The garret window rattled in its frame, a loose iron hook tapping the sill with each gust that came off the sea. Maren Voss looked up from the ledger spread across her knees, her charcoal stick pausing mid-stroke over a column of figures, and listened. Below the window, somewhere down the alley that ran between Widow Pell's inn and the chandler's shuttered shop, a dog was barking in short, frustrated yelps. Beyond the dog, further down the slope toward the harbour wall, she could hear the slow unspooling of rope on a capstan and the muted cursing of fishermen hauling in a net by lantern-light.
It was past the second bell of the evening watch, and the village of Briar Cove had settled into the particular hush that came after the day's work was done and before the night's work began. Maren did not count herself among those who slept through that interval. She had her mother's cottage on the clifftop, and she had this rented room beneath the eaves of old Tam Vey's house, and between them she moved like a ghost, carrying ledgers and ink and the quiet weight of a duty she had never asked to inherit.
She set the charcoal down on the scarred tabletop and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The figures in the ledger swam. Tides. Wind. Barometric pressure. The number of souls lost from the parish roll since the last quarter-day. She had been a scribe once, in the city, and she could keep figures clean and ordered as a row of new-laid shingles, but since she had come back to Briar Cove three winters past, the figures had begun to curdle into something she did not want to look at directly. Every column she completed seemed to lead, by some arithmetic she could not yet name, toward a sum she was not prepared to read.
The dog below fell silent. The rope on the capstan ceased its complaint. For a moment the only sound was the faint, almost subliminal groan of the bell rope in the tower above her ceiling, twisting in the offshore breeze.
Then she heard the footstep on the stairs.
It was a small, careful sound, the creak of a board that had known the weight of many such careful footsteps, the patient tread of someone who had climbed this particular stairway before and knew which treads to avoid. Maren straightened. The garret door was shut but not bolted; she had a habit, since her return from the city, of leaving it unlatched until last thing at night. Old Tam Vey, the landlord, was deaf as a post and lived two floors below, and there was no one else who had business on these stairs at this hour.
The footsteps reached the landing. There was a pause, longer than a breath, shorter than a sigh. Then came the soft sound of something being set down on wood, a faint clink of metal against metal, and the footsteps retreating down the stairway with the same patient, careful deliberation.
Maren rose. She crossed the garret in three steps, her bare feet whispering on the cold planks, and pulled the door open onto the narrow landing where the roof came down to meet the floor in a slanted eaves-wall. The little landing was empty. At the foot of the stairs, where the boards widened into the alley mouth, she caught the briefest flicker of a shawl passing into the shadows below.
She knew that shawl. Even in the dark, she knew it. The faded madder-red, the knotted fringe, the way it sat too high on a slender shoulder because the wearer had been hurrying and had not bothered to settle it properly. Coral Strand wore that shawl the way other women wore their hair, as a kind of public signature. One saw the shawl before one saw the face.
Maren looked down. There, on the worn threshold of her own door, set a careful hand's breadth from the sill as though the giver had wished to mark the boundary of offering without trespass, lay a small leather purse, the colour of old tobacco, its drawstring pulled loose so that a scatter of copper coins glinted dully in the light that leaked from her lamp.
She did not touch it at once. She stood for a moment with one hand on the doorframe, listening to the diminishing shuffle of Coral's footsteps down the alley, and felt the slow, familiar tightening at the back of her throat that she had learned, since her return, to associate with the moments just before a thing she could not take back.
She bent and picked up the purse. It was heavier than it looked, and the leather was warm, as though it had been held close for some time against a body that had been working its way up the stairs in the cold. She carried it inside and set it on the table beside her ledger and the stub of charcoal, and she stood over it with her arms folded across her chest, the way her mother used to stand over a found thing on the kitchen table, deciding whether it was a gift or a warning.
The coins inside were worn almost smooth. A few had been punched with square holes in their middles and strung on a cord that was itself so frayed it seemed ready to disintegrate at a breath. Maren tipped the purse out onto the table and began to count. There were forty-seven coppers, one half-groat, and a single small silver bit that had been clipped so many times along its rim it was hardly more than a sliver.
