第27章 The Second Girl

The second girl had a name, and Eleanor had been carrying it for fifty years, the way she had carried the brooch, the way the village had carried everything — close, and silent, and with the particular weight of a thing that cannot be set down and cannot be spoken. Clara went to her the next morning. The cottage at the edge of the village had not changed; the window box was empty now, because Eleanor's hands were too frail for planting, but the door opened the same way, with a soft creak that sounded like a welcome. Eleanor was in her chair beside the fire, small and light as a thing the sea has worn, and her eyes were still the gray of the harbor in winter, and they did not flinch when Clara sat down and told her about the letter. Eleanor listened without moving. When Clara had finished, she was quiet for a long time, and the fire settled, and the sea was a distant sound beyond the walls. Then she said, "Then the one in the cleft was the one who did not cry. Her name was Lily. I have carried that name for fifty years, because no one else would carry it, and I am too old to carry it any longer." Clara waited. Eleanor told it the way she had told the story of the brooch, flat and clear, the way you tell a thing you have said over to yourself a thousand times in the dark. The girl who did not cry had been sent from the mainland by her own father, who had paid Harlow to place her in a house where she would be safe and decent. He had paid for her passage the way you pay for a parcel — money, an address, a promise — and he had believed the promise, because believing is easier than asking. There was no house. There had never been a house. The girl had learned that in the room above the boathouse storeroom, in the days before the dark of the moon, and she had stopped crying, because crying did not change anything, and there was no one left in the world who would hear her if she did. Eleanor had known because Harlow's mother was her friend, the way old women are friends, by habit and memory and the things they do not say to one another. She had told Eleanor about the girls, because she was afraid, and because there was no one else she could tell. She had told her that the father had written, asking after his daughter, and that she had answered, in the girl's own hand, that Lily was well and placed in a good house and that letters would follow — and no letters had ever followed, because by then the girl was in the cleft in the rock and the father was on the mainland, and the distance between those two facts was the whole history of the place. The father had died not knowing. Eleanor did not know his name. She had never asked. Asking was how you found out, and finding out was how you were bound. "The photograph," Clara said. "Is there a photograph?" Eleanor nodded, and she reached into the pocket of her cardigan and brought out a small envelope, worn soft at the edges, and she handed it to Clara without looking at it. "Harlow's mother kept a photograph of the girls who came through that autumn. She kept them because she believed she was helping them, that she was giving them a better life. That was the lie that kept her upright. She gave me the photograph the winter she died, the year after the girls, and I have kept it where I kept the brooch. It has been waiting for you." Clara opened the envelope. The photograph was small, faded at the edges, and it showed two young women standing close together against a plain background, the way the girls in that house must have been made to stand before the work began. One of them was soft-faced and looked ready to cry — Polly, Clara thought, Polly with her letters and her sister and her belief that the world would be kind. The other was smaller and straighter, her hair braided tightly, her eyes looking past the camera at something only she could see. She was not crying. She had stopped crying days ago. Her name was Lily, and no record in the county had ever held it. Clara took the photograph back to the reading room above the community hall, and she laid it on the table beside the copies of the ledger and the letters that the village had begun to keep in glass cases. She studied the girl in the photograph, and she thought about the cleft in the rock, and about the cairn, and about the stone on the harbor wall that carried the wrong name, and she knew that they would have to set it right. The girl had a name now, and a name is a kind of beginning. If that was her name. It was the only name anyone had kept. She walked home through the village in the late light, and she stopped at the harbor wall and stood in front of the stone, and she told it, aloud, the way you tell a grave the news it has been waiting for: "Her name was Lily." The sea did not listen, and it never would, but the words had been spoken, and that was the point of them. She thought about Eleanor, who had carried the name for fifty years in a house at the edge of the village, and about the father who had paid for his daughter's passage and died believing her safe, and about the girl herself, who had stopped crying, and she understood that a silence, once broken, is broken for good, and that each breaking lets in a little more light. They would set a second stone in the spring, smaller than the first, close beside it, with the name that no record had ever kept. Eleanor's message had been clear: set her name where the sea can see it. The words were already settling in Clara's mind, the way words settle when they have been waiting a long time to be said. And in the meantime, there was the other question, the one that had been returned to them heavier than it had been when it left — the question of where Polly Marsh had gone, and whether she had lived, and whether the sea was keeping her, or whether the sea had let her go. That question would take them to the archives, and to the ships, and to the water's edge. But that was for tomorrow. Tonight, there was only the name, and the two girls in the photograph, and the light going down over the harbor, and the weight of a name being carried, at last, by more than one pair of hands.