Morning came up gray, with a wind out of the north that put a low chop on the lake—the first chop Eli had seen on it since he rode in.
The water had never moved before.
It had only waited.
He stood on the strand and watched it move, and could not decide whether a restless lake was a better sign or a worse one.
Nora was at her fire, the effects laid out on the flat rock.
There was a new piece at the row’s end: a shirt stud, mother-of-pearl, scrolled at the edge.
She was entering it in the list.
“Nine,” she said without looking up.
“Nine things in thirteen days.”
“You count them like it means something.”
“Everything means something on this shore.”
The clerk came down the strand at eight, walking the mud below the waterline, and where he walked the mud held no prints.
He carried the ledger under his arm, and his hat was on, and he stopped at the edge of her camp like a man respecting a fence, and took the hat off.
“Miss—” Nora said.
“Sewell,” he said.
“This week.”
“You had a name in the letters. She never wrote it down. She couldn’t. She said every time she tried, the ink ran.”
“She had a suspicious nature,” the clerk said.
“I’ve told your man that already.” He turned to Eli.
“Let’s do our business.”
Their business was done standing up.
He didn’t sit, and he didn’t ask them to.
He set the ledger down on the flat rock, beside the row of buttons and lace and pearl, and opened it to a page Eli again couldn’t read, and spoke plainly, like a man reading figures off a barn wall.
“Here is how it has worked, and works, and will work. Nothing in that water has ever been a gift. Not one coin of it. When a man forgets his grief, that’s a loan—he pays the interest in other men’s names. When the lake takes a woman, it doesn’t keep her. It borrows her, and the using of her comes out of somebody else’s account. Your town has been borrowing forgetfulness off each other for twelve years and calling it misfortune. It isn’t misfortune. It’s arithmetic.”
“And you’re the arithmetic,” Eli said.
“I’m the clerk of it.” He turned a page.
“Now.
Your account.
Three years ago a lady made a deposit—herself, against your name.
That deposit accrued.
A month ago you came back into the water with a borrowed boat and a borrowed sister—” Nora’s chin came up at that, and he inclined his head, correct and unapologetic, “—and you drew out a thing that had never once been drawn out: a release.
The glove went into the pool.
The town started getting its names back.
You made a withdrawal, Mr.
Cole, and you made it stick.
That’s more than anyone has done in the history of the account.
It doesn’t change what it was.”
“It was payment.”
“It was half of payment.” He closed the book.
“The pair was borrowed. The pair is owed. You buried the second glove in the mud like a debtor burying the strongbox, and the mud is not a bank, and the stones on top of it are not a signature. Tomorrow, or the next day, you’ll walk down here, and dig it up, and put it in the water, and the account closes.”
“No,” Eli said.
The clerk’s face did something no face should do: it registered the no without moving at all.
“I can tell you things,” he said, after a moment, in exactly the same pleasant voice.
“That’s what I’m for, you know. Not the collecting. The telling. Would you like to know why your arm is dead? You think about it at night. You turn it over like a coin you can’t read. I can read it. One word from me and you’ll know what you paid in the middle of that lake, and whether it’s coming back.”
“No.”
“Would you like your names back? The blacksmith’s is in you somewhere. The town’s. The boy’s. And hers.” He didn’t say Mara’s name.
He said “hers” the way a money man says a figure he knows you can’t refuse.
“Everything the water took off you, and everything the water took off her. I can put it in you so it never fades again. Not your failing memory of her—the whole of her, every day you had, kept green forever. Men have rowed to the middle of that lake and opened their own throats for half of what I’m offering you for one shovelful of mud.”
“You don’t give,” Eli said.
“You said it yourself. Nothing in that water is a gift. If I take what you’re holding, I’m holding what the lake holds. That’s not her back. That’s me in the case. Priced.”
Something moved behind the clerk’s stillness.
It might have been approval.
It was worse than anger.
“The lady, then,” he said, turning to Nora.
“Your sister is forty feet down, Miss—and walking.
Outward.
She has been walking since the day the glove went into the pool.
At present prices she covers about an inch a year.
At that rate you will be an old woman at this waterline, and she will still be a young woman under it.
I can hurry the pace along.
I can put her on this mud by autumn.
It costs one signature.
You’ve watched me sign half this town already.
They’re all easier than you.”
“Nothing on paper.” The clerk put his hat back on.
“They took things from me. That’s all a signature is.”
Nora looked at the row of effects on the rock.
Nine small things, wet and dark, laid out neat.
“Those came out of your lake,” she said.
“Did the town sign for those?”
“No,” the clerk said, and for the first time his voice was not pleasant.
“Those are not my disbursements. Those are hers. Your sister has been making payments—” and he stopped himself, and stood there with his mouth shut, and Eli understood, in one cold drop, that the clerk had said more than he meant to say, and that this was perhaps the first time in the life of that lake it had ever happened.
Nora didn’t press him.
She had a suspicious nature.
It served her well.
She picked up her pencil and wrote one more line in the column on the back of the last letter, and let the silence do the pressing.
The clerk recovered.
He took up his ledger.
“You won’t dig,” he said to Eli.
It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
“You’ll leave the account open.”
“It was never my account.”
“Everything on this shore is somebody’s account.” He settled his hat.
“Interest accrues, Mr. Cole. It always has. You’d be surprised what comes of open accounts, given years enough.” He looked out at the island, at the fog still hanging on the far side of it, and at the shape that stood in the fog where it had stood all week, patient as a fence post.
“He asks after you, by the way.”
“Who is he?”
“The original depositor.” The clerk said it the way other men say a thing is weather.
“The lake was his lending first. Everything since—the castle, the town’s misfortune, your lady, me—is interest on what he put in. He has been waiting a long time to be paid back. He can wait longer. That’s all he is, at bottom. The waiting.”
He walked off down the strand, north, along the waterline, and where he passed the mud held no prints, and the wind did not move his coat.
When he was small in the distance, Eli saw that the clerk was leaving the way he had come—not on the road, and not needing one.
Nora let out a breath she had been holding for the better part of an hour.
Then she knelt at the row on the rock, and counted it again, though she knew the count, and stopped.
Past the shirt stud, small and dark and wet, lay a ring.
Silver gone black, a seal carved in it.
Eli knew the shape of the seal.
He had seen its press in wax six times in one week, and for two years before that he had watched a woman turn it on her middle finger while she thought.