Lady of the Lake

They called it a lake, though the maps knew better. Reservoir, the maps said, flat and official, as though a word could stop water growing stories of its own. Margot had been in the village three days before anyone told her, and they told it fast, the way people tell a thing they've stopped believing but haven't stopped needing. A woman had drowned there, years back. She rose sometimes near the jetty, they said. Patient and unfinished, looking for something she hadn't found. Margot wrote it down and called it research. By the second week she'd stopped pretending that's what it was.

Old Ivo sat outside the post office throwing bread to birds that didn't much want it. "You ask like you already know the answer," he said, "and you're just checking it's the one you were given."

"That she jumped for love."

"Fits on a postcard, that one." He didn't look at her. "My father dredged the shallows after it happened. Brought up a shoe. Wrong size for a woman. Ask Mrs Nightwick why the parish book's missing a page."

Mrs Nightwick was ninety-one and glad of the company. The register was whole except for one page, cut so neatly it took Margot two visits to find the stub of it.

"Reverend Cole did that. Before he went." Her needles kept moving. "Here for Sunday service, and then not here at all. This village doesn't talk about things. Not properly. It just stops, all together, like everyone agreed on it without a meeting."

That evening Margot sat with her notebook open and found she couldn't write in it. She went down to the water instead, at the hour the village kept away from, and sat where the shallows turned from brown to black, turning over a page cut with a knife. It was Ivo who finished it, in the end, not because he wanted to but because she'd finally asked the right thing.

"What was her name," Margot said. "Not the story. Her name."

He looked at her a long while. "Same as yours."

She laughed, the way you do when something isn't funny. He didn't.

"There's a stone in the old part of the churchyard. No dates on it. Just a name, and under that, she is not lost. The shoe my father found was a man's shoe. There's a difference," he said, "between a woman who drowns for love and one who outlives a man and lets everyone think otherwise. One makes a ghost story. The other buys you some peace." He didn't look away. "Your mother never said where the family came from, did she. Before your grandmother."

It wasn't really a question. Margot had nothing to say to it — only the slow understanding that she'd come here a stranger and would leave something closer to kin, brought back at last to the one place that had been waiting, all this time, for somebody to ask.