Tinctures and Tidewater

Comfrey Beds

"That one's mine," Isolde said, and put her boot on the flag before he could drive it deeper.

Gideon Hartsell looked down at her boot, then at the mallet in his blistered hand. Orange tape snapped in the wind off the water. Behind him, three more flags stood in her comfrey like surrender notices.

"It's a county stake in county land," he said.

"It's a county stake in my second-year root stock. Lift your foot, please. Not mine. Yours."

He lifted it. He'd been standing on a seedling of marsh mallow, and he stared at the crushed leaves as if they had insulted him. She crouched and straightened the little stem with two fingers. It stayed bent anyway.

"I sent notice to the annex," he said. "Weeks ago."

"You sent a form. It said survey access along the tidal margin. It didn't say you'd bring a mallet and a map and a face like a closed gate."

"I don't have a face like a gate."

"You have exactly that face."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth and was put away. She noticed it, and was annoyed that she noticed. He was new, as these things went, only a year in town, and he still wore his boots like he'd bought them for a photograph. He walked the shoreline every morning with a rolled chart under his arm and spoke to no one but the tide gauge.

"Tern Point is the only footing that holds the surge," he said. "I've run it every way. The ground to the north is silt, and it'll slump under the first real load. The ground to the south is worse."

"And between them is my garden."

"Between them is a ridge of compacted clay that happens to have your garden on it."

"Happens." She stood, and the wind pulled her hair across her mouth. She pushed it back with a muddy wrist. "Do you know what's in this bed? Comfrey for knitting bone. Yarrow. Sea holly for the kidneys of the old men who still won't see a doctor. I've fed half this town out of this soil. The infirmary annex pays its lease on what grows here."

"I know what it pays."

"Then you know it's eighteen thousand a year, and Tobias Ketch would love an excuse not to renew it."

Gideon's jaw shifted. "I don't decide the lease."

"No. You only decide where the water goes, and who stands in front of it."

That landed. She saw it land, and knew where it had gone in, because she had aimed. Her father had stood in front of the water once, on a night the old barrier gave way, while a county office somewhere had a letter from the healers in a drawer. She did not say so. She never said so to people with clipboards.

Gideon set the mallet down very carefully, the way a man does when he wants to throw it. "I'm not your enemy, Ms. Branwick."

"Then work from what I know about this marsh. I've watched it nine years. I know where it floods first and where it drains last."

"I have gauge data."

"You have numbers from a pole."

"Numbers don't flatter anyone," he said, too quickly. "They don't tell me what I'd like to hear because I asked nicely."

There was something raw under it. She heard it and, against her better judgment, slowed down. He was looking at the flags, not at her, and his shoulders had the stiffness of someone carrying a heavy thing alone and calling it posture.

She yanked the nearest flag out of the mud. It came up with a wet sound, and the wire bent in her fist. She held it out to him, tape fluttering.

"Take it."

He took it. His palm turned over and she saw the blisters, two of them split, raw and weeping at the base of his fingers. He'd been swinging that mallet all morning without gloves, out of stubbornness or pride or plain lack of sense.

"That's a mess," she said.

"It's fine."

"It's going to fester." She dug into her satchel and came up with a small brown bottle, calendula and plantain steeped in oil, the cork sealed with beeswax. "Rub this in twice a day. Clean it first."

He looked at the bottle as if it might be a summons. "I'll pass."

"It's a tincture, not a lien."

"I don't take things from people I'm about to cost money."

"That's the most honest thing you've said all morning." She held it out a moment longer. His hand stayed closed around the flag. Pride, she thought. Stupid, beautiful, expensive pride. She knew it well, having worn it herself for years.

"Fine," she said, and slid the bottle into her coat pocket, where it knocked against her knuckles. "It'll keep. So will your hand, I suppose, until it doesn't."

"Ms. Branwick."

"Isolde. If you're going to ruin my garden, you may as well use my name."

He was quiet. Out past the reeds the tide was turning, a long silver pull over the mud, and she could feel the cold coming up through her boots. For a moment neither of them moved. He was closer than she'd realized. She could see the salt dried in the creases beside his eyes, and a nick on his chin where he'd shaved in poor light.

"Gideon," he said at last, low. "And I'm not ruining it. I'm trying to keep it from drowning."

"Along with the rest of us."

"Yes."

She almost believed him. That was the trouble. She turned away before it showed, and heard him exhale behind her, short and unsteady.

