第5章 The Stranger at the Gate

Timea Spurrier came to Harnsey Wick on the fourth day, at about ten in the morning, with a grey trunk over one shoulder and a notebook under her arm and a face that had been on the road for three days and not for long enough to lose the city out of it. Nissa met her at the gate by the marsh, where the road came in from Ildwater and turned east toward the pans. Timea was small and dark-haired and she had on a plain black skirt and a plain grey coat and she carried her trunk with both hands and she did not ask to be helped with it. "You're the Tidewarden," she said. "I am." "I'm Timea Spurrier. I write about these things. Folk customs. Tides. Places like this." She put the trunk down on the shingle and looked out across the flat. "I've heard there's a book here." Nissa did not say where she had heard. She did not say that the parson had talked to her, and the boatmen had talked to her, and a small girl at the school had whispered the word *ledger* to her on the second morning because she had seen it in the schoolmaster's desk. She did not say any of it. She only looked at Timea, and Timea was looking at her. "I have a room," Nissa said. "I have a meal. I don't know what I have." "Neither do I." They went up the lane together, and Timea looked at the marsh the way a person looks at a painting they have heard about and have not seen, and she did not comment on it, and Nissa noticed her noticing, and she noticed that Timea was not looking at the Nine Steps. She was looking at the marsh, at the reed beds, at the pans, at the shingle and the mud and the flat. She was looking at the place and not at the place's famous thing. "She doesn't want the book," Nissa thought, and she thought it twice, and she did not put it out loud. They had tea in the Saltwyke kitchen, and Timea drank hers black and Nissa drank hers with milk and they talked about the pans and the salt and the price of coal and the weather and how Merle had died, and Timea did not ask about the Ebb Ledger once, and by the end of the cup she had the room mapped in her head and she had looked at the shelf in the corner where Nissa had kept the Ledger with her back to the door and she had not asked about it. "Where did you hear about this place?" Nissa said. "Two places," Timea said. "One was the county archive at Ildwater, and there was a reference to a Tidewarden and a book, in a parish record from 1887. One was a conversation in a public library in the city, with a man who had been a surveyor here in the fifties." "What did he tell you?" "He told me that the tide comes out further here than anywhere in the country. He told me that the sea here has an opinion, and that the opinion has a bookkeeper." Nissa set down her cup. "Is that what you've come to find," she said. "The bookkeeper." Timea looked at her. She did not answer. She picked up her cup and drank the last of her tea and set it down. "I've come to find out what the tide does to a village that keeps a book," she said. "I've come to find out what the book does to the village." "Then you're here." "And if there's nothing." "Then you'll have had a room, and a meal, and a cup of tea, and a view of the marsh, and a story of a woman who died on the eleventh of October in a small room above a kitchen, and that's a story worth writing down, isn't it." Timea looked at her. She looked at the bookshelf in the corner. She looked at Nissa. "Yes," she said. "It is." She put a paper down on the table in front of Nissa, folded into quarters, with her own name on the front in ink. Nissa opened it. It was a card, printed on the reverse, from the Folk Lore Society in the city, with a list of three places in the county the society was collecting on this year, and Harnsey Wick was the third on the list, and the other two were gone, and the third was here, and Timea was here, and she had written the third in her own hand. "I could have come for the marsh," she said. "I could have come for the pans. I came for the bookkeeper, because the bookkeeper is where the marsh ends." Nissa folded the paper and put it in her apron. She did not put it away. She did not put it back. "I am not the bookkeeper," she said. Timea looked at her. "No," she said. "You are." --- That evening Nissa walked the Sallow Reed again. She walked it at dusk, when the reeds were grey and the water was coming in and the marsh was quiet. She walked the whole of it, from the pans to the far end, and she walked it twice. On the second walk she found the footprints again. They were the same prints she had found the day before. The same hobnail, narrow, square-toed, going out toward the Nine Steps. And they were not dry. They were wet, still fresh in the mud, and they were two sets, and the second set was smaller, and the second set was a child's. She followed them. She followed them as far as the water would let her, and the water was coming in, and the boots were not going on, and she stood at the edge of the mud with her boots off and her stockings wet, and the second set went out and out and out, and the first set went with it, and the second set turned back at the water, and the first set went on, and the first set was not Nissa's, and the second set was a child's. She took her boots off and she waded out to the first step and stood on it, and the second set of prints had come to the first step and turned back, and she stood on the first step, and she did not go further. ---