Chapter 62 The Accession Register

They went south on Thursday's boat with the ledger left safe at home under Wren's eye, because, as Lila said, you do not walk the original into a city that has not finished wanting it. Neve had never been to Edinburgh. She bore the journey — ferry, train, the slow climb out of the sea country into hills still white to the walls — with her chin at the window glass, and when the city came up at last out of its smoke she said nothing at all for a mile, and then: "It's like a harbor. Only the water is stone and it all flowed uphill." Iris met them at Waverley in a coat too thin for March and walked them at half-running pace through streets that meant nothing to her anymore because the basement lay at the other end of them. The archive was under the old college, down a stair worn hollow, into a warmth that smelled of paste and dust and the particular dry sweetness of paper that has outlived everyone who wrote on it. The archivist's name was Mr. Duthie; he had a white beard trimmed like a hedge and the manner of a man who has spent forty years being interrupted at his desk and has made peace with it. The rubbing lay flat in a shallow drawer, on a board, under glass. It was smaller than Lila had imagined — two hands' breadth of paper gone amber at the edges, blackened where the graphite had caught the stone's high places — and there, cut deep into the drawing's darkness, unmistakable, was the sign from the end of the bark sheet. Not near it. Not like it. It. The strokes ran off one edge of the paper as if the hand had run out of room or of nerve, and below, in pencil, in a small upright schoolroom script, someone had written: *the beginning mark. C.M.* "Miss Macneill rubbed this in June of 1911," Mr. Duthie said, "and posted it to the professor of the day with a letter we also hold, though it makes sorry reading — he acknowledged receipt and did nothing else whatsoever. Ladies' correspondence was filed by the window in those years." He permitted himself the smallest pause. "Her notebook was deposited later, in 1934, with her effects. It is small. You will want gloves." The notebook was smaller than a hymn book, bound in cloth gone gray, its pencil entries pressed so fine the pages had to be read at a slant. Iris put on the gloves. Lila did not touch it at all; she stood with her hands folded like a woman at a graveside while Iris turned the leaves, and the basement went very quiet around the little sounds of paper. Most of it was what a schoolmistress's notebook would be — attendance figures, sums copied out, a recipe for cough syrup — and then, interleaved at the back, in June 1911, the other thing entirely. *Walked below the old chapel at Kilvane this evening. The gable stands to half height. The stone lies face-down in the shingle below the point, as the old folk wished it, my grandfather said — turned over the day the minister came, so the sign would look at the earth instead of the sky until better readers should come. I am not a better reader. I have written to the University anyway.* And beneath that, dated four days after: *From Mrs. Banntyne, aged ninety-three: the women kept the roll of the drowned here inside the kirk, on the doorstep-stone, where every foot that came to worship trod upon it gently, which is no disrespect but the opposite. When the roof fell they asked leave to carry it nowhere, and instead buried the knowledge where it lay and let the turf grow over, till the right readers come. She says I may be one of them. She says I am the first person ever to have asked her the question outright.* Neve breathed something between a laugh and a prayer. "Under our feet," she said. "All this time, the roll has been under their feet at church." "There's more," Iris said softly, turning the last leaf. There was. The final entry was undated, in different ink, blotted, hurried — written, by every sign, on some evening when the light was going and the decision could not wait for morning: *Sent the kirk box north today with the MacArthurs' cart, as was promised before ever I was born, to be kept where the sea cannot finish it. God go with it, and with whoever keeps it next, and may they forgive us all for the sake of the names.* Nobody spoke. Down in the dark of the archive the heating pipes ticked once, twice, like a clock remembering it had a job. Lila found she had to steady herself on the edge of the drawer-table, because the ground had moved again, that same inch lower, everywhere at once: a box had lain at Kilvane, twin to the box the tide had given up at Thornhaven, and it had been sent north, deliberately, into the wilder country, before 1934 — and no page in the basement said to whom. "Mr. Duthie," she said at last, "is there any record of the MacArthurs? A carting firm, a croft, anything?" He looked over his spectacles with something close to sympathy. "MacArthur," he said, "on that coast, will be a family, a boat, and half a graveyard, Miss — Keeper. The record you want isn't here. The record you want is whoever up there still remembers a cart." There was one more matter, and Dr. Halloway delivered it himself that evening at his house, over soup, with an air of a man opening a cupboard he would rather stayed shut. "You should know that Mr. Quarrie of the Antiquarian Field Club has written to me twice asking after Miss Vane's inquiries — where she has been, what she photographs, when she means to publish. He writes beautifully and means to be helpful, and if he gets ahead of you he will print the location of that chapel in a pamphlet, and inside a year there will be trippers with hammers." He set down his spoon. "Scholarship wants daylight; stones want shelter. I don't know how you people square that circle on your coast, but I'd think about it before spring." "We'll think about it on the road," Lila said, and Halloway studied her face for a moment, and nodded slowly, as a man concedes that some other discipline may after all have methods of its own. On the train home Neve ruled a fresh page and headed it, in her careful hand, KILVANE — QUESTIONS, and wrote beneath it three lines: Where did the cart go. Who keeps the box now. What lies under the turf at the chapel door. She showed it to Lila somewhere past the last big town, when the windows had filled up with sea again. "That's the whole plan," Lila said. "You've compressed six months of committee work into a schoolgirl's page. Don't ever lose the habit."