Mirelight

The fen crossing is the slow way on the great road — half a day of mist and reed and slow water, with nothing anywhere to look away to. People come off it having travelled through more than the miles.

Oda has worked this water for forty years, first with the pole, then with the light. Bread set and proving, a kettle banked warm, a chair drawn round to the fire, and a rush burning in the fen-window for whoever is still out in the dark. She offers no cure. She offers the long night, sat through beside you.

Then the road comes back to life, the house is full for the first time in years, and at dusk a young widow comes off the water who wants none of it. Not the tea. Not the chair. Not the quiet. And she says so.

Frost is the one weather that does a fen any good. The road mends; the crossing gets easier for everyone except the ones with a load, or a bad leg, or years on them — and for those it is still the boat, and the boat will not last the winter.

Then the travellers stop stopping. A rumour comes up the road ahead of the man who has to deliver it: the council is costing a dry way east of the marsh, and the fen house is written in a register, on a second list, against the words may no longer be warranted.

Nothing has been decided. When the costing is finished, somebody will take a view.

Oda has worked this crossing for forty years and has never once had to argue for it. She has never had to say what the slow way is for.

Midwinter, and the road has been shut since the wet week. One bed of eight slept in. A third of the bake, every second day, and the ends of the loaves going to the birds. Only the light has not shrunk — three rushes a night, whatever the weather is doing.

The water should be still by now. It is not. It has come up over every mark Oda keeps in her eye, in the order she keeps them, and there is nobody within reach to be wrong in front of.

Then they come up out of the dark: the low village from past the far reed, a line of them going back further than her light goes. They have lost the place, not the people. And there is no one of them who needs her more than the rest.

Long before there is a light in the window at the fen crossing, there is a bare landing: no rail, no bench, no shelter, and a punt that was her father's. Maret works the slow water the way he worked it. People come to the near bank, she takes them over, they go on, and that is the whole of it.

Old Pader tells her she ought to hang a light at that window for anyone still out on the water after dark. She tells him the water doesn't care, and neither does she.

Then the autumn flood takes the raised path, and something out in the black keeps time against the water — and comes in at last with nothing at all in its hands.