The Proof of the Pudding

One Year On the Tide

You can always tell the tide you come home on, and a year on I came home every single day — down the same hill, onto the same quay, to the same salt-scoured shop with my name over the door and, if the light hit it right, an older name showing through underneath. The difference was that this time the whole of Porthgowan waved.

I had stopped the van at the top of the coast road, where the hedge falls away and the whole village drops open beneath you like a hand unclosing. I do that most days now. It is a foolish habit and I have made my peace with it. A year ago I had stopped at this exact spot with a dead engine and a deader spirit, a London chef with scorched hands and a burnt-out heart, come to bury a grandmother I had come too late to save and to sell a bakehouse I had never wanted. I had looked down at Porthgowan then and seen a place that had already decided about me. Grey slate, grey water, a huddle of chimneys turning their backs to the wind, and somewhere among them a failing shop with the wrong name over the door.

Now I looked down and saw colour.

That was the first and simplest measure of the year: colour. The Fishermen's Arms had a coat of ox-blood red it hadn't been able to afford in a decade. Peggy's stores wore a fresh sea-green that made you thirsty just to see it. Half the harbour front had been scraped and primed and painted in the long light evenings of last autumn, out of money the village had, for once, had to spend — because the trade had come back, and come back, and kept on coming, the way the mackerel do when the water finally decides you have suffered enough. The quay below was thick with masts. Day boats and pleasure craft and the two big trip-boats that ran the coast now in season, and every one of them meant somebody down there wanting a pasty, a saffron bun, a slab of hevva cake still warm from my ovens. The developer's shadow that had hung over the whole front last summer — the smoked-glass "harbour apartments" scheme that would have turned the quay into a car park with a view — was gone as if the tide had taken it, which in a manner of speaking it had. Petroc Angove had a proper harbourmaster's flag flying again. St Gowan's had mended its bells.

And at the middle of it all, where the front elbows round to face the harbour mouth, stood a squat granite shop with a window full of gold, and over the window a board that said, in letters I had repainted myself, MEADE'S. If you came at it from the west with the afternoon sun raking low across the stone, you could still see, under the paint, the ghost of the older sign it had carried for a hundred years before my grandmother turned it to the wall — TREGONING & DAUGHTER, cut deep into the granite by a hand long dead. A year ago that buried name had frightened me. Now it steadied me, the way a keel steadies a boat: the weight you cannot see, holding you the right way up.

I let off the brake and went on down, and the village waved.

That is not a figure of speech. Denzil Nancarrow, eighty-five and immortal, lifted his stick from the bench by the slip. Rev. Hester Quick, up a ladder outside the church door hanging a banner that read MIDSUMMER HARBOUR FESTIVAL, took one hand off the ladder to do it, which stopped my heart for other reasons. A gaggle of Peggy's summer girls, unloading strawberries, waggled punnets at me. I had spent thirty-three years being a stranger everywhere I went, in kitchens that measured a person by how much of themselves they were willing to burn, and it had taken this cold small granite place to teach me that being known is not the same as being watched. Being known is being waved at. I still hadn't quite got used to it. I hoped I never would.

I parked in the yard behind the shop, and the smell reached me before I had the door open — that deep, sweet, breathing warmth of a bakery at full tilt, flour and butter and the particular high perfume of saffron steeping, Gran's colour, Cornish gold, the true worth of a thing against all the fool's-gold in the world. Under it, low and yeasty and alive, the smell of a great mass of dough proving in the warm. We had a lot of dough proving. On Saturday, God and the tide willing, Porthgowan was going to attempt something no village on this coast had ever tried, and my ovens were the engine of it.

Kensa was at the bench when I came through, sleeves shoved up, a smear of flour along one cheekbone like war paint, shaping saffron buns with a speed and a certainty that a year ago she had not owned and did not know she was owning now. Twenty years old and going like a machine, tuck and turn and set, tuck and turn and set, the little golden domes coming off her hands in even rows. I stood in the doorway a moment and just watched her, because watching her still undid me a little. When she'd first come to me she'd burned everything she touched and cried about it in the yard. Now she baked like a professional, and the terrible truth I'd been carrying around for a month, unable to say, was that she was very nearly better than she needed me at all.

