Chapter 71 What Katrin Brought

They did not open the bundle on the strand. Flora appeared among them with a lantern before anyone had thought to want one and said that whatever had crossed two days of sea to reach them would be unwrapped indoors, at a table, with the kettle on, because that was how decent people received a thing like grief or scripture. So they went up through the dark to the kitchen, all six of them and the cat that owned Flora's step, and Katrin sat where the chair was put for her, and laid the bundle in the middle of the scrubbed wood as if setting down something that had slept in her arms the whole way north. The wrapping was sailcloth, tarred at one corner, tied with cord that had cut its own grooves into her fingers over the miles. Inside that was wool, an old jersey rolled around its cargo against the knock of the boat. And inside the wool, three things. The first was an exercise book, school-ruled, its cover soft as chamois from handling. Katrin opened it flat with both hands and turned it so the lamplight fell across the pages, and Iris leaned in and made a sound low in her throat, the sound she had made at the drowned stones in Achmore bay. Lines ran across the ruled paper — not staff-lines, nothing so official — but dots and dashes and little rising tails, drawn in pencil, renewed in ink where a page had been gone over twice, and beneath each line of marks a word written out plain: names, dozens of them, some doubled and trebled as if the writer had returned to certain ones again and again the way you visit graves. "She drew the sounds," Katrin said. "She couldn't write music and she never learned your letters for the script, whatever you call it. So she made her own. The dot is the low note, the dash is the long one, the tail goes up when the name goes up." Her thumb moved along a margin where the pencil had pressed hard enough to emboss three pages deep. "These were hers to keep. She taught me every one of them before I could tie my own boots, and she said, you will carry them until somebody comes who knows what they weigh." Iris had taken up the book as if it were a relic, which it was, and was moving her lips through the notation with two fingers of her free hand pressed to her breastbone, and Lila watched her arrive somewhere no scholarship had ever sent her: a system invented alone, on an island at the edge of the charts, by a woman who needed to keep a music and had no means but need. The second thing was small: a stick of sealing wax, deep red-brown, worn concave where a thumb had rocked it against a flame a hundred times or a thousand. And the third was a folded paper, modern notepaper, torn from the back of an old exercise book, covered in a crabbed upright hand. Katrin smoothed it and read it aloud slowly, the way you read words you have read forty times and still cannot hurry. *If I am gone and the box is under the water where I watched it go, then whoever is reading this has come asking, and my granddaughter will know your faces before you know our shore. The bearings are below. They are true. My grandmother gave me the place as her mother gave it to her, and we were told to hold it open, not to hold it shut. There is a difference, and you will know it too or you will not have come this far.* Below the writing, in the same hand, three lines that read like a verse of the cart-song stripped to its working clothes: stand at the door-stone of the ruined byre; bring the green top of the fire hill down onto the black stack; walk the line out to where the kelp ends. *Nine feet at the big ebb,* the paper said. *Springs. Not neaps.* Callum took the paper without asking, the way he took anything that concerned water, and studied it, and looked at the window as if he could see the moon through Flora's curtain, and Lila saw him doing arithmetic with tides and distance and arrived at his answer before he spoke it. "Big springs come round Thursday week," he said. "We'll want two days' weather to get there and I'll not fight the Monach race short-handed or short-slept. We go Monday." He set the paper down and squared it with the table edge, which was as near as Callum came to signing a document. Neve was already writing — inventory, dates, the bearing-lines copied fair into her notebook with the close care Wren had drilled into her, and Lila caught herself watching the girl's bent head and thinking that the circle had built itself a new pair of hands again, quietly, the way a shore builds a beach, one delivery of small things at a time. "Your grandmother," Lila said. "Will you tell us about her? Only if it's yours to tell." Katrin turned her cup once around on its saucer, considering, deciding whether the account would fit in a kitchen. Then she told them. Her name had been Signe, and she had been born in the house the storm ate, and she had kept what her family called the outer keeping, which was not the cave and not the kist but the memory that fed both: the sounds, the bearings, the rules. Rule the first: what comes to the second door stays whole until they come who can read it. Rule the second: ask before you lift, even the sea. Rule the third — and here Katrin smiled for the first time since the strand, a quick crooked smile that made her look sixteen instead of twenty-four — *never trust a calm that lasts past noon.* "She died in February," Katrin finished. "In my aunt's front room, facing the window, with a fair wind getting up. I hummed her own notes back to her at the end. She had breath enough left to nod." The cup stopped turning. "So. Thursday week. And after the water gives it up—" she looked round the table, at the scholar and the girl and the keeper and the silent man already rigging the passage in his head— "after that, I'll take you up the hill myself. Both doors. It's time somebody came who can count what's behind them." Flora, who had missed nothing, got up and put another log on the fire, and said to the room in general that Kilvane would mind their gear and their kettle till they came back, and that Raouline had left a message at the door not an hour after the boat came in, having heard about Katrin the way Raouline heard everything. "Tell them," Flora recited, savoring it, "the first door still stands. She said you'd know which one she meant." Later, with the kitchen gone quiet and the others asleep, Lila sat and wrote to Wren by the banked fire: the bearing matched the drowned road at Achmore, stroke for stroke; the far islands were not beyond the map but part of it; and somewhere west-northwest a hill stood green over a cold room that had waited out the centuries with its patience intact. She wrote *we are following instructions again*, and underlined it once, and went to bed with the tide turning in her ears like a slow applause.