Chapter 73 What the Sea Had Kept

The springs came fair on the Thursday, with a north wind that had blown all night and spent itself by dawn, leaving a sky scoured hard and blue and a sea running long and glassy under it. By eight the whole working population of Tarskay stood on the rocks below the ruined byre — twenty men and women, four dogs with official views, and every child on the island arranged along the top of the bank by common consent and Mrs. Enright's ruling that history was to be witnessed from where nothing could fall on it. Ewen walked the bearing first, slow and exact, with the folded paper in his fist and his lips moving over the lines like a man at scripture. Stand at the door-stone. Bring the green top down onto the black stack. Walk the line out to where the kelp ends. At the kelp-line he stopped, and looked back at the byre door, and forward at the water, and nodded once. "Here," he said. "Nine feet if she's a foot." Ruaridh went in first, as promised, with a face-mask and a weighted belt and no ceremony at all, and the cold of that sea came off him in spirit when he climbed out ten minutes later, breathing hard, eyes wide. "Stone floor," he said. "Boulder-fall from the croft, all manner of tangle — and under the biggest slab, wedged, a shape. Box-shaped." He got his breath back in two pulls. "It's *big*. Bigger than a kist should be, I'd have said. And wrapped. Canvas, tarred, gone hard as shell." They worked the next hour and a half against the draining tide with the whole shore hauling and Callum running the tackle he had rigged between the salmon boat's mast and a scarred rock-pin that predated everyone's grandfather. Two more dives for Ruaridh and his nephew Donald to set slings and clear the tangle, weed coming up in armloads, boulders shifted on prying bars by men standing chest-deep and swearing with affection; and then the rope came tight, and the load rose, and broke surface streaming brown and silver in the sun, and the shout that went up from the bank was taken and passed along it like something being handed. It was a box, all right. Four feet by two and a half by two, tarred sailcloth outermost, ropped with cord gone to black wax; inside that, oak, iron-bound, the bands rusted into lace but holding; and when the oak lid — pried, at Ewen's nod, with the gentleness of men opening something on behalf of the dead — came up on its hinges with a groan of trapped air, the smell that rose out of it stopped every hand on the shore. Wax. Cold wax and dry timber and, underneath those, something older and sweeter, like a kirk at midwinter. Inside the oak lay a chest of zinc, soldered shut along its seams, grey and perfect, and on the zinc lid, centered, pressed deep into a pad of the same red sealing wax Lila had last seen in Flora's kitchen, a single impression. Iris went to her knees on the wet rock without noticing that she had done it. She knew the stamp. Every one of them knew it now: the cluster, the title-mark, the little crown of strokes that opened every column of every roll from Carrowhead to Kilvane — cut here in bronze by hands that had been granted the right to seal what they kept. "Nobody breathe on it," she said, absurdly, and then laughed at herself with tears standing in her eyes, and Ewen said gravely that they would all do their breathing downwind. They carried it up the bank whole — eight men under it, slow as pallbearers, the children craning from their sanctioned height — and set it on trestles in the byre's one surviving room, whose roof had gone but whose walls stood waist-high and wind-tight enough for dignity. There, with the solder cut by Ruaridh's careful iron and the community pressing in around three sides, they lifted the zinc lid at eleven minutes past noon, and Lila, whose hands everybody had somehow decided upon, drew out what lay topmost and felt the day change gear beneath her, the way a boat changes gear when the water deepens. Packets. Flat packets sewn in waxed linen, each about the size of a psalm-book, tied with tarred twine, numbered — actually numbered, little stamped brass tags, seven of them — and under the packets a bundle of letters bound in oilskin, and under those, nested in wool gone hard as felt, the seal-matrix itself, bronze, palm-sized, its handle worn to the shape of somebody's particular grip, its face cutting the cluster in mirror image. And at the bottom, wrapped in a christening gown yellow as parchment, a child's wooden bird, painted blue, one wing mended with wire. Neve wrote the inventory aloud, voice steady, pen not steady, doing her work anyway, which is the whole of discipline. Iris lifted packet number one and untied it with fingers she could not keep from hurrying and could not make hurry, and unfolded bark-sheets thin and pale as onion skin, dense with columns, and found the cluster at the head of the first column, and read the station it named, and sat down slowly on an upturned creel. "They sent them *here*," she said. "When the breaking came — whatever breaking, whenever it came — they didn't bury the rolls or burn them or trust them to parish chests. They sealed them and shipped them past the edge of the map to the one place the storm of men couldn't reach, and the door-keepers took them in, and the sea took the door-keepers' house, and kept the whole consignment safe for—" she looked at the tag in her hand, at the date scratched under its number— "two hundred years and more, and never dropped one syllable of it." She looked round the byre, at the ring of island faces, weathered and waiting and not one of them surprised. "Do you understand what you have been? Your island has been the deepest shelf in the whole archive of this coast. Everything else we've found has been a station. This is the strong-room." Old Mrs. Enright, at the front of the crowd, put back her spectacles and considered the byre full of weeping scholars and salt-stained boxes and children straining for a view of the bird. "Aye," she said. "We could have told ye we were good at keeping. It's the only trade that never left."