"You're staring," she said, without looking up. "It's off-putting."

"I'm quality-controlling."

"You're standing in the doorway letting the warm out." She flicked a glance at me, then back at her buns, and there was something knowing in it, because Kensa Chynoweth missed nothing that happened in my kitchen or, increasingly, in my head. "Curtis rang. Twice. He says if you don't give him a final number for the scone flour by five o'clock he's ordering his own way and we can, and I quote, 'live with the consequences.'"

I laughed. There is a great deal packed into the fact that Curtis Pengelly and I now argued about scone flour instead of stealing each other's recipes. A year and a bit ago the man who owned the Gilded Crumb up the front had been my enemy in the pure clean way of two shops too close together with too little trade between them, and last summer he had very nearly been something worse. Now we were partners in a piece of gorgeous madness. The centrepiece of Saturday's festival — the thing Hester's banner and the whole county's newspaper interest were pinned on — was to be a village-wide cream tea: every household, every visitor, every soul on the quay sitting down at once at trestle tables strung the length of the harbour, to a scone and jam and clotted cream, all of it made in Porthgowan, all of it served in a single hour, going for a record nobody had thought to set before because nobody but us had ever been mad enough. Curtis's ovens and mine, running as one. His crumb, my saffron. Twin hearths where there had been two cold wars.

"Tell him four hundredweight," I said, "and tell him if he orders his own way I'll put it about that his scones have shop bought cream in and let the village sort him out."

"He'll enjoy that," Kensa said. "He likes it when you threaten him. It's the closest either of you gets to saying you're friends." She set her tray aside, wiped her hands, and looked at me properly, and I felt the conversation I had been avoiding for a month gather itself and rise in the room like heat off a proving cloth. She wanted me to say it. She half knew what it was. And I, who had faced down a killer on the quay and a coroner in a cold room, could not get the word partner past my own teeth. Not yet. Not while there was still one thing in this shop unfinished.

I put it off, the way I had been putting it off. "Where's the beast?"

She jerked her chin at the window.

Barnacle owned the front sill the way a magistrate owns a bench — vast, ginger, one-eared, wholly unbothered, folded into a loaf of himself in the last of the sun with the gold-glazed buns on one side of the glass and the whole thriving quay on the other, and the settled expression of a creature who considers all of it, reasonably, to be his. He had come with the shop. He had, in a manner nobody could argue with, come with the name. He opened his one good eye at me, decided I was neither food nor threat, and shut it again.

My phone went in my apron. I looked at the screen and felt the small warm click of another arc landing. DS Anand.

"Priya."

"Robyn." No preamble; there never was, now. "Quick one. If a man wanted to hide a quantity of something in a Cornish harbour village on a festival Saturday and have it look ordinary, where would he put it?"

"Depends what and how much. Is this a real question or a training-day question?"

"Training day, God help me. Camborne's making me do a scenario for the new DCs and I would rather ask someone who actually knows how a village breathes than make it up." A pause, and something dry under it. "Also I wanted to know you were still coming to the festival off duty, so I don't have to spend Saturday pretending I don't know you."

There had been a time — it felt like another woman's life — when Detective Sergeant Priya Anand had looked at me the way the whole village once had, as an inconvenient stranger who wouldn't leave a tidy story alone. She had reached for the easy answer, once, and it had nearly cost an innocent everything, and it had cost her something too, some old wound of a case gone wrong that she never named and I never asked about. Now she rang me first. Now she trusted my word before she trusted a tidy one. It was, of all the year's changes, the one I'd have bet against hardest.

"I'm coming," I said. "I'm running the thing. Bring your appetite and leave the warrant card at home."

I rang off smiling, and the smile carried me back through the warm kitchen and into the little room behind it that I had never quite decided whether to call an office or a shrine.

It had been Gran's. It still was, mostly. Her chair, her ledgers in her cramped hand, the tin clock that lost four minutes a day and always had. And on the shelf above the desk, between a jar of dried saffron crocus and the framed, water-stained photograph of Loveday Meade outside this very door in 1975, the two things that had rearranged my whole life and the small dull thing that hadn't yet.

