The canal boat pushed through water the color of weak tea, and the reeds parted around its blunt nose with a sound like fingers dragged across silk. Dessa Pickerel sat on the low bench at the stern with her knees pressed together beneath a brown woolen skirt, and she watched the village of Hollowmere take shape ahead of her like something being remembered rather than seen.
A heron rose from the shallows to her left. Its wings beat the air in slow, wet measures, and its shadow slid across the surface of the water without touching it. She counted the beats until it cleared the trees. Seven. The number lodged somewhere beneath her ribs, in the place where she kept things she did not wish to examine.
The boat was small and smelled of damp rope and the ghost of last week's eels. The man who owned it had not spoken more than five words to her since she boarded at the junction, and she had been grateful for every one of those silences. She had spent the last three nights in coaching inns where the wallpaper remembered a hundred other women's coughing, and she had grown tired of being looked at. Here, on the water, no one looked. The reeds looked. The sky looked. The heron, perhaps. But not a soul.
Hollowmere crept closer.
She could see the church spire first, leaning a little to the east as if it had grown tired of standing straight. Then a cluster of rooftops, thatched and dark with weather. Then the dock, a sagging timber tongue that reached out into the canal as though offering a hand to anyone fool enough to take it. A figure stood at the end of it, broad and patient, and she understood at once that this was a place where people waited. There were simply not enough arrivals to make impatience worthwhile.
Dessa lifted the leather satchel onto her lap. It weighed almost nothing. Dried sage, dried meadowsweet, dried elderflower. A pinch of something her grandmother had called marsh tea, though Dessa had never known if that was its true name or only the name of where it grew. And beneath all that, in the pocket lined with oilskin, the letter.
She had read it on the train, and then again on the coach, and then once more by candlelight in the inn at Wickfen while rain tapped the window like a polite but persistent caller. The lawyer's hand had been careful and clerkly. The bequest was clean. The tea house was hers. She had never seen it. Her grandmother had never seen her. These two facts had an arithmetic to them that Dessa was not yet ready to do.
The boatman killed the engine with a muttered apology to whatever gods governed canal craft, and the vessel glided the last ten feet on its own gathered momentum. The figure on the dock reached down and caught the mooring rope without being asked, looping it around a post with the ease of long practice. He turned, and his face was the color of old brick and creased in patterns that suggested laughter was a frequent visitor there.
"You'll be Miss Pickerel," he said. Not a question.
Dessa gathered her coat tighter across her shoulders. The wind off the marsh cut through wool the way a knife cuts through butter.
"I am," she said. "You must be... someone who knows everyone."
"Tom Brisket." He touched the brim of his cap with a thumb and forefinger that were thick as sausages. "Reed-cutter. Fetch and carry for the tea house, when there was a tea house to fetch and carry for. That'd be your great-aunt Esle's doing, until she stopped. You'll be wanting to see the place."
He said this last without a question mark either. It occurred to Dessa that Hollowmere might be a village in which questions were considered a kind of impoliteness, an opening of doors that ought to remain politely shut.
"I should like to see it very much," she said. "I have the deed."
"And the satchel."
"Yes."
"And a face like you've come from somewhere that didn't suit you."
Dessa looked at him. His gaze was mild and entirely unapologetic. She decided that she liked him, and was sorry about it immediately, because liking people was a kind of opening, and she had come here to close.
"Yes," she said. "All those things."
Tom Brisket nodded as though she had confirmed something he had privately suspected. He held out his hand for her bag, but she shook her head, and he withdrew it without offense. They walked up the dock together, his boots heavy on the planking, her boots barely audible, and the village arranged itself around them in stages.
The first stage was the canal basin itself, a rectangle of still water where two other boats sat rotting at their moorings. The second stage was the boatyard, where a stack of new punt poles leaned against a wall in a way that suggested they had been leaned there some years ago and forgotten. The third stage was the lane, a single track of packed earth that wandered off between two rows of cottages with the air of a dog that had lost the scent. And the fourth stage was the village green, which was less a green than a suggestion, a patch of trampled grass where a few geese had opinions about trespass.
