The Salt Clock — Chapter 2: What the Fen Remembers

Her uncle’s rooms above the keeper’s hall had been left exactly as he had them, which told Wren two things: that no one had wanted to go through his belongings, and that no one had wanted to be alone up there long enough to try.

She found the tide charts first. Forty years of them, pinned in overlapping layers to the wall above the desk, so that the room seemed papered in a single enormous grey wave. He had annotated them. Not the tides — the annotations sat in the margins, in a cramped, hurrying hand that got worse as the years advanced.

Low again on the ninth. Fen quiet.

Fen quiet.

Fen quiet. Too quiet. Ask the Roskell woman.

And then, four years ago, halfway down a chart of ordinary spring tides: It isn’t counting down. It’s counting back.

Wren sat with that one for a while.

The Roskell woman turned out to be ninety-one years old and entirely uninterested in Wren’s questions until Wren mentioned the salt.

Then she put down her tea.

“He asked me the same thing,” she said. “Your uncle. Sat where you’re sitting, in that coat you’re wearing, and asked me where the salt came from.”

“Where does it come from?”

“That’s the wrong question, girl. Everyone asks it and it’s the wrong one.” Mrs Roskell’s hands were folded, very still, on the table between them. “The right question is where it goes. It’s been falling three hundred years. Bulb below should have burst a century ago. Ask yourself why it hasn’t.”

Wren thought of the lower bulb, and the way the salt inside lay level and undisturbed, no higher than a man’s shoulder.

“Something’s taking it out.”

“Something’s being paid,” the old woman corrected. “There’s a difference, and you’ll want to know it before the last grain goes.”

Outside, the fen lay flat and brown to the horizon, and the light on it was the good, gentle light of an unnaturally fine summer — the kind Grayhollow had enjoyed, without comment, for as long as anyone could remember.

“How long?” Wren asked.

Mrs Roskell picked her tea back up. “Michaelmas,” she said. “Give or take.”