Salt of the Wound

The Long Ebb

The harbour was empty when I came down for the milk — not quiet-empty but gone, the whole inner basin drained to mud and chain and leaning boats, the way the big autumn springs drain it twice a day, as if the sea had thought better of Porthgowan and left on the long ebb.

I stood at the top of the slip with the milk warming in my hand and let it work on me the way it still did. In London I had never once looked at the sky before nine. Here the light got up before I did, and by half-past seven it was already going long and low and gold across the flats, laying every mooring-chain out in a bright wet line, glazing the flanks of the boats where they lay over on their bilges like tired dogs. The Morwenna leaned east. The Pride of Gwithian leaned west, so far you'd swear she'd never right. Gulls walked the mud on their red legs, unhurried, picking, and out past the harbour mouth the sea was a hard hammered pewter with the first white going on it, and the wind that came off it had teeth I hadn't felt since March.

The equinox. Denzil had been promising it for a fortnight, the way other men promise Christmas. The big springs are coming, maid. She'll suck the harbour dry and she'll fill it to the quay-lip, and somewhere in between she'll blow. And here it was: the tide gone out so far and so fast it left the mud steaming, and off south-west, low over Gullrock, a smudge of weather the colour of a bruise, muttering to itself, coming on slow.

Behind me my own shopfront was doing its best to fall down.

The August gale had done it — the tail of the one that took three slates off the Institute and a chimney-pot off the vicarage. It had got its fingers under the top edge of Meade's Bakehouse and peeled the paint back in long curling ribbons, so that the sign now read MEAD'S B KEHO SE, which Peggy said made me sound like a strong-drink establishment and which I had not had the sixty pounds to have seen to. Under the peeled place something older showed through, a ghost of darker lettering I hadn't looked at properly, meaning to and never finding the hour. There was always a more urgent thing. The roof, for one. Two buckets stood in the flour store this morning where the rain had come in overnight, and the sound of them filling in the small hours was the sound my mind now made when it worried, which was most of the time.

The bank had written on Tuesday. I hadn't opened it. I knew the shape of what it said the way you know the shape of a stone in your shoe.

But the Feast of the Nets was three days off, and that changed the arithmetic of everything.

Three days. Then the bunting and the lanterns strung the whole length of the quay, the blessing of the boats, the huer up on the headland to cry the old cry, the pilchard supper, and every table in Porthgowan carrying hevva cake for the crews. Three days, and the village would swell to twice itself, and if I baked cleverly and did not sleep I might take in a season's trade across one long gold weekend and buy myself another winter. It was that thin. It had been that thin since the day I came home too late to save Gran and stayed anyway, out of grief and stubbornness and something I hadn't a name for. But thin was not the same as gone. I had learned that this summer, if I had learned anything.

I took the milk in, started the ovens, set Kensa's dough to prove, and went out again while it worked, because the boatyard would have the kettle on and I wanted, before the day took me, to stand somewhere the roof was not my problem.

---

Sam Trerise's yard sat by the slip where the hard road ran down into the water, and it smelled the way I had come to like a great deal — of larch shavings and hot pitch and linseed, of the sea underneath all of it. He had the Water Rail up on the trestles with her garboard off, and he was down on his heels running a thumb along her keel, and when my shadow fell across him he didn't look up, only said, "Kettle's boiled twice waiting on you," which was Sam for good morning.

"I had a roof to catch in a bucket."

"How many buckets now?"

"Two. It's a growth industry."

He stood, unfolding, and wiped his hands down his front, and gave me the look he gave — steady, warm, a little amused at the edges, the sort of look that made you feel he'd already forgiven you something you hadn't done yet. A year ago we had circled each other like two cats over the business of Gran's good name. Now he poured me tea in the chipped enamel mug that had somehow become mine, no sugar, the way I took it, and I sat on the upturned dinghy that had somehow become mine too, and neither of us said anything about how easy it had got, because saying it would have spoiled it.

"She's away out," I said, nodding at the mud.

"Springs." He drank. "Big 'uns, these. Equinox pulls her hard." He set the mug on the Water Rail's planking and, without my asking — he never made you ask; I think he thought a person ought to be handed the tide the way you're handed bread — he reached the folded tide table off the nail by the door and opened it on his knee. "Look. High water tonight's near enough eight. By two in the morning she's down to nothing, bare mud right across the inner harbour, and the bar dry as your hand — you could walk to the Morwenna and never wet your boot. Then up she comes again, brims to the quay by half-eight tomorrow." He ran a blunt finger down the printed column. "That's your clock, Robyn. Not the church. Everything here runs on that. When the men fish, when they can't, when they cross the bar and when the bar won't let them. When the pilchards move. When you can land and when you'd drown trying."