The two things were a heavy canvas bag of gold sovereigns and a folder of old freehold deeds, both of them recovered last spring out of a hidey-hole and a world of trouble, and both of them the reason I could stand in this shop now and not be afraid of losing it. The small dull thing was a brass key.

I picked it up, the way I did too often. It was no bigger than my thumb, dark with age, a plain barrel and a worked bow with a shape in it that might have been a wave or might have been a wheat-ear, worn too smooth to say. It had come to me that first summer, in a firebrick tin behind the oven, wrapped in a scrap of paper in a hand not Gran's, and on the paper five words: For whoever proves true. It had fit the tin it came in and nothing else since. Ten times I'd thought I had its lock. Ten times I'd been wrong. It had opened the front door of nothing at all.

But I was close now. That was the thing that made this festival ache under the joy of it. Since last spring I'd had the sovereigns, and the deeds, and enough of the story to know that my grandmother had never stolen a farthing from anyone, whatever the village had whispered for forty years — that the shame she'd carried to her grave, the sign she'd turned to the wall, the name she'd hidden, was a wrong done to her and not by her. I was one document short of the whole of it. One document, and one account in one dead woman's own hand — Grace Tregoning's, whoever Grace Tregoning truly was to us — and then I would know the last of who Loveday had been, and, I had begun to suspect on the cold nights, the last of who I was. The key sat on the shelf and waited, the way the buried name under my sign waited, the way the sea waits: patient, certain, in no hurry at all, because it knows nothing stays sunk forever.

"You'll wear it away, handling it so."

Ivy Bosworth was in the doorway with two mugs of tea she had made herself in my kitchen without asking, because at seventy-five she had earned the run of any kitchen she pleased and mine most of all. Gran's oldest friend, my own fairy godmother, the woman who had stood at the graveside and then simply refused to let me be alone. She was slower this year, and dearer, and there was a new carefulness in the way she came down the step. Behind her, easing himself into Gran's chair with the enormous dignity of the very old, came Denzil, who had walked up from the bench because he had heard I was back and because, he said, the festival wanted talking about and nobody talked about it right but him.

"It'll open on its own time," Ivy said, pressing a mug into my hand and folding my fingers round the key with the other. "Loveday's things always did. She'd not be rushed and neither will they. Now. Denzil's got a face on him."

He had. Denzil Nancarrow had a face on him like weather coming.

"Have 'ee heard," he said, "about the cellars."

Something in the warm room cooled. "What about the cellars?"

"Sold." He said it the way you'd say drowned. "The old pilchard cellars, down under the quay, where the Trevails have brewed since afore my father's time. Some man come down from up-country and bought the whole warren of 'em off the estate, quiet as you like, and now he's here for the festival to — what's the word Peggy had —"

"Unveil," said Ivy, and made the word sound like something scraped off a boot.

"Unveil." Denzil's hands worked on his stick. "A Cornish Cellars Experience, if you please. Going to gut old Cador out of the stone his people have fermented in four generations, put in his colour lights and his gift shop and sell the dark back to the trippers at four pound a slice. And Cador and his maid Demelza, that make the best cider and the best cheese on this coast in that cold hole, out on the quay with nowhere to go." He looked at me from under his white brows, and there was a grief in it that was older than this news. "Feels wrong, Robyn. Feels like the very thing you sent packing last summer, come round again in a better suit."

I set the key back on the shelf. I did not say what I was thinking, which was the same thing, in almost the same words.

I finished my tea. I told Ivy I'd walk them out. And I went, because I could not help it, not up the front to the shop but down the other way, across the cobbles and past the fish store to the slip, where a man was sitting on an upturned punt in the low gold light with a coil of rope over his knee and a splice half-made in his brown hands, unbothered as the cat, easy in the world in the way I had spent my whole life not being and had lately, at last, learned to be near.

Sam Trerise. Coxswain of the Porthgowan lifeboat, boatbuilder by trade, and — I still had to say it slowly in my own head to believe it — mine. The boatyard by the slip and the bakehouse on the quay, side by side, the way we had somehow, without ever quite deciding a day for it, become side by side. He looked up when my shadow fell across his splice, and the whole hard year in his face went soft at one corner of his mouth, and I thought, not for the first time, that I would burn every kitchen in London to the ground again if it delivered me here.

