第2章 The First Blank

Merle died on the eleventh of October at about four in the afternoon, in the small room above the kitchen of the Saltwyke house, with the coal fire still going and the pans still hissing on their stand outside. Nissa learned of it from Isaac Threave, who came up the shingle road in the middle of the morning with a rope over his shoulder and a face that had been washed once and not twice. "I brought you the news," he said. "I know," she said. "The parson knows. Half the parish knows." "You're the first I told." She understood that. She understood that the way a person on a small island understands the order in which things are brought to them, which is by the person who was already on their side of the room when they arrived. Isaac Threave was a boatman, fifty-three years old, sun-browned and wind-creased in a way that showed how much of his life had been spent on the water and how little on solid ground. He was not a man of many words, and the words he had were about things: how much kelp, how much brine, how many fathoms under the keel of the *Nissa's Rest*. He came to the Saltwyke kitchen every morning before dawn to help pull the pans and leave before the smell of brine had gone out of his coat. Merle had liked him, in the way she liked most people, which was not to say much. "Merle said to tell you she'd finished," Isaac said. "I don't think she meant it as a warning. I think she meant it as a fact." "Merle didn't tell her anything to anyone," Nissa said. "Not since the frost of eighty-nine." "Eighty-nine?" "That was the year the frost came through. The year the pans froze over and half the crop went bad. Merle walked the whole of Bellrigg that winter and wouldn't speak to me when she came back." Isaac stood at the kitchen table with his hands on it and looked at the Ledger, which was open on the page with the substitution entry. "That's her book," he said. "That's always been her book." "Since the first of the year, yes." "Merle took the book in 1852. She was twenty-one. She'd held it for a day and a half before they took her mother from her." Nissa looked up. He did not elaborate. He was a man who did not elaborate, and she had known him for eleven years, and there were many things she had known he would never say. "Then what did Merle send?" she said. He looked at her, and there was something in his look that she had seen many times before and never quite put a name to. It was the look of a man who had been asked something he had been keeping out of the room on purpose, and who was deciding, in the moment of the asking, whether to let it in. "Nothing," he said at last. "Merle sent nothing. Straw and salt, every ebb, every ebb, and the sea kept its side of the trade because Merle made sure it did. And she made sure I did mine." "Your part." "Keeping the boats in. Watching the marsh. Standing where the tide can see me and calling out the shape of the day. That's all. That's all I've ever done." He put his hands flat on the table. The Ledger was under them. "I have told you all of it," he said. "You are the Tidewarden now. It is up to you." --- The Ledger lay on the kitchen table through the afternoon, under the kerosene lamp, and Nissa worked her way back through it page by page while the pans hissed and the mud sucked at her boots and the light went out of the little window in the north wall. She read every entry since Merle took the book in 1852, working backward. She read the 1891 entry, the 1852 entry, the 1813 entry, the 1773 entry. Each entry had the same shape. A date. A name. A line about a sent person. A further line about a substitute. The substitute was always something. Straw. Salt. A bundle of flannel. In three entries there was a further note: the Sounding present. Bell heard inland. Nissa read 1852 again. *One sent, not returned. Substitute: straw, nine lengths, salt, three pecks, flannel, one bundle.* The entry was written by a hand Merle did not have. The lettering was larger and less certain, the strokes pressed harder into the vellum, as if the writer had been unsteady or afraid. This page was Merle's first entry as Tidewarden, and the person who had written the words *one sent* before Merle took over had done it standing in a marsh in November of 1852. She did not know what had been sent. The page did not say. In Merle's years the entries always began with a name, and this page had one too, but a name Nissa did not recognise, and it was old enough to be the work of a Tidewarden before Merle, and she had no way of knowing how much of what had come before Merle's hand had been kept and how much had been softened. She sat down on the bench beside the table and put her hand over the page and thought about it. She had asked Merle about the Ledger, as a child, the way one asks about a thing one's been taught to keep away from. She had asked when she was nine, and Merle had answered, *you'll know when it's yours.* She had asked when she was thirteen, and Merle had answered, *you'll know when it's yours.* She had asked when she was nineteen, after the funeral of her mother's cousin, and Merle had answered, *you'll know when it's yours.* And now it was hers, and Merle had not taught her what was in it, and the book said nothing about how to keep it, or why, or what it was for. It said only that something had been sent, and something else had been put in its place, and the bell had been heard in the village. Nissa took up the pen. She wanted to write a note at the margin, some question, some marker of where she was and what she did not know. She dipped it, and then she put it down. There was something about that page that made her hand stay off it. She could not have said what. She only knew that if she had written on that page in that moment, she would have regretted it, and she did not have the sense of when she would regret the next thing she did. She moved the Ledger to the shelf by the fire, closed the front clasp, and turned it so the spine was toward the door. She did not lock it, because there was no lock. She did not wrap it, because there was nothing to wrap it in that was dry. She put it on the shelf, and she went out to the pans to keep the salt, and Isaac watched her from the doorway of the kitchen and said nothing. That night, out on the marsh, the drowned bell rang. It was a sound like a note struck on a big pot of metal with a heavy mallet, low and clear and not altogether unlike the church bell that had hung in the tower of Ashenholt before the town had drowned. Nissa heard it from the pans, on the far side of the village, three miles from anywhere that could have held such a bell. She heard it once, and then she heard it a second time, and then she stood on the shingle with her hands in her apron and looked out across the mud toward the middle of Ebbmouth, where the Nine Steps lay under the tide and where the flat ran to a point that no mapmaker in the last hundred and sixty years had drawn. The bell rang a third time, and the village dogs answered it, and the marsh was quiet, and Nissa stood on the shingle and thought, for the first time since she had signed Merle's book, that the book had been right, and that it had been wrong, and that the difference was in the part no one had ever told her what to do with. ---