“Mary and I search the shoreline for whatever the tide might have churned up,” she said, bending to pick up a bottlecap as evidence before tossing it away. “We come day or night. But, yes, nighttime is more convenient for us. Fewer of the mud larks about.”
“Mud larks?” He took a measure of the river with his eye from one vantage point to another.
“They’re more like shore rats, scurrying up and down the bank, scavenging for scraps of metal. A cup. A spoon. A bit of rope. Something to trade for a meat pie or strip of dried beef. Poor mortals can’t see a foot in front of them in the dark, so they flood the shore at low tide, morning and afternoon. Better than the toshers, though. Those poor souls are knee-deep in the sewers sieving for bits of treasure to sell.”
Ian tilted his head to the right and pursed his lips. “But isn’t mudlarking what you do?”
Edwina bent to inspect a glint of gold she’d spied in the interstices between rocks, but it proved only a broken brass buckle off a shoe. “No, it’s different for my sister and me,” she said, unsure how much to confide. Yes, this man was of a similar bloodline, but she still knew very little of his past or his inclinations. Not enough, she decided, to admit the entire truth. “We take what catches our eye,” she explained, dropping the broken buckle on the rocks. “We’re quite good at finding rings, brooches, and the occasional old coin. You’d be surprised how many turn up in the mud.”
She’d never known a river to hold so many secrets. Wedding rings and lockets with declarations of love on them, though now discarded. Mirrors and combs lovingly bought for a trousseau left tarnished and forgotten. A shoe worn by a medieval child. Gold coins once spent on amphorae of wine and tribute. Bottles filled with hair and nails meant to ward off witches. The river was the keeper of the island’s secrets, the guardian of time and history.
Ian watched a mother and daughter rinsing out buckets in a tide pool down shore. “But you sell your finds, too, do you not?”
“Yes, of course.” She thought about the distinction she meant to convey as she scanned the rocks, as much for treasure as to avoid twisting an ankle in her improper shoes. “I suppose the difference is we only sell our findings in our shop because otherwise we’d be buried up to our necks in all the bric-a-brac other people toss away or misplace.” She smiled and shrugged, hoping if she made light of it he’d get off the subject. “It’s a bit of a compulsion for us, really. My father is the one who came up with the idea of opening a shop. He was tired of all the clutter in the house.”
Ian walked with his hands clasped behind his back with the easy gait of a hill walker on an evening stroll, despite the rocky, uneven ground. Still, she could sense his mind whirring, somewhat like that odd watch of his, spinning his thoughts and observations into silent conclusions. He asked no more about the scavenging as he stopped to take inventory of the surroundings below the embankment. Edwina watched his face as he absorbed the view so familiar to her—the barges floating by with their heaps of coal, the clap of horse traffic on the embankment above, the whiff of fish and soot and rocks covered in algae still damp with river sludge. The tiny riverside oasis in the midst of the city had always made her yearn for home, for the mountains and rivers to the west. She wondered briefly if he felt the same, coming from the hills and dales up north.
He didn’t strike her as the type to chat about his past, so she leaned forward to inspect an unusual shape poking out of the mud instead. Curious, she bent to dig the object out of the muck with a stick. A flock of seagulls, their gray wings bent like arrowheads, circled and swooped overhead. Crying wolf, she thought, until the cranium emerged bone-white against the mud.
“What is it?” he asked.
Edwina pried the thing up, and even before she rinsed it off in the tidewater of a nearby shallow, she knew it was a bad sign. Bones found in water were always bad omens, but a skull could portend serious misfortune and sometimes death. The gulls screeched above her as she rinsed the enlarged eye sockets of their mud.
“A cormorant,” she said, holding the fragile skull in the palm of her hand. The hooked beak stood out against her chilled, pink skin.
“Do you often find such things?”
“Bones are common enough, but to find an intact skull is a little rarer.” The fragility of the bird’s remains sent a shudder of warning hollowing through her own bones, and she hugged her shawl tight around her, not knowing for whom the portent was meant.