Rain fell on Elsie Marrow and nowhere else.
She had walked the last mile from the moor road with her satchel pressed flat against her ribs, the leather sucking at her cardigan, and the downpour had tracked her like a stray dog following a particular child. To her left, the drystone wall stood unstained. To her right, the heather held its colour. Ahead, the chimney smoke of Little Thornwick rose straight into a sky the colour of weak tea, and not a single drop struck the slate of any roof.
She stopped at the stile where the footpath dipped into the village proper, and she tilted her head back, and she let the rain hit her closed eyelids for a count of five. When she opened her eyes the water still fell, and still only on her, pooling in the hollow of her collarbone and running down the bridge of her nose. The map inside her satchel was already spoiling. She had folded it into oilskin at the first heavy drops, but oilskin only buys time. It does not refuse it.
"Spiteful weather," she said to no one.
The path levelled. The cottages of Little Thornwick arranged themselves around her the way they always did, with their small yards and their strung lines of washing and their back doors open to the lane. She knew every one of these yards. She had drawn them, at one scale or another, for nine years, and before that she had run through them barefoot as a girl sent to fetch milk for her grandfather when the cart was mended. The lane stones remembered her boots. She knew which ones wobbled. She stepped over them without looking.
A dog barked from behind the Coopers' wall. A face she half-recognised withdrew from a window, then returned, then withdrew again. Elsie kept her gaze forward and her shoulders soft, the way her grandfather had taught her when she was small and the village had not yet decided what to make of the girl who came back from the coast to bury her father and stay.
The satchel strap bit into her shoulder. She shifted it, felt the weight of the leather folder slide against her hip, and thought, with the careful precision of a woman who always thought in two directions at once, that the weight of a thing is not the same as its value, but the body does not always agree.
The map she carried was not one of hers.
It was her grandfather's, the unfinished one. The last thing he had been drawing when his hand had stopped. She had found it tucked behind a jar of buttons on his mantelpiece, and the paper had smelled of his pipe tobacco and of the damp of the room he had not been able to leave for the last fortnight of his life. The ink had gone feathery at the edges of his lines, the way ink does when a wrist is uncertain. She had spread it on the kitchen table under the lamp, and she had seen at once that it was a map of Little Thornwick, but not the Little Thornwick she knew. Not the village she had spent nine years drawing from door to door. The lanes were the same. The placements of houses were the same. The church, the green, the war memorial, the harbour wall, the crooked house at the bend. All these were where she had put them, more or less. But the map also showed things she had never charted, because they had not been there, or because she had never been able to see them. A second green, behind the first. A door in the orchard at Marrow's Field that she had walked past a thousand times without noticing anything but the gnarled root of the oldest apple tree. A mark under the harbour steps she did not recognise at all, a small symbol in his careful hand that meant something she had not yet worked out.
And the map was wet now. Even through the oilskin. Her grandfather would have cursed, mildly and at length.
She turned into the lane that led to the workshop, and the rain stopped.
It did not fade. It did not taper. It stopped, between one step and the next, the way a tap is turned off by a deliberate hand. Elsie stood very still with her boots printing dark on the warm stones and felt her own wetness suddenly conspicuous. Drops gathered at her hem and fell onto the lane. Her hair clung to her temples. She looked up. The sky was the colour it had been: weak tea, all the way to the rim of the moor. The clouds were unbroken. There was no sign anywhere that rain had been a thing the afternoon intended.
A voice came from the open door of the workshop.
"Girl, you'll drown the floorboards."
Eda Weatherwax stood in the doorway with her hands on her apron, which was the colour of weak tea in a different light, and her face arranged into the particular geometry of a woman who had decided to be unimpressed by something before she had seen it.
"I'm wet," Elsie said, because she was, and because sometimes you state the obvious to the kind of woman who has no patience for a preamble.
"Aye," said Eda, "you're that."
