The Right-Hand Ledger

The right-hand ledger was thinner than Oisín expected and lived in the same chest as the others, which was its own kind of statement. Three names in four hundred and eleven years, each with a date, a commission, and a short entry in the hand of whoever had been master at the time.

The first was 1519 and the entry said only: gave the crossing at Tullow, whole. Would not say what it was of. Made nothing after, lived nine years, content. Oisín read that word content several times and could not get it to sit flat.

The second was 1704, a woman called Aoife Byrne, and the entry ran to half a page and was mostly about the bottle rather than about her, which told you what the master of 1704 had cared about. At the bottom, in a different ink and clearly added later: she asked me twice in her last year what it had been. I could not tell her. Nobody could. That is the part I was not prepared for.

The third was 1868, and Oisín knew the name before he read it, because it was over the workshop door and had been his whole life. Cadhla's great-grandmother. The entry was four words long and the hand was unsteady: for her own son.

"She lived to ninety-four," said Cadhla, from behind him. "I knew her. I was six. She was perfectly sound in every respect and she did not know she had had a son, and everybody in this village knew, and nobody ever said, and she died on a Tuesday in the chair by the window and I have thought about it approximately once a week since." She reached past him and closed the ledger. "That is the price. It is not a metaphor and it is not a lesson. It is a subtraction."

Oisín stood with his hand still on the chest. "Then why does the guild keep the copies at all? Why not stop? Tell people the truth and stop." "Because of the second column," said Cadhla. "Go and read what the buyers wrote when they brought them back."

He went and read it. It took him most of an afternoon, and it was the hardest reading he had ever done, and by the end of it he understood exactly why four hundred years of masters had gone on making a thing they could not defend.

The returns column was not a formality. Every bottle that came back came back with a line from whoever returned it, because the guild required it, and the guild had required it since 1602, and Oisín found himself grateful to a dead clerk for that particular piece of bureaucracy.

Kept it eleven years. Opened it twice. Did not need a third. That was 1774. My husband opened it every year on the day and I have never seen him afterwards in any state but calm, and I am returning it because he is dead and I do not want it and I am not sorry. That was 1810, and the hand was furious, and Oisín read it four times.

Most of them were short. A great many said some version of the same thing, which was that the hour in the bottle had not been what they expected and had been what they needed, and that they could not explain the difference and had stopped trying. Nineteen of them, across four centuries, said outright that they had known it was not their own memory and had not minded.

Eleven said they had known and had minded very much. The guild had recorded those too, in the same hand, with the same weight, which Oisín thought was either the most honest thing he had ever seen an institution do or the most convenient.

And near the end, in 1931: I am returning this because I have found out what it is. I want it recorded that I was not deceived — the master told me plainly in 1927 and I bought it anyway. I want it recorded because I do not want the next person told that we were all fools.

Oisín sat back. Outside the light had gone entirely and someone had banked the furnace without him, which meant Cadhla had been in and out and had left him to it. He looked at the shelves going back into the dark, eight hundred and sixty-one and counting, every one of them the same green with grey underneath, and he thought: they told him. In 1927 they told him.

Which meant the question was not whether the guild lied. The guild had a ledger four centuries deep recording exactly how often it had not. The question was Ardan Fell in the sleet on the causeway, who had been told a memory bottle would hold his daughter whole, and had not been told the rest, and who was bringing her back on the ninth.

She was smaller. That was the thing nobody in the workshop said and everybody registered in the first three seconds. Rosaleen Fell came up the causeway in June holding her father's hand rather than running ahead of it, and her good coat had stopped fitting in the direction coats stop fitting when the child inside them is going the wrong way.

She still wanted to hold something. Oisín gave her the same failed piece from the crate, the thick lopsided one, and she took it with both hands and said, "This one again," in the tone of a person greeting a colleague, and he had to go and do something at the far end of the bench for a moment.

Cadhla took her into the back room. Two hours. Fell stood outside in June sunshine looking as out of place as he had in the sleet, and Oisín went out with a cup because it had become a thing they did.

"You're further on," Fell said, nodding at the racks through the door. "The body's done. Throat's done. Stopper twice and both wrong." "And the last part?" "August or September." Oisín heard his own voice do something and could not stop it in time. Fell noticed. Fell was, Oisín had come to understand, a man who noticed a great deal and mentioned about a fifth of it.

"You have found out something you are not permitted to tell me," Fell said, "and you have been carrying it since March, and you are nineteen, and you are extremely bad at it." He looked out at the flat. "I would like to say something and I would like you not to answer, because if you answer, one of us has to do something about it."

Oisín said nothing, which was the first competent thing he had managed all afternoon. "When I came here in the autumn I had already been to Tullow, and to the guild house at Ennis, and to a man in Cork who deals in these things." Fell turned the cup in his hands. "I know roughly what I am buying. I know it is not unique and I have a fair idea why. What I do not know is whether Cadhla Rhun intends to tell me before she takes my money, and I have decided that I will judge her entirely on that, and on nothing else."

He gave the cup back. "Do not tell me what you found. Tell her that I said this, word for word, and let her do whatever she does." He almost smiled. "And for what it is worth — I am glad someone in there is finding it difficult. I would not have liked the other kind of workshop."

Oisín told her, word for word, that evening. Cadhla listened without moving and then went and stood at the furnace for long enough that he began to think about leaving.

"Right," she said. "Then it is a real decision and not a private one, which is worse." She came back to the bench. "There are two bottles I can put in that man's hands in September. I want you to say both of them out loud, because you have read everything I have read and you are the only other person alive who has, and I am not going to make this one on my own."

Oisín swallowed. "The first is a casting from the First Hour. Sile Rhun's hour. It works — eight hundred returns say it works — and he opens it at seventy and gets an ordinary morning with a child he loves and it will feel like Rosaleen because that is what the thing does. And it costs you nothing you cannot afford, and the guild goes on, and he never knows unless you tell him."

"And you tell him," said Cadhla. "That is not optional in this workshop and never has been. Go on." "The second is true." Oisín's mouth had gone dry. "One of us gives a whole hour, fresh, and it is her, actually her, the real thing for the rest of his life. And whoever gives it loses that hour as if it never happened, permanently, and never makes anything again." He looked at the racks. "And there are three names in that ledger in four hundred years, so it is not a thing people do twice."

"Correct on every point." Cadhla sat down heavily. "Now the part you have not said. Which hour?" "What?" "A true memory bottle holds a real hour of a real person. Whose hour, Oisín? He wants Rosaleen. I have had eleven two-hour afternoons with that child in the back room and I have perhaps five hours of her altogether, and I am eighty-one in the spring." She spread her hands. "You have had none. You carry a cup out to her father and you hand her a broken bottle and you go and stand at the far end of the bench. That is not an hour."

The furnace made its noise. Oisín looked at the old woman on the bench and understood, all at once and completely, the shape of the thing that had been standing in the room since March, and why she had told him to come to her and to nobody else, and why she had said I am too old to be surprised twice by the same door.

"You've already decided," he said. "I decided in October," said Cadhla, "the day he opened at eleven and went to fourteen in one breath. Everything since has been me finding out whether I could make myself say it in front of a witness." She stood up. "Well. I have said it. Go home, Oisín. Come back on Monday. There is a great deal to teach you and I have got until September."