Three women stood by a well. They watched Dessa pass. One of them had a bucket halfway up the rope, and she lowered it slowly back down without looking away. The second had her hands on her hips. The third was older than the other two and stood slightly apart, with a shawl pulled up over her hair as though expecting weather that had not yet committed to arriving.
"Good morning," Dessa said.
The three women said nothing. The geese said several things, none of them complimentary.
Tom Brisket cleared his throat. "Folk hereabouts take a day or two to settle into a new face," he said. "Don't take it personal."
"I don't," Dessa said, though she was not certain that was true. She had spent enough years in service to know what silence from a group of women meant. It meant we have already decided who you are, and we are giving you the chance to confirm it .
The lane dipped and curved, and the cottages gave way to a low stone wall, and the wall gave way to a wooden gate, and the gate gave way to a path of pale shingle that crunched underfoot in a way that reminded her, for a reason she could not name, of her grandmother's kitchen. She had never been in her grandmother's kitchen. She was certain of this. And yet her feet seemed to know where to place themselves on the path, as though a lesson had been given and she had only now arrived to take it.
"Here," Tom Brisket said. "Hollowmere Tea House."
Dessa stopped.
The building sat at the end of the path as though it had been placed there by a careful hand and then left alone for a long time. It was small, two rooms wide and perhaps three rooms deep, built of the same dark weatherboard as the cottages behind it, but with a verandah running across the front that gave it the air of a face someone had tried to make presentable. The verandah was empty of furniture. A single rocking chair stood in one corner with one leg shorter than the others, and it rocked faintly in the wind as though someone had just stood up from it.
Above the door, a sign hung from two iron brackets. The paint had faded to the color of dried blood, but the letters were still legible, drawn in a flowing hand that suggested the sign painter had loved his work:
HOLLOWMERE TEA HOUSE EST. 1847 BY APPOINTMENT AND GOOD FORTUNE
Dessa read the sign twice. She read it a third time. She had the strange sense that she was being read in return, that the wooden letters were weighing her in some private scale.
"Good fortune," she said, half to herself.
Tom Brisket spat into the grass. "Your great-aunt put that up herself," he said. "Made me carry the ladder, and then changed her mind about the wording three times. Said a tea house ought to set expectations but not promises. I didn't know what she meant then. I think I might now."
"What do you think she meant?"
He considered this. A gull passed overhead, and its shadow moved across the path between them.
"I think," he said slowly, "that most folk come to a tea house wanting something they cannot say. A quiet hour. A memory. A reason to sit still. And your great-aunt did not want to be the one to promise them they'd find it. Only that if they found it, there'd be a place to put it down."
Dessa looked at him. He looked back. His face, she saw now, was the face of a man who had outlived the version of himself that found such things ridiculous.
"She sounds like a person I would have liked," Dessa said.
"Aye," he said. "She was."
The wind moved through the reeds beyond the verandah, and the sound it made was not the wind she had heard in coaching inns or in the train or in the cities where she had once taught. It was a thinner sound, a sharper sound, a sound with edges. It smelled of water and rot and something green that was not quite mint and not quite nothing.
"Will you come inside?" Dessa asked.
"I'll wait out here," Tom Brisket said. "I've seen what's inside. You ought to see it fresh."
He sat down on the verandah step, which creaked beneath him, and took a clasp knife from his pocket and began, with great deliberation, to clean his fingernails. The gesture had the air of ritual. Dessa understood that he was giving her the room, and she took it.
She turned the handle. The door resisted, as old doors do, and then yielded with a small surrendering sigh. The hinges did not so much creak as whisper, in two notes, one slightly higher than the other, as though the door were clearing its throat.
