Chapter 6 The Bell Inland

The child heard the bell on the fifth morning, in the schoolroom at the far end of the village, while Barsham was teaching forty-two children the multiplication table. It was a girl of seven, the daughter of a fisherman who worked the small boats out of the little harbour at the southern end of Harnsey Wick. She came to the schoolhouse that morning with her father, who set her down at her desk in the middle row and kissed her on the head and went out into the cold. She sat with her slate and her pen and her slate-pencil, and she was copying her lesson from the blackboard when the bell began. Barsham heard it first. He was writing on the blackboard, seven times nine, and he put his piece of chalk down and stood still and did not turn around. The other children did not hear it. Forty-two children at forty-two desks did not hear it, and she heard it, and she did not look up from her slate. Barsham was quiet for a long time. Then he wrote on the board, seven times nine is sixty-three, and he said the number out loud, and he turned around, and she was still at her desk, and her pen was still moving, and her slate was full of numbers, and she was copying them from the board. He walked down to her desk. He stood over her. He looked at her slate. "What did your father say to you this morning?" he asked. "He went to the marsh," she said. Her voice was not lifted. Her voice was not worried. It was the voice of a seven-year-old reciting something she had learned that morning. "What did he say to you about the bell?" "He didn't know about the bell." "He didn't." "He didn't." She did not look up from her slate. Barsham stood over her for a long time. He had forty-two children in the room, and forty-two of them were looking at him, and none of them were looking at her, and he was not certain which was worse, that she was calm or that the others were not, and he did not know what to do. He had taught in this school for twenty-two years. He had taught every child in Harnsey Wick since the frost of eighty-nine. He had a rule for almost everything that could go wrong in a schoolroom. He did not have a rule for this. "I'm sorry, sir," she said. "I'm sorry," Barsham said. He sat down on the bench beside her desk, and he put his hand on her shoulder, and he did not move it, and he did not speak. The children went on with their multiplication table. The bell rang again, somewhere in the marsh, and the child did not look up, and Barsham held her shoulder until the bell stopped, and then he held it for another minute, and then he got up and sent for Nissa. --- Nissa came to the schoolhouse at two in the afternoon, with the Ledger under her arm, and she found Barsham sitting at his desk with the child on his knee and a slate on the desk in front of him with seven times nine written on it four times and a small drawing of a bell written in the corner. "She heard it," Barsham said. "She heard it at half past eleven. She heard it again at noon. She heard it again at a quarter past one. She's heard it every quarter of an hour since, and she doesn't stop writing." "Does she say where she heard it from?" "She says the marsh. She says the marsh, and she says it's inland, and she says it's going inland, and she says it will reach the schoolhouse by evening." Nissa put the Ledger on the desk. "Then let's go and see where it's gone." Barsham did not move. He held the child on his knee and he did not look up. "Nissa," he said. "She's seven." "I know she's seven." "She's seven and she heard a bell and the bell isn't inland yet and by tonight it will be at the schoolhouse and I don't know what that means and I don't know what to do and I've taught forty-two children and I don't know how to teach this one." "Then let me teach you." She did not know what she was going to say. She did not know what the book said, except what it did not say. She did not know what a bell heard inland meant, except that Merle had written it in the Ledger in 1891 and no one had written it since, and that in the entries before Merle it had appeared in 1852 and 1813 and 1773, each time with the same words. She did not know. She knew only that the book was on the desk in front of her, and that the child was on Barsham's knee, and that the bell was going inland, and that she was the Tidewarden, and that she had been for four days, and that she had not yet done anything that Merle would have recognised. "Put her in the schoolroom," she said. "Put her in the back row, away from the door. She's going to hear it again this afternoon and I want you to write down every time she says a word and every word she says. Every word, Barsham. Don't ask her to speak it again. Just write." He looked at her. "I don't know if that's the right thing." "Then write it anyway." Barsham did it. He moved the child to the back row, and he did not sit next to her, and he kept his own slate in his hand and he wrote while she wrote, and when she looked up from her own work, which she did six times, and said, *is it loud yet*, he said, *not loud enough*, and she went back to her slate, and he wrote it down in the corner of his own, and the bell came again, and the bell did not come again, and by five o'clock the room was quiet and Barsham had written five lines on a piece of paper, and the five lines said that the bell was going inland, and the bell would reach the schoolhouse by evening, and the bell was going inland from the marsh, and the marsh was going inland, and the marsh was going to Barsham. ---