CHAPTER TWO The Tide Mark
CHAPTER TWO
The Tide Mark
The Hallowwood in late autumn doesn’t behave like the rest of Vaelmoor. The oaks along the road go gold and drop the lot inside a fortnight. The Hallowwood only darkens, slowly, the way a room does towards evening, and its leaves stay put until something comes and takes them.
I walked up in the middle of the afternoon, and under the trees it was already six o’clock.
They said nothing to me. I’d spent the whole climb braced for it, for the name, that long soft sound they’d made at me a few weeks back, Nerissa, handed along the branches from one to the next. Nothing. Wind and wet bark, and a wren off to my left with a grievance of its own to air.
I ought to have been relieved. I was halfway to the door before I worked out that what I actually felt was snubbed.
? ? ?
She was on the step before I could knock, as she has been every single time since I was fifteen, and I’ve never once caught her getting there.
“Twenty-two days,” Mara said.
“I know.”
“I’m not scolding. I said it so you’d know I’d counted. Come in. The cat’s had the good chair, you’ll have to argue with him.”
The cottage smelled of woodsmoke and that green bitter stuff she hangs to dry over the fire every autumn. There was a pot going already, of course there was. I argued with the cat. The cat won, as he’s won since he was a kitten with a bad eye and I was twenty and neither of us had any sense.
She poured left-handed, badly, the way she has since the winter her right hand went stiff on her.
Too fast, so the tea ran up the side of the cup and a good spoonful slopped over onto the table, and she wiped it off with the heel of her palm and didn’t say sorry.
She never does. Years now of that same small spill and that same small wipe, and I’ve never told her how much I’d miss it if it stopped.
Then she sat back with her own cup held in both hands, not drinking from it, watching me over the rim, and let me get most of the way down mine before she started.
“Turn your face to the window.”
I’d walked up that hill twenty-two days late for the express purpose of this not happening, and the second she asked, I did it, like a child told to hold still. The afternoon light came in low over the sill and lay along my cheek and down my throat.
Mara looked. She took her time about it. I counted the ticks of the pot lid and got to forty.
“Well?” I said. “Is it going?”
“No.”
“It’s been fading. I’ve watched it fade. It’s half what it was three weeks ago, it’s.”
“It’s half what it was three weeks ago on the surface.” She put her cup down. “Child. Look at me. That’s no stain wearing off. It’s sinking.”
I put mine down as well, because my hand had decided it couldn’t be trusted with it.
“Sinking where.”
“Down. In. Wherever the rest of it went.” She leaned back.
“You came out of that water lit up like a lamp, by your own telling. Then the light went out of your hands, and your arms after, and now there’s a bit left in the soft places where you’re thinnest, and in a month there’ll be none anybody can see.
None of which means it’s leaving you.” She has a way of putting something dreadful down in front of you like a plate of bread. “Mm. Means it’s done arriving.”
? ? ?
I made her say it three different ways, and it came out the same every time.
At some point I got up and stood at the fire with my back to her, which I never do, and Mara let me. The cat came over and sat on my foot. Solidarity, or else the fire was warm.
“Am I going to change. My body. Am I going to.”
“I don’t know.”
“Mara.”
“I’d rather tell you I don’t know than tell you something nice that turns out a lie. I’ve had three weeks to decide which I’d sooner have said, if the worst came.” A pause. “It’s not a satisfying answer. I know that.”
I turned round. She looked older than she had a month ago, and I didn’t like that I’d noticed.
“Somebody put salt on my step.”
“Not me.”
“I didn’t think so. You’d have said. And you’d have used the cheap salt.” I sat back down. “I broke the line with my fingers. Was that stupid?”
“Rude. To whoever laid it. Whether it was stupid depends what they thought they were keeping out.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table.
“And I’d dearly like to know who in Duskmere is spending a handful of good salt on your doorway in autumn.
Ask about, if you can stand to. Not Wren.
She’ll sulk that she didn’t think of it first.”
That was the last of the easy part.
? ? ?
I asked it badly. I’ve been over it maybe four hundred times since, and whatever else I tell myself, I can’t pretend I asked it cleverly.
We’d come round to Nerissa the way we always do, sideways, off the back of something else.
