第1章 The Causeway

The tide chased the carrier's cart across the causeway and Eudora Cawdle watched it come in the little mirror above the driver's shoulder, a brown line sliding out over the flats behind them with no more fuss than a stain. By the time the wheels found the firm ground at the far end, the water had covered the stones to the first joint of a man's thumb. It did not splash. It arrived the way water arrives in a basin you had forgotten you were filling, and the mud that had been brown became brown-gold and then became a flat sheet holding the last of the evening. "Every time," the boy said. He was perhaps seventeen, with a coal mark on his jaw and the flat vowels of the fen in his mouth. "Every time I think I have it beaten and the tide has more." "You made it." "Loveday would have made me turn back for her bag." Eudora said nothing to that, because Loveday Fenwright was the reason she was here, and she had not yet decided how much of the reason she was willing to hold. The parish council had written to her twice about the vacancy, the second letter warmer and more urgent than the first, and she had taken the post because her own life in the city had come apart over eighteen months in a slow way that did not make good telling. A birth had gone wrong in a hospital corridor with too many people in it and too few who would be still, and afterwards she had found that she could not walk past the doors of a maternity ward without her hands going cold. A quiet fen village, she had reasoned, would be a place to set the work down and pick it up again. Nobody had written to explain why the post had stood empty for two years. Grithfen lay ahead in the last hour of the light — three dozen houses on a low bank of made ground, roofs of reed and slate, a chapel with a squat tower and a green door, and out on the higher ground a windmill with its sails stripped to the frame. The marsh went away from all of it in every direction, cut through by threads of water that showed brighter than the land. Off to the left a channel ran down to the sea, and Eudora could smell it from the cart: salt over peat, and under the salt the cold mineral breath of mud that had lately been drowned and was considering being drowned again. The hummock was quiet in the way of a room where someone has just stopped speaking. Smoke went up from six chimneys and stood in the still air in six straight columns. A dog watched the cart from a doorstep and did not bark. Two women at the well turned their heads, the way birds do, and went back to their rope. The driver set her trunk down at the end of the street and would not take coin for carrying it further. He was already turning the mare when a woman came along the raised path from the chapel, and the boy touched his hat and went. She was tall and straight and old, sixty at least, perhaps seventy, in a black coat cut for a man and boots laced to the shin. Her hair was grey and pinned flat, and she carried a leather book under one arm, held against her side the way a person holds a thing they have held for years. "You'll be the midwife," she said. It was not a question. "Eudora Cawdle." "Drusilla Rennock. I keep the parish books, and the graves, and most of what else wants keeping." She looked at Eudora's hands, which were bare in the cold, and then at her face, and whatever she was checking appeared to satisfy her. "The house is along here. Loveday's house. Nobody has wanted it." She led the way without waiting to be followed. The street was packed earth over laid stone, with a gutter down the middle, and every house they passed had its door set a step above the path with the step worn into a shallow bowl. Eudora noticed the bowls. In a place that flooded, people built their thresholds high, and she could read two hundred years of high water in those worn hollows. The house stood at the far end of the street with its back to the marsh. Inside it was warm, and clean, and full of another woman's arrangements. There was a bed under the window with a folded quilt, a table with a lamp and a bowl of salt, shelves of bottles and papers in careful rows, and on the wall above the fireplace a board with a row of hooks, each hook holding a small cloth bag tied at the neck. It smelled of peat and dried herbs and something under them, the faint flat smell the sea leaves in a room when it has been inside the walls a long time. "Loveday left it neat," Eudora said. "Loveday left it empty." Drusilla set the book down on the table and did not open it. "She went out one night in the spring and did not come back, and the tide brought her coat, and that is all anyone has to say about it. You will hear different versions. They are all true enough and none of them is the whole of it." "Was she ill?" "She was a midwife forty years." Drusilla said it as if the two facts were the same fact. "The parish wants you here, and the women want you here, and there has not been a birth in Grithfen without a woman from outside the parish standing in the room since before any of us were born. That is the arrangement. You will find the work is steady. Children come here the way the water comes: late, and all at once, and without asking permission." Eudora looked around the room that had been another woman's whole life and felt the old professional habit come up in her, the reflex to take stock. Instruments in a case. A bottle of carbolic. The cloth bags on the hooks, tied, waiting, and each one with a small paper tag she could not read from where she stood. "You have rules," she said. It was a guess, and a good one. "We have habits." Drusilla's mouth moved, which might have been a smile. "One for tonight, since the light is going. The path to the Skein Gate crosses the water-meadow at the north of the village. Do not walk it after the ninth bell. In winter the ninth bell rings at half past six exactly, and after it rings the meadow is not yours to cross." "And before it rings?" "Before it rings, cross all you like. Nobody will stop you." Drusilla picked up her book and tucked it back under her arm. "The ninth bell is the only hour we keep, and we keep it well." She went out. Eudora stood a while at the window and watched her walk back up the street, upright, unhurried, past the green door of the chapel, and it occurred to her that in a village this size the bell she had been warned about must ring from that chapel, and that the chapel was the one building in Grithfen she had not seen anyone enter. Then the light went, and the water out beyond the houses turned from gold to pewter, and somewhere behind her the first bell began to strike. She counted them without meaning to. One, two, three. On the ninth the sound stopped and the whole village went still with it, the way a hall goes still when the music ends and before anyone has decided to clap. ---