I looked at the column of times and, this was the new thing, this summer's small quiet miracle, they had started to mean something to me. In June they'd been Chinese. Now I could read the shape of a day off them — the double dip and swell of it, the hours the harbour had a floor and the hours it had a face. Sam had done that. Sam and the sea and a summer of standing on the slip at the turn while he named things for me.

"You're getting it," he said, watching me read, and there was a warmth in it that I put down carefully, like a hot dish, where I wouldn't have to look at it.

"I can nearly tell you when to expect me for tea."

"That'd be a first." He folded the table away. Then the ease went out of him a degree, the way a day cools when a cloud comes over, and he looked out at the drained harbour and the leaning fleet, and I saw the thing that was really on him, that was on the whole village, come up in his face.

"You've heard about Ferris," he said.

"I've heard the name. Peggy says it the way she says damp."

"Marcus Ferris." He picked a shaving off the plank and turned it in his fingers. "Up-country man. Suit. Calls himself a fisheries consolidator, which is a word they invented so you wouldn't hear the word undertaker in it." A short laugh with no laughing in it. "He's been at it a year, quiet. You don't buy a boat off a Porthgowan man — he'd sooner burn her. So Ferris doesn't buy boats. He buys the licences. The quota. The paper that says a man's allowed to fish, and how much. Without it your boat's a bath toy." He flicked the shaving down into the mud. "Some he's bought off men that were drowning in debt and glad of the rope, not seeing it was round their necks. Some he's — worked at. Leaned on the bank here, called in a chandler's bill there, till a family had to sell or sink."

"And they sell to him."

"They sell to him. And here's the trick of it — he's not keeping them fishing. Everyone thought, first, he was some green-scheme sort, save-the-fish, and he let 'em think it. He isn't. Once he's got enough of the quota in his one hand, he strips it. Moves it. Sells the right to fish it away up to a big outfit the far side of the country, and Porthgowan's left with the pretty boats and no paper to work them. A working harbour turns into a postcard. Holiday lets and a gift shop and us gone." He said us the way you'd say a thing you'd bled for. "That's what's coming down the quay to the Feast, Robyn. He's got nearly all of it. There's one licence left he wants — the keystone, the last big holding — and word is he means to close on it this weekend, with the bunting up and the boats blessed and all. Buy the last of us at the party."

I thought of the fleet lying over on the mud, patient, tide-broke, waiting for the water to come and lift them, and of a man in a good coat with a pen.

"Whose licence?" I asked. "The last one."

Sam looked at his hands. "That's the queer part," he said. "But you'll hear it soon enough. Half of it's the talk of the town and the other half nobody'll say above a whisper." And he'd say no more on it then, which wasn't like him, and I let it lie, because the dough would be up and the day had me.

---

It had me all morning, the ordinary blessed grind of it. Kensa slouched in eleven minutes late with her phone held up filming the mud — "It's sick, Robyn, look, the whole harbour's like an alien planet" — and I put her to knocking back the dough and she filmed that too, her thumb going, the world watching a nineteen-year-old's hands in flour. She was quick and she was gifted and she pretended to be neither, and when I wasn't looking she'd turned out a hevva cake for the Feast trials that came from the oven so exactly right, the criss-cross scored clean and even, the crumb close and buttered and studded, that I'd stood holding it and said nothing, because praise made her sarcastic and I wanted to look at it a moment longer.

Barnacle supervised from the flour bin, vast and ginger and one-eared, a cat built like a rolled hearthrug, who had installed himself as bakehouse mouser the previous autumn and had not, to my certain knowledge, ever caught a mouse. He watched us work with the flat contempt of a foreman drawing a wage for it, and when a mouse did once cross the floor in front of him he'd looked at it, and looked at me, as if to say the arrangement did not extend to that.

They came to the door through the morning the way they did, the village, in and out, as much for the news as the bread. Ivy Bosworth first, seventy-four and unstoppable, with a pasty still oven-warm wrapped in a cloth — "You'll not have eaten, you never eat" — and she put it in my hands and held them a second in her floury old ones and looked at the peeled sign over my head and her face went soft and far off. "Your gran painted that herself, the Meade's, up a ladder with Denzil holding it and swearing," she said. "I can see her now." And something under her eye that she blinked away, and gone brisk again before I could catch it, telling me who'd fallen out with who over the Feast supper rota.