She did not move from the doorway. Eda Weatherwax had not moved from doorways as a point of principle for at least two decades. It was how she received the world: framed, at a threshold, with the option of retreat. She was small and square and made of angles, and her hair was pulled back in a knot that had given up on the idea of being tidy somewhere around the time of the previous coronation. Her eyes were the colour of the sea in a particular wind, and just as ready to change.
"Come in then," she said, "before you take root."
Elsie stepped past her. The workshop smelled of her own hands, of the glue and ink and the small varnish she used for finishing, of the wood of the long table under the window. It smelled, also, of her father's pipe, though he had been dead nine years, because she had never had the heart to clean the pipe rack. She had told herself, over the years, that it was a useful thing to keep. A liar's reason, and she knew it.
"Sit," said Eda. "I'll fetch a cloth."
"There's no need."
"There's every need. You're dripping on the drafts I've pinned to that wall since Michaelmas. Sit."
Elsie sat. The stool remembered her weight in a way she did not entirely like. She set the satchel on the table and rested her hand on it, and Eda looked at the satchel the way Eda looked at everything that came into her own house, which was to say, with the sharp expectation that it would explain itself.
"Tea?" said Eda.
"Please."
Eda went out to the scullery and returned with a cloth that was not quite clean and a cup that was, and set the cloth on Elsie's shoulder with the brisk tenderness of a woman who had once delivered half the village into the world and considered most of it still damp. Elsie pressed the cloth to her hair and watched Eda put the kettle on the hob with the same deliberate movements her own grandmother had used, the same economy of gesture that said, this is the next thing, and the next thing, and so on until we are all warm and the world is, briefly, in order.
"You'll have come for a reason," said Eda, with her back to Elsie.
"I've come because I'm wet."
"You'll have come for a reason besides that."
Elsie did not answer at once. She unstrapped the satchel and drew out the oilskin folder and set it on the table. The folder was bowed with damp. She did not open it. Not yet.
"Grandfather left something," Elsie said. "I found it after."
Eda's hand paused on the kettle. Then it continued. Then it paused again, on the handle, and she turned with the kettle in her grip and a look on her face that was older than the room.
"After what?"
"After he was gone. I found it on the mantelpiece."
Eda set the kettle down. She did not pour. She came to the table and stood with her hands on the back of the chair opposite Elsie and looked at the folder as if it were a small animal that had wandered in and not yet made its intentions clear.
"You've not opened it."
"I've opened it."
"And?"
"It's a map."
Eda sat down, slowly, and the chair took her weight with a small complaint.
"Of what?"
"Of the village."
Eda looked at her. Then she looked at the folder. Then she looked at her own hands on the table.
"Show me," she said.
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Because I want to ask you something first."
Eda's mouth did a small thing, the small private negotiation between a woman and her own patience.
"Ask then."
"Did you know he was drawing?"
Eda was quiet for a long moment. The kettle ticked on the hob as the water found its heat. A gull went past the window with the air of a creature late for an appointment.
"He drew all his life," Eda said, at last, and her voice was careful. "He drew the lanes when there were no lanes. He drew the harbour before there was a harbour wall. He drew your grandmother's face from memory and he drew the moor at night when the rest of us had the sense to be indoors. He drew. That was the man."
"This was different."
"How different?"
"He was drawing things that aren't there."
Eda's hand went to the place on her apron where, in another woman, there might have been a brooch. There was no brooch. There was only the place where one had been, or might have been, and the habit of touching it.
"Things that aren't there," Eda repeated.
"Or things I haven't seen yet."
Eda stood up and went to the kettle and poured the tea, and the pouring took more time than pouring usually takes, because Eda was using it to think. She set the cup in front of Elsie. She did not pour one for herself.
"You'll have to let me look," Eda said.
"Yes," said Elsie. "But first I want to know whether Tam Crewe is in."
Eda looked at her over the rim of the kettle, which she was still holding for no reason that the kettle could fathom.