"Heard you'd been standing at the top of the hill again," he said. "Angove saw your van. Village thinks you've gone soft."

"Village is right." I sat beside him on the punt. The tide was making, licking up the slip toward the weed-line, and below us, cut into the rock where the quay met the water, the low black mouths of the Trevail cellars breathed out their cool damp stone-and-cider air into the summer afternoon. Somewhere down in that dark, Cador Trevail's great vats would be working away at their slow patient business, the same slow patient business as the dough breathing under the cloths in my own warm shop — yeast eating sugar, the invisible breath rising. Above the oldest cellar door, if you scraped the lichen, they said there was a name cut in the stone. I had never scraped it. I wish now that I had, that day, and looked, and understood a year sooner what I was looking at.

Up on the quay, in front of those dark mouths, a man had appeared. A man in a suit too good for a harbour, pale grey, London-cut, the kind of suit that has never once carried a fish or a warp or a hundredweight of flour, and he was walking the cellar frontage with a phone held up filming and his other arm making wide proprietary sweeps at the stone, at the water, at the whole breathing dark, pointing at things he plainly meant to own. Bunting was going up along the quay behind him, string by string, red and white and gold, exactly where the bunting had gone up the summer a man died on it.

Sam followed my eyes. He didn't stop his splicing.

"Feels like last summer come round again, doesn't it," Sam said, coiling a warp over his arm and nodding up at the cellars, where a man in a suit too good for a harbour was pointing at things he meant to own. "Different suit. Same appetite." I looked at the bunting going up along the quay, exactly where it had gone up the year a man died on it, and I felt the old cold flicker under all my new happiness. "Let's hope," I said, "that's the only thing that comes round."

A Cellar Full of Breath

A great proving is the most alive a kitchen ever gets. Forty pounds of dough breathing in the warm, swelling under the cloths like something dreaming — and every bubble of it the same simple magic: yeast eating sugar and breathing out gas, the invisible breath that lifts the bread. I have loved that breath my whole life. It had never once occurred to me that it could kill a man.

We had the whole back of the bakehouse turned over to it. Every bowl I owned and three I'd borrowed off Curtis stood in ranks along the bench, and each one wore its cloth like a christening gown, and each one had begun, very quietly, to rise. Kensa moved down the line with a jug of milk-and-butter still blood-warm, pouring, and I came behind her with the flour, and between us the dough came together under our hands the way it has come together under bakers' hands since before anyone thought to write it down.

"How many splits does a record want, then," Kensa said, not really asking. She had flour to the elbow and a smear of it up one cheek where she'd pushed her hair back, and she looked about twelve, and she was, I had lately been forced to admit, better at laminating than I was.

"Curtis says eight hundred." I thumped a mass of dough over and folded it into itself. "So we make a thousand. You never bake to the number, you bake to the day. Bakes go wrong. Grannies come back for seconds. And a village that's told there'll be free splits and then finds there aren't will remember it longer than the Reformation."

"A thousand." She blew out. "That's — how much is that proving?"

"Forty pound of dough today. More tomorrow." I nodded at the ranked bowls. "That's what all that is. Look."

I lifted the cloth off the nearest and we both bent over it. The surface had gone from a smooth pale skin to a landscape — domed, freckled, faintly shining, and shot all through, when you looked close, with a fine lace of holes, some no bigger than a pin, some you could have posted a lentil into.

"There," I said. "Every one of those holes is a breath. Yeast is a little living thing — millions of them in that bowl, more than there are people in Cornwall, more than there are in England. Warm them, wet them, feed them sugar, and they eat. And what they breathe out, same as you and me, is gas. Carbon dioxide. It can't get out through the dough, so it stays, and it pushes, and it puffs the whole thing up like a lung. That's your rise. That's the whole of it. That's why bread is soft instead of a brick."

Kensa poked the risen dough and it sighed and settled a little around her finger. "It's alive."

"It's alive until I put it in an oven hot enough to kill it. Which is most of cooking, when you think about it too hard, so don't." I dropped the cloth back. "And here's the thing you keep in your bones once you've done this long enough: the gas is the whole point, and the gas is nothing to play with. You never, ever, seal a thing that's fermenting hard. Cork a bottle of live cider and leave it and it'll go off in the night like a shotgun. Bung a fermenting vat tight and it'll split its own staves. The breath has to have somewhere to go."

