Fog rose off the canal in slow, heavy curls, the kind that turned the cobblestones slick and made every footstep echo against the shuttered shopfronts on Fog Lane. The gas lamps had been burning since dusk, casting long amber smears across the wet street. Somewhere toward the wharf, a bell buoy rang, low and insistent, a sound so familiar that most folk of Hollow Pines no longer heard it at all.
Wren Avery heard it.
She had been listening to that bell for three years now, ever since her mentor's cottage passed to her in a will made of cheap paper and stubborn ink. The journal it contained had cost her far more than the property: sleepless nights, a permanent squint from candlelight, and the uneasy sense that the pages rearranged themselves when she was not looking.
Tonight, the bell buoy sounded sharper. Or perhaps she was simply tired.
She set down her pen, flexed the cramp from her fingers, and reached for the kettle. The kettle was not where she had left it. She blinked, then found it on the wrong shelf, and remembered that she had moved it there herself an hour ago, though she could not say why.
The fog pressed against her window like a second pane of glass.
A knock shattered the quiet.
It was not the measured, apologetic rap of a neighbor collecting sugar, nor the heavy thump of Calder Marsh, whose knuckles announced him before his voice did. This knock was urgent. This knock was the knock of someone who had already knocked too many times elsewhere and was losing faith that any door would answer.
"Wren," came a voice through the wood, thin and reedy with worry. "Wren, child, it's Posy. Open up, please. I have come about my brother."
Wren crossed the room in four strides. The bolt stuck, as it always did in damp weather, and she wrestled it free before pulling the door inward.
Posy Grieve stood on the threshold wrapped in a shawl the color of dried sage, her white hair pulled back in a knot so tight it seemed to pull the lines of her face upward. She looked smaller than usual, as if the cold had borrowed an inch from her. Behind her, the fog swallowed the street whole.
"Auntie Posy," Wren said. "Whatever is it?"
"My brother," Posy said again, as though the words were stones she had to lay down one at a time. "His shop is closed. His lamp is dark. I have been standing on his step since the bell at eight, and he has not opened."
Wren glanced past her at the dim shape of the Grieve apothecary at the lane's bend. Sure enough, the green sign with its painted sheaf of herbs hung motionless, and the windows behind it were black as any night.
"Maybe he stepped out," Wren offered. "You know how he is. Lost in some pressing of dried rosemary, and forgets the world exists."
"No." Posy's voice was quiet but certain. "His lamp is out. He never lets his lamp go out. He has not let it go out in forty years, not once, not for storm or sickness or the night his wife died. That lamp is his promise to the town."
The words landed in Wren's chest with more weight than they should have. She had known Old Man Grieve as long as she had known anyone in Hollow Pines: a stooped, soft-spoken man with hands that smelled of camphor and a mouth that seldom smiled except when his niece was near. He had once pressed a jar of feverfew into her hands the night her mentor died, and told her, without ceremony, to come to his shop whenever the dark pressed in.
He had not been the same since the fogs began thickening.
"Come in," Wren said, stepping aside. "Come in from that wet, and tell me what you want done."
Posy shook her head. "There is no time. I have been past the harbor-master, past the inn, past Mrs. Pell's boarding house. Nobody has seen him since yesterday evening, when he closed his shutters earlier than usual. He told Mr. Dell he had a headache. He told Mr. Dell he would see to his lamp before bed."
"And he didn't."
"No."
Wren pulled her coat from its peg. The coat was too large for her; it had belonged to her mentor, and she had not yet found the heart to have it taken in. She tugged it on and felt the weight of it settle across her shoulders like a familiar complaint.
"Calder," she said, more to herself than to Posy. "We ought to fetch Calder."
"He is not at the wharf," Posy said. "I went there first. The night guard said he rowed out an hour past sunset toward the southern breakwater and had not returned. There is a new wreck come in, he said. He went to see if anyone needed pulling from the water."
"Then he is out there in it," Wren muttered. "Lovely."
She pulled the door shut behind her, made sure the bolt had caught, and then offered her arm to Posy. The old woman took it with fingers that trembled more than the chill alone could explain.
They walked together into the fog.
Fog Lane bent slightly as it neared the canal, following the old towpath that had once carried barges of slate and timber down to the marsh. The cobbles underfoot glistened with moisture, each one a small dark mirror reflecting the gas lamps above. Their breath mingled with the mist. Somewhere close, a shutter banged in a wind they could not feel.