The smell hit her first. Not rot. Not dust, though there was dust. It was the smell of dried herbs held too long in a closed space, a green sweet dusty smell that seemed to rise up to meet her and consider her from a polite distance. Beneath it, faintly, the smell of old paper. Beneath that, the smell of something she could not name, and gave up trying to.
There was a front room. A counter ran along the far wall, dark wood, scarred in places where hot kettles had been set down too quickly. Behind the counter, shelves, mostly empty. A few jars stood in a row, their contents reduced to powders and shadows. A framed card above the counter listed, in the same hand as the sign outside, the teas of the house. Dessa read them without taking them in.
A bell hung above the inner door, and as the outer door finished its closing, the bell moved, slightly, in air that had not been disturbed.
"Mrs. Esle," a voice said from somewhere within, and Dessa's heart performed an action she had not authorised.
But it was only the wind through a cracked window in the back room, finding a gap in the plaster and squeezing through it in such a way that the syllables formed themselves unbidden. Dessa put a hand against the counter and felt the wood, which was warm, though no fire had been lit in this room for she did not know how long.
She stood very still and listened to the house listen to her.
Then she opened the satchel on the counter and took out the letter and read it once more in this room where it had been written, or at least where its consequences lived. The lawyer's hand was careful. The bequest was clean. The tea house was hers.
She folded the letter and put it back, and she put her hands flat on the counter, and she stayed there for a long time, while Tom Brisket cleaned his fingernails on the verandah, and the wind moved through the house, and the reeds beyond it whispered of something that might have been her name.
The counter released her hands only when she made it release them. She had been leaning her weight upon it as if the wood were a wall and she were a child again, pressing her palms to the bark of the apple tree in the garden at Thornham, where the summer wasps had come for the fallen fruit and she had not wanted to go indoors to the quarrel that was waiting there. The memory was so clear she could smell the ferment of the bruised fruit and feel the sting of bark against her skin, and she closed her eyes against it because it was not true any longer. The apple tree was gone, sold with the house. The quarrel had finished itself long ago, in ways that the newspapers had been pleased to print.
She opened her eyes. The tea room was only a tea room, dusty and silvered with disuse, and the woman in it was only herself, thirty-one years old and with a letter in her satchel and nothing in the world that belonged to her except this building, which her great-aunt had left to her as if it were a hat one had no use for and wished to pass on.
The kettle was the first thing she touched.
It stood on the shelf behind the counter, blackened at the base from years of use, its handle wrapped in a strip of leather that had been stitched on with the kind of patience that the women of her family had always seemed to possess. The leather was cracked now, and the stitching had gone to rot in places, but the kettle was heavy in her hands, heavier than she had expected, and when she tilted it she heard the dry whisper of nothing inside. She set it down on the counter and felt the wood take its weight with a small complaint, and then she stood for a moment with her hand still on the handle, as if she were waiting for the thing to tell her something.
It did not. It was only a kettle, after all.
She went through into the back room and found the stove, which was the kind that took a fire of sticks and a careful hand. The ash in the grate was cold and grey, but there was a scuttle of coke beside it, and a box of kindling, and a hearth set with newspaper in the way her grandmother had taught her to lay a fire, the sheets crossed and the kindling laid in a small tent above them. She had not laid a fire since she was eleven years old, and her hands remembered before she did. She struck a match from the box on the mantel and watched the paper catch and curl, and then she put the kettle on the iron cradle above the flame and waited for it to fill with water from the pump she had seen at the back of the yard.
The pump was outside, beside the well, and she had noticed it from the lane when she first came. She went out now and turned the handle, and at first nothing came, and then a shudder went through the iron and a brown water coughed out into the trough below, and then the water cleared, and she filled the kettle and brought it in and set it back on the stove. The flame was steady now and the water was beginning to speak in the kettle, a low sound that rose into the room and seemed to push back against the silence.
While the water heated she went through the rest of the house.
