Fifty Minutes Later

The boat smelt of herring before I was well aboard her. There were scales on the thwarts, scales in the bilge water, scales drying silver on the skipper's sleeves. He had fished all night outside the point, put his catch ashore at dawn, and run up the fjord before the wind to fetch a policeman without stopping to wash down.

That was at half past seven in the morning, at the quay below the sheriff's office. The lighthouse keeper at Skjervik was dead at his desk, the man said, and the pastor had sent for someone. The sheriff was two parishes away over a boundary quarrel, and I was what there was. The skipper gave his name as Sivert Nesse, a man of fifty-five with a grey beard cut square and very little to say, and for three hours, beating back down the fjord, he said it. I asked him once about the night. "South-west, and hard," Sivert said. "Rain from half past eleven. The worst of it had blown through before we hauled, and it quit when it got light." The wind still had some of the night in it, and the sky sat low over the whole crossing, the colour of ash.

At half past ten the village came out from behind a headland: a dozen houses hung on a slope, a chimney smoking above a long shed, and at the waterside a big tarred warehouse standing out over the sea on piles. I asked what that was. "The brygge," Sivert said. "The merchant's. A boat lies in under it from the water side and loads where she lies. On the land side there is the one door." It was the herring season, and the quay beside it was stacked with barrels three and four high.

Off the village, not half a mile out, lay a small bare island — the holm, Sivert called it — and on it a white tower with a low house built against its foot. The lantern at the top was dark. Between the island and the shore the water ran grey and unbroken from the one to the other. I looked for a causeway, a bridge, a line of stakes, and saw nothing a man could walk on.

On the quay the men had been counting barrels and had stopped; they stood with their hands hanging and watched us come in. "You will want the small boat for the holm," Sivert said, and went aft to see to it. At the far end of the quay, apart from the men, a young woman was standing by herself with a shawl held tight at her throat. The hem of her skirt was dark with wet to the height of a hand.