"Tam is always in," said Eda. "Tam is the most in man in the village. He in's at the harbour when the harbour needs him and he in's at the pub when it doesn't, and he in's at his sister's when the pub is closed. Why?"
"Because if I'm reading this right," said Elsie, "I'm going to need a man who knows the bottom of the sea."
Eda set the kettle down with a click that sounded, in the quiet of the workshop, like a small door being shut.
"You read it," said Eda, "and I'll fetch him."
"No," said Elsie. "I'll read it to both of you. I want you to hear it at the same time. I want to see both your faces."
Eda's mouth did the thing again, the small private negotiation, but this time the answer it came to was not patience.
"All right," said Eda. "Fetch him in. I'll put the kettle on again."
Elsie stood, and the cloth fell from her shoulder onto the floor, and she left it where it lay. Outside, the lane was dry. The heather on the moor was dry. The sky was the same weak tea, end to end, and there was no mark anywhere on the stones to say that rain had been a thing the afternoon had ever intended.
She walked down to the harbour with the folder under her arm, and her boots were loud on the cobbles, and the smell of the salt came up to meet her halfway.
Tam was where he always was when the afternoon got thin: on a coil of rope at the end of the stone jetty, his back against the wall of the net-she'd, his hat over his eyes. He was not asleep. Tam did not sleep in the afternoon. He was conserving himself, which was his word for it, and which Elsie had always suspected meant listening to the gulls and deciding whether he agreed with them.
He lifted the hat when her shadow fell across his knees.
"Marrow," he said.
"Tam."
"You've got that look."
"I don't know what look."
"The look like you've found something in a drawer that shouldn't have been in there." He sat forward, slowly, the way a man does when his knees have opinions about the weather. "What is it, then. A map of the bottom of the sea."
It was not a question, and it was not quite right, and Elsie did not correct him. She sat down on the coil beside him and put the folder across her lap and looked out at the water, which was the colour of old tin and moving in a way that did not match the air.
"I want you to come up to the inn," she said. "Both of us."
"Why both."
"Because I want to read it in front of witnesses, and you are the only witness in this village who has been sober for fifty years."
He looked at her then, properly, under the hat, with the small blue eyes that had watched the tide come in and go out since before her father had been born.
"That's a wicked thing to say," he said, "and it's mostly true, and I'll come."
They walked back up the cobbled lane together. Tam took the inland side of the path out of habit, where the stones were wider and the drop to the gutter less sudden. He carried his hands folded behind his back. Elsie carried the folder. Neither of them spoke, which was the kind of conversation they had been having for years, and which neither of them would have called a conversation at all.
Eda had the kettle on. She had also, Elsie saw, set out three cups and a small plate of ship's biscuits that had been in the tin longer than the tin had been in the shop. The room smelled of damp wool and lamp oil and the faint, sweet rot of old paper that had got wet once and been dried and never quite forgiven.
"Sit," said Eda, and Tam sat, and Elsie sat, and the three of them were arranged in the workshop like a compass with three points, the kettle at the north, the window at the south, and the folder at the centre.
Elsie opened the folder. The four sheets lay inside, the first three in their familiar order, and the fourth, which was not, lying face down across the top of them. She did not turn it over yet. She put her hand on it, lightly, the way her father had taught her to put his hand on a sheet when he meant it to be taken seriously.
"You know what these are," she said to Eda.
"Aye."
"You know I've been keeping them up to date."
"Aye."
"You know there are three. Have been, since I started. The village. The moor. The coastline."
"Aye, lass, I was there when you started."
"This is a fourth." She lifted her hand. "I did not draw it. It was in the folder this morning. I do not know where it came from. It is not in my hand."
Eda's mouth did its small private thing.
"You haven't touched it?"
"I have touched it. I had to. I had to take it out to look at it."
"And?"
"And it's the bottom of the sea."
Tam's hand, which had been resting on his knee, went still.
Elsie turned the sheet over.