She stopped counting. She picked up the silver bit and turned it between her fingers, and the light from the lamp caught the faint ghost of a stamping on its face, a crown above a rose, the old royal mark of a reign that had ended before Maren was born. Such coins did not pass through Briar Cove except as keepsakes, or as the last small savings of someone who had held on to them through long years and had only now, for some reason she could not guess, decided to let them go.
From outside, the dog began to bark again, more insistently, as though something had moved in the alley. Maren set the silver bit down on the table with great care, as though it were an insect she did not wish to startle, and went to the window.
Below, in the slant of lamplight that fell from Widow Pell's kitchen door, she could see Coral Strand crossing the cobbles toward the steep path that led up the cliffside to the row of fishermen's cottages where the diver and her family had their rooms above the drying sheds. Coral's bare head was bowed, and her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of a salt-stained canvas coat that had seen better days. She did not look up. She walked with the stiff, deliberate gait of a person who is holding themselves together by the simple act of placing one foot in front of another, and who is afraid that any variation in that rhythm might undo her.
Maren pressed her palm flat against the cold glass and watched her go. The shawl slipped a little further down Coral's shoulder as she reached the first switchback of the cliff path, and Coral did not reach to pull it back. The lamplight from the inn caught the angle of her jaw, the hollow beneath her ear, and Maren thought, with the sudden, unbidden clarity that sometimes came over her in this garret, that grief had made her old friend look like a much younger woman playing at being old.
Coral turned the corner of the drying sheds and was gone. The dog fell silent. The village settled back into its thin, watchful quiet, and Maren remained at the window for a long time, her breath slowly fogging the pane in small pale discs that came and went.
She turned back to the table. The coins lay where she had tipped them, a small disordered heap, and beside them the leather purse slumped open like the husk of a small animal. She sat down on the low stool beside the table and pulled the ledger back toward her, and for some minutes she only sat there with her hands resting on the open pages, looking at the numbers she had been writing when the footsteps had come up the stair.
The numbers meant nothing to her now. They were only marks on a page, the tidy inventions of a hand that had been trained in a city counting-house to keep the world in its proper columns, and they sat on the rough paper with the same mute patience as the coins on the wood beside them. She closed the ledger and set it aside, and she drew the leather purse toward her and began, with great care, to arrange the coins back inside it in the order in which she had tipped them out. It was a small, foolish thing to do, and she knew it. But she had the feeling, which sometimes visited her in this garret, that the order of things mattered even when the order could not be made right.
When the purse was restored, she drew the cord through the drawstring hole and knotted it, and sat holding it in her lap for a while. The leather was still faintly warm. She thought of Coral climbing the stairs in the dark, the careful placing of each foot, the long pause on the landing while she gathered whatever courage or resignation she had needed to set the purse down and walk away. Maren had seen Coral in many moods over the years, in the bright recklessness of her youth when she would swing out over the harbour wall on a single rope and laugh at the spray, in the quieter hours of her marriage to the rope-walker's son, in the brief, fierce joy of the year her boy had been born and she had come down to the cove with his name already chosen and a shawl over her head against the wind. But she had never seen this Coral before. This was a Coral who had decided something, and Maren did not yet know what, and the not knowing sat in her chest like a stone.
She set the purse on the table beside the ledger, on the spot where the charcoal had been, and she got up and went to the corner of the garret where a small deal chest stood against the slanted eaves-wall. From the chest she took a folded square of oilcloth, and from the oilcloth a small notebook bound in pale blue paperboard, the kind she had used in the city for keeping her own accounts. She carried these to the table and sat down again, and she opened the notebook to the first blank page and wrote, in the careful hand her mother had taught her, the date, and below it the words, Forty-seven coppers, one half-groat, one clipped silver bit, delivered by hand to my door this night by Coral Strand, no word spoken.
She paused with the charcoal over the page. She thought of adding, For what? but she did not, because she knew she would have to wait for the answer, and she did not want to tempt the fates by writing the question down where they could read it.