Denzil Nancarrow held up the quay wall in the afternoon, as he held it every day, eighty-four and folded into his coat, a fishing festival three days off and himself in his glory. He named the weather for me — "She'll blow Friday night, top of the springs, mark it" — and named the boats as they'd been when there were three times as many, and told me for the ninth time about the year the pilchards came so thick you could have walked on them, and I let him, because Denzil's stories were the village's long memory kept warm, and one day I'd want a thing out of that memory badly and be glad I'd sat and listened for the price of nothing.

Peggy Chynoweth had it all at the post office when I went up for stamps I didn't need — Kensa's grandmother, Kensa's exact opposite, a woman who processed information the way the harbour processed the tide, taking everything in and giving it all back out twice a day. Ferris was stopping at the Harbour Hotel, best room. Ferris had been seen with the harbourmaster, thick as thieves. Ferris had a young woman off the Marine Management down here poking at his papers and the two of them at each other's throats, and that one — Peggy leaned in over the counter — that one was Kerensa Nankervis as-was, gone off years back, come home a government officer, and did I know she and Sam Trerise had been sweethearts once, long ago, before poor Sam's Nia, and here Peggy watched my face with the pure clinical interest of a woman checking a thermometer. I kept the face flat and bought stamps I didn't need, and something small and mean turned over in me that I did not care to name, and I was cross with it, and it did not go away for being told to.

Curtis Pengelly gave me a nod across the quay from the door of the Gilded Crumb — a nod, not a sneer, which for Curtis and me was a diplomatic breakthrough on the order of a treaty. He'd chased Ferris's catering for the Feast and lost it, Peggy said, and it had chastened him, and he was trying, in his stiff way, to be a person. I nodded back. The war was over. We were merely, now, both losing to the same weather.

---

I met Ferris's shadow before I met the fury, and I met the fury on the quay in the low gold end of the afternoon.

Reuben Pascoe of the Morwenna stood over his own boat where she lay on the mud, a big-shouldered man gone stringy with age, third generation on that hull, and he had the look of a man watching a coffin and not able to stop. His quota was mostly Ferris's already — Peggy again — sold in a bad winter for less than it was worth, and the Morwenna mortgaged past her gunwales. Two of the younger men were near him, and he was not lowering his voice, he was raising it, so that it carried across the flats.

"Let him come," Reuben said. "Let him come down here in his good coat with his pen. I've fished this harbour fifty year, my father before me and his before him, and no upcountry counting-house—" his voice cracked and came back harder— "I'll see that man in the harbour mud before I sign. In the mud, where she'll have him. You mark it." And he spat, once, off the quay-edge, down onto the drained flat, and the younger men said nothing, which was a kind of agreement.

I stood at the corner of my own peeling shopfront and felt the whole village lean, the way the boats leaned — all of it tilted one way, toward a man not yet arrived, toward the mud where the water would come back. It frightened me a little, the size of it. Grief and fear together make a heavy sea.

And in all that leaning there was one still place, and it was up at the far end, at the old pilchard cellar they still called the Salt Cellar, where Senara Spargo carried out onto her step a tray of hevva cake gone gold and set it to cool in the wind.

"There's the one soul with the right to hate him worst," Sam said. He'd come up beside me without my hearing, the way he did. He was looking up the quay at her, at the broad strong figure in the apron, the widow, the one who ran the cellar and the wash-tanks and the ice, who was the warm beating heart of the Feast every year and had lost her husband to the sea a lifetime back and her boy to it only last winter. Jacca. A young skipper with a new baby. The debt had driven him out in weather no one should have sailed, and the boat had gone down off Gullrock, and Sam's crew had launched to a shout that reached him too late. Sam did not say that part. It sat in him where I could see it sit, and I did not touch it.

"She forgave him," Sam said, watching Senara Spargo carry a tray of hevva up to the cellar for the Feast, and there was wonder in it, and a little grief. "Ferris as good as drowned her boy with his sums, and she made him tea and forgave him. I couldn't." Behind us the tide had turned, and somewhere out past the bar it began, very slowly, to come back in.

Hevva

There's a cake in Cornwall you score with a net. Hevva cake — heavy cake — the one the huer's cry gave its name, Hevva! Hevva!, when he spotted the pilchards darkening the water and the whole village ran to the boats. You cut the criss-cross on the top for the seine net, and you bake it for the men coming home. I made forty for the Feast, and Porthgowan came to the door as if I'd cried it myself.