The paper was a stock she did not use. She used a heavy, slightly creamy cartridge, the kind that took ink without bleeding and held a line true. This was thinner. It was a smooth, pale grey, and it felt under her fingers like the skin of something that had been kept in a drawer for a long time. It was not damp. It was not foxed. It was not aged in any of the ways she had learned to recognise age. It was simply not from her shelf.
The drawing on it was hers.
She knew it was hers before she could have said how. The line of the headland, the small kink at the point where the chalk began, the way the kelp beds off Black Carr were drawn as a slow, dark scribble rather than the neat hatching she used for rocks, the way the harbour mouth was a careful half-moon, the way the deeper water off the north bar was left almost empty because her father had taught her that the deepest water on a chart was the water you trusted least. It was all hers. It was her hand. It was her trick of letting the line breathe at the corners. It was her trick of leaving the small white of the paper at the very edge of a wave.
It was the bottom of the sea.
And in the bottom of the sea, in the place where, on her coastline chart, she had drawn a single small cross and the word UNKNOWN in her father's hand, there was now a shape.
The shape was not a rock. The shape was not a wreck. The shape was a door.
It was drawn as a door is drawn on a child's drawing of a house, a tall rectangle with a small round handle, but the proportions were wrong for a door in a wall. They were the proportions of a door in the floor of the sea, standing upright in the dark, waiting for something to walk through it.
And around the door, in the slow water, there were marks she did not at first recognise, and then, with the small cold shock of recognising them, did. They were the small curved lines she used for the edges of footprints in soft ground. There were prints in the seabed leading up to the door. There were prints leading away from it, in two directions. And there were prints, fainter, half-erased, that came from somewhere off the sheet, from somewhere beyond the edge of the chart, and stopped just short of it.
She read it to them.
She read it the way she read charts to the fishermen in winter, when they came in to ask whether the season had shifted, whether the sandbanks off the north bar had moved, whether the old channel was still safe. She read it slowly. She read it in the order she had been taught: the whole shape first, then the features, then the marks, then the labels.
She did not have to tell them what the labels said. Eda was already leaning forward.
Elsie read them anyway.
"DOOR. FOOTPRINTS. TWO COMING. ONE GOING. ONE WAITING."
She put the sheet down.
The kettle, behind her, began to hiss, and Eda did not move to take it off.
Tam was the first to speak.
"That's not the bottom of the sea," he said. "That's a story."
"Yes," said Elsie.
"Who drew it?"
"I don't know."
"Who put it in your folder?"
"I don't know."
"When?"
"This morning. It was not there last night."
He looked at Eda.
"It's not her hand," he said.
"It's her hand," said Eda.
They both looked at Elsie.
"It's my hand," said Elsie. "I don't know how it's my hand."
Tam picked up the sheet, carefully, by the corners, the way he had been taught to pick up sheets at the fishery office in Whitby when he was a boy, before the fishery office had stopped teaching boys. He held it to the light from the window. He turned it. He looked at the back, which was blank except for a small mark in the lower right corner, a tiny crescent, like a fingernail moon.
He put it down.
"The door," he said. "Where is it?"
"Off the north bar," said Elsie. "In the place my father marked UNKNOWN."
"Why did he mark it UNKNOWN?"
"Because we never found the bottom."
Eda's mouth did its thing.
"There is a bottom to everything," said Eda.
"There is," said Elsie. "There's a bottom to that water and he never found it. He went over it in the summer of '89, the year I was nine, with a lead line that was a hundred and twenty fathoms long, and he never found the bottom. He marked it UNKNOWN. He told me not to put a cross there unless I had found it. He said, A cross is a promise, Elsie. A cross is a place you've been. He said, Do not put a cross where you have not been."
"And you haven't put a cross there," said Tam.
"I have not put a cross there."
"But someone has drawn a door there."
"Someone in my hand has drawn a door there."
The kettle was now boiling in earnest, and the lid was beginning to rattle, and Eda got up at last and lifted it off and set it on the trivet and stood for a moment with her back to them, her shoulders a little higher than usual.