"He was strange these last weeks," Posy said, her voice low, almost reluctant. "He told me once that someone had come to the back door asking after old ledgers. I asked him what ledgers. He said the kind that should have gone down with the ship."
Wren slowed her pace. "What ship?"
"He did not say. He said it like a man who wished he had not spoken at all. And then he talked of something else. About the journal you inherited, and whether you had come to understand it."
The question landed heavier than the fog. Wren said nothing. Her mentor's journal sat in its locked drawer behind her, full of ciphers she had cracked and ciphers she had not, and she had learned not to speak of it in open air, not even to those she trusted. The journal was a room with many doors, and she was not yet sure which ones were safe to open.
"Your brother knew my mentor?" she asked carefully.
"Knew him," Posy said. "Respected him. Feared him a little, I think. They had an understanding, those two. About things that should not be repeated in company."
They rounded the bend, and the apothecary shop stood before them, solid and dark. The green sign creaked faintly on its iron arm, though there was no wind. The windows were shuttered, and a thin line of frost, unusual for the season, rimmed the lower panes.
Wren tried the handle. Locked.
She knocked twice, then three times, loud enough to rattle the glass. No answer came from within. No shuffle of feet, no clearing of a throat, no bark of an old dog, for Old Man Grieve kept a terrier named Tatters who would have set up a howl at the first knock.
"Tatters," Wren said. "Where is the dog?"
Posy's hand tightened on her arm. "Inside, I expect. He never lets the dog out at night. Never."
The fog shifted, and for a moment the lamplight caught a smear on the threshold: muddy, and dark, as though a boot had slipped on the step. Wren crouched, angling her head. There were marks in the mud, partly washed away by the mist, leading away from the door and toward the canal path.
She did not mention them yet.
She cupped her hands around her mouth and called through the letter slot. The slot exhaled a thin stream of air that smelled of camphor and dust, the smell of the shop she remembered from her childhood visits. No sound from within. No bark. No voice.
"Auntie Posy," Wren said, straightening slowly. "Have you a key?"
Posy reached into her shawl and produced an iron key on a ring, the kind that belonged to a different century. Wren took it, felt its chill against her palm, and fitted it to the lock. The tumblers turned with a reluctance that made her think of her own stubborn bolt.
The door swung inward.
Inside, the shop was exactly as it had always been: dried bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters, glass jars ranked along the shelves with their handwritten labels, the brass scales on the counter, the mortar and pestle worn smooth at the bottom of a shallow drawer. The room was dim. The lamp on the counter was indeed cold, its wick trimmed and blackened, the glass chimney set aside.
But something was wrong.
The desk chair was overturned. The ledger that Old Man Grieve always kept open on Tuesdays, for the weekly accounts, lay face-down on the floor, its spine cracked. A scatter of dried chamomile lay across the tiles, ground underfoot by what looked like a heavy boot. And in the corner, half-hidden under the counter, a small brown terrier lay on its side, breathing shallow and quick, its eyes glassy.
"Tatters," Posy breathed, and crossed the room with surprising speed. She knelt and gathered the dog into her arms, crooning to it, her Welsh lilt thickening. The dog whimpered once, a thin sound, and its tail did not move.
Wren stayed by the door. Her eyes swept the room, taking in every detail, filing each one in the place she kept for puzzles.
The overturned chair. The broken ledger. The boot print in the chamomile. The cold lamp. The empty shop.
And on the desk, half-covered by a fallen jar, a square of paper with a single line written in a hand she did not recognize:
THE WICKER OF THE GARDEN DOES NOT BURN.
She did not touch it. She read it twice, three times, and felt the words arrange themselves into something that was not a message, or not only a message, but a warning. The Grieves kept a garden. Everyone in Hollow Pines knew that. The garden was not in the front of the shop, but behind it, down a short path that led to a gate no one but family ever opened.
"Auntie Posy," Wren said carefully. "Did your brother have any visitors yesterday evening? Anyone at all?"
Posy looked up from the dog. Her eyes, sharp and dark in the lamplight, met Wren's without wavering.
"No," she said slowly. "No one he would have opened for. But there is a matter I have not told you, child. Not for any reason you might think. For his sake. For yours."