Mara was saying the sea-born don’t scar, or not the same way, and that my mother had a mark on her shoulder that never took.
And I said, with no weight on it at all, the way you’d ask somebody how they take their tea:
“How long did you know her, in the end?”
And Mara said, “Three years.”
She said it perfectly. Right words, right tone, not a thing moving in her face, no hand wandering anywhere it shouldn’t. Anyone else in that room would have heard an old woman answer a simple question about a dead friend.
Only it came half a beat late.
I don’t mean a pause. People have paused at me my whole life, I know exactly what a pause looks like from my side of it, and so does she.
This was smaller than that and a good deal worse.
It was the gap you get when the answer’s already sitting there waiting and somebody spends half a second deciding to use it.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years watching men’s faces for the exact instant the wanting shows up, because my safety depended on catching it. I’m very good at half-beats. Of everything the Influence ever gave me, that’s the one bit I’d keep.
A log settled. The cat shifted on my foot.
“Three years,” I said. “That’s what I thought.”
? ? ?
We talked for another hour after that.
That’s the part I still can’t get comfortable with, more than the hesitation.
The hour. I sat in her chair with her cat on my foot and we talked about whether the fire still came when I called it, which it did, smaller, and whether I was sleeping, which I wasn’t.
She asked after Elias and meant it, and I told her he was reading his family into the ground, and she laughed properly at that, head back, all of her laughing.
And the whole hour, underneath, I was keeping a cold little ledger.
Three years would mean she met my mother the winter before Samuel was born.
It would mean she was in Duskmere for the marriage and the pregnancy and the second pregnancy and the end of it, and that everything she’s ever told me about Nerissa she saw up close.
Which is what I’ve always assumed. Which she’s never quite come out and said.
Which would have been the most ordinary thing in the world to say out loud, any time in the last nineteen years.
Or else three years is just the number that makes everything she’s already told me hang together.
It could be both. That’s the trouble with it. Nothing she said was wrong. I’ve got no charge to bring. What I’ve got is half a second of a woman’s silence in a warm room, and I’m building a case out of it against the person who taught me my letters.
I hated myself the whole way down the hill.
Because there’s a version of me, not a nice one, and I know her very well, who’s spent her life being told her feelings about people can’t be trusted, that whatever she reads in a room is spoiled by what her face does to the room.
And that woman would give a lot to catch somebody else out for once.
To be the one holding the half-beat, instead of the one being watched for it.
So I went down through the dark trees knowing I couldn’t tell, and I still can’t, whether I’d caught that hesitation because it was really there or because I’ve wanted for a very long time for somebody to owe me an explanation.
The Hallowwood didn’t say my mother’s name on the way down either. I’d stopped expecting it by then, and I listened the whole way anyway.
? ? ?
Four nights later I went down to the shore, because I couldn’t sleep, and because the pull under my ribs had been at it all night like a finger drumming on a table.
Low tide, an hour before dawn. The cove under my house isn’t a beach, really.
It’s a slot in the cliff with a shingle floor, forty feet across, and at low water you get a strip of wet stone and a lot of weed.
I played there as a girl. Samuel tried to teach me to skip flat stones there and I never did get the knack of it.
The light was that grey that isn’t light yet, just the dark going thin, and I came down the steps with my boots in my hand, because the steps are slippery and I broke my wrist on them at eleven.
I saw it from six feet up.
? ? ?
Someone had laid a line of things along the tide mark.
That was my first thought, and it was wrong, and I knew it was wrong before my foot was off the bottom step.
The tide mark’s where the water stops. Nobody lays anything down there on a rising tide unless they want it gone.
The sea had been over that stone ninety minutes before; the weed was still flat and dark where it had been.
The things were dry.
I stood on the shingle with my boots in my hand and didn’t go any closer. Not yet.
There were nine of them. Evenly spaced, a handspan apart, running dead straight alongside the water, and nothing broke the line, no weed, no stone. Each one sat in its own small clear patch of shingle, as if the shingle had shuffled over to make room.
The first was a comb. Tortoiseshell, three teeth missing.
I lost it off the harbour steps at fifteen, in a temper, flinging my hands about in the middle of telling Wren something furious I can’t even remember now.
It sailed over the edge into eight feet of water and we both laughed, and that was the end of the comb.