'll say it once. There is a set of stones in this bay that comes up four times a year. Everybody in this village knows it. It is in a book that has been kept since before any of us and it has been kept by women in my family for four generations, and there is a harbourmaster in this town who has had a copy of it in a drawer for fifty years, and neither of those things is illegal, and I am not asking this board to outlaw a tide. I'm asking it to write down that it exists, in the minutes, in one line, so that the next person who comes here with a theodolite and finds two numbers in a mark is not standing here alone with it." The chairman wrote for a while, and then he read it back, and it was not quite what she had said, and she let it stand, and four men voted for the minute and three against and one abstained and it was carried. Then the chairman said, "We'll want a copy of the book." "No," said Nell Ashgrove. "You won't." The meeting ended at twenty past eight. She walked down to the harbour in the dark and found the lamp on the bollard where Teague had left it a week ago and no longer was, and there was a boat at the slip with her case already in it and the engine warm, and Emmett Roache was sitting in the stern with his hands in his pockets looking at the water, and he did not turn round. "They've carried it," he said. "I heard." "The minute or the book." "The minute's carried. The book's mine and my gran's and it stays in this parish." She got in. "Enoch has forty leaves in a drawer and he'd have handed them over inside a minute if I'd asked him in front of them, and I'm glad I didn't, and I'd have been ashamed, and I'd not have slept." He took the throttle out and let the boat drift, the way he had at Loch Skerry. "You've said the whole of it out loud," he said, "in a room full of men, and you're sat in a boat, and there's four days to the fourteenth, and the tide's at the lowest of the year on the Wednesday morning at ten past five, and there's nothing I can say to you tonight that I haven't said, and so I'm going to do the only thing that's any use, which is to take you out to the mouth of the harbour now and turn the lamp on the white water over the marker so that you can see it properly, in the ordinary way, in daylight, with an instrument, like a professional, because that's the last time you'll ever be able to do it and I'd like it to be done properly at least once."