第79章 Weather Bound

The weather came up out of the southwest on Friday night with the full authority of the equinox behind it, though the equinox was weeks away — a gale out of season, Mrs. Enright declared, showing that the times were as stirred as the sky — and it pinned the island for five days. The supply boat did not come; the salmon boat lay double-moored and useless; rain moved across Tarskay in horizontal regiments, and the company was housebound in the schoolhouse with a stove, forty years of the *People's Friend*, and the largest discovery in the history of the practice folded in oilcloth three feet from the coal scuttle. Lila wrote letters. It was, she had learned, what keepers did in storms: the sea shut the roads, and the roads of paper stayed open, and you kept the circle's circulation going with whatever the weather could not reach. To Dr. Halloway she wrote carefully, granting the grammar entire — letter-forms, stroke-order, the tones rendered as best paper allowed — and withholding the map without apology: the alphabet would be his to publish; the addresses would travel by hand or not at all; and enclosed, as proof of good faith, her fair copy of the colophon from Kilvane, which would keep any scholar awake for a month. To Quarrie she wrote shorter, warmer than usual, and posted through it one hard sentence that she revised four times and finally let stand: *You have been asking whether the circle is worth your archives. I am writing to tell you the circle has been keeping yours.* Whether he would understand it she could not control; that it was true she no longer troubled to doubt. To Wren she wrote longest, by the stove, while the gale tried the shutters like a creditor. She wrote the whole of it — the box from the sea, Effie MacArthur's sisterly prose, the door that breathed cold, the mother-roll and the woman who refused arithmetic — and then, because Wren's eyes were failing and long letters arrived at her house read aloud by visitors, she ended with three lines in her largest hand: *The road never broke. It went quiet, and waited, and kept. You told me once the circle grows the way a shore does. Wren — this week I stood on new sand.* Neve read that part aloud back to her, twice, for the pleasure of hearing it, and then added her own postscript below Lila's signature: a pressed sprig of thrift from the fire hill's crown, pasted flat, and one sentence — *Teach me the counting of tides properly when I'm home; I mean to learn the diving next summer* — which Lila read, and signed around, and sent, because the girl's plans were no longer hers to approve, only to witness. The evenings belonged to the island. Ewen, loosened by weather and lamplight, told the stories of Signe that Katrin had never heard or had not known she needed: how she had faced down the revenue men as a girl of nineteen by singing at them until they left, unnerved, without searching the kelp-store; how she had walked the fire hill the night of the great storm of '68 with a lantern in each hand, "minding the door," while the sea came into the township streets; and once — told more quietly, the room settling around it — the tale of the time the door had been opened before. Twice in living memory, Ewen said. Once in the hungry years, by unanimous word of a starving council, for what the pots might hold; and they had found grain, sealed dry, seed-corn of a kind nobody sowed anymore, and had thanked the door and shut it again, and had never fully explained to their children why the grown men wept coming down the brae. And once more, later, when Signe herself was young: because a stranger had come up the hill claiming kinship and knowledge, had stood at the threshold, and had asked to enter — and Signe's mother had looked at the stranger's hands, and had said, *you know the sounds but not the weight*, and had sent her down off the hill before dark. "What happened to her?" Iris asked. "Boat next morning," Ewen said, "gone back south. Nobody ever knew whose she was, or who had taught her the sounds." He looked into the stove for a while. "My grandmother said, mind that story, for the door keeps best what it is not forced to defend. There are folk that collect other folks' holy things, and they learn the songs now too. Songs get copied, same as anything." His eyes came round the room and rested, without accusation, on the oilcloth parcel by the coal scuttle. "So you'll understand if we sleep easy only when the copies travel separate from the originals, and the originals stay under our green, and what leaves this island leaves as paper and love and nothing heavier." "That," said Lila, "was always the plan, uncle. We're keepers, not carriers. Carriers get paid in meal and silence." Which got the laugh the room needed, and closed the subject better than a vote would have. On the fifth day the wind dropped between one hour and the next, the way arguments do, and the light came up hard and washed, and everyone went out onto the schoolhouse steps and stood squinting in the enormous quiet. Gulls resumed their errands. The fire hill smoked with drying mist. The sea lay out flat to the Monachs and beyond, blue-gray, businesslike, ready to resume — and did, within the hour, the supply boat's smoke standing up on the southern horizon like a first signature on a fresh page. Katrin stood at the rail with her face turned into the clean wind, and Lila, watching her, understood that the girl was saying goodbye to the week and bracing toward whatever came after it — and that neither of them yet knew, that morning, how nearly the next thing after it would concern a small brass key and a lock that had been waiting longer than any of them.