"Don't set another stake in here," she said over her shoulder. "Not without asking me first."

He said nothing, and she walked toward the annex with her hand closed around the bottle in her pocket. She did not look back. Behind her the flag lay where he'd dropped it, and the wire stayed bent in the mud between them.

Twine on the Bell

"You borrowed my salve-pot and returned it with a fingerprint on the lid," Isolde said. "That's either manners or a confession."

Gideon stood in the dispensary doorway with the little tin held out in front of him like a hat. Rain had darkened his shoulders. The bell over his head hung quiet, its clapper bound in twine, and he was careful not to touch the frame.

"Your mother lent it to me," he said. "Two days ago. She came down to the Point with a flask and a lecture."

"She does both well."

"I noticed." He stepped in. The door swung shut behind him with only a hush. "I wanted to say thank you. And I brought the pot back clean."

It was clean, scrubbed bright. The blisters on his hands had dried to pink, tight skin. Somebody had been using the salve, then. Not the tincture in her coat pocket. The other one, the one his pride had allowed because it came through her mother.

"Mama," Isolde called toward the stairs, not turning around. "Your engineer is here."

Nell Branwick came down one step at a time with her cardigan buttoned wrong and her reading glasses pushed into her white hair. She took in Gideon, the tin, and her daughter's face, and smiled like a woman who had already won something.

"He's not mine," Nell said. "Though he does eat like a boy who's been left to fend. I gave him half a loaf and he apologized for it."

"I said thank you," Gideon said.

"Twice. Then you apologized." Nell patted his arm and went to the kettle without being asked. "Isolde never apologizes. It's restful, in a way."

"Mama."

"I'm putting the water on. Nobody has to do anything about it."

Isolde set the tin on the shelf between the yarrow and the jar of dried elderflower. When she turned, Gideon was looking at the long counter by the window, where her father's almanac lay under a weight of river stone. The cover was swollen from old salt and old weather. She had not covered it. That had been a mistake.

"May I see that?" he asked.

"No."

He blinked. "I haven't said why."

"You don't have to." She crossed to the counter and laid her palm flat on the cover. "It's tide notes. Weather. My father's handwriting, mostly. It isn't survey data."

"It might be useful. Your mother mentioned he logged the creek heights for years."

"Did she." Isolde sent a look at the kettle. Nell hummed and found a great deal to do with the tea tin.

"Records like that are rare," Gideon said, gentler. "If the old surges are in there, I could check them against my model. I'd bring it back the same day. I'd wear gloves, if that's the objection."

"It isn't gloves."

"Then what?"

Because the last person from the county who asked to borrow something of his had kept it. Because she could still see the clerk's tidy hand on the receipt. Because her father's book was the one thing she owned that no board could vote on.

"It stays here," she said.

He nodded slowly, jaw set, and she waited for the argument. It didn't come. He only looked at the book a moment longer, as if memorizing the cover, and let it go.

Nell set three mismatched cups on the counter. "Sit. Both of you. The tea's chamomile and it's going to be drunk."

They sat at the little table by the window, the almanac within arm's reach of Isolde and out of his. Rain ticked against the glass. Gideon wrapped both hands around the cup and winced a little, then pretended he hadn't.

Nell took her tea upstairs with a remark about her knees, which were perfectly sound. Her footsteps went overhead and stopped directly above them. Isolde looked at the ceiling. Gideon looked at the ceiling.

"She's listening," he said.

"She's a retired midwife. Waiting at doors is her whole trade."

He almost laughed. It faded quickly. He turned the cup a quarter turn on its saucer, then another, and she watched him decide to speak.

"I should tell you why I measure everything twice," he said. "Three times. Why I won't take a thing on faith."

"I assumed you were born that way."

"Before this job, I signed off on a sea wall in another town. My design, my seal. The local people said the footing was wrong at the north end. An old fisherman showed me where the water came up through the sand. I had numbers that said otherwise, and I believed my numbers." He stared into the tea. "It held for three winters. Then it didn't."

The room was very quiet. Overhead, a floorboard creaked and was still.

"Was anyone hurt?" Isolde asked.

"A street flooded. Some houses. Nobody died." He said it carefully, like a man who had practiced the sentence. "It was luck. I know it was luck."

She thought of her father. She thought of the old barrier giving way in the dark, and the warnings the healers had sent that no one had read. For nine years she had hated men who signed things. She found it hard now to hate the one in front of her, with his split-open hands and his clean borrowed tin.