There were four rooms, as the lawyer had said, though he had not said what the rooms contained. The front room was the tea room itself, with its shuttered windows and its empty shelves and its card of teas that she had not read. Behind it was the room with the stove, which was a kitchen and a sitting room together, with a settle by the fire and a small deal table and a dresser that held a set of cups and saucers in a blue pattern she did not recognise. Upstairs were two bedrooms, each with a bed made up and a chair beside it and a window that looked out over the pond. In one of the bedrooms there was a small writing desk, and on the desk a paper knife with a handle of mother-of-pearl, and beside the knife a single letter, unsealed, addressed to no one.
Dessa stood at the desk and looked at the letter. She did not touch it. The water downstairs had begun to sing, and the song of it rose through the floorboards, and she stood for a moment with her hand on the back of the chair and listened, and then she went back down.
Tom Brisket was at the door when she came into the front room. He had not knocked, or if he had knocked she had not heard it from upstairs. He was standing on the threshold with his hat in his hand and a look on his face that she could not read at once, because it was a Suffolk face and Suffolk men kept their features close.
"Mrs. Pickerel," he said, and then corrected himself, for she was not married. "Miss Pickerel. Begging your pardon."
"Mister Brisket," she said. "Come in. The kettle is on."
He came in, and he brought the outside with him, the smell of reeds and the cool of the pond and the sound of the wind over the water, which was louder here than it had been at the station. He stood in the middle of the tea room and looked about him with the same look she had seen on his face at the lane, the look of a man who had come home and found it changed.
"I put the shutter back," he said. "It was hanging."
"Thank you," she said. "Sit down. I will bring the tea."
She went through to the back and made the tea in the brown pot she had found on the dresser, and she carried it through on a tray with two of the blue cups, and she set it on the table by the window in the front room, where the light came in through the slats of the shutter in thin bars. Tom Brisket sat down at the table and looked at the pot as if he were not sure what to do with it.
"There is no milk," she said. "I beg your pardon. I have not been to the village."
"Never mind milk," he said. "It's the leaf I'm after, not the white." He poured for himself, and for her, and he drank without waiting, which was not what she had been taught but which she forgave because his hands were rough and the cup was small. He drank, and then he set the cup down, and he looked at her across the table, and his face had softened a little.
"She would have approved of you," he said.
Dessa did not answer at once. She held her cup in both hands and felt the warmth of it through the china, and she looked at the shuttered window, and then she looked at him.
"You knew her," she said. It was not a question.
"Knew her these forty year," he said. "Cut her reeds. Mended her roof. Drove her to market when the cart was whole. She was a one, was Mrs. Esle. Knew her own mind and made no apology for it." He drank again. "You'll find the like of her in the village. They will tell you what they think of you, because she would have told them first."
"I am not she," Dessa said.
"No," he said. "You're not. But you're here, and that is the beginning of it." He set his cup down and leaned forward a little, and his voice fell into the lower register that Suffolk men used when they meant to be serious. "Now, Miss Pickerel, I have a thing to say to you, and I would rather say it plain. This house has been empty two years come Michaelmas. Before that, Mrs. Esle kept it with a girl from the village, a simple soul, and the girl left to be married, and Mrs. Esle would have no other, and so she sat here alone and took her own tea and waited, and then she was took, and the house has been empty since, and the village has had its own opinion of the place, which I will not trouble you with now except to say this." He paused, and his thumb moved along the rim of his cup. "There are those who think the house should be pulled down, and there are those who think it should be let be, and there are those who think it should be lived in by a person of sense, which is what she would have wanted. I am of the last party. I would not like to see this house come down. I would not like to see it empty. I would like to see the kettle on the fire and a light in the window and a person at the door who means to stay."
Dessa looked at him. "And you think I am such a person?"