"The matter," Wren said.
"The garden is not what it seems. My brother did not always keep an apothecary. Once, long ago, he kept a light on the rocks near the southern breakwater. And once, a ship came in that should not have come in at all. He took from that ship what should have been left to the sea, and he buried it where he thought it would rest. Now the fog has come, and something has come with it, and I think, I fear, that someone knows where he put it."
Wren's mouth went dry.
"What did he bury, Auntie?"
Posy did not answer at once. She stroked the dog's ear and looked at the fallen jar on the desk as though she had forgotten it was there.
"He never told me," she said. "But your mentor knew. Your mentor was the only other soul alive who knew. And now they are both silent."
The fog pressed against the windows of the shop. The bell buoy rang again out on the water. And somewhere down the canal path, a heavier tread was approaching, the slow sure footfall of a man who had rowed through the dark and come back changed.
Wren stepped through the apothecary door before Posy could warn her, and the smell hit her first: something scorched and acrid beneath the sweeter ghosts of lavender and dried sage. The room was small, dim, packed floor to ceiling with the peculiar density of a life spent measuring things out. Shelves of amber bottles crowded the walls. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the beams, their leaves whispering faintly in some draft she could not feel. A workbench ran beneath the window, scarred with old rings and knife marks, and on it sat a kettle that had boiled itself to death.
The metal was blackened around the spout. The water inside was gone. What remained was a crust of mineral scale fused to the iron, pale as bone, and the faint sweet reek of something that had been reduced to ash.
"Auntie," Wren said, low. "Don't touch anything."
Posy paused on the threshold. Her hand, still holding the dog's collar, tightened. She looked past Wren at the kettle and made a small sound in the back of her throat, the kind of sound an old person makes when they see something they had hoped never to see.
"Grieve," she whispered. "Oh, Grieve."
Wren moved further in. Her boots found grit on the floorboards, and she looked down to see it: a scatter of fine green glass, the kind used for tinctures, broken and crunched beneath her soles. She crouched, slowly, and swept her thumb across the largest shard. The glass was tacky. She raised it to the thin light from the window.
A residue clung to the broken edge, dark and faintly iridescent. It smelled of bitter almonds and something else, something underneath that Wren's nose could not place but her stomach understood at once. Her mouth flooded with the sour warning taste the body gives when it knows a thing is poison.
"Nightshade," she said. "A full vial of it."
Behind her, Posy drew in a breath.
"He kept it for the foxes," Posy said. Her voice had gone strange, thin and distant, as though she were reciting a thing she had long ago decided to forget. "The foxes that come in from the marsh. He would mix a few drops with offal and leave it at the edge of the garden. He never kept more than a thimbleful in the house. But that bottle on the bench was his winter store. Two years he had it. Two years, and now it is on the floor."
Wren set the shard down carefully on the bench and stood. Her knees protested; she had been kneeling longer than she meant to. She looked around the room with the deliberate patience her mentor had taught her, letting her eyes move in a slow circuit, taking inventory.
There. A row of iron hooks by the door, set into a strip of oak for coats and hats. Most were empty. The second from the end held a battered oilskin hat that smelled of brine. The hook beside it held nothing at all.
"His stick," Wren said. "Where is his stick?"
Posy came in at last, shuffling. She shut the door behind her with care, as though closing a mouth. The dog pressed against her shin and stayed there, trembling.
"He did not go anywhere without it," Posy said. "Not since the winter he fell on the pier. He had it cut for him from a piece of driftwood, long and pale, with a crook at the top he had whittled himself. He said it was the only honest piece of wood in the house. He would have taken it."
"Unless he didn't take it himself."
Wren did not mean to say it. It came out anyway, because the room had the feel of a sentence she had been reading without realizing: a period where a comma should have been. She moved to the bench and studied the kettle without touching it. The blackening was heaviest on the side facing the door. The grate beneath it was cold. Whatever had happened here had happened hours ago. Long enough for iron to forget its heat.
She turned and looked at the back of the room. A door stood half open, leading into a narrow scullery that smelled of brick and damp. Beyond that, a second door, heavier, opened onto the back garden. Both were latched from the inside. The scullery latch was stiff with rust; the garden latch had been lifted recently, the oil on its thumbplate still tacky and fresh.
"Someone came in through the back," Wren said. "And left the same way."
Posy said nothing.