"So you stopped listening to anyone," she said.

"I stopped trusting anyone who couldn't show me a number." He glanced up. "I know how that sounds to you."

"It sounds like fear."

"It is fear." He let out a breath. "I'd rather you hear it from me than guess."

She had no answer ready, which was rare. She reached out instead, not thinking, and turned his hand over on the table. The skin was healing clean. Her thumb rested a moment beside the mended blister.

"You used the salve," she said.

"Twice a day. I was told it wasn't a lien."

"Who told you that?"

"Someone who then took the bottle home herself."

She let go. Her face was warm and she hated that it was. She stood and carried the cups to the basin so she wouldn't have to look at him, and when she came back he was already on his feet with his coat over his arm.

"I'll stay off your beds," he said. "Until we've talked again. That's a promise."

"I'll hold you to it."

"I'd hope so."

At the door he paused under the bell. She saw him look at the twine, the knot grayed and stiff from years of damp. Nell had tied it after the last night birth, when she'd said she was done answering the dark.

"May I?" he asked.

Isolde meant to say no. Instead she nodded. He reached up with his healing hands, worked the knot loose with careful fingers, and let the twine fall into his palm. He held it out to her. She took it.

"It's a good bell," he said. "Shame to keep it quiet."

He pulled the door open and the bronze swung, and the clapper struck once, low and round, a note that filled the whole room and went out over the wet street after him. Isolde stood with the twine curled in her hand. Upstairs, nothing moved at all. The bell rang once as he left and she did not retie it.

Storm Night

"Hold the lamp lower," Isolde said, "and stop apologizing to him. He can't hear you."

"He might," Gideon said. He lowered the lamp anyway.

The surveyor lay on the dispensary table with his boot off and his trouser leg cut to the knee. Two other men had carried him in out of the rain, set him down, and gone back to the Tern Point site to see to the tarps. The gash along his shin was ugly, a flap of skin torn up by a snapped stake. Rain hammered the window. The wind pulled at the door until the frame groaned.

"Saline," she said.

Gideon had it in his hand before she finished the word. She had not expected that. He poured where she pointed, steady and slow, and the grit ran out pink into the basin. The surveyor swore at the ceiling.

"Nearly done with the worst of it," she told him. "Look at the lamp. Count the cracks in the plaster."

"Eleven," the man said through his teeth.

"Good. Keep going."

She pressed the edges together and Gideon braced the knee without being asked, his blistered palms flat and careful. When she reached for the needle he was already threading it for her, squinting at the eye. His fingers were not quite still.

"You've done this before," she said.

"Once. On a pier crew. I mostly held things."

"You're holding things well."

Nell appeared at the foot of the stairs in her wrapper, took one look, and went to the kettle without a word. She came back with a tin of clean linen and a jar of the plantain wash, set both at Isolde's elbow, and climbed back up. At the landing she glanced down once at the two of them bent over the table. Isolde pretended not to see it.

Eight stitches. She tied off the last and laid on the poultice, then wound the linen firm. The surveyor's face had gone from gray to merely pale. She gave him a few drops of willow tincture in warm water and tucked a blanket to his chin, and in minutes he was asleep, one arm flung over his eyes.

"He'll keep until morning," she said. "I'll sit with him. Someone should send word to his people."

"Already did. One of the crew went down the road." Gideon stood back and looked at his hands. There was blood on both cuffs. "I thought I'd be worse at it."

"You were fine."

"Only fine?"

"Don't push your luck, Mr. Hartsell."

He laughed, short and tired. Then the wind slammed the door open against the wall and the lamp guttered, and she went to haul it shut. He came to help. They leaned together on the wet wood until the latch caught.

The rain had blown straight through. It had knocked a shelf of drying bundles to the floor, and comfrey lay scattered across the boards, leaves crushed under the dragged mat, the whole room suddenly green and bitter and sweet. Isolde bent to gather it. Her hands were shaking now that there was nothing left to do with them.

"Leave it," Gideon said quietly.

"It'll rot."

"Isolde."

She stopped, a fistful of stems against her chest. He had crouched across from her among the leaves, close enough that she could see rain drying in his hair. He looked at her the way he had looked at the marsh on the first day, as though the thing in front of him was far larger than his plans for it.

"You haven't asked me to promise anything tonight," he said.

"I don't want a promise tonight."

"What do you want?"

