第51章 The Winter Letters

The reply from the northern coast came back before Advent, and it was not the letter Lila had expected. She had thought to receive thanks, perhaps, or the small satisfied silence of a woman who had finally set down a weight she had carried for thirty years. Instead the envelope, when she opened it at the reading-room table with Wren's kettle breathing on the stove, held a second question, and the question had teeth in it. *You asked what my town is called,* the woman wrote. *It is called Carrowhead, and it lies farther north even than Saltwick — a hard day's journey, two buses and a boat, farther than most people here go twice in a lifetime. I must tell you why I am writing again, so soon after you were kind enough to answer me, because there is no one else I can ask.* *The council is rebuilding our sea wall in the spring. The grant money has been promised for three years and now it has come at last, and the village is glad of it, because the wall leaks and the winter seas have been taking a hand's width from it every year since the flood. But the wall is old underneath. Older than the council knows. There are stones at its base with marks on them — letters, some of them, though nobody I have spoken to will say what they spell. The engineers' drawings show concrete poured from top to bottom, new over old, and whatever is under the old wall will stay under the new one, seen by no one, forever.* *I am eighty-one years old, Miss Lila. I do not know what a village does about its stones. I think maybe you do.* Lila read it twice, the way she had learned to do, and then she read it aloud, because Wren was watching her face across the table and had stopped pretending to mend the lamp wick. When she finished, neither of them spoke for a moment. Outside the window the harbor lay gray and restless under the first real cold of the year, and the two old stones and Eleanor's stone stood just above the tideline with the light going off them like something banked rather than extinguished. "Concrete," Wren said at last, in the voice she used for words she did not like the taste of. "Poured over. That happened here once, you know. After the flood of fifty-three they raised this very wall, and there are men in this village who could tell you which course of stone went under, if any of them remembered their grandfathers' words. We were luckier than we knew. The masons then were local men who'd grown up with the names in their ears. They built around what mattered." She set down the wick. "A county contractor won't know a marked stone from a ballast block." "The asking reached Carrowhead once," Lila said slowly. "Whatever those letters are, someone cut them for the same reason we cut ours. And when the wall goes under, that asking goes under with it, and the village will not even know what it has lost, because it lost the knowing first." Wren looked at her over the lamp, and there was something in her old face that might have been satisfaction, though she would never have called it that. "Then you'll go," she said. It was not quite a question. "I'll go." "In January. The letter says spring for the machines, but you don't pour concrete over a coast in January without knowing your tides, and the big low water comes with the dark moons. If there's a bottom to be seen at Carrowhead, January will see it." Wren folded her hands. "I'm too old for two buses and a boat in the winter, and I won't pretend otherwise. You'll take someone young." It was Neve who asked — that same evening, in fact, when Lila went down the lane to tell the family where the Wednesday girls lived. Neve was sixteen now and had been copying addresses and sealing envelopes for two years; she knew the ledger almost as well as Lila did, and she had been born with the particular stubbornness of children who have grown up listening at doors. Lila had barely finished explaining before Neve said, "I'll come," in the flat tone that meant the matter was already decided, and only afterward remembered to add, "if I'm wanted." "You're wanted," Lila said. "Wrap the ledger in oilcloth. We'll travel as keepers." The last letter of the autumn went north in the week before the solstice, and Lila kept a copy of it, as she kept copies of all of them now, pasted into the back of her working pad. *We are coming to you,* she had written. *In January, at the low water. Bring out what can be brought out, and write down what cannot, and between us we will see that nothing under that wall goes under in silence. Do not be afraid of the engineers. They are not the enemy of stones. Forgetting is the enemy of stones, and it works faster than concrete ever did.* She posted it on a morning when smoke rose straight up from the cottage chimneys and the gulls stood hunched along the wall like small judgmental elders, and she stood a while at her own stones before walking back, doing the arithmetic of journeys in her head — ferries and buses and a boat at the end of it, and somewhere at the end of the boats a woman of eighty-one who had carried one name through thirty winters without once saying it aloud. Three days before Christmas, the final letter of the year arrived, and it contained the fact that turned the journey from a duty into a race. *I should have written this sooner,* Ailsa wrote — for that was her name, learned at last, Ailsa of Carrowhead — *but I did not understand until the clerk showed me the drawings. Our tide hardly ever uncovers the base of the old wall. The new wall was built higher than the old one in 1954 and the beach has risen against it ever since. Once a year, at the great low water after the new year, the sea draws back far enough to show the foundation course, and for a few hours the marks stand open to anyone willing to climb down the ladder the fishermen keep chained to the harbour steps. This year the great water falls on the fourteenth of January. The machines are due on the seventeenth.* *Three days,* the letter ended. *I have waited thirty years to speak my name, and it appears I must speak it quickly.*