"Or?"

"Or it goes where it likes. And here's the mean little secret of it —" I held my hand flat, palm down, and lowered it slowly toward the floor. "Carbon dioxide's heavier than the air we breathe. You can't see it, you can't smell it, it doesn't do you the courtesy of stinking or stinging. It just sinks. Fills a low place from the bottom up, quiet as water, and sits there. Any baker worth her salt treats a shut ferment room the way you'd treat a well — you air it before you trust it. My old pastry chef in London had a cold cellar we proved in overnight and there was a rule pinned to the door in his own hand: PROP THE DOOR. Because you can walk into a lungful of nothing and never know you did."

I said it the way you say a thing you've said a hundred times, the way a fisherman says never turn your back on the sea — a piece of the trade, warm and worn and dull with use. Kensa nodded, filed it, went back to the milk. And I turned back to the bench and the good living smell of it, and thought about the sentence I had been carrying around in my apron pocket for a fortnight and could not, somehow, get out of my mouth.

Kensa. I want you to be my partner.

It was true. It was overdue. She had grown from the girl who could not be trusted near a hot tray into a baker I would put against anyone Curtis could hire, and the bakehouse was as much hers now as mine, and every week I didn't say it was a week I was letting her think she was still on trial. I opened my mouth. She looked up, floury and expectant. And what came out was, "Cover the second batch when it's doubled, I'm going down for cream," which is not the same sentence at all, and we both knew it, though only I knew why.

Coward, I told myself, and untied my apron, and went out into the light.

---

Porthgowan wore its festival face. Bunting crossed the quay in loops, boats had come in early and lay gunwale to gunwale showing off their brasswork, and along the front the whole village was hanging out its best — Peggy's window a pyramid of jam, the Fishermen's Arms rolling out barrels, St Gowan's flying a banner that Rev. Quick had certainly not sewn herself. And under all of it, cut into the living rock below the quay, older than the quay, older than the church, went the cellars.

You reached the Trevail cellars down a flight of granite steps worn to hollows, through a low arched mouth that breathed cold at you before you were halfway down. I'd been in and out of them a dozen times for cream and cider since I came home, and I never went in without the back of my neck lifting a little. It is a proper old Cornish pilchard cellar, or a warren of them, one leading into the next: thick walls of dressed stone, low barrel-vaulted roofs a tall man must stoop under, floors of slate flags gone slick and dark. In the old days they'd pressed pilchards down here by the hundred thousand, salted and stacked them in great baulks, and pressed the oil out under weighted planks; you can still see the runnels cut in the floor to carry the train-oil away. It smells of that even now, under everything — salt and old fish and stone and the cold — and over it, warmer and sweeter, the smell that means the Trevails still work it: apples and honey and the yeasty tang of things turning slowly into drink.

Demelza was in the upper vault, where the light from the door still reached, up to her forearms in a muslin-lined trough of curd. She had her mother's cheeses going — I'd sold half a round of her nettle-wrapped truckle in the bakehouse the week before and had three people come back asking — and she looked up at me over it with a face that was handsome and cross and about as courtly as a slammed door.

"Robyn." She wiped her hands. "Cream, is it. Dad's below. Mind the steps, they've been dripping."

"How much can you spare me for a record?"

"All of it, at what Curtis is paying." A flash of a grin, gone as fast. Then the crossness came back and settled, and she jerked her chin at the far dark, toward the deep cellar. "You'll have to squeeze past his lordship's tape measures. They're down here again. Been down here weeks."

"Rashleigh's man?"

"Rashleigh's man, Rashleigh's other man, Rashleigh's dehumidifier the size of a fridge." She said the word dehumidifier the way you'd say an obscenity in church. "Measuring us out of existence, flag by flag. Drying the place out for his — what does he call it — his reveal." She turned back to her curd, and drove her hands into it harder than the curd deserved. "Four generations we've turned this rock into cider and he's going to turn it into a gift shop and charge you four pound to look at a photograph of us doing it. Go on down. Dad'll be glad of you. He's better company than I am today, and that's not saying much."