She had no clever answer. She let the comfrey fall. Her hand went to his collar, which was damp and stiff with salt, and she pulled him the rest of the way in.

His mouth was cold from the weather and then not. He made a low sound against hers, surprised and grateful, and his bandaged hands came up carefully to her face as though she were something he could break. She kissed him harder to tell him otherwise. Crushed leaves stuck to her knees. The room smelled like a green field after a cut, and she did not care about the shelf, or the lease, or any line on any map.

When they drew apart he rested his forehead on hers. "I didn't plan that," he said.

"Good. I'd have distrusted a plan."

"Is that a yes to the next one?"

She kissed him again instead of answering. Behind her the door shuddered, the wind found the gap under it, and over their heads the bell swung on its bare hook and rang out low and round, again and again, as if the whole night had come to the door to announce them.

Filed Papers

Tobias Ketch came into the dispensary with his hat in his hand and a basket of pears he had not grown, which meant he wanted something.

"You look well," he said. "Rested."

"I've been up since four, Tobias." Isolde kept grinding. The mortar rang dully against the pestle. "Put the pears on the counter. If it's about the lease, the answer's still that I'll talk when the board talks to me honestly."

"It isn't the lease. Not today." He set the basket down and looked around at the shelves, the hanging bundles, the mended floorboards where the comfrey had lain a week ago. Nell's slippers whispered on the stairs behind the curtain, then stopped. Her mother was listening. Isolde did not need to turn to know it.

"Then it's the weather," Isolde said.

"It's good news, if you can believe it." Tobias smiled the way he did before council meetings, all teeth and no weight. "Hartsell's done it. Filed the whole Tern Point plan on Thursday, signed and stamped, and went off to the county seat Friday morning to walk it through the offices. Quick work. I'd say that's the end of the dithering, whichever way you feel about the footing."

The pestle stopped.

"Filed," she said.

"Ah." His smile slid. "He told you. Surely he told you."

She thought of Thursday. Gideon at her table with salve on his palms, laughing at her chipped cups. Gideon, three nights ago, asking if he could walk her to the gate and then standing there too long, saying nothing about it at all. He had kissed her goodnight in the rain with the plan already in a drawer somewhere with a stamp on it.

"Tobias. Through the marsh? Through my beds?"

"It's the only footing that holds the surge. You've heard him say so." He lifted a hand, placating. "Nothing's been poured. But it's filed, Isolde. You know what that means. It can't be pulled back without the whole quarter's funding going with it."

"And the annex lease."

He did not answer, which was the answer. He picked up his hat from the counter, put it on, took it off again. "I'd have thought he'd say. I'm sorry for it."

"No, you're not," she said, without heat. "You're relieved. Go on home. Take the pears."

"They're for you."

"Then I'll decide what happens to them."

When the door shut behind him, the bell swung once and went quiet. Isolde stood with her hands flat on the cool stone of the counter. Her father had trusted a man in a good coat once, a man who said they were looking into it. The sea had come up the Landing's one road a week later. She had been fourteen. She had not stood so still since.

"Isolde." Nell came through the curtain in her cardigan, one hand on the frame. "Love."

"Don't."

"I've known since the storm that you were gone on him. A mother knows by how the teacups get set down." Nell's voice was dry and gentle at once. "I won't say it'll be all right. I'll say that you should hear him before you decide what he is."

"I heard him. He told me he'd never build anything without asking the ground first." Her laugh cracked in the middle. "He asked everything but me."

She went to the corner where the survey flag stood, the one he had planted in her best plantain bed on the first day, red cloth gone pink with weather, and signed in his square hand at the hem. She had kept it out of spite and then out of something worse. She pulled it from its stake of lath and carried it out back to the burn barrel behind the annex, where she scraped a match on the rim and set the cloth to the flame. It took slowly, curling, his signature browning before it vanished.

Her phone buzzed against her hip before the last of it fell in. His name. She let it ring three times, and answered on the fourth.

"Isolde, I can explain. I meant to tell you before I left, but the filing window closed, and then Tobias called me in--"

"You filed it Thursday."

A silence, with the long hum of a road under it. "Yes."

"You kissed me Wednesday night."

"That has nothing to do with the drawings. Please. I was afraid if I told you, you'd stop me, and I'm not certain you'd have been wrong. I needed it to be sound before--"

"Before what? Before I could look at it?" She watched smoke lift off the barrel. "You checked it alone because you trust nobody's eyes but your own. Well. Now you've got what you wanted. Nobody's looking."

