Lilianne’s face showed that she understood perfectly thenature of the question, and the answer it was intended to produce. “My fatherand mother are very well,” she said. Then, with an almost malicious stab ofcourage, “Have you seen how the grass is coming up on the dunes, Miss Augusta?It is so thick and black this year. It is long as my shoulders.”
“You shouldn’t go to the shore alone, Lilianne,” said MissAugusta, too stricken to manage any other answer. “The waves come high, thistime of year.”
“I don’t go at all,” said Lilianne. “My mother goes forrambles. At night, early in the morning. She comes home with heaps of that grassin a paper bag. She says she can put it back, if I let her, but I won’t. Ithink it will hurt too much.”
“Your father? What does he say?”
“He doesn’t know.”
Miss Augusta could think of no reply for a long andburdensome moment. At last, she succumbed to the horrifying inadequacy ofpoliteness, and said, “That chalkboard looks very clean, Lilianne. You may go.Thank you.”
For a long while after the girl surrendered her rag and leftthe schoolhouse, Miss Augusta sat at her desk, her hands shaking. The fire hadburnt down to cinders and the room was dark when she stood and gathered herbelongings, then made her way to the sagging grey cottage on the cliffs abovethe sea. The moon alone accompanied her. The Widow Clary was the only person inBranaugh who received fewer visitors than the schoolteacher.
◊
“You are going to want to save her life,” said the WidowClary, when she opened the door. “And you can’t.”
At this flat-voiced affront, Miss Augusta’s cheeks reddenedwith something between anger and humiliation. She had not spoken a word and yetthe old woman already knew. She must be the laughingstock of Branaugh.“Please,” she said. “I need to speak with you.”
The Widow opened the door a little wider, squintingunpleasantly at her. “Come in, then,” she said. “Hurry, now.”
The inside of the cottage had a deep, briny scent, like theocean preserved too long and gone sour. Miss Augusta exhaled in a huff to ridher lungs of the wet thick feeling that came when she breathed. The widow,unaffected, struck a match and lit a series of long, wax-mottled tapers, thenretreated to the stove to heat the kettle. Miss Augusta sank onto an under-stuffedottoman, preferring this minor disgrace to the more inconceivable theft of thewidow’s only armchair. The Widow Clary, as anticipated, claimed the seatwithout a moment of polite hesitation, only looking awkwardly for a surface toset the tea tray before Miss Augusta volunteered her own lap.
With the tea steaming before them, Miss Augusta lost andregained her courage ten times in a moment. She wavered, her hands trembled.She was remembering her own furious shame, not long ago, at being accosted inthe delicate shell of her own lonely home. She was trying to remember thatBranaugh was many years older than the Widow Clary, that the old woman sittingacross from her could not really be at fault. The Widow Clary had read thelighthouse-keeper’s name from the innards of a fish, but she had not summonedhim, or his daughter.
“What is happening,” she said, finally, “to LilianneEisner?”
“What will you do if I tell you?” said the Widow Clary,sipping languidly from her teacup. “I suppose you’ll want to be her mother. Isuppose you’ll think you must take full responsibility. You are a sad,squirming thing.”
Miss Augusta did not let herself flinch; if she flinchednow, she could never go on. “She says she lives inside a thin place.”
“Well, she doesn’t. What does she know? Only what you say inthe schoolhouse. What did you tell her a thin place was? Repeat it to me now.”
Miss Augusta obeyed. “Thin places are parts of the worldwhere the barrier between the clay and the mist is more fragile, where it canbe broken.” She stopped, then, because she’d forgotten the old words as soon asshe began truly listening to them.
But the Widow Clary had been a Branaugh schoolchild oncetoo, and her memory did not fail: “Things happen in thin places that can’thappen anywhere else, but they are never safe from getting lost between clayand mist. They are always in-between.”
“But,” Miss Augusta said desperately, “what does it mean?”
“Listen,” said the Widow Clary with infinite patience,settling back in her armchair, “you cannot understand. I doubt that any of yourschoolchildren can. Perhaps the lighthouse-keeper’s girl is the only one amongyou with half a chance of ever understanding at all. But she’s wrong. Shedoesn’t live inside a thin place, any more than the rest of us. We arealways in a thin place. We have always lived in-between.”
◊
The red rain came to Branaugh in mid-April. The childrentrudged to school in rubber boots and rainslickers. Inside the schoolhouse,they shook the moisture from their coats into shimmering crimson puddles on thefloor, murmuring excitedly that harvest was soon to come, that Branaugh againlived. Miss Augusta struggled to quiet them. When at last they were all seated,she saw that Lilianne Eisner’s desk was empty. Miss Augusta’s throat swelled,she thought, they are never safe from getting lost, and the words formeda different shape now that they had been uttered by an old woman in a darkhovel: now they had the sheen of truth on them, of magic.
“Has anyone seen Lilianne?” she inquired of the class, hereyes drifting across the rows of faces. No, they all chorused, rote as if theywere saying multiplication tables.
Miss Augusta waited for school to end, then slipped on herown rubber boots, her own raincoat. She had never shown up unannounced atanyone’s house before. The lighthouse was not quite a house, thelighthouse-keeper not quite anyone, and in some sense that was worse: she mightfind anything on the other side of that weathered old door. Miss Augusta’sknocking went unanswered, and she had almost resolved to leave when a fork oflightning split the mist behind her, followed closely by thunder. She would notbe able to go home until the storm passed; she had no choice but to enter.
