第55章 The Maiden

The twenty-ninth came in on a sea that had not made up its mind. Callum stood on the quay at first light with his face into the northwest and his whole body reading the air like a page, and what he read there he pronounced in one word: "Waitable." They waited until ten. The swell, as if offended by the attention, lay down slowly, grudgingly, the way old men lie down in company, and by eleven the white water had come off the Maiden's flanks and left it black and streaming and, for the first time in anyone's sightseeing memory, fully dry from crown to tideline. "Two trips, no more," Callum said at the ladder. "The water turns at ten past two, and I'll be leaving that rock at five past whether it's got all of you aboard or none of you. Mrs. Munro stays ashore." This last to Ailsa, who had come down to the steps wrapped in two coats and her grandmother's plaid shawl, and who received the ruling with the face of a woman being sentenced. "I've been kept off that rock by lesser men than you," she said, "and by better weather. Go carefully. All of you. The dead have waited seventy years; they can wait another hour if the sea says so." The landing was everything the stories promised — weed-slick, sudden, unkind. Callum put the boat's nose into the one gully that faced south, let a swell do half his work for him, and then it was boots on wet black stone and hands finding holds that offered themselves grudgingly, and then they were up, four of them, Lila and Neve and Tam Brechin and young Davie Sorley — the engineer had sent her nephew, saying afterward that she'd have come herself if the drawings hadn't needed her — standing on a skerry no bigger than a churchyard, with the whole cold weight of the North Sea arranged around them in every direction. The stake was there, of course, ancient, iron-hooped, leaning. Gulls argued over the high ledges. Kelp lay in ropes along the tideline, still breathing faintly. And between the pools, in the gully at the island's landward foot, exactly where seventy years of stories had agreed to put it, stood the stone. It stood upright. That was the first impossible thing. Not cast down, not tumbled among the boulders, but *set* — bedded into the shingle at the bottom of the gully where the sand had scoured away around its base, facing seaward, the way a stone faces when someone has taken trouble about the view it will have. Weed had grown up its flanks. Limpets had colonized the corners. But the face was clear. Lila knelt in six inches of freezing water and cleared it with her bare hands, because her gloves were in the boat and she did not want to wait, and the letters came up out of the dark under the weed one at a time, cut deep, cut clean, cut *recently* — not the softened century-worn grooves of the wall's base course but something sharper, something whose edges still held their argument. *EFFIE.* And beneath the name, deeper still, in the same hand: *REMEMBER.* "Same name as the wall stone," Neve said behind her, very quietly. "But a different hand. Look at the serifs. And look at the E — the cutter on the wall crossed them this way—" she drew in the air "—and whoever cut this crossed them that way. Two different people, two different days, same name." Tam Brechin took his cap off out on open water, which told the story better than any telling. They brought it aboard on the second trip, slung and lashed and riding inboard like a passenger, and Callum — who had said little enough on the rock — talked steadily the whole way home about nothing: tide times, fuel prices, a dog he'd owned. Only when the harbor mouth opened did he glance once at the lashed stone and say, to the wind rather than to them, "She'd have been my grandmother's grandmother's age," and leave the sentence unfinished, and bring the boat in beautifully. They stood the stone upright in the mission hall that evening, on a pallet borrowed from the timber yard, and Ailsa came at dusk with Tam and Neve and Lila, and the hall smelled of dust and paint and sixty years of whist drives, and the electric fire in the corner made its small brave claim against the cold. Ailsa looked at the stone for a long time. Then she took off her glove and laid her fingers on the letters, and Lila watched her face change — watched the thing arrive in it slowly, the way light arrives at the bottom of a well. "That's my grandmother's hand," she said. "Not Effie's. Not the mason's. My grandmother *Lettie's*. I'd know her capitals anywhere; she taught me mine. These are her letters." She turned, and her eyes were wide and dry and appalled with understanding. "This isn't the flood stone at all. Or it is, and she replaced it — no. No, look at the cutting. She cut this herself, or had it cut to her hand, and she brought it out here, in a boat, an old woman alone or near enough, and she set it on the rock where the sea could see it. Because the council wouldn't let her put a woman's name on their fine new wall. Because her mother forbade the name and her sister-in-law forbade the name and the whole village agreed to forget. So she didn't argue with any of them. She just asked anyway. In secret. At low water. Alone." The hall held its silence. Out beyond the walls the sea worked at the dark the way it always had, patient, unhurried, keeping whatever it keeps. "All those years I thought she'd only written it down," Ailsa said. Her voice had gone very low. "One pencil line in a prayer book, and I built my whole thirty years of carrying on that one line — she carried too, I thought, in her way, quietly, the best she could. And the truth is she rowed. The truth is she asked out loud, at the edge of the water, where asking counts, and she never told a living soul, and she let me grow up thinking the name had gone quiet with her." She laid both hands flat on the cold granite now, the way you'd take someone by the shoulders. "Effie was never forgotten. Not for one single day. She was remembered in a book, and under a wall, and on a rock in the sea, by women who were all forbidden the same words, and obeyed the prohibition in every particular except the only one that mattered." Lila crouched beside her, the way she had crouched at the wall, the way keepers have always crouched beside keepers at the moment the weight changes hands. "Now you know the whole of it," she said gently. "And knowing it, you can do the thing she couldn't. She asked alone so that someday somebody wouldn't have to." Ailsa straightened her back. It was the straightening Lila would remember afterward — that small, deliberate, elderly act of a spine deciding something. "On Thursday, at the new wall," she said, "we read them all. Twelve names, out loud, together, in front of God and the council and the machines. And then we're going to talk about what else my grandmother wasn't allowed to tell me. Because a woman who rows out to set stones in secret does not stop at one name. Women like Lettie never stop at one."