Chapter 52 The Road North

They left on the second Tuesday of January, in a wind straight off the ice, with the ledger wrapped in oilcloth in Neve's rucksack and Lila's working pad in her own coat pocket, and the journey took the better part of two days, exactly as the letters had promised: ferry to the mainland, train to the northern city, a bus the next morning that followed the coast through villages getting smaller and grayer and more stubborn the farther north it ran. Neve talked for the first hour and then fell silent, the way the young fall silent when the sea starts showing them what it is. She watched the water change color — the soft grays of the south giving way to harder blues, then to a green-black that looked like it had opinions — and somewhere past the third headland she said, without turning from the window, "It's colder up here. Not weather-cold. Sea-cold." "It keeps different things," Lila said. "Or the same things, longer." They changed buses at a town whose name neither of them caught, and the driver of the second bus was a man who had heard of Saltwick but not of Thornhaven, and who found it hilarious that anyone would ride to the end of the line in January on purpose. He let them off at a crossroads with a single signpost, the paint scoured off it by weather no southerner would believe, and told them the walk to Carrowhead was a mile and a half and mostly downhill, which was the good news, he said, and grinned at his own joke without explaining it. Ailsa was waiting for them. She stood at her gate like a woman posing for a photograph taken sixty years ago — small, straight-backed, wrapped in a coat that had been made for someone larger, her white hair cut short and practical against the wind. Her face was lined the way driftwood is lined, all grain and no softness, and her eyes went first to the oilcloth bundle on Neve's back, and only afterward to their faces. "You brought it," she said. "The book of names." "We brought ourselves, too," Lila said. "Aye. Well." Something moved at the corner of her mouth that on a younger face would have been a smile. "Come in before the wind decides you're its business. It's been known." The cottage smelled of peat and bread and, faintly, of churches — candle wax and old paper — and Lila understood the smell before she had located it, because Ailsa had the prayer book out on the scrubbed table before their coats were off, as if it had been waiting by the door these three months the way some people wait at windows. It was a small book, bound in black cloth gone green at the corners, its spine held together with a strip of electrical tape applied with more care than skill. Ailsa opened it the way you open a thing you have opened ten thousand times and still refuse to hurry. Inside the front cover, in pencil, faded almost past reading, was a line of writing. Lila bent close. *Effie. d. 1913. remember.* Nothing else. No surname, no explanation, no prayer for the soul of the departed, none of the pious formulas such books usually collect. Just the name, the date, and the word — the same word, cut into the same kind of stones, that Lila had traced with her fingers in the buried row beneath her own harbor. "My grandmother Lettie's hand," Ailsa said. "She died when I was nine, and I found this the day they cleared her room, and I asked my mother who Effie was, and my mother went white and said we didn't speak of that, and that was the end of it, as far as my mother was concerned. It was not the end of it as far as I was concerned. But I was nine, and then I was twenty, and then I was forty, and the word *didn't speak of it* had grown so thick around the name that I couldn't find the edge of it anymore. That's how a silence works, isn't it? It doesn't forbid. It just grows." "Effie," Neve said quietly, trying the shape of it. "Euphemia. My grandmother's elder sister. Nineteen years old, lost off this coast in January 1913 — the very month, near enough, that we've come to. With my great-grandfather's boat, though whether the sea took the boat and spared the story or took the story and spared the boat, nobody living could tell me. There was no body. There was no grave. There was a sister who wrote a name in a book instead, because writing it was the only place the word *remember* could legally live." Ailsa closed the book, gently, both hands on the cover. "Thirty years I've carried it. And in all that time I never once said it out loud where another soul could hear, because my mother's rule outlived my mother, and rules do that, you know. They outlive everyone who understands why they were made." Lila laid her own hand flat on the table beside the book, not touching it, near it. "You've kept it well," she said. "All those years, keeping was the asking. You didn't know you were practicing. You were." Ailsa looked at her for a long moment, and her eyes — harbor-gray, unweeping, furious at the edge — said that no one had ever put it to her that way, and that she would be thinking about it for a long time, and that thinking was not the same as agreeing. "There's a thing you should see before bed," she said instead, rising. "The fishermen call the marks at the wall's base *the old tally.* Come to the window. At this light, if you know where to look, you can see where the courses change." Outside, full dark had come down, and the sea beyond the wall was a sound more than a sight — long, heavy, patient, working at the stones the way time works at grief. Ailsa pointed through the black glass at nothing visible, and her finger did not shake at all. "On the fourteenth," she said, "you'll climb down and look at them properly. But I wanted you to know tonight, before you sleep, that they're there. Twelve of them, my father used to say, when he was in drink and feeling talkative. A whole course of women, holding up a wall that men built on top and never asked about."