It is not a clever cake. That is the whole of its dignity. Flour and lard and butter rubbed to a coarse crumb, a fistful of sugar, currants until the dough sulks with the weight of them, milk to bring it together, and no yeast, and next to no leavening — nothing to make it rise and prink and pretend. You roll it thick and low, an inch of stubbornness, and you brush the top with milk and dredge it with sugar and then you take a knife and score the lattice, corner to corner, the two sets of slanting lines that any child on the quay could tell you were the net. Into a hot oven. Out again gold and blistered, the sugar gone to a thin sweet armour, the fat weeping just enough to gloss the edges. Cut warm, it is nearly indecent. Cut cold, with the currants gone jammy and the crumb close as felt, it will carry a grown man from dawn haul to noon and think nothing of it.

I had the first tray in at half six. By seven the smell had walked out through the storm-cracked door and along the wet cobbles and gone hunting.

"That's Denzil at the window again," Kensa said, without looking up. She was nineteen and could locate any human being within forty feet by the specific quality of their loitering. "Third time. He's pretending to read the tide board."

"Let him pretend."

"He wants a corner off the burnt one."

"There isn't a burnt one."

"There's always a burnt one," Kensa said, with the serene fatalism of a girl who had spent a summer learning exactly how hot my oven ran on its bad side, and she was right, there was, a tray at the back that had caught along one edge where the element sang, and I would give the burnt one to Denzil Nancarrow because a burnt corner of hevva is the connoisseur's cut and he knew it and I knew it and we neither of us would ever say so.

I stood her at the bench with the second batch and I watched her hands.

I try not to hover. Ten years in London kitchens taught me what hovering does to a young cook — it puts the fear in the fingers, and fear is the enemy of good pastry, which wants a light quick honest hand and no second-guessing. So I gave her the flour and the fats and I turned my back to the proving loaves and I watched her in the black window instead, in the ghost of glass, the way you watch a cat you don't want to spook.

She rubbed the fat in without being told to keep it cold. She stopped at the coarse crumb and didn't overwork it — didn't do the thing every beginner does, which is to keep going, to tidy, to bring it to a smooth sad paste because smooth looks finished and finished feels safe. She left it rough. She salted with her fingers from a height, the way I do, the way I never taught her, just because she'd seen me do it and something in her had filed it as right. She weighed nothing. She wet the dough to the exact hair before it goes sticky and stopped. And when she took the knife to score the net she did it in one confident sweep each way, no sawing, no hesitation, the lines even and slanting and clean, so that the lattice sat on the top of that cake as if it had grown there.

Her first tray came out of the oven perfect.

Not good-for-a-beginner. Not I'd-pass-it. Perfect: risen the little a heavy cake is meant to, cracked exactly where it should crack, the sugar armour even and gold, the net standing proud. First try. I have taught grown pastry chefs who could not put that net on straight after a fortnight, and this glued-to-her-phone teenager with the flat sardonic stare had done it once and got it and moved on to wiping down the bench as if she'd made toast.

"Kensa."

"What. What's wrong with it."

"Nothing's wrong with it." I turned the tray so the light took the top. "Look at it."

She looked at it. She looked at me. She was braced, I saw, for the correction — because in her nineteen years the world had mostly handed her the correction — and I watched her not know what to do with the other thing.

"It's a cake," she said.

"It's a very good cake. It's better than mine were at your age by about eight years." I said it flat, no fuss, because fuss would have made her armour clang shut. "You've got hands. I'm not going to say it twice, so file it."

She filed it. She turned away too fast and got very busy with the cloth, and the back of her neck went pink, and her phone buzzed in her apron and for once she didn't reach for it. I let her be. You plant a thing like that and you leave it to prove in the dark; you don't stand over it.

By nine the quay had come to the door, as I'd said it would. That's the thing about hevva — it isn't mine, it never was, it belongs to the whole coast, and to bake it is to send up a signal older than any of us. Peggy came from the post office and bought six "for the counter" and ate one on the step. Frank Bunt came off the lifeboat slip smelling of diesel and bought the burnt tray outright before Denzil could get to it, and there was a small cold war about that which I settled by producing, from the back, another burnt one I had been saving, because there is always a burnt one. Ivy came and didn't buy anything, only stood in the warm and breathed it in with her eyes shut and said, "Loveday's oven never held its heat that even, maid, you've spoiled us," which from Ivy Bosworth is the Nobel Prize.

And under all of it, all morning, the shopfront waited to be dealt with.

