What the Harbourmaster Kept

The harbourmaster of Pol Treven was a woman named Loveday Trahair, fifty and brisk and entirely uninterested in the past, which was, Edith had always thought, an excellent quality in a person who looked after boats and a poor one in a person who looked after records. She found Loveday in the harbour office the next morning, with the rain coming sideways off the water and the heater ticking, and she did not waste either of their time. "The tide register," Edith said, setting it on the desk in its oilcloth. "I want to ask you about an entry." "That old thing." Loveday did not look up from her screen. "Heritage business. You'd want the committee." "The committee gave it to me. I'm asking you because you keep this office, and because your predecessors kept it, and because I think one of them knew something." Edith unwrapped the oilcloth and turned the register to the page she had marked, and she set her finger beside the uncrossed entry, and she watched Loveday Trahair's face the way she had once watched a hundred faces over a hundred desks, looking for the small flinch that meant a child had reached the part of the sum they had hoped you would not check. The flinch came. It was very small and very quick and Loveday Trahair was not a woman who flinched, and that was how Edith knew it had cost her something to do it. "The Mary Gwen," Edith said. "October, nineteen seventy-eight. She went out and she was never written home. Stephen Pascoe, and a second man whose name the damp has taken. And I have spent this week being told, by everyone I have asked, that no Pascoe ever drowned out of this harbour. And then yesterday a man with the Pascoe face spoke to me on the cliff path and knew my name and my business before I had given him either." She kept her finger on the line. "So I should like you to tell me, Mrs Trahair, what the harbourmasters of Pol Treven have been keeping in this office. Because they kept something. A custom does not fail for one boat and one boat only. Someone chose not to cross this out." Loveday Trahair was quiet for a long moment. The rain went sideways. The heater ticked. And then she did a thing Edith had not expected, which was to get up, and cross to the grey steel cabinet against the back wall, and unlock the bottom drawer with a key she wore on the same ring as the lifeboat keys, as though it were ordinary, as though it were part of the job. "It is kept here," Loveday said, not turning round. "It has always been kept here. Every harbourmaster is shown it on their first day and told the same words, and I will tell you the words, because I have wanted, for eleven years, to tell somebody them, and you are the first person in eleven years to walk in already knowing enough that telling you is not the same as betraying it." She lifted out a second book. It was smaller than the tide register, and newer, and it had no name on the cover, and she set it on the desk beside the first with a care that was almost tenderness. "The register is the boats the sea took," Loveday said. "This is the boats the village took. And the words, Miss Crewe, the words they tell you on your first day, are these. Some men do not drown. Some men are let go. And it is the harbourmaster's work to know the difference, and to keep it, and never, ever to cross the wrong name out." Edith Crewe looked down at the small book with no name on it, and at the rain on the window, and she understood that she had not, after all, found a careless harbourmaster. She had found a door, and Loveday Trahair had just, very quietly, set it open.