Wren crossed the room and crouched by the bench. There, in the thin dust that gathered in the seam where wood met wall, she found what she was looking for: a print. Not a boot. A shoe, narrow at the heel, broad across the ball. The kind of shoe a townsperson wears when they want to look respectable. The tread was shallow. The dust held the shape clearly.
"Small feet," Wren murmured. "A woman, perhaps. Or a young man."
She sat back on her heels. Her mind, trained by years of breaking ciphers for a man who trusted patterns more than he trusted people, began to work. A kettle boiled dry meant heat, time, patience. A shattered vial of nightshade meant access to the bench, knowledge of the store, an aim that was not merely theft. The missing walking stick meant either that Old Man Grieve had been moved or that he had moved himself, under a kind of duress she did not yet have a word for.
Why take a walking stick?
Because an old man with a bad leg could not run from you. And if you did not want him to run, but you also did not want to leave evidence of force in a room his sister would one day enter, you took the one thing that would slow him down, and you gave him back his dignity by letting him lean on your arm instead.
Wren stood up slowly.
"Auntie Posy," she said. "I need you to tell me something, and I need you to tell me true. Your brother, the apothecary, the lighthouse, the shipwreck. What was the cipher that came ashore that night? And why does anyone still want it?"
Posy lowered herself onto the stool behind the bench. The dog lay at her feet. Outside, the fog pressed at the window, and somewhere down the canal path, the heavier tread she had heard before had grown louder.
"There was a ship," Posy said, "that came in with no lights showing, in the year my brother took the lamp. She was a small thing, black-hulled, low in the water. He thought at first she was a smuggler. They were common enough in those years, and the men who ran them had no love for the Crown. But when she struck the rocks near the southern breakwater, she did not break up as a smuggler would have. She held. And the men who came ashore did not scatter. They carried a chest between them, wrapped in oilskin, and they came up the path to the light as though they had always known the way."
"What was in the chest?"
Posy looked at her for a long moment. The lamplight caught the lines of her face, and for the first time since Wren had known her, the old woman looked every one of her years.
"A book," she said. "A codebook. The kind they used in the old wars, when a message had to travel by fast rider and the rider had to be trusted with the key. It was bound in black leather, and the clasp was silver, and inside the front cover there was a name. A name my brother would not tell me, even at the end."
"And he took it."
"He took it. He could not let it go. He had spent his life keeping a light so that ships would not die on his rocks, and here was a ship that had come in to die on purpose, and a book that would have been worth a great deal to certain people. He took it, and he buried it in the garden, under the stone with the broken cross. And he let the men go, because he did not think they would ever come back."
"But they did."
Posy said nothing.
Wren heard the tread stop at the gate. The latch lifted. A moment later, the shop door opened, and Calder Marsh came in, filling the doorway with the bulk of him and the smell of river water and woodsmoke. He had taken off his hat. His hair was plastered flat. He looked at the kettle, at the glass on the floor, at Posy on the stool, and at Wren, and his face did something complicated that Wren could not read.
"The path is muddy," he said. "There are prints going out toward the marsh, two sets, heading south. One is wide and heavy, like a man's, and it leans. The other is lighter, in the narrow shoes. Whoever went out of here did not go together. They went one after the other, and the lighter one was following."
"Following the old man?"
"Following the old man," Calder said. "And not catching him, either, by the look of the stride. He is moving faster than he ought to be able to, for a man with a bad leg."
Wren looked at the empty hook by the door. The wood around it was scuffed, fresh. She looked at the kettle. She looked at Posy. And she understood, all at once, what her mentor had understood, and what he had tried to tell her from the other side of his silence.
Old Man Grieve had not been taken. He had been warned.
He had taken his own stick. He had gone out the back. And whoever had come for the book had followed him, not knowing that he had spent a lifetime on the rocks, and that a man who has kept a light knows how to move through fog better than any city-bred courier ever could.
"Calder," Wren said. "Take the south path. Stay off the stones, walk the soft ground. If he has gone toward the breakwater, you will find his prints where they cross the marsh grass. Do not call out. Just follow, and be there when he comes back to the path."
"And you?"
"I am going to ask Auntie Posy where the stone with the broken cross is. And then I am going to sit in this shop, and I am going to wait, and I am going to hope that whoever was in those narrow shoes does not come back the same way they left."