"I don't know what you are," he said. "But you came. And you have put the kettle on, which is more than most would do on a first afternoon." He looked about the room, and his eye went to the card above the counter, the list of teas in the careful hand. "She had a way of writing out the names of the teas as if they were people. You will see, when you read it, that she gave each its character. The Lapsang she called 'a smuggler with a kind heart.' The Keemun she called 'a schoolmistress of the old sort.' She had a word for every one."
"I read it," Dessa said, though she had not, and she made a note to do so, and Tom Brisket saw her make it, and he nodded as if she had passed some small test that he had set her without her knowing.
"Well," he said. "I have said my say, and I had best be off, for the light is going and I have a mile to walk and a wife to mind, though she is in her grave these six year and minds me nothing." He stood up, and he put his hat on, and he looked at her once more with that softened face. "You will find things in the back room. Cupboards. Jars. The things of her life. There is a box of letters in the dresser that you may do with as you please. There is a key to the reed-loft on the hook by the door. There is a cat, if she is still about. She was called Smoke, for the colour of her, and she was the terror of the pond."
"A cat," Dessa said.
"A cat," he said. "A great grey thing with a torn ear and a poor opinion of most people. She took to the reeds when Mrs. Esle died, and I have not seen her since, but she is about, for I have seen her sign along the edge of the water, and a bird she took from the air last week, which I would not have believed if I had not seen it with my own eyes." He went to the door, and then he turned back. "Miss Pickerel."
"Mister Brisket."
"I would have you take my number," he said. "There is a card in my pocket, and it has my name upon it, and if you have need of a man with a cart or a pair of hands or a word to the village, you will send for me, and I will come."
She took the card. It was a plain card, with the name in his own hand, which was a large and rather clumsy hand, and below the name the words, Reed-cutter and Handyman, and below that the name of the hamlet, which was Lower Hemphill. She put the card in her satchel beside the letter, and he nodded to her and went out, and she heard his boots on the gravel of the lane, and then the wind took the sound and she was alone.
The kettle had gone off the boil while he was speaking, and she went through and lifted it off the cradle and set it on the hearth, and the fire spat a little at the loss of it. She stood by the stove and looked at the room, and she thought of the woman who had lived here, alone, with her own tea and her own fire and her own opinions, and she thought of the girl who had left to be married, and she thought of the cat in the reeds, and she thought of the letter upstairs on the writing desk, addressed to no one. She thought of these things, and then she put the kettle back on the cradle, for the water had cooled and she wanted more tea, and she went to the window and looked out through the slats of the shutter at the pond, which was darkening now, and at the reeds beyond it, which were moving in a wind that had come up since she had come in.
She had not yet read the card of teas. She went through to the front room and stood on a chair and took the card from its nail, and she carried it to the window and read it in the failing light, and she found that Tom Brisket had spoken true. Each tea had its character, written in the same hand as the sign outside, and the hand was a hand that had taken its time and had meant every word.
Lapsang Souchong, she read. A smuggler with a kind heart, and a taste of pine after a hard night at sea.
Keemun. A schoolmistress of the old sort, who expects you to sit up straight and finish your cup.
Earl Grey. A gentleman of parts, who keeps a little bergamot about his person for the ladies.
Assam. A field hand in the rain, with a strong back and a quiet tongue.
Darjeeling. A young woman of good family, who has come down in the world and does not complain.
Oolong. A traveller between two places, who has not yet decided which to call home.
Dessa read it twice, and then she read it a third time, and the light went out of the sky while she read, and the room darkened, and she stood in the dark tea room and held the card in her hands and felt the weight of the kettle behind her on the counter, and she felt the house about her, and she heard the reeds, and she heard the wind, and she thought that perhaps, if she stayed, the house would learn to speak to her in the voice of the woman who had lived in it, and that the voice would be a company to her in the evenings, when the kettle was on and the shutters were closed and the village had gone to its own beds.
