The Sounding Bell

The fourteenth page gave no depth for the bell. Celia checked both margins before she folded the dry sheet beneath the flap of her case. The sounding marks ended at the outer harbor wall, where the stone dropped steeply into water too dark to judge by eye. Beside a household address, someone had drawn five small strokes: two close together, a gap, then three more.

“Could be a depth mark,” Mira said.

“Depths usually have numbers.”

“Could be a person who hated numbers.”

Celia shut the case. “Then I shall try not to take it personally.”

The wall was slick above the tide. Celia fixed her brass measuring chain to an iron ring on the quay and fed it down to find the foot of the masonry. She had brought a separate sounding line, tarred cord with a lead weight at its end. The page showed that weight striking something below the water, but not what. A useful omission, if one wished to spend an afternoon damaging harbor fittings.

Mira held the case away from the spray while Celia worked. Each pull of the sounding line left cold tar against her fingers. At twelve feet the weight brushed stone. At fifteen, it swung clear. She shifted a pace along the wall and lowered it again.

A fishing boat passed behind them. Its wake lifted the cord, then let it fall slack. Celia waited for the water to settle. Mira stood with one boot braced against the ring, watching the line rather than the boat.

“Here,” Celia said at last.

The lead had met metal. Not the dull tap of an old pipe. This sound was thin and round, and it traveled up the cord into her hand.

Mira leaned over the coping. “Can you reach it again?”

“Provided it stays where bells tend to stay.”

Celia marked the length of cord with a pinch of chalk. She raised the weight six inches, let it drop, and caught the line at once.

One note rose through the water. It was faint enough that the slap of a wave nearly took it, yet Mira lifted her head at the same instant. They had both heard it.

Nothing followed.

Celia looked at the page. The five strokes belonged beside the address, not beside the drawing of the bell. There was no mark to say how many times to ring. One would do for a first test. Anything more might make the answer, if there was one, harder to separate from their own noise.

She asked Mira to put a finger on the cord where it lay across the coping. “If it moves after I stop, tell me.”

“You’re asking me to keep watch on a bit of string.”

“I trust you with difficult work.”

Mira’s mouth twitched. She set her finger lightly on the tarred line.

Celia struck the bell once more and caught the weight. The line came tight between her hands. Water ran from it onto her cuff. She counted the seconds against her pulse, a poor clock but the only one they had brought.

At seven, a knock came from below.

Another followed close upon it.

Celia’s grip tightened. There was a pause long enough for a wave to break against the wall. Then came three knocks, spaced farther apart.

Mira took her finger from the cord. “I didn’t move it.”

“Neither did I.”

The lead weight hung still against Celia’s pull. Five knocks. Two close, then three apart, just as the strokes stood beside the household address.

An echo of a single bell note had acquired remarkable manners.

Celia hauled the weight up before her shaking hand could drop it back onto the metal. It broke the surface with a twist of weed caught around its narrow end. Mira caught the cord above her and helped lay it on the stones. Neither of them spoke until the lead was safely beside Celia’s boot.

“Again?” Mira asked.

Celia looked down at the page. A household address was not an instruction to keep knocking until someone came to the door. Nor did it tell them who had made the sound. Stone and metal carried noise in strange ways here. She had measured stranger errors in dry ground.

“One more,” she said. “After the boat has gone.”

They waited while the fishing boat rounded the end of the quay. Celia checked the chain where it hung against the wall and noted the tide against a pale seam in the stone. Mira wound the slack sounding cord over her palm, then stopped when Celia reached for it.

“You do it,” Mira said. “Same hand.”

Celia took the cord. She lowered the lead to the chalk mark, found the bell with a light touch, and lifted the weight clear. One strike. She held the cord taut.

The first answering knock came after seven counted seconds. The second came close behind. After a pause, three more sounded at wider intervals.

Mira pressed the heel of her hand against the wet stone. “That isn’t the harbor talking back.”

“It may be the bell’s fitting,” Celia said. “Some part set loose by the blow.”

“Twice? With a pause in the same place?”

“No. Not likely.”

Mira kept her hand on the wall. Her knuckles had gone white, but she did not pull away. Celia looked at the address on the page. A house number and a street the upper city no longer used. The marks were small enough to pass for a clerk’s stray pen strokes. Someone had taken care to put them there.

Celia drew her notebook from the dry pocket of her case. Her pencil would not make a clean line at first. She scraped its point against the stone, turned to a fresh page, and wrote down the depth, the tide mark, the position along the wall. Under the copied household address, she recorded one strike on the submerged bell; seven seconds’ wait; two close knocks, a pause, three spaced knocks. The second trial gave the same sequence.