第80章 Two Keys

They sailed on the Tuesday morning tide, with the island at the pier to see them off and the boxes of copies stowed amidships wrapped in oilskin inside sailcloth inside, at Neve's insistence, a layer of tarred jersey that made the whole consignment look like cargo from a shipwreck, which in a sense it was. What stayed, stayed: the packets went back through the breathing cold door to their niches, the zinc chest went down into the earth of the byre floor under fresh concrete poured by Ruaridh with funeral thoroughness, and the mother-roll returned to its corner niche above the kist, where Donald, watch-rota in pocket, would pass at midnight twice a week for as long as he lived, which Mrs. Enright prophesied loudly would be a long time now that he'd started talking. Katrin came aboard carrying one bag. She was going south for the winter — to Kilvane first, then wherever the work was, to learn letters and grammar and the reading of stones, because Signe's book deserved a reader and the outer keeping, she said, ought from now on to have somebody on both ends of it. Ewen embraced her at the gangway in the manner of big slow men, briefly and entirely, and put into her hands at the last a twist of paper she was to give nobody but the keeper, and stood back on the pier among his neighbors and did not wave, and was still standing there when the point took the boat from their sight, which Lila had learned this year was simply how that family said the thing. They were an hour out, running south with the flood, before Katrin unwrapped the twist of paper at the cockpit table with Callum at the tiller and the rest of them crowded in the lee of the wheelhouse. Inside, wrapped in a scrap of the same christening-gown linen that had lined the sea-box, lay a key. Small. Brass, gone the deep even brown of things handled for generations and polished by wool. Its stem was slender, its bit cut in an intricate old pattern of notches and wards, and stamped into the flat of its bow — tiny, needing the sun and Iris's jeweler's eye to be sure of it, but sure — was the cluster. The title-mark. The little crown of strokes that had opened every roll of the drowned from Carrowhead to Kilvane to the cold room under the green. "My grandmother's cord," Katrin said. "This is what it held. She made me swear the giving-over, February last: *to them that ask, and more.* I've had it against my skin for six months wondering what it wanted, and then yesterday morning I dreamed of my grandmother standing at the foot of my bed looking impatient, which those who knew her will find entirely credible." She laid it in Lila's palm and closed Lila's fingers over it with both her own hands. "It wants its fellow. Everybody on that island knows the song. Two keys, one door. But it doesn't belong to the kist — Ruaridh swears the kist never had a lock, and he's had his hands in every corner of it. So it's yours to carry till we find the thing that's been missing half of itself since before the steam ferries." Lila held it, and recognition landed before memory had finished arranging itself. She had never seen this key before. But she knew its fellow the way a household knows one chair: the little brass key that lived in the first box on the archive shelf in Thornhaven — handled by three generations of keepers, tried in her own time against every lock from the kirk door to the harbor shed, fitted nothing, explained itself never. Wren had made her learn the contents of that box before she was trusted with the ledger itself: letters tied with seaweed ribbon; a locket with its clasp broken; a photograph of a woman and a child on a dock; and at the bottom, wrapped in nothing, a small brass key stamped with a mark nobody living could read. Eighty years and more, said the colophon at Kilvane, since a woman opened that box in a front room in Thornhaven and the whole road began again. The circle counted its ages loosely, the way families do; the arithmetic shifted with the teller and none of them minded. It did not matter now. What mattered lay in her palm warming toward her skin: the fellow of the key from the first box, the key that had opened nothing because what it opened had been waiting here, west-northwest, under a green hill, behind a door that breathed cold, two keys short of a promise for as long as anyone had kept records of keeping. "The first box," she said. Her voice came out level, which surprised her; the levelness cost something. "On our own shelf, in our own reading room, all my keeping-life. There was a key in it." She looked round the cockpit — Iris with her pencil stopped mid-stroke; Neve with her hand flat on the deck as if the boat needed steadying more than she did; Callum watching the compass but missing nothing, missing less than any of them. "We have had half an answer sitting in the light for three generations, and we called it a curiosity." Iris recovered language first, as Iris did. "Then there is another lock," she said. "Somewhere. Something the practice locked away so surely that they split the means of opening it across the breadth of the map — one half to the farthest door, one half to the first, hidden in an ordinary box among ordinary griefs in an ordinary village." She was writing already, fast, the pages of her notebook fluttering in the spray-wind. "A thing they judged too heavy for any one place to hold *or* any one person to carry. Keeper — do you understand? The strongest-room wasn't Tarskay. The strongest room was *scattered*." The boat ran south. Behind them Tarskay sank its green shoulder into the horizon with the unhurried certainty of a thing that had watched out a hundred such departures and expected to watch a hundred more, and ahead the long gray line of the mainland coast stood up out of the sea — Achmore, Camas Beg, Kilvane, and far down it, two days' sailing and eighty years of keeping away, the harbor wall of Thornhaven, where on a shelf in the reading room a wooden box had held its small brass secret through every storm of the intervening world. Winter stood in front of them like weather. There were copies to deliver, a grammar to see safely printed, a Quarrie to be answered, a girl to be schooled, a coast of stones to be visited before the dark closed the roads. But under the stove-warmth of all that necessary business, Lila felt the key against her sternum where she had hung it on its new cord, and it pulled gently, steadily, the way a tide pulls at a moored boat — northward, homeward, downward, toward the one door in all the world that had never yet been opened, because the two halves of its permission had only this week, after four hundred years of patient arithmetic, been reunited in the same pair of hands. The asking had taught her that the sea keeps what it is given. Nobody had yet taught her what to do with a lock that had been given back.