From somewhere down the alley came the sound of a door opening and the brief, muffled exchange of voices, too low to make out the words, and then the door again and silence. Maren listened until she was sure the silence was only the ordinary silence of a village between the second and third bell, and then she returned the charcoal to its place in the pot beside the inkwell, and she shut the notebook, and she sat a while longer in the lamplit garret with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the purse.
The bell rope above her groaned once in the offshore breeze, and she thought of her mother up on the clifftop, alone now in the cottage with the kettle on the hob, and of the long walk she would have to take in the morning to deliver the news of the dead boy whose name had not yet been entered in the parish ledger. She had not been there when they pulled him from the culvert, but she had seen them carry him up the lane on a shutter, and she had heard the small, choked sound that Coral had made at the sight, a sound no louder than the creak of a rope under strain, and she had felt that sound enter her somewhere beneath her ribs and take up residence.
She got up and crossed the garret to the small shelf above the washstand, where a folded kerchief and a stub of tallow candle stood beside a chipped saucer. From the saucer she took a key, and from the shelf a small iron lockbox that she had carried up from the clifftop the previous autumn and had kept there ever since, against the day she might need to lock something away that she was not yet ready to be seen with. She knelt and fitted the key to the box and lifted the lid, and inside, on a bed of clean linen, lay a small bundle wrapped in the same oilcloth she had just unfolded, and inside the bundle, a folded paper.
She did not unwrap the paper. She set the purse inside the lockbox beside the bundle, closed the lid, locked it, and set the key back in the saucer. Then she returned to the table and blew out the lamp.
In the sudden dark, the garret became a small black room full of familiar sounds: the tapping of the iron hook at the window, the creak of the old boards under her feet as she crossed to the narrow bed under the eaves, the distant, almost inaudible complaint of the bell tower above her as the wind shifted and the rope turned in its pulley. She undressed in the dark with the unhurried motions of someone who has long ago made peace with the cold of a winter garret, and she lay down on the rough blanket and pulled the thin quilt up to her chin, and she stared at the black underside of the slanted roof where a faint grey line of sky showed through a gap in the eaves tiles.
She thought of Coral's face in the lamplight from the inn. The hollow beneath the ear. The set of the jaw. The way she had walked away without looking up, as though she had set something down that she could not afford to be seen carrying.
Forty-seven coppers. One half-groat. One clipped silver bit, old as the reign of a dead queen, the last coin of a kind of saving that belonged to a world which had already, in some small way, passed away. And a purse that had been held close against the body on the climb up the stair, as though warmth were the last thing the giver could offer along with the metal.
Maren did not sleep for a long time. When she did, near the third bell, her dreams were full of stairways, and of small leather purses set down on thresholds, and of a face she could not quite see bending to set them there. And when she woke, some hours later, to the pale grey light of a coastal dawn and the slow tolling of the drowning bell out on the headland, she lay still for a moment with her eyes on the slanted roof and her hand pressed flat against her chest, and she listened to the bell as though she had never heard it before.
The third bell had not long ceased when Maren Voss set her boots on the cold boards of the landing outside her mother's cottage, and stood for a moment with one hand on the door frame and the wind off the Blacktide pulling at the hem of her coat. The bell had been rung by the drowned man's ghost, or so the village believed. Maren knew it had been rung by her own hand at the appointed hour, and that the rope was scarred where her palm had pressed, and that the sound had gone out over the water and had brought back nothing but the ordinary cries of the curlews and the slow, indifferent knock of the swell against the base of the cliffs.
The dawn was thin and grey, the kind that did not promise to thicken into true morning but only to hover, salt-weighted, between night and day. Below the headland the Blacktide moved with a slow, oily swell, and somewhere out beyond the shelf a curlew was calling, its voice thin as a crack in a glass. Maren could taste the salt on her lips, and beneath it the iron tang of the peat smoke that had been seeping out through the thatch since her mother's time and that no amount of new thatching had ever quite succeeded in driving away.