"Isolde."

"The door's shut, Gideon. Don't come to it. Send the mail through Tobias, since you two are so close."

She ended the call before he could say her name again, and stood with the phone hot in her palm until her breathing settled.

Inside, the wind had picked up off the water. The bell above the door was knocking softly against its hook, a small clear note, then another. She dragged the stool over, climbed it, and found the length of twine in her apron pocket where it had lived for years. She looped it around the clapper, pulled it snug, and knotted it twice. Then she tied the twine back on the bell.

Pilot House Dusk

"You're sure," Tobias Ketch said, and it wasn't quite a question. He stood on the mud track with his good shoes ruined, watching Isolde heave a crate of lemon balm into the wheelbarrow.

"I've been sure since breakfast. Hold the lid."

He held it. Behind him the marsh at Tern Point lay open and raw, the beds stripped to dark squares where her stock had grown for most of a decade. Her arms ached to the shoulder. She had dug for two days, wrapping each root ball in wet sacking, talking to the plants the way her mother talked to laboring women. Nell had come out on the second morning with a thermos and a trowel and said nothing at all, which was how Isolde knew she was proud.

The almanac sat on the wheelbarrow's tailgate, wrapped in an oilcloth. Her father's hand filled the margins, tide heights, wind notes, a crooked little drawing of a ridge of hard clay south of the beds. He had marked it with a cross and the word holds.

She unwrapped it and put it in Tobias's hands. He turned the pages as though they might bruise.

"The county's surveys stopped at the fence line," she said. "My father walked past it every spring for twenty years. That clay doesn't move. The gate can sit on it, and nobody has to drown a single bed."

"Except yours, which you've dug up."

"Those I'm moving anyway. The new site's drier, and the filing can't be undone, so I'll stop pretending it can." She wiped her palms on her trousers. "Take the book. Have your people check it against the tide tables. Have Gideon check it. Have everyone check it."

Tobias looked up. He was a hard man to read, and she had spent eight years trying. "The board seat comes with it. You've refused it three times."

"I know."

"I can't renew the annex lease for a woman who answers to nobody."

"Then I'll answer to the board." It came out sour, and she let it. "I'll sit in your meetings. I'll read your minutes. If the county ignores another warning, it'll do it to my face."

He closed the almanac gently. "It won't," he said. "Not this time."

She nodded and took up the wheelbarrow handles, because if she stood there another moment she would cry in front of the works director.

Gideon's truck came down the shore road at the end of that week, after the tide notes had been checked twice by strangers and found true. She saw it from the annex window and kept sorting dried yarrow until her fingers shook too hard to sort. Nell, upstairs, began very loudly to move furniture.

A message came by Tobias's office the next morning. It said only: The old pilot house, at dusk, if you'll come. There was no signature, and she understood why.

She went. The pilot house stood on its stilts at the edge of the point, grey boards gone silver, one window still holding glass. The tide was far out. She climbed the stair with her heart pounding like a fist on a door.

He was standing at the window with his coat on and his hands empty. He looked thinner. When he turned, he didn't come toward her.

"I read your father's notes," he said. "Three times. He was right about the clay. I'd have found it if I'd asked you, and I didn't, because I was afraid you'd tell me something I couldn't bear to be wrong about." His voice scraped. "I filed it because I couldn't stand to be talked out of it. That's the true reason. I'm sorry, Isolde."

"I burned your flag."

"I heard."

"I tied the bell back up." She crossed the floorboards, which complained under her. "I did that every time something frightened me. Shut it. Tie it down. You weren't the only one who checked everything alone."

"You gave up the beds."

"I moved them. They're growing fine." She laughed shakily. "I took the seat, too. Tobias is insufferable about it."

He let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep. "I love you," he said. "Plainly. I should've said it before I said anything about drawings."

"I love you." Her eyes stung, and she didn't bother hiding it. "I've been furious and I love you, both, the whole time."

He reached her in two strides. His hands framed her face and she pulled him down by the coat, and the kiss tasted of salt and relief. He held her as though the floor might tilt, and she held on as if it already had.

When they drew apart, the light had gone amber across the water. A small ship's bell hung from a bracket by the door, green with age, its rope frayed to a tassel.

"Nobody's rung that in years," she said.

He took her hand and wrapped her fingers beside his on the rope. Together they ring the pilot house's small ship bell once.