The passage to the lower cellar dropped again, another six steps, into the true dark, and here I stopped as I always did, because here was the rule of the place made iron.

Over the mouth of the deep cellar the rock was bored through to the quay above by a ventilation shaft, a stone throat as wide as a chimney, and across the bottom of it hung an iron hatch on a pintle, and the hatch was propped wide open with a baulk of oak worn shiny by a hundred years of propping. You felt the draught of it on your face, a thin cold thread of moving air going up. Beside it, painted on the whitewash in letters gone the colour of weak tea, someone long dead had written: HATCH OPEN OR STAY OUT.

"Mind the notice," said a voice from below, warm as a hand on your back, "and you'll do."

Cador Trevail came up out of the dark toward me with a hurricane lamp, though the electric bulbs strung along the vault were burning; he liked the lamp, he told me once, because it told him things the bulb couldn't. He was a big man gone spare with age, brown as a hazelnut, with white hair like carded wool and hands so scarred and stained with his trade they might have been carved from one of his own apple trees. He had a way of inclining his head when you spoke that made you feel you'd said something worth the hearing.

"Robyn Meade," he said, as if my name were a small good piece of news. "Come for cider as well as cream, I hope. I've a mead too that I'd not be ashamed to set before the Queen, if we still had one to hand." He set the lamp on a barrelhead. "But mind, now — the hatch."

"I'd never come down past a notice like that."

"No more you should." He nodded at the propped iron. "Four hundred year folk have fermented in this hole, and every one of them that lived to be old kept that hatch propped. It's the deep cellar does it — she's the lowest floor in the parish, lower than the harbour bed, and what the vats breathe out has nowhere to run but down and along the floor. So we give it a road up and out." He tapped the oak baulk with his boot, fond, the way you'd cuff a good dog. "Hatch open or stay out. You could carve it on my stone."

"I say near enough the same thing to my girl about a ferment room," I said, and I meant it, and something passed between us — the recognition of one person of the trade for another. He heard it. His eyes creased.

"Ah, you'd know," he said, pleased. "You'd know. Come and see, then."

The deep cellar opened out bigger than I'd thought, the vault higher, cathedral-dark past the throw of the lamp, and it was full of a sound before it was full of anything else: a low, thick, working murmur, a fat contented seething, coming from three great open vats that stood along the far wall like standing stones. I knew that sound in my sleep. It was the sound of my own bowls upstairs, only vast — a whole slow flood of yeast at its labour. Cador led me between them and I looked down into the nearest and the surface heaved and turned, a brown roil of apples and froth, breaking and closing, breaking and closing, and every break of it a bubble let go.

"Festival cider," he said. "And that's the mead, and that's the perry beyond. Pitched them all a purpose for Saturday." He rested his hand on the vat's shoulder. "Feel how she works."

I laid my palm flat on the cold wet stave and felt it — a faint continuous tremor, the whole great vessel alive with the same breath I made upstairs by the bowlful. Down here in the still low air you could feel the weight of what it gave off; the draught of the hatch pulled it up and away in a thin steady stream, and I found myself, without deciding to, glancing back at the propped iron to be sure it hadn't moved.

"She'll not sit still, will she," I said.

"Never. Not while there's sugar in her." He beamed. It was pure pleasure, the pleasure of a man showing a good horse to someone who can ride. "That's the trick of the whole thing, maid. You've to know her. Warm her too little and she sulks and you've flat cider for the festival and shame on your name. Warm her too much, feed her too hard, and she'll run away from you — froth over, turn thin, blow herself out before the day and be past her best when it's wanted." He moved to the second vat, dipped a long wooden thief into it, drew up a measure and held it to the lamp, and squinted at it, and smelled it, and did not taste it. "This one I fed fresh this morning. She'll climb now, and climb, and come to her height — her peak, where she's working her hardest and breathing her most — Friday evening, near enough dark. And by Saturday noon she'll be steadied and sweet and just so, and I'll draw her for the contest, and she'll win it, because she always does."

"You can call it that close? To the evening?"