She did not know if she would stay. She had not yet decided. But she put the card back on its nail, and she lit the lamp that stood on the counter, and she went through and made herself more tea, and she sat at the table by the window in the front room and drank it in the yellow light, and she listened to the house, and the house listened to her, and outside the wind moved in the reeds, and somewhere among them a grey cat with a torn ear moved also, and watched the light in the window with eyes that were green and did not blink.
The lamp on the counter burned with a small steady flame, and the wick hissed now and then where the draught from the front room crept under the door. Dessa sat at the table with her hands around the cup and her eyes on the glass, and in the black square of the window her own face looked back at her, faint as a coin held under murky water. The evening had come down on Hollowmere like a lid set on a pot. Behind the tea house the marsh began its night sounds, a low conversational creak of reeds, a solitary plop from somewhere out among the pads, the thin piping of a frog whose species she would not have been able to name. The smell of the room was of old wood and lamp oil and, very faintly, of the cold that breathed through the timbers of the place even in summer.
She thought of the card with its tea-fingered gentleman. She thought of the card of the grey cat on the sill of her bedroom window, with its green eyes and its torn ear. She thought, with a small bitter twist at the corner of her mouth, that she had inherited not only a tea house but a whole mythology, and that the mythology had its own opinions about who was fit to sit in the front room and read the cards by lamplight on a winter evening. She drank her tea and found it cooling, and she thought of going up the narrow stairs to the bedroom with the patchwork quilt, and of lying down in it, and of whether she would sleep, and whether, if she slept, she would dream of Lady Ashgrove or of the children or of the face of Mr. Sedge, the master of the house, looking at her across the breakfast table on the last morning with that expression which had nothing on it, nothing at all, and which she could not, even now, bring herself to forgive.
She put the cup down. The clock ticked. The wind shifted, and from somewhere down the lane came the sound of a slow footfall on the path, a measured tread, the kind of footfall that does not hurry because it has learned that hurrying does no good, and which is the footfall of people who have lived in one place a long time and learned its weather.
A knock came at the door. Not the polite tap of a stranger but the solid knock of a neighbour, two raps and a third a moment later, the third being not quite a knock but a tap of the knuckle as if to say, I am here, and I do not mean to startle you, and I will wait as long as is required.
Dessa rose and crossed the room. She took the latch in her hand. The door swung inward on its old hinges, and there in the last of the dusk stood a man of perhaps seventy, broad in the shoulders still, though the shoulders had gone a little soft with the years, in a corduroy coat the colour of wet bark and a cap pulled low over his ears. He had a face that had been outdoors for a long time, weathered to the colour and grain of a chestnut burr, and a mouth that seemed set in a permanent half-frown, though the half-frown, as she would learn, was merely the resting expression of a man whose face had been formed to take the wind. He carried no lantern, though there was hardly light enough to see by.
For a moment neither spoke. The man looked at her, and she looked at him, and the wind moved in the reeds behind the tea house and the lamp inside threw their two long shadows down the path and across the little stone-edged bed where, in better weather, the marigolds had been set.
Now then, said the man. He did not raise his voice. So you are the one.
Dessa drew herself up a little. She was not a tall woman, but she had been a governess, and governesses learn to take up the space that is given them. I am Dessa Pickerel, she said. I believe I am the new mistress of the tea house.
The man gave a short nod. Aye, he said. That is what they said down at the post. Tom Brisket, I am. I keep the wall. He lifted one large hand and gestured at the low brick boundary that ran along the lane at the back of the tea house. Old Perkin used to let me do it. His sister, before. He paused, and the half-frown deepened. His auntie, since.
He said the words as if they were entries in a parish register, each one set down in its proper place. Dessa understood at once that this was a man who counted things by their order.
Will you come in, she said. I have just put the kettle on. She had not, in fact, put the kettle on, but she had been about to, and she had a great-aunt's instinct that to meet a neighbour was to put on the kettle, and the instinct had won out over the truth.
Tom Brisket looked past her at the warm interior of the tea house, at the lamp, at the kettle on its hook. A small softening came into his weathered face, not a smile exactly but the easing of a muscle that had been held tight for a long time. Well, he said. If you are putting on.
