第26章 The Question

The question arrived on a Tuesday in autumn, and it arrived by post, in a buff envelope bearing the return address of the county council, which meant it was official, which meant it could not be set aside for later. Clara found it on the mat when she came in from the garden, her hands still dark with soil, and she opened it standing in the hallway, because the day was bright and the sea was flat and she did not think the post could carry anything heavier than bills. It could. It did. The letter was from Inspector Hale, the officer who had taken the call from the cove two years before, and it was short and carefully worded, and it said that the remains recovered from the cleft in the rock had been re-examined at the county laboratory as part of a routine review of unresolved cases, and that a DNA comparison against a sample provided voluntarily by Ruth Marsh had returned a negative result. The remains, the letter said, were not those of Polly Marsh. There was no error in the laboratory; the comparison had been repeated twice, with the same result. Inspector Hale was sorry. She would come to Thornhaven herself if Clara wished, to explain the finding in person, but the finding stood. Clara read the letter twice, and then she sat down on the bottom step of the staircase, because the hallway was narrow and the stairs were close and the letter did not change no matter how many times she read it. The memorial stone on the harbor wall carried Polly Marsh's name. The cairn at the cove marked a grave that the village had blessed and mourned over, where Ruth had laid her own coat over the stones and Eleanor had sent the brooch back to the water. The silver brooch with the initials P.M. had matched a report that had gathered dust for fifty years, and all of it had said Polly, and the bones had said otherwise. The bones had said: not her. The bones had said: the other one. There had been two girls. The ledger had said two packages. The village had given the girl in the cleft the only name it had, because a name was what they had to give, and now the name had come loose from the bones the way a mooring line comes loose in a storm. The girl who had been mourned as Polly Marsh had not been Polly Marsh. The girl who had become nothing at all — no report, no family, no line in any record — had lain in the cleft all along, waiting fifty years for someone to come and ask who she was. She walked to the harbor. The stone stood at the head of the wall, dark granite, bright in the low autumn light, and she stood in front of it and read the names she had helped put there: Thomas Maren. Polly Marsh. And the unknown who came to this shore. The third line, she thought, had been meant to hold the ones the ledger had never kept, and it had held the truth all along, in its way — because the girl in the cleft had been unknown until this morning, and now she was unknown in a different way, known only by what she was not. She phoned Ruth. The call went the way those calls go, with a hello that already knew something was wrong, and Clara read the letter aloud, and there was a long silence, and then Ruth said, "Then where is she?" Not: how can this be. Not: it must be a mistake. Where is she. Ruth had waited forty years for a word, and the word had turned out to belong to someone else, and the question that had driven her across the water to Thornhaven — the question of what happened to Polly — had been returned to her, heavier than it had been before. Graham came that evening, because the village is small and news travels in the dark as well as the light, and he sat at the kitchen table with his cap in his hands and listened, and when Clara finished he was quiet for a long time. Then he said, slowly, fitting the pieces together the way he had fitted nets all his life, "The one who cried was the one who went aboard the ship. Silas said so. The one who fought. Polly fought. If the bones are not Polly's, then the bones are the other girl's, and the other girl did not go aboard anything. She stayed in the cove." Clara watched the truth settle into him, and she saw him take it up, because taking things up was what he had always done. "The sea gave us back the wrong girl," Clara said. "The sea gave us back the only girl it had," Graham said. "We gave her the wrong name. That is not the sea's doing. That is ours." They sat with that for a while. Outside, the tide was going out, and the light was going with it, and Clara thought about the long thread her mother had written about, the thread of silence and fear and love that ran through the village like a current running under the water, and how she had believed they had reached the end of it, and how the thread had simply been longer than she knew. It ran out into the sea and down, to a girl who had been kept in the room above the boathouse storeroom, who had stopped crying because crying changed nothing, who had been taken down to the cove on the dark of the moon, and who had never been given a name in any record that the living kept. They had come looking, and they had asked the wrong name, but they had asked. The asking had to count for something, because it was the only thing the girl had ever been given. Clara stood at the window and looked out at the sea, gray and patient and full, and she thought about the stone that now carried a name it had no right to, and about the girl whose name no one had kept, and about what they would have to do. They would have to find out who the girl in the cleft was, if there was a name to be found, and they would have to give it back to her, the way Eleanor had given back the brooch. And they would have to keep asking where Polly Marsh had gone — whether she had gone aboard the ship, whether she had walked up a gangway in a foreign port and never looked back, whether she had lived, whether she had written letters home that were never sent, whether anyone had ever answered them. The sea gave back on its own calendar, and it had given them a girl, and they had not known her, and the sea was not done with them. She turned from the window. "Tomorrow," she said. "We start tomorrow. I am going to see Eleanor."