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that travelling, and what have they got… ?’
    Marion tried to consider this odd question. The fact was, she hadn’t seen the greatgrandmistress since that day on the shore, nor the son who was also apparently staying here. ‘Everything?’
    ‘Girl,’ the steward didn’t even shake her head, ‘there’s no need to try to be clever. You must have heard how ill the lad is.’ She sighed. ‘And this, by the way …’ Her pearly fingertips traced the kidney bean. ‘This thing you’ve been staring at when you should have been listening to me—do you know what it is?’
    Marion shook her head.
    ‘It’s from the Fortunate Isles. These beans are seeds and they drop from the palms and are bore all this way across the Boreal Sea.’
    Thinking of white beaches, densely coloured flowers, Marion touched the kidney bean. This, she imagined, must be what a guildsperson must feel when they touch one of their own many strange devices—chalcedonies, whisperjewels, pain-stones, the spinet keys of a reckoning engine, numberbeads …
    ‘Some final conditions,’ the steward said. ‘Firstly, this house runs on mutual respect and duty. Every single saying which cook has had framed—and which I’ve noticed you smirking at, by the way—is entirely true. And I expect all my staff to spend time with their families on Noshiftdays.’
    ‘I haven’t had a Noshiftday off, Mistress.’
    ‘Well, you have one now. Wilkins has a wagon going up to Luttrell in about half an hour. See that you’re on it, and in your best skirt and pinafore …’ The steward’s eyes travelled up and down. ‘Remember, you’re a representative of this house, and that people will look at you and imagine, may the good Elder help them, that you’re the best we at Invercombe can manage. Your family—I’m sure they’re wondering how you’re getting on. Now you can go back to Clyst and tell Bill Price that Cissy Dunning sends her regards and says you’re doing well enough, even if you still have to buck up your ideas a bit, can’t you?’
    ‘Yes, Mistress.’ Curtseying, Marion realised that she hadn’t done so when she’d first entered the steward’s presence. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Oh, one more thing.’ The steward slid open a bottom drawer in her desk and wheezed open a tin. She held out a brown envelope. ‘You might as well take this.’
    ‘Mistress?’
    It felt colder than Marion had expected as she sat on a bench at the back of a produce wagon with an assortment of stable lads, apprentice gardeners and undermaids, and the road beyond the estate was deeply puddled and the bare trees were dripping. Yet if it had rained at Invercombe, it had happened so stealthily that she hadn’t noticed. She gazed back towards the weathertop. The idea that it could change the weather had been a story she’d been brought up on, then cast aside as a pleasant fantasy.
    Set down at the roadside by Wilkins, Marion headed straight for the shore. After Invercombe’s fiddly sense of things constantly in need of doing, she felt her spirits physically lifting. Here, if you yelled and waved your arms, the only creatures you startled were terns and gulls. Whooping, leaping, pausing only to drag off her new boots and socks, and then again to tear off her cap, Marion sprinted through the freezing, flecking mud. The tide was a neap one, big and cold and quick, hissing away from her even as she ran towards it, and at last her feet were in it, and it was sweet, effortless agony after the pinch of those boots.
    She searched amid the rockpools for a kidney bean. The odds were impossible, but she was an inveterate shore-searcher. She’d found pennies, serviceable washpans, skirthoops, brooches, gluts of seacoal, fluted bones, fantastic scraps of machinery, lurid heaps of cuckoo-wrack. Once, washed down from Severn Bridge, had come the huge and hairy corpse of one of the gargoyles which crawled along those distant gantries as they endlessly painted them grey. But all she found