Chapter 3The Ledger Answers

She began writing in the ledger on the fourth night, because she could not sleep and because the alternative was watching the clock.

What was borrowed? she wrote, under her uncle’s crossed-out name.

The ink dried. Nothing happened. She had not expected anything to happen; she was a woman of twenty-six who had come here to sell a house and instead found herself in possession of a municipal hourglass, and she was entitled, she thought, to one foolish gesture.

She went to bed.

In the morning there was a second line on the page, in the small even hand from three hundred years ago.

The same as always. Ask better.

Wren did not scream, or faint, or run for the coach road, and she was quietly proud of all three. She made tea. She sat down. She read the line eleven times, and then she picked up the pen.

Who am I speaking to?

The keeper.

I’m the keeper.

Yes.

She looked at that for a long moment. Downstairs, the hall clock struck seven, and the sound went through the building the way sound goes through a place that is mostly empty.

What happens at Michaelmas?

The ink took longer this time. When it came, it came slowly, letter by letter, as though whatever was writing had to remember how.

The account is called. A keeper answers for the town. That is what a keeper is for.

Answers how?

You have four weeks to decide. Your uncle took forty years and decided nothing, and the water decided for him.

Wren set the pen down very carefully, as if it might go off.

Through the window, the fen was doing its flat brown nothing under a sky of remarkable, generous, borrowed blue.