She went inside. She fed the peat fire a sod of last winter's stock, and the sod took the flame reluctantly, hissing at her with a sound like a small, dry complaint. She set the kettle on its hook above the coals, and she stood with her hands around the cold iron of the cup she had taken down from the shelf. She listened to the kettle begin its small complaint, and to the wind in the eaves, and to the faint, persistent knocking of a shutter three cottages down that never latched properly and that she had been meaning to mend since the autumn.
She thought of the purse on the table. She had not opened it again since she had counted its contents in the lamplight of the inn, but she knew without looking that the forty-seven coppers, the half-groat, the clipped silver bit, were still inside, and that the leather was still warm from where Coral Strand had held it against her own body on the climb up the stair.
Coral had asked her, in the inn, with Widow Pell's firelight making the hollows of her face deeper, and Maren had answered that she would not, that she could not, that the watch had spoken and the verdict of the watch was final in matters of drowning on this stretch of the coast. She had been, she knew, gentle enough. She had not been cruel. But she had been final, and Coral had gone away with the purse still in her hand.
And then, an hour later, Maren had found the purse set down on her own threshold, and she had stood for a long time in the cold of the upper landing looking at it as though it were a thing that might speak.
She had brought it inside. She had counted the contents. She had laid the coins out on the table in three small piles, and then she had put them back, and she had gone to bed. And now it was morning, and the kettle was beginning to steam, and the shutter three cottages down was still knocking in the wind.
A sound on the stairs. Not a knock. A footfall, and then another, and then a small, choked breath that might have been a word held back.
Maren did not move from the hearth. She knew who it was. She had known since the third bell, perhaps, or since the purse, or since the night before, when Coral had set it down and walked away without looking up, as though she had set something down that she could not afford to be seen carrying.
The door opened. Coral Strand stood on the landing with the dawn at her back, her hair loose about her shoulders and her feet bare against the boards, though the boards would have been cold enough to bite. She wore a knitted jacket over her shift, and her hands were empty, and her eyes were red in a way that was not the wind. The hollow beneath the ear was more pronounced in the morning light than it had been in the inn. The jaw was set in the way Maren had seen it set on the cliff paths when Coral was gathering salvage and the wind was pulling at her ropes.
"Maren," she said. Her voice was hoarse, the bright island lilt scraped down to something raw. "Maren, please."
"You left the purse," Maren said, without turning from the kettle. "I have it. I will return it to you."
"I don't want the purse back." Coral came a step into the room, and then stopped, as though the threshold were a line she was not certain she had leave to cross. Her bare feet left two dark prints on the boards where the damp had soaked through from the landing. "Maren, the watch said he wandered. The watch said he went down to the Blacktide on his own and that the tide took him in the dark. I am telling you he would not. I am telling you my son has not gone within a fathom of that water since he was four years old, since the fever that almost took him, since he woke up screaming in a bed that was soaked with his own sweat and would not be comforted until I carried him away from the window where he could see the sea."
She took a shaking breath, and the breath turned into a cough at the end of it, and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. "He would not go near it. He would not. He would walk a mile out of his way to avoid the smell of it. He would not go down to the rocks even in summer, even when the other boys were there with their lines and their baskets. He would sit up on the headland and watch them, and I would see him counting the waves under his breath the way he had taught himself to do, as though the counting would keep the water from rising. The watch did not know him. The watch did not ask me."
Maren poured the water into the cup, and the steam rose up between them and was gone. "Coral," she said, and her voice was as even as she could make it. "I am not the watch. I am not the magistrate. I am a woman who rings a bell when the tide brings the dead back to us, and who has no office, and no authority, and no standing in the village that would bear the weight of a second finding against the first."
"You were the Crown's inquiry agent," Coral said. "I know what you were. Widow Pell told me, down at the inn, with her mouth close to my ear so the room could not hear. You found out things. You wrote them down. You sat in the courtroom at the county town and you told the magistrate what you had seen, and the magistrate believed you because you were careful, and because your hand did not shake when you signed your name."
"That was three years ago. It is no longer true."
