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“Thank you,” he says.

“Don’t.” I have to look at the lane. “Don’t thank me for that. Somebody should have done it years ago.” I make myself breathe. “Why have we stopped? The road’s that way.”

“The Guillou house is down there. The daughter sat with this thing for five weeks and made it tea. She is the only person alive who barred a door against it and can tell us what it did. Twenty minutes will not change anything at the foundry, and she may tell us something we need.”

I hate that he is right. I hate it in my whole body.

“Twenty minutes,” I say. “Which house is hers?”

RIWAL

The Guillou house smells of tallow and sickness still, though the shutters have been open since the old man died.

The daughter answers the door. She has got thinner. She looks at me and then past me at Enora, standing in the lane with her hand on a grey horse’s neck and her hair coming down, and the woman’s shoulders drop.

“You brought somebody.”

“My wife,” I say.

Enora does not correct me. It is the first time either of us has used the word and neither of us looks at the other, and the daughter stands back from the door and lets us into a kitchen where a thing sat drinking tea for five weeks.

Her name is Anaig. She puts the kettle on because her hands need a job.

“You said not to let him in,” she says. “So I did not. He came on the Tuesday and I sat with my back against that door and I did not say his name and he stood out there for an hour.”

“What did he do?”

“He knocked.” She is looking at the door. “Not hard. He knocked the way he used to, two and a scrape, because his hands were always full. And he said, Anaig, it is cold. And I sat on this floor with my hands over my mouth.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He said, ‘You will let me in eventually.’” She has to stop. “And then he went away, and my father died four days later, and I do not know if it would have gone differently if I had opened it.”

“It would not have,” I say. “It would have been faster, and he would still have gone, and you would have been in the room with the thing that did it. You did right and it cost you a great deal to do it.”

Enora, at the table, has stopped turning her cup and is watching the woman’s face.

“Tell me about the first time,” she says.

Over the next quarter hour Enora gets all of it out of her. I have been hunting this thing since last autumn and I did not have half of it.

Yann was drowned nine years ago. Anaig’s father never mentioned Yann after the first year, which is how that family did things.

In June a tinker came through, mending pans. About the town for a week or two, pleasant, no trouble.

He sat in that kitchen twice while the kettle did its work, and asked after the family, and was given tea, and a stranger who asks kindly and will be gone by Friday gets told what the neighbors are never told: the boy who went off the Sept-Îles, and what he was like, and how he knocked with two knuckles and a scrape because his hands were always full of rope.

Then the pans were mended, and the tinker went, and three weeks later Yann came home.

“What did the first man look like?” Enora says.

“I cannot tell you.” Anaig puts both hands on the table. “That is what keeps me up. He was in this room twice and I gave him bread, and I cannot tell you if he was tall or short or what color his hair was. It slides.”

Enora looks at me.

“The pedlar at Lannoz,” she says. “The husband couldn’t tell you his face either.”

“No.”