第3章 The Pan Keeper's Account

The sheep went on the second morning after Merle's death. They went out of the Sallow Reed, which was the stretch of marsh between the Saltwyke pans and the far end of Harnsey Wick, a place where the ground was soft and reedy and the lambs grew fat in the summer and thin in the winter, and which belonged in law to no one and in practice to everyone who had a fence of hazel and a dog that barked at shadows. Twelve lambs went. All of them young stock, all of them gone overnight in a way that was not like wolves and not like foxes and not like anything else that came out of the marsh in the wet season. The pan keeper, a broad man who had run the pans since Merle took them over from his own father, brought the news to Nissa in the morning with a basket of brine on his arm. He was sixty years old and sun-weathered, and his face did not move when he told it. "Twelve," he said. "Not one a bite taken. Not one a footprint on them. Just gone." "Where?" "Where. I don't know. I walked the whole reed. I asked the dogs. I asked the boatmen at the well, and they stood there with their hands in their pockets, and then they went away." Nissa set down the pot she was pouring brine from and looked at the man. There was something in the way he had said the last part. Something in the way his voice had dropped on *they went away*, and in the fact that he had noticed it, and not said anything more. "Did you ask them why," Nissa said. "I asked them why. They said why the sheep. That was all." "Then why did you come to me, and not the parson?" The pan keeper looked at the pans. The pans were boiling. "Because you're the Tidewarden," he said. "And you ought to know." --- Nissa walked the Sallow Reed that afternoon with a stick in her hand and her boots in the mud, and she found nothing. No tracks. No wool. No blood. The twelve lambs had walked out of the reed in their own time, if they had walked out of it at all, and the marsh had taken them in a way that did not leave a mark, and the mud had settled over the grass where they had stood and there was nothing to see but the grass. She walked it twice. She walked it a third time, in the last hour of light, when the flat had opened out again and the water had come back in and stood against the first of the Nine Steps like a wall. And on the third walk she found a footprint. It was small. It was not a shoe print, and it was not a bare foot. It was a hobnail print, narrow and square-toed, in the mud at the edge of the reed, going out toward the steps and not coming back. It was old enough to have dried to a fine line, and fresh enough still to be there, and it was the print of a woman's boot. Nissa stood over it for a long time. The water was up to her knees. She could see the first two steps, and beyond them the mud of Ebbmouth running out to nothing. She could see the point where the line of stone ended and the flat began, and she could see, at the very end of the line, something that was not stone and not water, a dark shape that had been there since she was a girl and had never been there before. She took her boots off. She left them on the shingle. She waded out to the first step, and stood on it, and did not go further. She came back to the Saltwyke house at dusk. She washed her legs in the bucket by the fire. She ate the bread and mutton that Isaac had left in the kitchen on his way home to his boat, and she sat down at the table, and she opened the Ledger, and she read the entry for 1851 again, and she looked at the shape of the writing, and she looked at the wax stamp, and she looked at the small line at the bottom of the page that she had not noticed before, and she read it. *Kept for want of another hand.* Nissa held the book in both hands. She did not read that line a second time. She understood it. --- The next morning she went to see Cuthbert Lanyon. He was at home, in the little rectory behind the church, with the windows shut and the fire going and a stack of parish papers on the table in front of him. He was a small man, and he had been at Harnsey Wick for twenty-six years, and he had the look of a man who had read the parish records every year of his life and had never once found anything in them he did not already know. He opened the door and looked at Nissa with his red-rimmed eyes, and he saw the Ledger in her hands, and something in his face changed. "Nissa," he said. "You're too young to be holding that yet." "The Ledger is mine now, sir. Merle gave it to me yesterday." "Yes. She did. I know." He stepped back and let her in. "Come in, come in. Sit." She did not sit. She stood at the table with the Ledger in her hands and watched him take off his coat and hang it up and come back with two cups of tea and set one in front of her. "The Sallow Reed," she said. He looked at her. He did not answer. "Twelve lambs, sir. Young stock. Gone overnight." "I know about the lambs." "The boatmen at the well said nothing." Cuthbert took up his tea. He did not drink it. He set it down. "Nissa," he said. "I am the parson of this parish. There are things I am asked to keep and things I am asked to speak. The lambs are a thing I am asked to keep." "By whom?" By whom. She watched him answer. "By the village," he said. "By the account. By the Tidewarden, of whom I am reminded that she is twenty-two years old and twenty years too young for a book like that." "Then let me tell you what is in the book," Nissa said. "Every entry since 1851 has the same shape. A name, sent, not returned. A substitute. Straw, salt, flannel. The bell heard inland. Merle kept this book for forty-one years, sir, and she never once sent what it said to send." The parson looked at her. He put his cup down on the table, and he did not put it down gently. "Then it is good she did," he said. "It is good she did. And it is not up to you, child, to correct her." "Correct her. You mean the secret." "I mean the account." "Tell me what the account is, sir, and I will keep it." He looked at her. He had been a parson for a long time, and he had a great deal of practice with people who did not listen. He took it up again. "Sit down," he said. "The account is long, and your head is not made for it yet." "The book has been waiting ninety years, sir. My head has had time to be made for it." ---