"Then why did you take the purse?"
Maren set the cup down on the table, beside the purse, and she turned at last and looked at Coral's face. The set of the jaw had not changed. The hollow beneath the ear had deepened, if anything, in the time they had been speaking, as though the bones of the skull were pressing outward from the inside.
"I took the purse," Maren said, "because you set it on my threshold and I could not leave it there for the dogs. That is all it means."
"It means you are listening," Coral said. "Maren, I am not asking you to go against the watch. I am asking you to look. I am asking you to walk down to the Blacktide with me and look at the place where they say he was found, and to tell me whether you think a boy who would not go near the water would have gone down there alone in the dark. That is all. Only your eyes."
"My eyes," Maren said, and the words came out of her more roughly than she had meant them to, "saw a man hanged for a thing I did not understand. My eyes wrote a truth that was not the whole truth, and
My hand wrote a truth that was not the whole truth, and a woman who was not guilty of the thing she was accused of went into the ground with the print of a noose upon her neck."
Coral's breath caught, a small audible intake that Maren heard as clearly as though a pebble had fallen into the well.
"Who?" Coral asked.
"It does not matter who. It was three years ago. The woman had a name and the name is in the records at the county town and the records are right and the woman is dead and her husband will not speak to me now, though he used to nod to me in the market. That is what my eyes have done, Coral. That is what my hand did when it did not shake."
"Then look again," Coral said. "Look again and look better. Maren, I am not asking you to write anything down. I am not asking you to sign anything. I am asking you to walk down the cliff path with me before the dark comes and to look at the place where the constabulary says he was found and to tell me, here in this room where no one can hear us, whether you believe it."
"Why would I believe it any more than I believed the last thing?"
"Because you are not a magistrate this time. Because there is no one waiting to put a rope around a neck on the strength of your word. Because Hester Fawn is not asking for vengeance. She is asking for her brother to be brought home and buried under a stone with his name on it instead of under the kelp at the bottom of the Blacktide with the rest of the drowned."
Maren stood up from the table. The chair scraped against the floorboards. She went to the window and looked out at the path that ran along the clifftop, and beyond the path at the pale line of the sea, and beyond the sea at the place where the sky came down to meet it and was no different from it. The gulls were crying, as gulls do in the afternoon when the wind comes off the water. A single fishing boat was making its way back toward the harbor, its sail a brown triangle against the grey.
"If we go down," she said, "we do not speak of it in the village. We do not speak of it at the inn. Widow Pell will have a cup ready for us when we come back, and we will drink the cup and we will say nothing about where we have been, and if Hester Fawn asks us what we have seen we will tell her what we have seen and nothing more."
"Yes," Coral said. "Yes. That is what I am asking."
"Then wait," Maren said. "I will put on my boots."
She went into the bedroom and took the boots from under the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress and drew them on. The leather was stiff from disuse. She had not worn them since the last time she had walked the cliff path, which was in the spring, when her mother was still alive and had asked her to bring a bundle of dried herbs down to Widow Pell at the inn. Her mother had died in the summer. The boots had not been out of the cottage since.
She laced them tight. She stood up. She went back through the kitchen and past the table where the purse still sat beside the cup, and she took a shawl from the hook by the door, because the wind off the sea was colder than it looked from the window.
Coral was waiting on the step. Wheezer was with her, sitting at her feet with his ears laid flat and his ribs showing through the rough fur. Groat was not there. Maren did not ask where Groat was. Some questions you did not ask in the afternoon.
"We will take the upper path," Maren said. "The one that goes past the old signal post. It is longer but it is safer, and the light will hold better."
"I know the path," Coral said. "I was born on this cliff."
They walked. The path was narrow and ran along the edge of the turf, with the gorse on one side and the drop on the other, and the drop went down to the rocks and the rocks went down to the sea. Maren kept her eyes on the path. She did not look down. She had not been able to look down since the day she had stood at the edge and watched the cart take the woman away, three years ago, though the cart had been on the road below the cliff and not on the rocks below the cliff, and the woman had been in the cart and not on the rocks, and yet the two things had become joined in her mind and she could not separate them.