"I'm going to ask you a question," she said, "and I want you to answer it straight, because I am old and I have no time for the kind of answer that goes around a house to get in at the front door."
"All right," said Elsie.
"Has the girl been here?"
Elsie said nothing.
"Has the girl who came in from the moor been to your door."
"Yes."
"When."
"This afternoon. Just now, in fact. I came straight from her."
Eda turned around.
"And you didn't say."
"I didn't say because I didn't know yet what to say about it."
"What did she say."
"She said her name was Seraph Coldwell. She said she had walked across the moor in a storm that wasn't there. She said she had come to ask me about a door."
Eda set the kettle down on the trivet with a click that was louder than it needed to be.
"A door," said Eda.
"A door," said Elsie.
"In the bottom of the sea," said Eda.
"She did not say that. She said a door she had been looking for. She did not say where."
Tam was looking at the sheet.
"The door is in the bottom of the sea," he said, "and the girl has come asking about a door. And the sheet has come asking about the same door. And the sheet is in your hand, and you did not draw it."
"Yes."
"That is a great deal of door for one afternoon," said Tam, "and I am a man who believes in doing a thing once and being done with it."
She poured the tea. She put the cups in front of them. She did not put a cup in front of herself, because Eda, when she was thinking, forgot to drink, and thought better without a cup in her hand.
"Now," said Eda, sitting down, "we are going to drink this tea, and we are going to be sensible, and we are going to say what we know and not what we fancy, because fancy is what gets people into trouble in this village, and we have had enough trouble to be going on with."
"No," said Tam.
"No?"
"No, Eda. We are not going to be sensible. We are going to be accurate. Sensible is for people who have not just been handed a chart of the bottom of the sea with a door in it drawn in a dead woman's hand."
Eda looked at him.
"It's not a dead hand," said Elsie, quietly.
"Then whose hand is it," said Tam.
"I don't know," said Elsie. "It's my hand. I don't know when it's from. It is not from yesterday. I would stake my ink on that."
Tam looked at Eda. Eda looked at Elsie. Elsie looked at the sheet.
Outside, the village went on with its small, ordinary business. A dog barked at the gulls. A cart rattled over the cobbles towards the harbour. Somewhere down the lane, a woman called her child in for his tea, and the child did not come, and the woman called again, more sharply, and the child came, reluctantly, dragging his heels on the stones.
Inside the workshop, the three of them sat with their cups going cold and the sheet on the table between them, and the door on the sheet looked up at them from the bottom of the sea, and waited.
Elsie set her cup down and rose without a word, and went to the small room at the back of the workshop that was not, strictly speaking, a kitchen, but which contained a small iron stove and a deal table and two chairs that did not match, and one chair that matched neither of them. Eda, when she was on her feet, liked to feed people, and if you left her to it, she would feed you whether you wanted feeding or not, and she would do it in such a way that refusing would be an act of cruelty on your part, and not on hers, and so the only thing to do was to let her.
Eda went to the stove. The kettle was already on, because Eda had put it on before she had come into the front room, because Eda had known, without being told, that they were not going to settle this in five minutes, and that a body could not be expected to think on an empty stomach, and that Elsie, in particular, had not eaten since dawn, if then, and that this was no way to go on.
"Sit down, lass," said Eda, without turning round. "I've got the broth on. It'll be ten minutes."
"I'm not hungry, Eda."
"I didn't ask you if you were hungry. I said sit down."
Elsie sat down. The chair that matched neither of the other two creaked under her in a way that it never creaked under anyone else, and she had long suspected that it had opinions about her, and that the opinions were not flattering. The table was scrubbed white, and the scrubbed whiteness of it was very stark against the dim of the rest of the room, and in the middle of the table there was a blue jug with a single sprig of dried sea-thistle in it, and the sea-thistle had been there so long that it had stopped pretending to be a flower and had become a small piece of pale architecture, and was more itself now than it had ever been when it was alive.
