Corinne Ellis

The county clerk's office in Quillon occupies the ground floor of the courthouse, and the records are in the basement, and the basement is damp, and the clerk is a woman named Mrs. Trent who has been in that basement for thirty-one years and knows more about Mercy County than the county does.

I went down on Friday morning with a request and a theory, and I got two answers, of which the first was documentary and the second was human.

The documentary answer took forty minutes and cost twelve dollars in copying, and it was given to me by a deputy clerk who had to be argued with and who then would not stop talking. In 1911, by petition to the superior court, a man then of twenty-eight years, born in Mercy County and christened Corbin Vandermeer, had his name changed to Corbin Ashcombe, on the grounds — and I quote the petition, which Cole has since framed — "of a family dispute with which the petitioner declines to burden the court, and of the wish to earn his living in this county without being thought to be somebody else's relation." "Nineteen eleven," said the deputy clerk, leaning on the counter with her pen down. "That would be the year the beach road came through. My grandmother's people were on that road." And then the rest of it, read out to me as she found it: the hay-tedder patent four years later in the new name, the garage at the north end of Quillon in the twenties, the sale in 1931, and the drowning in the harbour in 1934, which the record calls accidental. She read that last one out in a level voice, and then she put her pen down and said that everybody on the coast knew it was not. I asked her who had told her so. She said: the same people who told her the family was cursed, which is what that coast says when it does not want to say a thing out loud.

His son was named Hollis Ashcombe, and went to college on a scholarship and became a county agricultural agent, and died in 1974. Hollis Ashcombe's son was born in 1970 and christened — the register is quite clear — Emmett Ashcombe, and in 1981, when his mother remarried a man named Raymond Scully, the boy was adopted by petition and became, in law and in the schools, Emmett Scully.

So there was the whole thing, in the county's own handwriting, for twelve dollars. A disinherited chemist writing furious letters in the 1890s. His son changing his name to keep off the family's bad luck and putting "Ashcombe" on his patent applications. His grandson the county agent. And his great-grandson, born in 1970, who had grown up thirty-one miles from Harrow Reach and had spent sixteen years running a wildlife station on the boundary of the estate that ought, by any reading of the family's history, to have been his.

I telephoned Dr. Cray from the courthouse steps.

"Did you know?"

"That there are Ashcombes in the county? Of course. Everybody's an Ashcombe up there." A pause. "That the man who breeds giant dogs next door to Harrow Reach has the Vandermeer blood in him and a grievance forty years deep? No, Dr. Ashby. I did not know, and I am going to put the phone down and sit very still for a while."

The human answer took longer, and it came from Corinne Ellis.

Ellis's Nursery is at the north end of Quillon on the shore road: two acres of greenhouses and outdoor benches and a shed with a signboard, and it is the only place within forty miles where a person can buy a plant in a pot, which means that everybody who has a garden between the headland and the county line has stood at that counter with a cart and had a conversation with the woman behind it. She was about forty. She had a gardener's hands and a careful, pleasant manner that was doing a great deal of work, and she talked to me for twenty minutes about hydrangeas and the salt wind with a fluency that did not once touch the ground.

I had gone there to say a single sentence and watch her face while she heard it, which is a thing Ronan Varley had told me to do weeks earlier in an entirely different context, and which is the least honourable and most reliable technique in his whole repertoire.

"Mrs. Ellis," I said. "When Mr. Vandermeer came out of his house at ten o'clock on the night of the twentieth of October, he was coming to meet somebody at the lower gate. I think the person he was coming to meet was you."

She put down the trowel she was holding and stood looking at me for a moment, and then she walked to the door of the shed and looked out at the road, at the grey water, at the empty benches, and she pulled the door closed behind her.

"I didn't go," she said. "I want you to hear that first. I wrote to him and I didn't go."

"Why did you write?"

She told it badly, and then she told it well, and I have put it down in the shape of the second telling.

She had come to the coast from inland fifteen years ago with a husband who had lasted three years and a plan for a nursery that had lasted, in various forms, ever since. The business had never quite failed and had never quite worked. Six years ago the year had gone bad and a spring frost had taken every bench of young stock, and she had gone to the only man in the county with money and land and a habit of helping people when it suited him, and Ambrose Vandermeer had lent her the money at four per cent, in exchange for a mortgage on the two acres, with a side agreement that she would supply the plants for the Harrow Reach garden for nothing, forever.

"And then, in the summer, he wanted the loan called in." She said it flatly. "Not the garden — the garden I'd have done for nothing and been glad to. The loan. He had decided to die, doctor, that's what he'd decided; he'd got to the age where a man starts closing the accounts, and he wanted everything clean, and the two acres was not clean. He told me in July that he'd give me till the end of the year to find the money and that if I couldn't find it he would take the land."

"Go on."

"There's a man in this county who has been very good to me," said Corinne Ellis, "and who asked me for one thing in return, and I did it, and it was the worst thing I have ever done, and if this is what I think it is, then I have killed the old man." She stopped, and made herself go on. "He came into the shop on the seventeenth. He said to me, 'Corry, I want to help you with the mortgage, and here is the way we do it.' He said he had it on good authority that old Mr. Vandermeer intended to put the two acres up for sale to the trust in February anyway, and that all I needed to do was to get him out of the house to a place where he and I could talk to him without anybody eavesdropping, and that if I wrote him a letter asking him to be at the lower gate at ten in the evening and to come alone, he would come."

"Did he tell you why it had to be at night?"

"He said the old man had been told the land was being watched, and that he wouldn't come out in daylight." She was crying, and was arranging her tools while she cried, and the arrangement was perfect. "He wrote it out for me. He wrote the letter with his own hand, all of it, and gave it to me, and I copied it out in my own writing and posted it in the box at the corner, and it said: 'Dear Mr. Vandermeer, I must speak with you tomorrow night at ten and I would rather nobody knew. Please be at the lower gate and I will explain everything. Yours, C. Ellis.' And I wrote that letter out and posted it in that box on the nineteenth of October, doctor, and he was dead on the twentieth."

"And you didn't go."

"I did not go, and that is the only thing I have." She put the trowel down. "I got as far as the crossroads. There was fog and I had no torch and I thought, this is a fool's errand, and it is his errand and not mine, and I went home. And the next day a man was dead on a path forty yards from his own back door with his face the way it was, and I have not slept since." She looked at me. "You want his name."

"I have his name."

"I should think you do," said Corinne Ellis. "But I want to say it out loud, because I have not said it to anybody, and I want there to be one person on this coast besides me who has heard me say it. Emmett Scully wrote that letter and put it in my hand, and I wrote it out and sent it, and I did not know what he was going to do with a man of seventy-four at ten o'clock at night." She took a breath. "He was going to frighten him, doctor. That is what he said to me, in the shop, and I remember the exact words because I have thought of nothing else since: 'He has a weak heart and I mean to frighten him, and if you tell anybody I will see you out of this county with nothing.'"