Chapter 20 What the Tide Brings

Eudora left Grithfen before dawn with the child in a sling against her chest and her bag on her back, and she did not tell a single soul, and it turned out that not telling a soul was the easiest thing she had done in the whole of that winter. She went out along the raised path between the sedge banks, past the water-meadow, out toward the gate, because the old track over the higher ground to Oxmarsh started on the far side of the sluice and it was the only road out of the parish that was above the water. Godwin Grike was not at his post. The punt lay at its mooring, and the shed was dark, and the hollow boat was in its hut with the door shut, and she passed all of them without stopping and did not look at any of them twice. The child slept against her in the cold. The track on the far side of the sluice ran along the top of a bank for a mile and then dropped down to the ford, and beyond the ford was the causeway and Oxmarsh and the whole ordinary world. She climbed the sluice steps and walked the bank with the first light coming up grey and flat off the sea, and behind her the village began to show against the sky, small and dark on its hummock, with one thread of smoke, and she stopped at the top of the bank where the ford came into view and looked back at it for the last time, and it was then that she heard the bell. It was ringing early. It was not the hour of the ninth bell; the sun was only just up and the ninth bell was miles off in the day. It rang and rang from the squat tower, out over the water, and after a moment she understood that it was ringing in the way a bell rings when the sexton has lost count and stopped simply pulling and left the rope swinging, and that the sound of it was carrying over the whole flooded Skaithe toward her, and that a thing can carry on water farther than it carries on land. Then she looked down at the ford, and stopped. The ford was gone. The water was already over it, and not shallowly — it stood a foot deep across the whole width of the crossing, brown and moving, and it had not been there when the old boatman had crossed it two days before, and it should not have been there for another week, because the Tithe tide was past. And as she stood at the top of the bank with the child warm against her and the bell ringing behind the village, the water on the ford began to rise, not quickly, not in any way you could call a flood, but the way the water in Grithfen always rose, quiet and deliberate, the way a basin fills, and she watched the last dry stones of the crossing go under and stay under and knew, with the whole of her trained and practical mind, exactly what it meant. The water had taken the ford before she could cross it. It had taken it in the night, while she was packing, while the whole of the parish was asleep and nobody was walking any path she could name. The count was short and she was carrying the child that made it short, and the water had done what water does when a thing is owed and not paid: it had simply come, and closed the road, and it would go on closing every road she turned to, because the fen was one road wide and the water was made of all of them. She stood on the bank in the grey morning with the bell going on behind her and the ford going under in front of her, and the child woke in her sling, and looked up at her, and did not cry. Then she turned around and began to walk back, past the sluice, past the dark shed, past the hollow boat in its hut, back along the raised path toward the village and the ringing bell and the one thread of smoke and everything she had said she would not do. Halfway home she met Godwin Grike coming out to meet her in the punt, poling through the flooded water-meadow with a lantern still lit in the daylight and his whole weathered face gone the colour of wet ash, and he did not ask her where she had been or why she had come back. He only held the punt steady against the bank and said the thing that told her the rest of it. "Sibby Braccan has gone into labour," he said. "A month early. They have sent the children running for you. The bell is for you, midwife. The bell is for you." And out beyond the gate, where the whole flooded Skaithe lay flat and brown and quiet under the coming day, something moved in the reeds. She got into the punt. Grike poled her back across the drowned water-meadow with the lantern burning uselessly in the daylight and the bell still going, and neither of them said anything for the length of the crossing, and Eudora sat with the child against her chest and the bag on her back and looked at the village coming nearer with all of her leaving still packed into that bag and nowhere to take it. She had got within a mile of the ordinary world and the ordinary world had gone under while she slept, and she understood now, in a way she had not understood it in the chapel, that the fen did not need to guard her. There was one road, and the water knew where it was. "I will need hot water," she said, when the punt touched the bank. "And clean cloths. And salt." "That is already being got," Grike said. "The women are with her." "Then take the bag to my house and come back." He took the bag and went, and Eudora climbed the bank with the child in the sling and walked as fast as the wet path would let her toward the chapel and the guest-room where Sibby Braccan lay. The bell was still ringing. It had been ringing a long time now, and she had begun to hear in it the thing that a bell is for, which is to call a parish to the one place it cannot avoid. She was halfway up the street when she saw that the chapel door stood open and the whole village was gathered outside it in the grey morning with their hands still and their faces turned toward the water, and that they were not looking at the bell and they were not looking at her. They were looking north, past the houses, out over the drowned meadow to where the sedge banks stood black against the risen water, and there, moving up the flooded channel toward the village on the incoming tide, with nobody poling it and nobody aboard it that any eye could see, came the hollow boat. Eudora stopped in the middle of the street with the child in her arms. Somewhere behind the shut door of the chapel guest-room, Sibby Braccan was in labour. Out on the water the empty boat came on, riding its own reflection, and the reeds on the far bank leaned toward it all at once as if something were walking through them, and the whole of Grithfen stood and watched it come and did not make a sound.