Coral walked ahead of her, lightly, on the stones, with Wheezer at her heel. The girl moved like something born to the cliff, her feet sure where Maren's were careful, her body tilting into the wind as though the wind were a hand she knew. Maren watched the set of her neck, the way the tendons stood out when she turned to look back. There was a fierceness in the girl that Maren did not have, or had had once and had let go of. She was not sure which.
They came to the place where the path dipped toward a natural shelf of rock, sheltered on three sides, with a view down to a cove that the villagers called the Blacktide because of the colour of the water when the cloud came over. The shelf was wide enough for two people to stand and a third to sit, and there were marks on the stone, old marks, where generations of feet had worn the surface smooth.
Maren stopped. Coral stopped.
"There," Coral said, and pointed down.
Below them, at the foot of a scramble of loose stone that ran from the cliff path down to the cove, there was a place where the rock was darker than the rock around it, as though something had been dragged across it, or as though something had bled on it and the rain had not quite washed the stain away. A length of rope, frayed at one end, lay in a coil near the dark patch. A button, brass, glinted among the stones.
Maren looked at it. She looked at it for a long time. The wind pushed at her shawl and she pulled it tighter across her chest. The smell of the sea came up to her, salt and weed and the cold mineral smell of the rock itself, and beneath that smell there was another smell, fainter, that she did not want to name but that her nose named for her anyway. She had smelled it before. She had smelled it in the courtroom at the county town, when the man who was hanged had been brought in from the holding cell and the cell had been small and the air in it had been close.
"Someone was here," she said. "Someone was here, and they did not come down on their own feet. The rope is cut, not broken. The button is not from a fisherman's coat. It is from a coat of town cloth, the kind they sell in the county town. Look at the stitch."
"I have looked," Coral said. "I have looked every day since they told me where he was. Maren, the constabulary says he came down here alone. He was a clerk, Hester says. He was afraid of the water. He would not come down here alone in the dark for any reason."
"People do things in the dark they would not do in the light."
"They do," Coral said. "But not people like him. Not people who are afraid. And not to a place where they would have to swim."
Maren said nothing. She looked at the dark patch on the rock. She looked at the rope. She looked at the button. The wind was rising. The sea below was beginning to whiten at the edges.
"I will tell Hester what I have seen," Maren said. "I will tell her the rope was cut and the button is town cloth and the dark patch is what we both think it is. I will not write it down. I will not sign it. I will speak it to her, in her own cottage, with the door shut, and I will not speak it anywhere else."
"Will that be enough?"
"It will be enough for me. It will not be enough for the constabulary. But Hester is not the constabulary, and I am not the magistrate, and the boy is not in the ground yet. They have not found him, have they? They have only found the place."
"No," Coral said. "They have not found him."
"Then there is still something to be found. And I will help her look for it."
Coral turned and looked at her, and for the first time since Maren had opened the door, the set of her jaw softened. Not much. A little. The hollow beneath the ear was still there, and the fierceness was still there, but there was something else in her face now that had not been there before, and Maren did not have a name for it, but she thought it might have been the first edge of hope, or the first edge of something that was not yet hope but that would have to do in its place.
"Come," Maren said. "Widow Pell will have the kettle on."
They turned from the shelf and began the walk back along the path. The light was going out of the sky, but the path was clear, and the cottage was not far, and the bell in the tower at the top of the cliff was silent, and the sea was loud, and somewhere below the cliffs the drowned were waiting to be counted, as they always were, as they would be until the last fisherman stopped going out and the last bell was hung.
Maren walked behind Coral, and she thought of the woman in the cart, and she thought of the man in the holding cell, and she thought of the boy whose name she did not know yet, and she thought that perhaps the only honest thing a person could do with their eyes was to keep them open, even when what they saw was the thing they had prayed not to see.
The cottage came into view. The lamp was lit inside. Widow Pell's voice reached them on the wind, calling to Wheezer, who had gone ahead. And the bell in the tower did not ring.