He stepped inside, and the tea house received him as it had received, perhaps, several generations of such men, with a slight creak of the floor and a faint sigh of the chimney. He took off his cap and held it in one hand, and she saw that the cap had been mended at the brim with a length of darker cloth, and that the mending was the work of someone who had been taught to use a needle and who had not minded the work.
Sit you down, she said, and pointed him to the chair at the table by the window. She went through to the kitchen and lit the lamp there and filled the kettle from the pump and set it on the hob, and came back and took the chair opposite him, and they sat for a moment with the table between them and the lamplight on their faces, and she found that she could not think of a thing to say, and that he, on his side, seemed to have the same trouble, and that the trouble was comfortable, and that it was the kind of trouble one has with a person one is going to know for a long time.
It was he who spoke first. He put his cap on the table and laid a hand flat upon it as if to keep it from being carried off by some draught, and he said, in his broad Suffolk, which to her London ears sounded like the speech of men in old prints, They will have told you, I dare say.
Told me what, said Dessa.
About the auntie, he said. About how it is she is not here to meet you herself.
Dessa folded her hands on the table. She had been told something. She had been told it in a letter from the solicitor, in a few formal words that said that her great-aunt had gone out one autumn evening to walk in the marsh and had not returned, and that after three years the matter must be presumed, and that the property would pass to her as the next of kin. She had not been told anything else. She had not been told how it was that a woman of nearly eighty should walk out into a marsh on an autumn evening and not come back, nor why no one had been able to find her, nor whether anyone had tried.
I have been told the form of it, she said. The letter. I have not been told the manner.
Tom Brisket looked at her, and his face, which had been set in its resting frown, shifted slightly, and what she saw in it was not pity exactly but a kind of measuring, the look of a man who wants to know whether the person across from him is made of the kind of stuff that will do.
It was three years this autumn, he said. He spoke slowly, as if he were stepping across stones in a stream and did not wish to wet his boots. Three years come October. I had been here that day to mend a bit of the wall at the back, and she had brought me out a cup of the lapsang, and we had stood by the gate and looked at the marsh, and she had said to me, Tom, she had said, there is a thing I must do before the weather turns, and I had said, Auntie, let it wait till the spring, and she had laughed at me, and that evening she had taken her stick and her little lantern and gone out by the back path, and that is the last that was seen of her by any person living.
He paused, and the kettle on the hob began to whisper, and the whisper rose to a small song.
They searched, he went on. Every man in the village turned out. They beat the reeds from the back meadow to the creek. They had the dog from the Hall out, a good dog, a dog that had found a child lost in the turnips two summers back. He went on, but his voice thickened a little. The dog went up and down. He found nothing. The lantern was found, on the path, near the place where the path forks towards the heron pool. The stick was not found. Her was not found.
Dessa sat very still. The lamplight wavered a little as if the room had drawn a breath. She thought of the front room with its row of little drawers, each with its label and its sample. She thought of the card of the grey cat. She thought of the card of the young woman who had come down in the world and did not complain. She thought of the woman who had written those cards, and of the hand that had held the pen, and of how the hand had one evening taken up a lantern and a stick and gone out into the dark marsh, and had not come back.
And what do they say, she said. Here, among the people.
Tom Brisket looked at her for a long moment. Then he drew a breath and let it out again through his nose, and the sound was almost a whistle.
There is a thing they say, he said. They say that the marsh took her. They say it as if the marsh were a person, you understand, and a person with a will. He paused. There are some that say she saw a light out across the pads, and followed it, for she was one that had the sight, though she would never have owned to it. There are some that say she had had a warning of her own end, and went to meet it, and that the meeting was not one to be spoken of. He paused again. There are some that say she was taken for a debt, and that the debt was an old one, and that the marsh collects its own.
Dessa was quiet. The kettle sang.