"To the hour." He said it without a scrap of boasting; he said it the way I'd say butter melts at ninety degrees, as a plain fact of the made world. "Temperature and sugar and yeast and time — it's all one language, and I've spoke it sixty year. You give me the vat and the weather and the strain I've pitched, and I'll tell you the hour she peaks the way you'd tell me the tide." He lowered the thief back into the murmuring dark. "A true master leaves nothing to luck, maid. Nothing. Luck's for men who don't know their trade and want an excuse ready."

Somewhere below us, further down still, there was a sound of water — a slow slap and suck against stone.

"Tide's in the sump," Cador said, seeing me listen. "She comes up through the floor down the far end twice a moon, spring tides. Fills the lowest bit knee-deep and drains again with the ebb — always has. That's why the good stuff stands up here on the flags and the fools' work goes down there to be washed away." He chuckled. "The sea keeps her key to this place, and always did. You can't own a cellar the sea walks into when she pleases. Somebody ought to tell his lordship."

At the far end of the deep cellar, past the vats, past the reach of the lamp, was the oldest door — a low iron-strapped slab of oak set in an arch that was rounder and rougher than the others, older stone, first stone. And above it, where the whitewash gave out and the bare rock furred over green and grey with the lichen of centuries, something had been cut into the stone. Letters. Deep-graven, old, half-swallowed. I only half-saw them, the way you half-see a name on a stone you're not looking for; I couldn't have read them if you'd asked. But some quiet thing in my chest, some thing that had been listening for a year, turned its head.

And in my pocket, where it lived, where it had lived every day since the winter I first came home and found it in Gran's firebrick tin, the brass key seemed to weigh a half-ounce more.

It fit nothing. I had tried it in every lock in the bakehouse, in the church door, in Denzil's sea-chest and Ivy's escritoire and the poor-box at St Gowan's; a stubby old brass key with a barrel worn bright and a shank green with age, and Gran's own hand on the paper it was wrapped in — for whoever proves true. Ten locks I'd tried it in. None of them was its. I stood under the lichened arch with cider breathing all around me and looked at letters I couldn't read, and thought, not for the first time and not the last, there is a lock somewhere in this parish that you were cut for. Then I thought about a thousand splits and eight hundred guests and Curtis's face if I let him down, and I put the key back in its corner of my mind, and closed the drawer on it.

I bought my cream and two firkins of the festival cider and a bottle of the mead for luck, and Cador himself carried them up the worn steps for me and would not let me take a handle, and set them by the mouth in the good daylight, and dusted his hands, and looked back down into the dark of his kingdom with the plain love of a man who has never wanted to be anywhere else.

Denzil was on the quay when I came up, on his bollard, in the sun, mending nothing with great authority, the way he did. He watched me set my firkins down and jerked his chin at the cellar mouth.

"Been down to Cador's, then."

"For the festival."

"Ah." He worked his gums. His pale old eyes went past me to the dark arch and stayed there, and his voice dropped into the register he kept for the things he half-remembered and wholly believed. "The Tregonings pressed their pilchards in them cellars, maid. Afore your gran's time. Afore mine, even, and that's saying summat." He tied a knot that didn't need tying. "And afore that —" a longer pause, a sea-pause, the kind that waits for the wave "— they kept more than fish down there. Oh, ay. More than fish."

I waited. But Denzil had said his say; he shut his mouth on the rest of it the way the tide shuts on a rock, and turned his face back to the sun, and left the words hanging in the warm air like the bunting.

I filed that too. There was a festival to bake.

I went back down at the end of the day, for the empty firkins, when the light was long and gold on the water and the whole village smelled of paint and possibility. Cador was still there, of course. Cador was always there. He had the lamp lit again and he was standing between his vats in the murmuring dark with his head tilted, listening to them the way I listen to a proving, and when I asked him — because I couldn't not — whether he ever worried, with the whole of Saturday riding on it, that a vat might turn on him at the last, he smiled.

"A master leaves nothing to luck, maid," Cador Trevail said, laying his brown hand on the shoulder of a bubbling vat as gently as you'd touch a horse, "and everything to the clock. I could tell you the hour that one'll come to its height without looking — I've the whole of it in here." He tapped his temple, and smiled at me like one craftsman to another, and I smiled back, and above us, under a hundred years of lichen, a name I hadn't yet learned to read waited in the dark.