Chapter 9 The Last Cart

The carrier came on the Thursday and said he would not come again before the new year. Eudora met him at the end of the street and paid him to take a letter to Oxmarsh and put it on the coach, and he took the coin and the letter and looked at the sky for a while, and told her the news she had known was coming. The spring tides were running high and the causeway had taken water at the middle for the first time that season, and if the weather held the way it had been holding, the road would be gone for three weeks and maybe four. After that the marsh would dry and it would come back, but nothing on wheels would cross it until then, and nothing on feet either, unless a person knew the old track over the higher ground and was willing to spend a day at it and get wet to the waist twice. "You could go with me now," he said. "I can take your trunk." Eudora looked back at the village. Smoke stood in the still air. The reeds at the north were moving, and there was no wind, and she had stopped telling herself she was imagining it. Somewhere down among the houses a woman was calling a child in to eat. "No," she said. "Why not?" She did not answer him with the truth, which was that she could not leave the parish two weeks before Sibby Braccan was due, and that a midwife who runs out on a lying-in she has promised is a midwife who should find a different trade. She gave him a smaller truth instead. "I have patients on both sides of the water," she said, "and I have not finished my work." "That is your business." He climbed up onto the cart. "I will see your letter goes. If you change your mind, it is a long walk and a wet one, and I would not try it at night." He drove away over the causeway with the mare stepping carefully, and Eudora watched the cart until it was a small dark knot against the flats, and then she walked out to the edge of the firm ground and stood where the stone causeway began and looked along it to the far bank. The middle of the causeway had water on it already, shallow, lying in the low places between the raised stones, and the water was the colour of the sky and did not look deep, and she knew that in ten days it would look exactly the same and be five feet deep, because that was how the Skaithe drowned a road. It did it without drama. It simply kept coming. That evening she wrote three letters and did not send any of them. The first was to the county medical officer of health, and in it she set out the facts as she knew them, in the flat professional voice she had used all her working life: that she had taken a post in a fen parish, that certain customs here concerned the handling of newborn children, that she had reason to believe a child had been, or would be, placed in the water, that she could not name a crime or a culprit or a body, and that she was asking for guidance. Reading it over, she saw that it said nothing a clerk could act on. It said that a village had strange ways, which every clerk in the county already knew, and it would be filed and answered in six weeks with a request for further particulars that she would then be unable to supply, because she had no particulars, only a hollow boat and a rule about salt and a mark on a foot. The second was to the woman who had been her ward sister in the city, and that one she got three lines into before she stopped, because there was no way to write it that did not make her sound ill. The third she wrote without stopping, and did not sign, and put at the bottom of her trunk. In it she set down everything: the ledger, the columns, the word titled, the eight and eight in the chapel, the hollow boat, the cry Godwin Grike had heard and heard stop, the mark on two children she had delivered with her own hands, and the fact that she had written a lie about a time in her own book. When she had finished it she read it once and put it away, and the act of putting it away told her something about herself that she would rather not have known, which was that she had already decided, somewhere below thinking, to stay and see. In the night the wind got up and the water came over the water-meadow and licked at the bottom step of the north houses, and Eudora lay awake and listened to the Skein fill the whole village with its slow breathing, and for the first time since the causeway she thought about the word that Drusilla had used the day she arrived. Kept. A thing kept is a thing that is prevented from leaving. She turned it over until she slept. The next weeks made her a village midwife in earnest. She was called out eleven times in the fortnight that followed, and the calls came at all hours, and she went to all of them, and she learned the whole shape of the parish by its doorsteps and its bad roofs and the white fan-stains of damp on its walls. She learned which houses had the swelling in their floors that came and went with the tide, and which had none, and she learned that the two were divided neatly by the line of the old bank, so that half of Grithfen had been built on ground the sea chose not to want and half had been built on ground it merely lent. She set a fisherman's broken finger and drained an abscess and coaxed a constipated child with a syrup of figs, and she sat up one long night with an old woman who was not going to die yet and set her house in order around her all the same, and in the mornings she wrote it down in her own book, case by case, the way she had written every case of her working life. The village kept her at arm's length and used her every day. Both of those were true, and she had stopped expecting them to resolve. The women let her into their kitchens and their confidences and did not let her into the one room where the whole thing lived. The men touched their hats and looked at her hands. The children liked her, because children do not keep the count; they had already forgotten that she had ever been a stranger and had begun to bring her the ordinary treasure of small places, a bird's egg, a broken knife, a ribbon the colour of a fish. Only Sibby Braccan treated her as if she were a person, and Sibby was a month from her time and had begun to sleep badly, and twice in that fortnight Eudora sat with her in the evening and did not examine her and did not take out a book, and the two women talked about nothing that mattered, which is the deepest form of trust there is between a midwife and a mother, and each time Eudora walked home afterward with the particular lightness of a night on which nothing had been decided. ---