第1章 The Ledgership

The post-mortem of Merle Saltwyke was read at nine on the morning of the eleventh of October, in the little church by the sea, and by the time the parson had reached the part about her long and faithful service, Nissa had already signed her name across the top of the Ebb Ledger. The Ledger lay open on the third pew. It was a fat book, bound in oiled leather the colour of a bruise, with an iron clasp gone green and a leather label on the spine printed in the same faded hand as the parish records behind it. It smelled of salt and of the kerosene lamp that had lived above it for forty-one years. Nissa held it in both hands the way one holds a live chicken, and she had not thought to notice how heavy it was until she set it down on the pew and pressed her palm against the cover, feeling for the seam. Cuthbert Lanyon was still speaking. He was a small man with a great deal of white in a brown face, and his voice had the particular resonance of a parson who had been doing this work for twenty-six years without once changing his mind about anything. "— a woman who kept this parish through two famines, one war, and the last of the Long Ebb, and to her we owe whatever we still have left —" "Whatever we still have left," Nissa repeated to herself, in a murmur nobody could hear. The Ledger was the hereditary record of the Tidewarden of Harnsey Wick, the woman who kept the account of every Long Ebb since the founding of the parish. There had been twenty-three Tidewardens before Nissa, going back to a woman named Saltwyke in 1531 who had walked into the marsh one morning, come out the following evening, and returned to the village with a stone in her apron that no geologist in the last hundred and fifty years had been able to account for. She had taken on the office, whatever it was, and the office had passed down through the women of her line without interruption. Merle had been the twenty-third. Nissa, at twenty-two, would be the twenty-fourth. Her father had been a man of the road, a travelling man, gone before he was thirty-eight. Her mother had come of the Saltwyke cousins from Ildwater, a quiet woman who had died of a fever in the winter of the year Nissa turned twelve. The girl had been left to Merle, who had brought her up on the marsh with the rest of the salt family's business: feeding the pans, hauling the brine, raking the salt, again and again. Nissa had been in charge of nothing, officially. That had been the arrangement. She had done whatever needed doing and waited for Merle to say the next word, which Merle had said for forty-one years in a single low voice that never once rose and never once faltered. Now that voice was dead. The word for the next forty-one years was Nissa's to say, and she had not yet said it. She turned the Ledger open. The binding gave with a soft crack of dry leather, and inside was a page of vellum, and on the vellum a line of script in Merle's hand, dated the previous evening. *I keep the Ebb Ledger for so long as my hand can hold it. I give it now to my niece Nissa, of this parish, to keep it after me, on the understanding that she will read it first.* There was a signature below that line, in the same small, careful hand, and beneath the signature a small stamp of red wax the colour of dried blood. Nissa looked at the wax. She knew the mark. Every Tidewarden's page carried one, going back a hundred and thirty years at least. It was a single stroke of a stylus, like a small arrowhead pointing down. She turned the page. The next page was older, in Merle's hand but earlier, from around 1960. A date. A name. A line that read: *one sent, not returned, the Sounding present in the mother.* And then a further line, indented, in a browner ink: *substitute accepted. straw, nine lengths, salt, three pecks. Bell heard inland for three nights.* Nissa read that twice. She did not understand it. She turned the page again, and again, working back through Merle's years. Every entry for a Long Ebb was short and neat. A date. A name. A line beginning *one sent.* A further indented line about a substitute. She passed through 1891, 1852, 1813, 1773. Each entry had the same shape. Each entry had a substitution. She turned to 1852. The entry was dated the third of November. *Saltwyke, one sent, not returned. Substitute: straw, nine lengths, salt, three pecks.* Nissa put her palm flat on the page. The page was cool under her hand, cooler than it should have been in a room with a coal fire. She had not known that the Saltwyke name had been written into this book by Merle, or by the Tidewarden before Merle, or by any other woman who had stood where she was standing now. She had not known that her own bloodline had walked onto the Nine Steps more than once. She sat back in the pew. Across the aisle Cuthbert was finishing his address and looking for applause. "…and she has given of herself without end. The sea, which takes so much from us, has taken nothing from this woman that she did not first give. Let us remember her in the silence we are owed." The congregation did not applaud. They stood, and then they sat, and a broad man who kept the salt pans came forward and took the Ledger off the pew and held it out to Nissa with both hands. "You'll want it home before dusk," he said. "Before dusk," Nissa repeated. She took the Ledger. It was heavier than it should have been, heavier than anything held in both hands by a man of sixty ought to be, and she carried it down the aisle past the people who nodded at her with their heads turned half a degree too far, and out the wooden door and down the two stone steps that ran beside the churchyard and across the marsh in the last hour of October afternoon. The marsh was flat and wet and brown. Beyond the reed beds the tidal flat of Ebbmouth opened in a wide grey sweep, the water gone out until the mud showed white as salt and dry as flour. To the west, where the flat turned to rock, a thin grey line stood in the middle of the mud. It was four hundred yards long. It was made of stone. Nissa had seen it a hundred times. Every autumn it came up, and every winter the water took it back. It ran from Bellrigg, the little rock off the southern shore, straight across the mud to a point somewhere in the middle of Ebbmouth, and there it stopped. Beyond that point the mud was flat, and the water had gone out further than anywhere else in the estuary. The line was the Nine Steps. She had walked out to the first two of them when she was nine, with Merle's arm in hers. She had never gone further. Merle had told her never to go further. She had asked why, many times, over many years, in many rooms and in many weathers, and Merle had not answered. Now the line was gone, or almost gone. The Long Ebb was due in three days. Until it came the steps sat half under the water of the ordinary tide, and only the highest joints of the stone broke the surface at low slack. From the marsh they looked like a row of grey knuckles under the skin. The church at Harnsey Wick was a plain building of local stone, with a squat tower and a door that opened onto the marsh rather than onto a churchyard, and Nissa had gone home this way from the moment she could walk. She knew the way by her feet. The mud was under her boots to the ankle, and beyond the reeds the flat ran out to the water, and on the water she could see the first of the steps. She did not go to them. She stood at the edge of the reed bed and looked at them for a moment, and then she went home to the Saltwyke house at the far end of the village, where the pans were still steaming and Isaac Threave's boat was drawn up on the shingle with its keel turned up to the sky. ---