The fog pressed against the window. The bell buoy rang, far out and faint. And in the apothecary, with the kettle cold and the nightshade broken on the floor, Wren Avery sat down on the stool beside Posy Grieve and began, for the first time, to read the room the way her mentor had taught her to read a page: as though every misplaced thing was a letter, and every silence was a word.
Wren did not speak for a long moment after Calder left. The bell over the door whispered against its clapper, once, twice, as the draft found it, and then settled into silence. Posy Grieve sat in the high-backed chair by the cold hearth, her hands folded in her lap, her thumb moving in a slow circle against the knuckle of her index finger. She had not looked up since the front door closed. The bruise on her cheek was already darkening, a plum-colored shadow that spread across the high bone toward her temple.
"I told my brother," Posy said at last, her voice thin and unhurried, "that the world had not changed. That the people who came looking for the cipher in my husband's day were dead or in their beds. That no one remembered." She paused. "I told him he could leave his stick by the door and still be safe."
"And he did not believe you."
"He did not believe me." The thumb stilled. "He believed the fog. He has always believed the fog."
Wren looked at the broken jar on the floor. Nightshade berries, black and dull as old iron, lay scattered among the shards. She did not touch them. She had been taught never to touch what had been thrown in anger, because the throwing was a sentence, and the broken glass was its punctuation. She looked instead at the shelf where the jar had stood. A small square of dust, outlined in grime, marked its absence. Beside it, a row of small green bottles stood in perfect order: wormwood, in three dilutions, then valerian, then a bottle she did not recognize, labeled only with a date. October, three years past.
"Auntie," Wren said carefully, "where is the stone with the broken cross?"
Posy's eyes met hers then, for the first time since the bell had stopped. They were the pale grey of river water over sand, and they held, beneath their tiredness, the same look Wren had seen in her mentor's face the day he had first opened the journal and understood what was inside it: the look of a person who has carried a weight so long that they have forgotten they are carrying it, and who has just been reminded.
"Behind the shop," Posy said. "Where the salt garden ends and the wall begins. There is a stone set into the wall, low down, with a cross carved on it. The cross was broken in the great storm of '34. A piece fell out and was never replaced." She paused. "My husband put something behind that stone, the night before he sailed. He told me, if ever I needed him, and he was not here, to go and look."
"What did he put there?"
"A key. And a letter. And a small book, no bigger than my hand." Her thumb began to move again, a slow orbit against the knuckle. "I have never read the letter. I have never opened the book. I was told, when I married him, that some things are not meant to be opened until the right hand comes for them. And no right hand has come in thirty years."
The fog pressed against the window. The bell buoy rang, far out and faint, a single low note that seemed to come from the bottom of the sea. Wren stood. Her legs were stiff from the cold floor, and she rubbed her palms down the sides of her skirt, feeling the weave of the wool rough against her fingers.
"I will go," she said.
"You will not." Posy's voice sharpened, just a little, the way a blade sharpens against a stone. "You will sit here, child, and you will keep this door between you and whatever is in the fog. You told Calder to go. You did not tell yourself to go. There is a reason."
"What reason?"
"The reason is that whoever wore those narrow shoes is still out there, and they are not looking for my brother. My brother is only useful to them as a way to find what is behind the stone." Posy's gaze dropped to the scattered berries. "If you go out there, you will lead them to it. If you stay here, and you are quiet, and you let the fog do what the fog does, there is a chance they will lose themselves in it. The same way the sailors lost themselves, in my husband's day. The same way the shipwreck lost itself, before my brother found it."
Wren sat back down. The stool creaked beneath her. She folded her hands in her lap, mirroring Posy without meaning to, and felt the stillness of the shop settle around her like a second skin. The cold from the broken jar crept across the floor in a slow, invisible tide. Somewhere above them, in the loft, the rope from the missing hook swayed against the rafter with a sound like a swallow's wing.
They waited.
The fog thickened. It pressed against the panes until the glass seemed to bend, until the shapes of the bottles on their shelves blurred and doubled, until the shop itself felt less like a room and more like a thought held loosely in a mind. Wren listened. She listened the way her mentor had taught her to listen when a code refused to break: not for the loud thing, but for the thing that should have been there and was not. The drip of the gutter. The creak of the floorboard. The breath of the old woman in the chair.