She heard Eda moving behind her. The clink of the ladle against the pot. The small, competent sounds of a woman who had been feeding people for sixty years and had got the measure of it. The smell of the broth came to her before Eda did, and it was the smell of bone and onion and a little bit of barley, and it was the smell of every winter she had ever spent in this village, and it was, against all reason, a comfort.
She took out the pencil. She took out the small notebook she kept in her apron pocket, the one with the soft cover and the pages that were not quite square. She opened it to a fresh page. She put the point of the pencil to the paper, and she waited, and nothing came, and so she drew the first thing that came into her head, which was the dog from the lane, the brown one with the white sock, the one that belonged to Widow Petch and that was afraid of the postman and that she had drawn a hundred times before, and she drew it in a few quick lines, and the lines were not bad, and the lines were not good, and they were the lines of a woman who was trying very hard not to think about what was on the table in the next room, and who was, by any measure, failing.
Eda set the bowl down in front of her. The bowl was blue, and chipped at the rim, and the chip had been there since before Elsie was born, and Eda had never got rid of it because, as she said, a bowl that has survived this long has earned its place, and I am not one to argue with a survivor.
"Eat," said Eda, and sat down opposite with her own bowl, and picked up her spoon, and did not look at Elsie, because Eda understood that there are times when a body does not want to be looked at while it eats, and that one of those times is when the body is trying to remember how to be a body at all.
Elsie ate. The broth was hot, and it was salt, and it was good, and she ate it slowly, and the warmth of it went through her in a way that the tea had not, and somewhere in the middle of the bowl she felt the knot in her chest loosen by a single degree, and she was grateful to Eda for the broth, and she was grateful to Eda for not asking her how she was, because the answer to that question was too large for this room, and too tangled, and she did not have it in her to be honest about it, and Eda knew that, and that was why Eda had not asked.
They ate in silence for a while. The lamp on the table gave a small, steady light. The broth went down. The blue jug with the sea-thistle stood between them like a small, patient witness.
When the bowl was empty, Eda took it from her without a word, and went back to the stove, and Elsie heard the clatter of the pan in the basin, and then Eda came back, and sat down again, and folded her hands on the table, and looked at Elsie, and the look was not unkind, but it was a look that meant: now we are going to talk about it, and you are not going to wriggle out of it, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner we will all be able to go to bed.
"Eda," said Elsie, and stopped.
"Aye."
"The salt on my boots. The salt I told you about. The one that was not like sea salt."
"Aye."
"I have been thinking about it."
"I should think you have, lass. I should think you have thought of little else since you walked in here."
"I think it is not salt at all. I think it is what is left when salt has been somewhere it ought not to have been, and come back changed. I think the sea on the other side of the door, if there is a sea on the other side of the door, is not a sea like ours. I think it is older. I think it is colder. I think it has been doing what it does for a very long time, and I think it has learned things that our sea has not had the time to learn, and one of the things it has learned is how to leave its mark on what it touches, and not let go of it, even when what it has touched comes back to our side."
Eda was very still. Her hands, folded on the table, did not move.
"That is a very particular thing for a lass who has had two hours' sleep and no breakfast to be thinking," said Eda, at last.
"I have not had two hours' sleep," said Elsie. "I have had none."
"That explains the broth, then."
"Eda."
"Aye."
"I am not making it up. I am not fevered. I have not had a turn. I am telling you what I think, and I am asking you to hear me."
"I am hearing you, lass. I have been hearing you since you walked in the door. I have been hearing you since before you walked in the door, if the truth be told. I have been hearing you in my sleep, these last three nights, and what I have been hearing in my sleep is not what you are saying to me now, but it is of a piece with it, and that is why I am sitting here and not in my own house with my own fire, and that is why I did not tell you to go home when you came in."
"What have you been hearing, Eda?"
