Her father went down the Salt Road in the spring she was nine.
He is number thirty-eight. He is in the Guild book with a date against him and four words, and the four words are contract, Salt Road, no return, which is what it says against all of them.
Aldous Reed was a surveyor and he was not a good one.
That is a thing his daughter has always said out loud, in that Guild, to anybody who tried to be kind about it: he was a decent chainman and an indifferent draughtsman and he had a hand like a farrier, and he took the Salt Road contract in 1799 because he was four hundred marks in debt to a man in Harrowgate and because nobody else would have him.
He was thirty-four.
He came into the room where she was sleeping on the night before he went and sat on the end of the bed.
She has four things from that night and she has had seventeen years with them.
That he smelled of the pipe he was not supposed to smoke in the house.
That he said, "You are not to come out in the morning," and that she did not, and that she has thought about that more than anything else in her life.
That he left his chain — the good one, the sixty-six-foot, with his mark on the swivel — leaning in the corner of the kitchen, which he had never once done, because a surveyor going out takes his chain.
And that he said one other thing, at the door, and did not turn round when he said it.
"If it goes on being four days, Tam, I shall come back."
She made her own chain at nineteen.
She learned to survey on his and then she made her own, because there is a thing that happens when you use a dead man's chain and it is not sentiment, it is that every time you close a traverse you are checking his work.
His is still in the kitchen at Cowl Street.
Hers went into a cairn on a beach at the bottom of the Salt Road twenty-two years later, and that is the end of this story and not the beginning of it.
Ferren thinks she took it for eleven hundred marks.
The whole of that Guild thinks she took it for eleven hundred marks, and four of them have said so out loud in her hearing since, and she has never once corrected any of them.
She took it because she had spent seventeen years in a town where forty-one people had gone down a road and nobody had ever gone and looked.