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I stand in the corridor of a dead-quiet house belonging to something everyone in Morlac stepped away from, holding a candle, with a plan to hang bedsheets on the walls of a hall I have been in for six hours.

Then, out over the gate, the bell goes off.

It is worse than I imagined. It grabs and bangs and smears, and under the smear I can hear the note it would give if anybody let it, and I am standing with my hand on the wall when I hear the gate open and shut.

He has gone out, into water and dark, to carry somebody over.

And I am here, in his corridor with a candle, with a blanket over my door and no one to talk to, and the whole rest of the night in front of me.

RIWAL

The woman in Trevern dies at twenty past four, holding her sister’s hand. I take her over and she is not frightened. By the time I come back along the causeway the light is up, and there is smoke coming out of my own chimney at an hour when there has never been smoke.

Malo does not light that fire until seven.

I stand in my own yard and look at it. I had expected a cold hearth and Malo telling me she had asked for a cart to be sent for. Smoke means she is still here, and awake. I am glad of it, more than is sensible.

Inside, the hall smells of scorched fat. She has found the kitchen. A pan sits on the iron with burned egg welded to it, and Enora is at the long table with her sleeves pushed up, eating it standing at the end of the bench, and when I come in she says, “Don’t,” with her mouth full.

“I have not said anything.”

“You were about to make a face.”

“I have one face.” It comes out worse than I mean it to. I meant it as a joke. I have not made one in some years, and it shows.

She swallows. “I couldn’t sleep and I don’t sit still well, so I found the eggs and I have burned them past saving. Malo’s asleep. Don’t tell him about the pan, I’ll do the pan.”

“You were awake all night.”

“The bell went.” She puts the plate down. “It’s very loud, that bell, and I know you’ve heard me on the subject, but you can’t sleep through it and you also can’t ignore it, because it doesn’t ring, it hits. So I lay there and had a look at the ceiling and thought about all the things I could be doing with a strap of oak.” She stops. “Where were you?”

“Trevern.”

“Somebody died.”

“Yes.”

“Did they know you were coming?”

Nobody asks that. They ask whether it hurts, or they ask nothing. I have to stand still a moment before I can answer her.

“Sometimes,” I say. “She did. She had her sister with her and she was not afraid at the end of it.”

Enora looks at me for a moment with a fork in her hand.

“Good,” she says. “That’s good. I’m glad somebody’s there.”

Then she goes back to the eggs.

Somebody. She means me. It goes in under my ribs on the left side and stays there, and I am glad of it. I want to sit down at that table and watch her eat. I go up to the study instead, because if I stay I will tell her who was in the counting room.

I keep a ledger of the dead. Every person I carry over goes into it: name, town, date, and what killed them. I know what killed them because I have to put my hands on the dying to carry them, and when I do, I feel what is wrong in the body. A fever. A lung full of water. A heart that has been failing for ten years.

Thirty-nine volumes stand on the shelf behind my desk, going back to before the causeway was laid. The fortieth is open in front of me. It holds the last four years. I have been putting off reading it since June, because I am afraid of what it adds up to.

Last autumn I carried a woman at Plouder, and nothing was wrong with her body. No fever. No injury. Nothing worn out. She was dying anyway. What I felt in her was a person with most of the life taken out of her, a little at a time, over three weeks, like a cask emptied by the cup.

Something had been coming to that house and feeding on her. I wrote “fed on” beside her name, because I had no better words. I did not know what had done it. I still do not.