Eda did not answer for a long moment. She looked at the lamp, and the lamp looked back at her, and the small flame of it leaned a little in the draft from the door, and steadied itself again.
"I have been hearing a door," said Eda, slowly. "I have been hearing a door, and I have been hearing water behind it, and I have been hearing, on the water, a sound like a boat, but not like any boat that was ever built in this village or in any village I have ever heard of. I have been hearing a boat that goes nowhere, and that has been going nowhere for a long time, and that is tired of it. I have been hearing that boat knock against the door, and I have been hearing the door answer it, in a language that is not a language, and that I have no business understanding, and that I have been understanding anyway, and that I would give a great deal not to understand, and that I cannot stop understanding, and that is the long and the short of it, Elsie Marrow, and you may make of it what you will, but I will tell you this, and I will tell you true: I have not slept a whole night since the night your grandfather's chart went missing from the church, and I have not been right in my innards since, and I am not a woman who is given to fancies, and I have not been given to fancies for seventy years, and I am not about to start now."
The room was very quiet. The dog in the lane had stopped barking. The cart had gone by. The child had been called in. The only sound was the small sound of the lamp, and the larger sound of the sea, far off, going about its business.
"Tam," said Elsie, at last. "Did Tam hear it too?"
"Tam hears what he wants to hear, and what he does not want to hear, he has the good grace to pretend he has not heard. But I will tell you this for nothing, and you may take it or leave it: Tam has not been down to his boat in three days, and Tam, in fifty years, has not missed three days down to his boat for any reason under the sun, and that is a fact that you may lay alongside the other facts, and see what shape they make."
Elsie looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back.
"I am not going to leave the chart with you," she said.
"No," said Eda. "I did not think you were."
"I am not going to leave it with Tam."
"No."
"I am going to take it home. I am going to sleep with it under my bed. I am going to look at it in the morning, in the good light, when my head is clearer, and I am going to decide then what I am going to do with it. And I am going to ask you, Eda Weatherwax, because you are the longest memory in this village, and because you have been hearing doors in your sleep, and because I have no one else to ask, and because you are the only person I trust to tell me the truth when the truth is not what I want to hear, to do me the kindness of telling me, in the morning, whatever it is that you have not told me tonight, and to do it in such a way that I can bear it, and to do it before I open the door to the woman on the moor, if I open it at all, and to do it knowing that I will hold you to no account for it, and that whatever you tell me, I will not think the worse of you for it, and that I will be grateful to you for it, and that is the truth, Eda, and the whole of it."
Eda looked at her for a long time. The blue jug with the sea-thistle stood between them. The lamp leaned, and steadied, and leaned again.
"You have grown up," said Eda, at last. "I have been waiting for you to grow up, and I have been dreading it, and now you have done it, and I am not sure that I am glad of it, but I am not sorry, either. I will tell you in the morning, Elsie. I will tell you in the morning, and I will tell you true, and I will not spare you, and you will not thank me for it, and that is the bargain, and I will hold you to it as long as you hold me to mine."
"Thank you, Eda."
"Do not thank me yet. Thank me when you have heard it, and if you can still bring yourself to thank me after, then I will accept it, and not before."
Elsie stood up. The chair creaked under her, and the creak was, for once, almost companionable. She went back into the front room, and the lamp was still on the table, and the sheet was still on the table, and the door on the sheet still looked up at her from the bottom of the sea, and waited, and would go on waiting, for as long as it took, and for as long as was needed, and not a moment longer, and not a moment sooner.
She rolled the sheet, and tied it with the tape, and put it under her arm, and stood for a moment in the middle of the room, and the room was very quiet, and the village outside was very quiet, and the sea, far off, was not quiet at all, and never had been, and never would be.
She turned down the lamp. She went to the door. She opened it, and the cold came in, and the smell of salt, and the small, ordinary sounds of a village that was going to bed, and that did not know, and that she was not going to tell, not tonight, and not tomorrow, and not until she had to.
"Good night, Eda," she said, into the dark of the other room.