第54章 The Missing Stone

The Maiden was a skerry — a black fist of rock half a mile beyond the harbor mouth, awash except at the lowest springs, crowned with a stake that had once held a beacon and now held only weather. Children in Carrowhead were threatened with it and sailors swore by it, and nobody, as far as Lila could discover, had landed on it in living memory except by accident. That evening the daybook came out in Tam Brechin's kitchen, wrapped in a flour sack against the damp, and Tam's grandfather's handwriting marched across its pages in a fisherman's cursive, all economy and salt. The entry Tam wanted was from February 1953 — the Great Water, the flood that had drowned half the eastern coast in a single night and rewritten every harbor wall upon it. *Worst night in the memory of man,* the old man had written, in a hand gone ragged. *Wall overtopped from midnight. The keeper Mrs. Sandison went out in it to see to the warren door and was swept from the causeway. Found her on the ebb, God rest her. The twelfth is on the Maiden — the sea has moved what we would not. God knows what else besides.* "She was the keeper," Ailsa said quietly. She had come to Tam's kitchen straight from the wall, still in her good coat, and she sat very upright with the prayer book on her knee like a woman in a portrait. "Mrs. Sandison. I was a child but I mind her — a big woman, a loud woman, kind underneath it. She went to the wall every morning. Everyone said she was mad, and nobody said why, because everyone knew why. She read the names out. That was her morning, rain or shine — down the ladder and along the base, name by name, the way you'd wake a household." Her hands tightened on the book. "And when the flood came, and took her, the council rebuilt the wall higher and stronger and nobody ever went down the ladder again. The asking didn't die of forgetting here. It died of concrete and grief, the first time. And I nearly let it die of them again, the second time, by writing to you too late." "You wrote in time," Lila said. "That's the whole difference. That's the only difference there's ever been." "There's a thing in that entry I don't understand," Neve said, bent over the daybook with her finger under the line. "*The sea has moved what we would not.* Moved it how? A flood doesn't carry a dressed granite block half a mile over open water and stand it up on a skerry." Tam turned his cap in his hands. "My grandfather thought it did, and wrote it so, and I'll not call him a liar. But there's another story, and my mother had it from Mrs. Sandison herself, or from the women who drank tea with her. The story says the keeper saw the flood coming for the base course — saw it, the way keepers see weather before weather arrives — and that she and my grandfather and two other men got the loosest stone out themselves that afternoon, before the night came, and loaded it on a boat, meaning to land it somewhere safe above the waterline." He shrugged, the shrug of a man handing over a thing heavier than he can account for. "And then the storm arrived early, and the boat went out with the stone aboard and nobody aboard, or somebody aboard, the stories differ, and it ended on the Maiden, and after the keeper drowned nobody had the heart to go and fetch anything anywhere ever again. Take your choice of truths. Both of them end the same. Twelve women held up this harbor, and for seventy years there have been eleven stones and one question sitting on a rock in the tide." The room was quiet. In the stove, peat settled and glowed. Out the window, past the harbor wall, the Maiden showed black against the last light with the white water worrying its flanks, exactly as it must have shown to a grieving village in 1954, and to a grandmother with a pencil in 1960, and to every keeperless year since. "We'll need a boat," Lila said at last, "and a boatman fool enough to take a party of women to a skerry in January." "Callum," said Tam and Ailsa together, and then Tam added, alone, "and you'll get no sense out of him until you've fed him. He's my sister's grandson, and the best small-boat handler on this coast, and he's twenty-four, which is to say he's immortal, which is to say he's exactly what the job wants." They found him the next morning gutting fish on the quay, a lean red-haired young man with rope-scarred hands and his grandfather's eyes, and he heard the whole scheme out leaning on the cleaning-table, expressionless, and then looked at the Maiden for a while, and then at Ailsa, and then at the oilcloth bundle on Neve's shoulder, and spat neatly over the side of the table. "The fourteenth's gone," he said. "Next water low enough to dry the Maiden is the twenty-ninth — the big moon, three days after the machines come, which is a fine joke somebody's playing. Sea state permitting, and I'll be the judge of permitting, and I don't permit swell over two meters, so don't argue." He wiped his knife and folded it. "For my grandfather Brechin I'd have gone for nothing. For Mrs. Sandison I'd have gone in worse weather than this. But it's the twelfth woman I'm going for, mind, and when we bring her in, she stands in the new wall with her sisters, and I want that written down somewhere official-like." Lila took out her pad and wrote it down somewhere official-like, and Callum read it over her shoulder and nodded once, sharply, as a man countersigns a contract. The twenty-ninth was fifteen days off. The machines came on the seventeenth, as promised, and the village watched them unload on the quay with the wary attention of people watching wolves arrive to build a sheepfold. And every evening of those fifteen days the weather report was read aloud in Tam's kitchen like scripture, and every evening the forecast held its old gray grudge — swell from the northwest, easing, perhaps, perhaps — and Ailsa sat by the fire with the prayer book open on her knee, reading and rereading the pencil line inside the cover, as if thirty years of silence could be rehearsed away in fifteen days of whispering.