CHAPTER TWO The Tide Mark #2
The second was a boot. Child’s size, left foot, the leather gone black and hard as wood. I didn’t know it.
The third was a green hair ribbon, and that one I knew.
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I made myself go along the line properly, which meant crouching, which meant putting a hand down on the stone to keep my balance. The stone was cold and gritty and couldn’t have cared less about me.
Fourth, a knife with no handle, just the tang and a blade eaten away thin as a leaf.
Fifth, a button. Brass, with an anchor on it. Half the harbour wears that button.
Sixth, a hoop earring, gold, fine as wire. My mother’s. I’d never set eyes on it in my life, and I knew whose it was before my hand got anywhere near it, and I can’t explain that without sounding like everybody who’s ever said so afterwards.
Seventh, a key.
Eighth, a length of red cord with three knots in it, spaced the way Mara spaces hers.
And the ninth.
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The ninth was a wooden fish about the length of my thumb.
Samuel made it. He made it the December before he died, because I had a fever and he couldn’t think what else to do with his hands.
I have to go slowly here.
He was sixteen. He’d been sitting in that room four days because our father wasn’t going to, and he’d already worked out that he was the one in our house who did things, and he’d run out of things to do.
So he found a knife and a bit of soft wood off the boat pile and sat at the end of my bed where I could see him, and didn’t talk.
He carved for an hour and a half by one candle with the shavings dropping into the blanket, and every so often he’d hold it up and pull a face at it so I’d know it was going badly.
He cut the mouth wrong, and it came out permanently offended.
He knew, and he leaned right into it and cut the eyes a touch too wide, so the whole thing looked appalled.
When he finally put it in my hand he said, in a dreadful plummy voice, “Madam, I regret to inform you,” and I laughed, and laughing hurt, and I did it anyway.
“Something enormous has occurred,” he said, “and it is a fish.”
There was a hole through the tail where he threaded it on a lace.
I lost it in the harbour the summer I was seventeen, two years after him.
Off the end of the north jetty, messing about.
The lace snapped and it went down through the green water, and I went in after it in all my clothes in front of eleven people and stayed down until Hallam’s father got hold of my arm and dragged me out.
I fought him. I was still fighting him on the steps.
Nobody in this town has brought it up with me since, not once.
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It was dry. There was still a dark ring round the hole in the tail where the lace had been.
My knees went first, and not gracefully. I sat down hard on the wet shingle in my nightdress and the cold came straight up through the cotton, and I didn’t feel it for a long while.
I didn’t pick it up. That’s what I remember best. It lay in its little clear patch eight inches from my hand and I couldn’t make my arm move, because as long as I didn’t touch it I might still be wrong.
It might be some other child’s fish. There could have been two appalled fish in Duskmere that year, and mine could still be down in the harbour where it had been lying seventeen years.
I looked at it, and the sky got a fraction less dark.
Then I put both hands over my mouth and made a noise I hadn’t made since I was fifteen, in Mara’s kitchen, with my brother three hours dead. It came up from the very bottom of me and kept coming, and there was nobody in the cove to hear it, and if there had been I wouldn’t have stopped.
It wasn’t the fish. Or it wasn’t only the fish. Somebody had gone looking. Somebody had gone down through seventeen years of harbour mud and found the one thing at the bottom that could knock me off my feet, and brought it up and dried it and put it last in the line. And had known to put it last.
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I don’t know how long I sat there.
Long enough that when I did reach for it my fingers were stupid with cold and I dropped it twice.
It was warm. There was no sun, so it wasn’t that. It was blood-warm, warm like a thing that’s only just left somebody’s hand.
I held it in both fists against my chest and rocked over it like an old woman, and the tide came up the shingle behind me with that slow gravelly suck and slide, and I stayed a lot longer than I should have.
Then I was up and going along the line fast, grabbing, shoving things down the front of my nightdress like a thief. Comb, ribbon, earring, cord, key. The water came over the stone where the boot sat and took it back, and I let it. I let the knife go, and the button.
I got up the steps with the shingle sliding under my bare feet. Three teeth of the comb had gone into my palm and I didn’t notice till I was through my own door.
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Elias came up off the blanket in the front room with his hands already up, and stopped.
I must have been a sight. Nightdress soaked to the knee, hair stuck to my face, blood on one hand, and the whole front of me lumpy with stolen goods.
“Rose.”
“Don’t say anything. Not for a minute.”
He didn’t. He got the fire going instead, and put a blanket round my shoulders, and crouched down in front of the chair and waited. Not asking cost him something; I could see it in how he held his mouth, the muscle going in his cheek.
I laid them out on the hearthstone one by one, in the order I’d found them. He watched me do it. When I put the fish down last, he made a small sound in his throat.
“That’s the one you told me about. Off the jetty.”
“Yes.”
“You said nine.”
“There were nine. The tide took three back.” I turned my hand over and looked at the blood without much interest. “They were dry, Elias. Every one. The water had been over that stone an hour before, and they were dry, and this one was warm.”
“I believe you.” Quick, right over the top of me, and then quieter: “I believe you. Skip the bit where you convince me. We’re past needing that.”
“I was going to be very persuasive.”
“I know. You get a look.” He held out his hand, palm up, and left it there until I gave him mine.
He tipped the cut one towards the firelight and picked the three slivers of tortoiseshell out of the heel of my palm with his thumbnail, one at a time, slowly, the way a man lifts pins out of a lock.
He didn’t speak while he did it. His thumb stopped a moment on the inside of my wrist, where the last of the blue-gold was, and then went on.
He put each piece down on the hearthstone next to the fish.
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For a while neither of us said the obvious thing.
An attack you can just be frightened of. Fear’s simple. Something came up out of the water in my garden a month ago and put me through a wall, and I knew exactly what I was being told and exactly how I felt about it.
This was somebody sifting through a hundred years of harbour mud and picking out nine things, and knowing which nine to pick.
The comb, so I’d know it had been paying attention since I was fifteen. My mother’s earring, so I’d know it went back further than that. Mara’s cord, so I’d know it had been close enough to my life to have opinions about who was in it.
And Samuel, last in the line, still warm.
It had gone to a great deal of trouble to be gentle with me, and that was the worst of it. Nobody’s gentle with a thing they mean to break.
“It’s not hunting you,” Elias said at last.
“No.”
“It’s courting you.”
“Yes.” I looked at the little wooden fish on the hearthstone with the firelight on its appalled face. “And it’s good at it. It’s better at it than you.”
“I’ve never said I was any good at it.”
“No,” I said. “You haven’t.”
He got up and fetched a cloth and came back and wrapped my hand, badly, far too tight, and I let him do it badly because he needed something to do with his hands. I sat in that chair until the fire had burned right down, with the fish where I could see it, and neither of us went back to bed.