---

The storm in the spring had taken the front of the bakehouse the way the sea takes everything here — patiently, and then all at once. The salt had been working under the paint for years; one bad March night of wind off Gullrock had finished it, lifting the top coat in long grey scabs and leaving the boards beneath naked and weeping. It had been on the list ever since, under the roof and above the ovens and jostling with the bank's letters, and now the Feast had forced it up the list because you cannot bless a fleet in front of a shop that looks drowned.

A man was coming Thursday to reface it. Trevaskis, out of Truro, good and slow and not cheap, and the not-cheap was the trouble. He'd quoted for the stripping as well as the painting, and stripping is only elbow grease, and I have elbows, so I told him I'd do the stripping myself and save the labour, and he'd sucked his teeth in the way of tradesmen everywhere and said suit yourself, maid, mind the lead in the old stuff.

So on the Wednesday, in the long gold September light, with the tide out and the inner harbour drained to its wet desert of mud and mooring-chain, I took a scraper and a wire brush and a bottle of stripper and I went at my own shopfront.

It is filthy, mindless, satisfying work, the kind that lets the top of your head think while your hands stay busy below. I got the grey scabs off in sheets. Under them the older paint, my grandmother's paint, MEADE'S in the plain honest sans-serif Loveday had liked, the M with its slightly heavy left leg where her brush had leaned. I felt a pang scraping at that. It felt like scraping at her. But the letters were blistered too, gone soft with salt, and Trevaskis would only paint them out again fresh, so I worked on, and the stripper bit, and the old sign came away under the wire in flakes and curls.

And beneath my grandmother's name there was another name.

I nearly didn't see it. It was under a coat of what had been white and had gone the colour of old teeth, and only where I'd bitten deepest with the scraper did a different colour show — a warm colour, a glint. I stopped. I put the brush down. I got my thumbnail into the edge of the flake and I worked it, gentle now, gentle as lifting a tuile off a tray, and the old paint came away and there it was.

Gold leaf. Real gold leaf, the way they signwrote a proud shop a hundred years ago, ghosting up through the grey. A serif hand, generous, curled, from a time when a shopfront was a sentence a town read every day. Letters. I cleared them one at a time with my thumbnail and my breath held somewhere it shouldn't have been.

TREGONING & DAUGHTER.

Clear as day on the quay for anyone to read. A name I had never heard my grandmother speak. A name that was not ours, over the door that had been ours my whole life. And Daughter. Whose daughter. Which daughter.

I stood back with the scraper hanging in my hand and the September light lay flat and gold across the letters and made them shine as if they were pleased to be up in the air again, and I felt the small stupid vertigo you feel when a floor you've walked all your life turns out to have a room underneath.

That was when I heard the footsteps stop.

Denzil Nancarrow had been coming along the quay from the direction of the boatyard, his stick going tock on the cobbles, a man of eighty-four in his good jersey because it was near the Feast. I'd heard him and thought nothing of it. Now the tock had stopped. He stood in the road, ten feet off, and he was not looking at me. He was looking at the wall over my head, at the gold name rising out of the grey, and his face had done something I had never once seen it do.

Denzil is the living memory of this place. He knew my grandmother sixty years and more; he was on this quay as a young man; nothing on this coast has happened in his lifetime that he cannot tell you the weather of. His face is a working face, weathered to bark, and it is always, always ready to talk — that is Denzil's whole joy, the talking. And now the talk had gone out of it. He looked at TREGONING & DAUGHTER like a man leaning over a gunwale and seeing a drowned face rise white through the green.

"Denzil?"

He didn't answer. His mouth worked. His knuckles went pale on the stick.

"Denzil, are you all right? Come in, I'll—"

"That should have stopped covered," he said. Not to me. To the wall. To the name. And then he turned, quick for an old man, quicker than his hip should have let him, and went off up the quay the way he'd come without his cake and without another word, the stick going tock tock tock, fast, like something driving him.

I stood in the gold light with my drowned name and I did not understand a single thing about it, and behind me, far out past the bar, the tide had turned and begun, very slowly, to come back in.

---

I couldn't leave it. I have never been able to leave a thing that didn't add up; it is the failing that has made me some money and cost me more sleep.