Then she heard it.
A sound from the back of the shop. Not a knock. Not a footstep. A scrape, low and deliberate, like a stone being drawn out of a wall. Wren's hand went to her skirt pocket, where she kept the small knife she used for trimming the wicks of her candles. Her fingers found the bone handle, worn smooth with years of use.
"Auntie," she whispered. "Did you lock the back door?"
Posy's eyes widened. "The lock has been broken for twenty years. There has never been a need."
The scrape came again. Closer. And then a voice, muffled by the wall and the fog, but unmistakable: a voice like a handful of gravel poured slowly onto a tin tray.
"Posy." Old Man Grieve. "Is the child there?"
Posy rose from the chair. She moved faster than Wren had thought she could, her long skirt whispering over the floorboards, her bare feet finding the cold boards without flinching. She crossed the shop in four strides and put her hand on the latch of the back door.
"Brother," she said, and her voice was steady. "Come in."
The door opened. The fog came in with him, a cold grey presence that filled the back of the shop and reached, with slow fingers, toward the hearth. Old Man Grieve stood in the doorway. His stick was in his hand. His cap was gone. His white hair was plastered to his forehead with salt damp, and his eyes, under the heavy brows, were wild and bright.
Behind him, in the fog, a figure turned and ran. Wren heard the soft, hurried slap of narrow shoes on wet stone, the clatter of something dropped and not picked up, and then silence. Whoever had followed him had followed him into the fog, and the fog had done what the fog does.
"He was behind me," the old man said. He was breathing hard. His chest heaved beneath the wool of his coat. "When I left the back door. He was there, in the salt garden. He did not speak. He only watched."
"And you?" Posy asked. "Did you find the stone?"
"I did not need to find it." He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The latch clicked, the old wood settling into its frame with a sigh. "I have known where it was for thirty years. I only needed to know that it was time." He looked at Wren. His eyes, wild as they were, held something else now, something she had not seen in them before: a kind of weary recognition, as though he had been expecting her, and had been right to expect her.
"You are the codebreaker's girl," he said.
"Yes," Wren said. She did not let go of the knife.
"Your mentor sent you."
"He did."
"Then you know why you are here." He lifted his stick, and from the crook of it, where the wood curved around the handle, he drew a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth. The cloth was stiff with salt, and blackened at the edges where it had been pressed against the hot metal of a lantern on some long-ago night. He set it on the counter, beside the register, and stepped back.
"There is a key," he said. "And a letter. And a small book. My sister has told me she never opened them. I never opened them either. We waited." He looked at Posy. "We waited for the right hand."
"And if this is not the right hand?" Wren asked.
The old man looked at her a long moment. The fog pressed against the window. The bell buoy, far out, gave its single low note again, and the sound seemed to hang in the air, as though it had nowhere else to go.
"You broke the code on the third page of the journal," he said. It was not a question. "Your mentor told me, in his last letter, that you would. He said, when she breaks the third page, send her to us. And we will know."
The shop was quiet. The nightshade berries lay on the floor, black and patient. Posy stood by the back door, her hand still on the latch. Wren stood by the counter, the bone handle of the knife warm in her palm. Between them, on the scarred wood, the oilcloth bundle waited.
Wren set the knife down. She reached out and untied the cord that bound the cloth, and the knot gave way with a small, dry sound, like the opening of a letter that had been sealed for thirty years. Inside the cloth were three things: a key, dark with age, its teeth worn but distinct; a single sheet of paper, folded twice, the creases soft as cloth; and a book, no bigger than the palm of her hand, bound in red leather that had faded, at its corners, to the color of old brick.
She did not open the letter. She did not open the book. She looked at them, and she understood, as her mentor had understood, that some things are not meant to be opened by the hand that finds them. Some things are meant to be opened only when the time is right, and the time is not yet right, and the right hand has only just arrived.
She folded the cloth back over them, and she set the bundle on the high shelf behind the register, beside the bottle labeled with the date three years past. She stepped back. She nodded, once, to Old Man Grieve, and once to Posy.
"I will come back," she said, "in the morning. When the fog has lifted. And we will sit at this counter, the three of us, and we will decide what is to be done."
Old Man Grieve looked at his sister. Posy looked at the bundle on the shelf. The bell buoy rang, far out and faint. And the fog, pressing against the window, began, at last, to thin.