That night, with the shop shut and Kensa gone home and Barnacle installed on the warm slate by the range like a one-eared ginger draught excluder, I climbed to the flat and I got down the box from the top of the wardrobe. Loveday's box. The things I'd found after, that I hadn't been able to throw and hadn't been able to look at properly either: the brass key that fits no lock in this building, I've tried them all, twice; the photograph, foxed and soft, of two young women outside a shop in a summer I can't date, laughing, and above their heads the very gold letters I'd bared that afternoon, TREGONING & DAUGHTER, plain in the picture as they'd been plain on my wall; and the book.

The book is a baker's notebook, cheap oilcloth cover gone the colour of a bruise, and it is full, cover to cover, of my grandmother's hand — and none of it, or almost none of it, is anything I can read. It is a shorthand. Her own. Some of it is plain enough: recipes, in the dialect she'd have used at the bench, scald the crame, scem the top, dust of orange in the pil — a hevva variation, that one, I'd nearly wept over it in the spring. But threaded all through the plain writing are strings of numbers, close-packed, grouped in fours and sixes, that I had taken for baker's measures and could never make balance. No recipe needs a number that runs to four figures and a decimal. No dough was ever weighed to a hundredth. I'd assumed she'd had a code for her suppliers, or for money, and given up.

I sat at the kitchen table with the book and the photograph and a pot of tea going cold and I made myself look at the numbers as numbers, not as a baker looks at a bill but as — I don't know what. As a puzzle set by a woman who'd painted out a name.

8.14. 2.02. 8.41.

I stared at that group a long time before it walked up and hit me, and when it did I actually said it aloud to the empty kitchen, so that Barnacle lifted his head.

They were times. Eight fourteen. Two-oh-two. Eight forty-one. And not just any times — I'd seen those exact three-a-day, roughly-twelve-hours-apart, creeping-fifty-minutes-later shapes every single day of my life on the harbour tide board bolted to the wall by Angove's office, the board the whole village steers its hours by. High water. Low. High. The tide.

My grandmother's numbers were tide times.

I got up and I found the little tide almanac Sam had pressed on me in June — learn the water, Robyn, it's the only clock down here that never lies — and I sat back down and I checked one of the plain-language recipe lines against the string of numbers beside it, and I understood, cold along my arms, that the numbers weren't part of the recipe at all. They sat beside the words the way a key sits beside a locked thing. She wasn't recording the tide. She was using it. The reading for a given day — those three creeping figures — was the key that turned the letters. Change the day, change the tide, change the cipher. That's why nothing had ever balanced. I'd been trying to add up a lock.

I didn't crack it that night. I want to be honest: I got the shape of it, the that, not the what. But I'd got the shape, and the shape was this — that my grandmother Loveday Meade, who painted out a golden name and never explained it, had also written a book she did not want read, and had bolted it shut with the one clock in Porthgowan that never lies. Which meant there was something under the code the way there was something under the paint. The tide as her key. Nothing stays sunk here for good; the sea always brings it back.

I was still sitting there, cold tea, warm cat, the almanac open, when the knock came at the shop door below. Soft. Twice. Late.

I went down. Through the glass, small under the streetlight, stood Denzil Nancarrow, and he had his cap in his two hands the way men here hold their caps at a graveside.

I opened the door. The night came in off the mud smelling of salt and weed and the first tang of the gale that was somewhere out past Gullrock, muttering. He didn't come in. He stood on the step and looked at me, and then past me at the dark shape of the shop, and I understood he'd walked down here in the cold night because the thing had been at him all day and would not let him be, the same way it would not let me be. We are the same, Denzil and I, in the one bad way.

"You should have left it painted, maid," he said. "But you never do leave a thing, do you. No more did she."

"Denzil. What is it. What's Tregoning and Daughter?"

He was quiet so long I thought he'd turn and go again. Out in the dark the returning tide found the first of the mooring-chains and rang it, once, a low iron note.

"Nineteen sixty-one," he said at last, and his voice had gone down to something I'd not heard from him, no story in it, no quay-comedy, only a very old weight. "That's the year. That's when Loveday came in on the winter boat — off the packet, in December, in weather, a young woman with nothing and no reason anyone would say. I was a boy on this quay the morning she landed. I mind it." He stopped. His thumbs worked the brim of the cap. "There was a name here before hers. On that door you've gone and bared. The last of the old bakers, this coast. Grace Tregoning."

He said it like a bruise you press to see if it still hurts. It still hurt.

"Grace Tregoning. And there's them, maid—" his eyes came up to mine, and there was the drowned-face look again, and under it something that in a younger man I'd have called fear "—as never forgave what happened after."

"What happened after?"

But he had said his measure and no more. He set the cap on his head. He was already turning, the stick finding the cobble.